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Recently in Salon People

People Feature
Pox populi
In which the current presidential candidates are matched to ancient Roman emperors with eerie accuracy. But where are their clothes?
By Eugene Finerman
[09/25/99]

Nothing Personal
Touch me in the morning ... just not there.
Diana Ross gets frisky, a strapless dress is risky, and while Kevin shakes the Bacon, the Reform Party's achin'.
By Amy Reiter
[09/24/99]

My Lunch With
Kris Kristofferson
The Great Gravel-Voiced One talks of films, beautiful actresses, the importance of Dylan and chillin' with the Sandinistas.
By David Bowman
[09/24/99]

Nothing Personal
OK Guccione, now you've got Thelma mad
Penthouse exposes Geena -- ungraciously; Douglas marrying Zeta-Jones? Just as soon as he becomes a Muslim; Diana Ross said to grope groping guard; Stephanopoulos just says no to White House intern.
By Amy Reiter
[09/23/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Men in dresses behaving badly
"The RuPaul of Robbers" busted in Baton Rouge; scandal! Boozed-up Amish renegade flips buggy while blotto. Plus: Rupert Pupkin lives!
By Douglas Cruickshank
[09/23/99]

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After returning from the Korean War, Fisher married Debbie Reynolds, the girl next door. Theirs was the ideal marriage, at least to the media. "I've often been asked what I learned from that marriage," he says. "That's simple: Don't marry Debbie Reynolds."

Soon enough, he left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. And when that marriage collapsed, he got hitched to Connie Stevens. Throughout all these musical chairs, he was singing, pouring out records -- and the money was pouring in, along with the women. Queen Elizabeth asked him to dance; Bette Davis "made drool eyes at me." He knew, sometimes intimately, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Sue Lyon, Lana Turner, Margaret Truman. So much fun, so many parties. One wonders how he was able to find time to record songs between his bouts of passion.

In anyone else's hands, this would be your typical ho-hum let-me-tell-you-about-being-a-star-and-getting-laid routine. But there is something else going on in "Been There, Done That." First, Eddie Fisher and his co-writer know how to put words together. The story is fascinating; the one-liners are funny; the vignettes are out of this world. Especially when he is telling us exactly what it was like to live with Elizabeth Taylor: "She was drinking and taking pills and passing out. She was constantly passing out. It was just awful; not awful enough to make me miss my life with Debbie, but awful."

Been There, Done That By Eddie Fisher, with David Fisher Thomas Dunne Books Nonfiction 333 pages

Once when he threatened to leave, Taylor swallowed an entire bottle of Seconol. "I tried to stay calm," Fisher writes, "although it's hard to stay calm when foam is coming out of your wife's mouth." Another time, he dared to venture the opinion that she should do something about her addictions. "Elizabeth, what would you think about going to see a psychiatrist?" he asked.

"As it turned out, not very much," Fisher recalls. "She erupted. She started screaming at me ... She got out of bed, totally naked, and ran down the stairs. I ran right after her. She got into her Cadillac and turned on the engine. It was crazy, this hysterical naked woman trying to drive while I ran alongside the car, holding on to her door. I was begging her to stop, telling her, 'It's not you, it's me. I'll go to the psychiatrist. I'll go, I'll go, it's me ...'"

There's a genuine juvenile enthusiasm in "Been There, Done That." It's the sense of wonder that you or I would have if we woke up one morning as a star. And we get the feeling that Fisher's still stunned that a poor kid from the streets of Philadelphia could end up, all of a sudden, living "under the bank on the hill, where the money just rolls down." With Elizabeth Taylor.

The tale of Elizabeth and Eddie -- they called him "Mr. Taylor" -- is enough to make a grown man cry ... and, often, to laugh: "The one thing that it was impossible to ever forget when you were with Elizabeth Taylor," he tells us, "was that you were with Elizabeth Taylor ... She was smart and funny and beautiful. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Sexually she was every man's dream; she had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver."

Fisher did not marry Elizabeth Taylor. Rather, he entered into a contract with her to let her run his life, and to be subject to her every whim, to deal with her incessant pill-taking, her endless boozing, her tantrums, her sulks, and her impossible Jezebel nature. "I had successfully made the transition from one of the country's most popular singers to Elizabeth's companion and nurse," he writes. "I was caught in a magnificent trap, and even though I was madly in love with her, it was still a trap. I'd forgotten who I was ... The only singing I was doing was around the house."

And what did he do when he she ran off with Richard Burton? "I couldn't stop loving her, and needing her. I missed her more than I had ever missed anyone in my life. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sit still, so I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I appeared on the television quiz show 'What's My Line' as the mystery guest."

Next page | Fisher's final meeting with Taylor and Burton