Not that I’ve ever done a single thing that might encourage people to consider me anything remotely like the soul of discretion. It’s true that I do tell a lot. Indeed, I have the well-deserved reputation of divulging conspicuously more information that would ordinarily fall on the intimate side. But, though I do admittedly lay bare far more than the average bear, before disclosing anything that is possibly someone else’s secret to tell, I make it a practice to first let that person know about my intention. (Aren’t I ethical? I thought you’d think so.)
They’re free to persuade me to alter what I’ve written to reflect their (obviously gutless) recollection of the experience, or be even more wimpy and ask me to remove them from the story altogether, in light of their concerns that their reputations and/or lives might be forever destroyed. I don’t want to make anyone else look stupid. That’s a privilege I reserve for myself.
Because, with the exception of fucking with the truth about whether or not I was loaded at any given moment or if I stole painkillers from your medicine cabinet, I’m no liar. I need you to trust that or stop reading. Recollections might differ with regard to the smaller details, but I don’t think my perceptions are distorted. No one has ever said to me, “That never happened,” or “I don’t remember the evening that way at all. There were no pygmies in our group that night.” I mean, if I have even a teensy doubt about something’s having happened, then I don’t tell the story. Not worth it.
Bottom line, not only am I not a liar, I’m not even an exaggerator. If anything, I like to dial things down a bit so everything doesn’t come off as a drag queen line dance at Mardi Gras.
Do I at times wish I’d had a calmer, wiser, and more manageable sort of existence? One that even at times included pauses and yawning? Absolutely. But then who would I be? More than likely not someone who, at nineteen, found herself having an affair with her fourteen-years-older married costar without first ever having had with him a linear, meaningful conversation while clothed.
Also, if I didn’t write about it someone else would. Someone without direct knowledge of the “situation.” Someone who would wait—cowardly—until after my passing to speculate on what happened and make me look bad. No.
Though no one seems to have any idea that our affair occurred, or even may have occurred, forty years later, here’s the truth, the banal, romantic, sweet, awkward truth. The truth that is Carrison.
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i began filming Star Wars hoping to have an affair. Hoping to strike people as somewhere between sophisticated and louche—someone you’d think had gone to boarding school in Switzerland with Anjelica Huston and had learned to speak four languages, including Portuguese. An affair for a person like that would be a completely predictable and totally adult experience.
This would be my first affair—not surprising, when you think about it, for a nineteen-year-old female in the seventies—and I didn’t really know what someone actually needed to do in order to make a thing like that happen. Back then I was always looking ahead to who I wanted to be versus who I didn’t realize I already was, and the wished-for me was most likely based on who other people seemed to be and the desire to have the same effect on others that they had had on me.
I knew I was going to be awful with men, partly because of the way my mom had been, with her two divorces and one separation in the pipeline. I possessed that certainty by fifteen or sixteen, and so I needed to prove it to you. Sure, the insight wasn’t a comfortable one, but it was mine, and I was still young enough to be considered precocious. Wow! I was clairvoyant! Maybe I couldn’t fix it, or alter it even a little, but what the hell! I knew what was coming and didn’t bother with feeling sorry for my not-too-distant-future self—it might not be great, but I predicted it, named it, claimed it, and tried to project the illusion that I was up to my elbows in control.
Despite the fact that almost everything was new to me then, it was crucial that I appeared to be a kind of nonchalant citizen of the weary part of the world—been there, done not only that but also this, and even that other one a few times later on. I could hardly be expected to do too much more.
Which is undoubtedly why a man might easily have assumed that I’d been around the block, without having any idea how I’d arrived at that block in the first place, or what sort of block it was that I’d been around, and was it lined with homes or trees? Was it an auction block? A city block? Or a chopping one?
I did my best to come off as this kind of ironic, amused, disenchanted creature. An often chatty, even giddy gal with little to no sense of fashion.
Simon Templeman, a British boy I had gone to drama school with, had been my only boyfriend till then, and he and I were together for close to a year before we actually slept together, i.e., had sex. But whatever I’d done or not done with Simon, that—along with some fooling around with three straight guys and kissing three gay guys—was basically the sum total of my earthling version of sexual experience (and an exciting preview of things to come).
Sure, I’d devoted a lot of time to exploring the world of foreplay. Mostly in the shallow end, though—the far reaches caused me, in theory, a certain amount of concern. What if I went there and never made it back? I don’t know even still what it was about sex that concerned me. Was it that once you gave up your virginity, that was it—you could never be a virgin again? Ever? Was it that my mother had been known as Tammy? Tammy the Girl Scout, the last one standing at the virgin sit-in, who raised me to be a very good girl, save my milk and not be a cheap cow no one wanted to buy? Or was it my father, the Olympian sex enthusiast?
Maybe it was the specter of the back of my first stepfather Harry Karl’s gray, withered hanging ball sack as he rose from the bed without pajama bottoms to yet again visit the bathroom. A ball sack available for my nightly viewing throughout my childhood and on into my adolescence. If that was what my future held—a facsimile of what I would someday have to hold tenderly—I would cling to my blessedly penis-and ball-sack-free present for as long as possible. And that possibility finally ended when Simon and I began.
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i am someone who wants very much to be popular. I don’t just want you to like me, I want to be one of the most joy-inducing human beings that you’ve ever encountered. I want to explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong.
Having famous parents doesn’t endear you to your high school classmates. I found this out one day in ninth grade when I overheard two girls walking behind me in the school hallway. One of them said to the other in an audible whisper, “See that girl just ahead of us? With that headband?”
“Yeah?”
“She’s Debbie Reynolds’s daughter.” There was a slight pause before she added, “She thinks she’s so great.”
Wow, right? Uncanny how she so perfectly nailed me straight out of the box. I just thought I was incredible.
Of course, most people want to be liked, I think, especially when you consider the lonely alternatives. Even the fringier members of society—gangsters, drug cartel types, garden-variety serial killers—even they want to be liked in their own endearing ways. They might want to be admired for their own particular brand of impressive awfulness, such as managing to elude the law for longer than anyone in their questionable line of work, or for the unique and even striking manner in which they slaughtered their victims. Clearly there are numerous methods that can be employed in one’s ravenous quest to be loved.