Carrie Fisher - Shockaholic

I never went into show business. It surrounded me from my first breath. A neater trick would’ve been for me to sneak out. I never wanted to be an actress, let alone a celebrity. I’d grown up watching the bright glow of my parents’ stardom slowly dim, cool, and fade. I watched both my parents scramble to stay in the light. But fame has an unpredictable half-life. While not necessarily fleeting, it is guaranteed to inevitably flee. Running and screaming from the room.

When I got the part of a princess in this goofy little science fiction film, I thought, what the fuck, right? It’ll be fun to do. I’m nineteen! Who doesn’t want to have fun at nineteen? I’ll go hang out with a bunch of robots for a few months and then return to my life and try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. Who knows! Maybe I’ll even go to college! You know? Real college this time—not a pretend drama one. Or I could get a Eurail Pass and blunder around Europe with the rest of the hippie students. But then this goofy, little three-month hang-out with robots did something unexpected—it misbehaved. It did something no movie had ever really done before. It exploded across the firmament of pop culture, taking all of us along with it. It tricked me into becoming a star all on my who-gives-a-shit own.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because there are absolutely amazing things about being a celebrity. Things that are really fun, you know? Things like traveling, getting a good table at a full restaurant, and generally being treated better than almost any human could possibly deserve. But from the very beginning, I knew something that wouldn’t ordinarily have crossed another brand-new celebrity’s mind. I knew it would be over eventually, that I was on the clock in a way that the other newly famous folks had no idea about. And this knowing of mine put a kind of damper on the whole thing. I was playing a waiting game. My expensive car would return to being a more affordable pumpkin, and my designer ballgown back to being the knockoff attire they once wore. So, rather than wait for this shoe to drop—for this glass slipper to shatter—I thought, why not break it myself and get it over with? Break it and go back to that place where I had a more manageable amount to lose.

What does all of this have to do with Michael Jackson?

Frankly, I can’t quite remember how I got out here on this limb of what’s so bad about looking familiar. But I do know that if there’s any kind of a vibe that I emanate, it’s the one of not being enthused about being a celebrity. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s not that I don’t care about it, it’s that I don’t trust it. It’s shaped my entire life. Maybe not shaped so much as distorted, because that’s another part of what it does. It’s a magnifier, in a way. It can make good people great and bad people awful-ish. It makes life more lifelike.

I was watching a documentary about New Guinea recently and in it a man from one of the tribes there was marveling at how much stuff Americans seemed to need. “Why you all have to have so much cargo?” Well, to me that’s part of what celebrity is. A massive amount of cargo. Cargo and spectacle. “You know who I am, therefore I am.” Or, perhaps more to the point, “You know who I am, therefore I must be someone. Right?”

Anyway, it radiates out of me. My at least partial pose of how indifferent I am. And that was a big deal for Michael Jackson, because you’d see people around him who would completely transform, becoming virtually idiotic. Michael was so famous that he transcended humanness. Becoming a kind of Jesus Michael Jackson Christ.

His fame distorted whichever situation you were in with him. His otherness could actually overwhelm his gifts a lot of the time, which was quite a feat because I know I bring no news when I say he was a very gifted human being.

I am fairly certain that I first met Michael in Arnie Klein’s office around the time Billie was born, which makes it about eighteen years ago. My friend Bruce Wagner is one of her godfathers, and Arnie is the other. Billie would call Arnie “Godfather Two.”

When Billie was about six months old, Michael saw some pictures of her in Arnie’s office, called, and left me a message, in that voice of his, with its own dialect. And picking up this message of his was an amazing and disconcerting thing. In a way, it was like getting a communication from Santa Claus, or some other fairy-tale character. Michael’s message was that he wanted pictures of Billie. Now, that was odd. But you know, also—given that all the court case stuff hadn’t happened yet—kind of sweet. It was like he identified with or was drawn to all things innocent. And yet everyone turned that into something perverse. No one could believe that he was that innocent or that his motives were innocent. But I actually did.

But getting back to the special medical access I mentioned earlier, I had this dentist at the time, a Dr. Evan Chandler, who was a very strange character. He was what would be referred to as the Dentist to the Stars! And as one of the people who would have unnecessary dental work just for the morphine, this man was one of those people who could arrange such a welcome service. He referred his patients to a mobile anesthesiologist who would come into the office to put you out for the dental work. And as if that wasn’t glorious enough, this anesthesiologist could also be easily and financially persuaded to come to your house to administer the morphine for your subsequent luxury pain relief. And I would extend my arms, veins akimbo, and say to this man—“Send me away, but don’t send me all the way.”

But remember that dentist who sued Michael for molesting his kid?

Yes, that was my dentist. Evan Chandler, D.D.S. Dentist to the Stars. And this same Dr. Chandler—long before the lawsuit was brought (though not necessarily before it was contemplated)—needed someone to brag to about his son’s burgeoning friendship with Michael Jackson. (This was years before Michael had children of his own.) And so my “dentist” would go on and on about how much his son liked Michael Jackson and, more important, how much Michael Jackson liked his son. And the most disturbing thing I remember him saying was, “You know, my son is very good looking.”

Now I ask you—what father talks about his child that way? Well, maybe some do but (a) I don’t know them, and (b) they probably aren’t raising an eyebrow and looking suggestive when they say it. Over the years I’ve heard many proud fathers tell me, “My son is great,” or “My kid is adorable,” but this was the only time I’d ever heard this particular boast:

“My son [ unlike most average male offspring ] is VERY [ unsettling smile, raised eyebrows, maybe even a lewd wink ] good-looking [ pause for you to reflect and/or puke ].”

It was grotesque! This man was letting me know that he had this valuable thing that he assumed Michael Jackson wanted, and it happened to be his son. But it wasn’t who his son was, it was what he was: “good-looking.”

So here was Dr. Chandler telling me how Michael was buying his kid computers and taking him to incredible places and sleeping in the same bed and getting him… WAIT!

“Hang on,” I said. “I have to interrupt here. Let’s just go back a tic, okay?”

“Sure,” Chandler said.

“They’re sleeping in the same bed?!”

He blinked. “Well, yeah, but my ex-wife is always there, so it’s okay, and his stepfather and… and… and…”

Dr. Chandler’s stories became longer than my treatments. The drugs were wearing off before the story. Not that there was enough dope in the world to make these stories palatable. This was one creepy story. Off hand, I’d say the creepiest. And somehow I’d become this freak’s confidante.