On Eddie Fisher (No, Not Fishs Eddy)

If you’re my age, and even a little older, you grew up knowing only a couple of things about Eddie Fisher (1928-2010): 1) he had caused a stir by leaving Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, and 2) he was Carrie Fisher’s father. If you’re younger than me you most likely didn’t even know that much.

But the Liz Taylor thing was kind of inexplicable. She was damn near the most desirable woman in the world, as well as one of the biggest movie stars. But who the hell was HE? What songs did he ever sing, we wondered? We KNOW what Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams sang, even if it wasn’t our kind of music. We can’t be faulted for assuming Eddie Fisher was some kind of second tier, flash in the pan crooner, on a level with, say, Steve Lawrence or Vic Damone — though I was much more aware of even those guys. Yet in the ’70s when I was growing up, Eddie Fisher was, like, NOWHERE in the popular culture. I never even saw him on the Jerry Lewis telethon.

Well, it pays to know how to read the charts. I have a friend who reads the astrological charts; I read the pop charts. No, not the pop tarts. The pop CHARTS. Granted, Fisher’s sales were already sagging by the late ’50s when rock and roll started to come in, but after the thing with Liz went down in 1959…crickets. The public absolutely turned away. He lost his television show. RCA Victor dropped him from the label. And though he kept performing, and had a couple of subsequent minor hits, it pretty much went downhill from there.

BUT! (My point being): prior to that, he was on TOP! Like, very much on top! That was pretty much the case throughout the 1950s, but especially the first half when he was a total idol to teenyboppers. Between 1950 and 1956, Fisher had 17 top ten hits and 35 in the Top 40. Four of them went all the way to number one. I’m tempted to claim that I have never heard of any of them, but I do happen to know “Any Time”, the Emmett Miller song he took to #2 in 1951 — though it’s the Eddy Arnold version I actually know. He also had a #6 hit with “Lady of Spain” in 1952, but I mean, c’mon. I also am aware of his stab at rock and roll, “Dungaree Doll”, which went to #7 in 1955, but only because it’s so patently preposterous. To this day, it’s the only love song I can think of that has the word “dung” in it. Although, who knows? Maybe the band Rough Trade has something like that in their oeuvre. But to sew up our thesis here, Eddie Fisher did enjoy incredible popularity, but then his legacy was simply buried. Persona non grata.

The back story:

Fisher grew up in Philly, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. When still a teenager, he was already on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. In the late ’40s he sang at Catskills hotels like Grossingers, and this was how he came to the attention of Eddie Cantor, who made him a regular on his radio show. From there it was on to television shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour,The Milton Berle Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show. With head-turning swiftness he was made the star of his own tv variety program Coke Time (1953-57), sponsored by Coca Cola, which was followed by The Eddie Fisher Show (1957-59). He was also in a couple of movies: Bundle of Joy (1956) with Reynolds, and BUtterfield 8 (1960) with Taylor. On top of this he had a $1 million contract to play the Tropicana in Las Vegas. All this at his peak.

The story goes that the affair with Taylor arose from the fact that he was consoling her over the loss of her previous husband, Mike Todd, who had died in a plane crash. The Fishers were friends with the Todds. And then they got too close. It was not the firmest of foundations for a marriage, and they parted ways in 1964. Just long enough to upend a few lives, most of all, his own.

For a time, there was a flirtation of sorts with Broadway. He a had a minor hit with “Tonight” from West Side Story in 1961, and another with “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler in 1964. He did a residency at the Winter Garden in 1962, and another at the Palace (with Buddy Hackett) in 1967. In 1968, Fisher recorded a tribute album to Al Jolson, called You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet. His commercial instinct would appear to have fled entirely by this point.

Meanwhile in 1967 he married Connie Stevens. They were only together two years, but it was time enough to produce Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher, who both went into the biz themselves. (I’m guessing the latter adds her middle name so she won’t be anybody’s “Trisha Fisha”.)

By the mid ’70s, when his oldest daughter Carrie was becoming a mega-star, her face on every Star Wars lunch box and coloring book and bedroom poster, Eddie Fisher himself was a trivia question. In 1981 he released a memoir, Eddie: My Life, My Loves and attempted to parlay that into a comeback with a 1983 tour and an 1984 LP. Sinatra had a hit with “New York, New York” in 1979, after all. Gene Kelly was in Xanadu (1980)! Anything could happen. But it didn’t. he wrote a second autobiography, Been There, Done That in 1999.

You can catch a glimpse or two of him, looking pretty shaky, in the 2016 documentary Bright Lights, though he had passed away several years earlier, in 2010. Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds horrified us all by dying within days of each other six years later.

For more on show biz history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.