The Trials and Triumphs of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher

The sad news of Carrie Fisher’s death was compounded this week by the shock of her mother, Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds, passing away just one day later. If you read it in a script, or saw it in a movie, the medium that defined both, you wouldn’t believe it. Being the daughter of a movie star “was hard for Carrie,” Reynolds told Oprah in an epic 2011 interview with the pair. “In school her teacher would call her Debbie. But now I’m Princess Leia’s mother.” As a girl, Fisher was intimidated by Reynolds’s glamour, her gorgeous clothes, her famous friends. “Next to my mother, I felt like a thumb,” she told Oprah. “In the morning, she would go in one end of her closet as my mother and come out the other as Debbie Reynolds. It was like a car wash. The scary thing about it though is watching celebrity fade. You’re part of their audience. And my mother was no longer wanted in movies by the time she was 40.”

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Debbie Reynolds was a product of the tail end of the studio system, and a vehicle through which Hollywood created the '50s myth of the girl next door. A talented singer and dancer, Reynolds projected optimism, cheer, innocence, and that all American can-do spirit. It didn’t matter if it was true or not (spoiler alert: it never is) but Reynolds made you believe it. That was her job. And if there is one thing Debbie Reynolds never did (she came from bruising poverty and an abusive home) it was shrink from a job. Or let her smile fade. If you haven’t seen that smile, just check out her “Good Morning” number with Gene Kelly on YouTube. You won’t be sad for a week. That song was in “Singin’ In the Rain,” her breakthrough movie.

Along the way, there were three marriages, the first of which ending when Carrie’s father, '50s crooner Eddie Fisher, ran off with Reynolds’s friend Elizabeth Taylor, becoming a tabloid scandal of Brangelina proportions. Her second husband, Harry Karl, gambled away all her money, leaving her flat broke. So she dusted herself off and hit the road, touring 42 weeks a year with her nightclub act to support her children, Carrie and Todd. The third marriage also ended in divorce. She would later say, to anyone who would listen, that she was done with men. Except gay men, of course, who openly worshiped her as a living legend from the golden age of Hollywood. “Now I have many men in my life,” she told an ecstatic audience at San Francisco’s Castro Theater in 2005 with a knowing wink, “and they won’t mess around, and they won’t steal from me, and they love me. And they like my costumes.”

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Remembering other Hollywood icons we lost in 2016:

1. David Bowie Dead at 69: How Beauty Industry Insiders Remember Him
2. After George Michael's Death, a Look Back at His Most Iconic Moment
3. Prince Dead at 57: His Most Iconic Beauty Moments

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In 1987 Carrie Fisher published Postcards From the Edge, a best selling semi-autobiographical novel about a drug addicted young actress growing up in the shadow of a screen legend mother (sound familiar?). Postcards from the Edge was later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. Though all involved took pains to call it a work of fiction, the parallels were impossible to ignore. Most people assumed that MacLaine’s portrayal of a ferocious, scenery-chewing, attention-needy fading star was Reynolds to a tee. “Carrie took everything very hard,” Reynolds would later tell Oprah. “I think her pain came a lot from my pain. It’s very hard when your child doesn’t want to talk to you. It was total estrangement for maybe 10 years. Heartbreaking.”

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But in the end, the two did reconcile, with Reynolds supporting her daughter through the ravages of addiction and bipolar disorder. "I had to walk through a lot of my tears, but she’s worth it. All I can do is love her and I always will," she told Oprah of Fisher. What they clearly both admired about each other is something they shared: tenacity, and an instinct for survival. At the end of the Oprah interview, Fisher and Reynolds sidle up to the piano to sing a duet of “You Made Me Love You,” from the Broadway musical “Irene,” in which Reynolds starred. With enough subtext going on for a solid decade of joint therapy, it's almost painful, too personal to watch. Still, there they were, on stage together—smiling, singing. Fisher picked the last song that she wanted to sing for her mother. She had considered it carefully, she said, for 30 years. She gathered herself up and began: “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

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