Entertainment

Paul Simon on His Marriage to Carrie Fisher: “Mistakes on Top of Mistakes”

In retrospect, maybe Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels characterizing himself as being nearby and “praying for death” while you proposed isn’t the best omen you could ask for when it comes to the marriage itself, but as Paul Simon knows, sometimes you’ve just gotta live and learn.

A new documentary about Simon, 82, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, archival interviews offer some retrospective brutal takes on the one-year marriage between Simon and late Star Wars actor Carrie Fisher. The two first met when Fisher, in her full Princess Leia splendor and fame, hosted SNL in 1978. They married in 1983. By July 1984, they were divorced.

In one clip, Simon characterizes the union as, “All types of mistakes on top of mistakes on top of mistakes.” Michaels, a longtime friend of Simon, was present—and incredibly seasick—for the proposal, which took place on a chartered boat in Greece. See the earlier death prayers.

“Other than that, it was a really fun time,” Michaels said of the jaunt. He was also Simon’s best man at the wedding, and apparently also joined the couple for their honeymoon, where in his words, “we went up to Egypt, went up the Nile.”

While Fisher was in what Michaels characterized as a “complete fame bubble because of Star Wars” at the time, Simon was certainly not sitting idle: He had already won 10 Grammys by then, and was on a reunion tour with his musical partner Art Garfunkel. He characterized Fisher as adept at handling the media attention constantly turned her way, saying she could “make it work for her. She was really good at it, and I wasn’t.”

While Ben Affleck famously said in an Oscar acceptance speech that “marriage is hard work,” Simon speaks of his former ties that no longer bind less euphemistically.

“I mean, what was I thinking?” he said in one interview. “Marriage is very… it’s a hard thing to do. You have to concentrate on…not everything can happen at once, not everything is a media event.”

“I realized I could become exhausted by—I could exhaust myself from emotional upheaval,” he said.

Not that Fisher, who died in 2016, minced words herself when discussing the brief union in her memoir Wishful Drinking. Asked if the marriage was “the wrong thing to do,” she answered, “Yes.”

She continues, “Well, because I think, if you look at me, at the most, you can think I’m an interesting girlfriend. But a wife? I think you’re going to be disappointed,” she said with her trademark self-deprecating humor. “Poor Paul. He had to put up with a lot with me. I think ultimately, I fell into the heading ‘good anecdote, bad reality.’ I was really good for material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was a little more than he could take.”

Of course, even after they divorced, she wrote, “Then we dated again. We were together for more than 12 years (off and on) and we traveled a lot. The last place we went to was the Amazon, which I recommend if you like mosquitoes.”

Fisher said that Simon’s songs “She Moves On” and “Hearts and Bones” were both inspired by her, and recalled their frequent fights—and laughs. 

“We once had a fight (on our honeymoon) where I said: ‘Not only do I not like you, I don’t like you personally!’ We tried to keep the argument going after that but we were laughing too hard,” she wrote.

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Source: VFair

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