Author Shelia Weller has crafted the book Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, an anecdote-filled journey which chronicles Fisher’s incredible life, including a fly-on-the-wall view of her wild celeb-filled house parties. Here’s an excerpt of the exclusive excerpt at EW.com.
With money now from Star Wars, Carrie wanted an outpost in her hometown, so she bought a house next door to her friend Teri Garr’s log cabin in Laurel Canyon. It was a tiny house, and Carrie decorated it felicitously: she put a big statue of a foot on the front lawn and had cutouts of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the stairs. When she and Paul [Simon] were in L.A., she gave parties there, where a gourmet cook was on the premises, teaching everyone cuisine. The hired chef was “supposed to give us lessons,” Teri Garr recalled, “and we’d all watch him cook and try to learn how, but mostly we’d just drink a lot of wine.”
Eventually, she rented out the Laurel Canyon house and bought a house on Oak Pass in Benedict Canyon. There, for her editor guests, especially the female ones, life at Carrie’s was like a sorority house on Friday night, and it often included the new custom in Carrie’s life, which would make her a social icon for thirty years: her legendary joint October birthday parties with Penny Marshall. A more exclusive, A-list-filled, in-demand party in Hollywood—or anywhere—didn’t exist than the Carrie-Penny parties. Nina Jacobson—now one of Hollywood’s major producers—once said to a journalist that when she and her girlfriend, Jen, first started attending them, “we felt bad for not being famous,” because the guests were, by Nina’s estimation, “85 percent incredibly famous people. We were wondering what we were doing there.”
The guest list was such that celebrities got quietly excited over fellow celebrities. At one party, early on, a friend says, “When I saw Barbra Streisand walk in, I had to walk out and hyperventilate.” (In fact it is said that Barbra wanted to hire Carrie’s housekeepers, Gloria and Mary, to serve the same southern fare at her parties, but Carrie wouldn’t let Barbra do so.)
Read more on the excerpt here. Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller is published by Sarah Crichton Books and will be released on November 12th, 2019, and we look forward to reading it in full.
