Carrie Fisher’s wild life — by her best friend Griffin Dunne

“Don’t do that thing you do with the girls,” he said, breaking out in a French accent and kissing his hand over and over while chanting “Ma chérie”.

I laughed, while nervously looking around to see if my embarrassment was showing.

“Just don’t” — he suddenly reverted to a dead monotone — “trick her into liking you.”

Carrie arrived and as per Alex’s instructions I ignored her.

At the time I had just turned 16. Carrie was a year younger than me but looked exactly like the teen seductress in Shampoo she would soon play opposite Warren Beatty. I knew I had to get out of the room or I’d break my vow to Alex and to myself.

I was about to leave when she addressed me. “You’re friends with Piper, aren’t you?”

With Dunne, left, and her Star Wars co-star Mark Hamill in 1977

COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE

I didn’t know who Piper was. Torn between admitting my ignorance or inquiring about him or her — both of which would have betrayed my brother — I shyly looked down. The effect, though unintentional, made me appear tortured and sullen.

“Griffin’s friends with everybody. I don’t even have a name at school. They just call me ‘Griffin’s brother’,” Alex said cheerfully, if not with downright pride. I was so touched, I wanted to kick his ass for making such a stupid remark in front of the woman he loved.

“Well, at least they don’t call you ‘Debbie’s daughter’,” she said in reference to her mother, the actress Debbie Reynolds.

“Is that tough to live up to?” I asked. Oh shut up, I thought to myself.

“It’s a burden, but I still get three square meals a day.”

“There is that.” Shut up!

“Always looking on the bright side.”

“A glass-half-full kind of broad, are you?” Oh, for God’s sake, what is wrong with me?

“Guilty as charged.”

“Who’s Debbie?” asked Alex, not keeping up at all.

“The Singing Nun. We saw it about five dinners ago,” I reminded him, hoping to bring him back into the conversation.

Carrie later announced that it was a school night and she had to get home or her mother would worry.

“No, I’m kidding, she’s asleep for a 5am call and has no idea where I am, but I do have to get back. So nice to meet you all. Alex, your family seems incredibly well balanced. You must be very proud.”

Best friends become best friends suddenly, and without knowing that’s what’s happening until it happens. One insignificant day, weeks later, I looked at Carrie and realised she would be in my life for a long time. Before I failed Spanish, I remember the teacher describing the eve of fluency as when one night you dream in the language and suddenly you can speak it the next morning. That is what it felt like when Carrie and I realised we were best friends. To the exclusion of everyone around us, we established our own Sanskrit that baffled the locals and established our reputation alongside the great pairings of all who came before us: Laurel and Hardy. Pork and Beans. Griffin and Carrie.

That we were platonic didn’t comfort Alex; if anything, it made things worse. Our friendship, clearly destined for a long history, meant that my impossibly romantic brother would never have the chance to win his Guinevere. Et tu, Carrie, he must have thought when she introduced him only as “Griffin’s brother” at a barbecue at her house, and he never set foot there again.

First of all, let me cut to the chase and say that Carrie never became my girlfriend. She knew, long before I did, that being lovers would diminish our possibilities. Carrie was a virgin when we met, and she lived for every lurid detail of my own sexual encounters: from my first kiss to postcoital anxieties I shared with no one but her. Her curiosity was so forensic that I felt like a cadaver undergoing an autopsy.

Making her screen debut at the same age in the 1975 comedy Shampoo

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When she was 19 and living in New York, Carrie had a boyfriend, a sweet English actor named Donald, whom she’d been dating for the past few months. Donald had stepped into the same black hole as every man who had fallen hard for Carrie, and he did what every man before him had done: sought my advice on how he might win her heart. I was an acting student in New York at the time. I’d grown accustomed to watching these poor guys be drained of their confidence under her barrage of mixed signals, their late-night calls begging me to translate a cryptic postcard or a parting quip delivered after a furious make-out session.

Of all her confused suitors, Donald was the one I liked the most, and I was rooting for him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that, shortly into their courtship, Carrie had chosen to lose her virginity to me. As messed up as it sounds, there was a certain logic to Carrie’s approach. For years I’d been walking her through the minutiae of every conceivable sexual act like an ordnance handler telling a housewife how to defuse a bomb. Yes, it can be scary, but not if you know what you’re doing.

Donald was going to be the one, Carrie told me, on a night her mom was out of town and I was staying over at the Midtown hotel suite they were living in. Afterwards I was in the shower, and suddenly a severed bloody hand, convincingly amputated from the wrist, flew in and landed at my feet. The gruesome rubber prop was promotional swag given to Carrie by the publicist of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and had become the star of an ongoing gag between us. I first laid eyes on it under my pillow one night. I screamed like a little girl, but only for a moment, and then plotted my revenge.

Fisher aged 17 at the Savoy hotel in London, July 1974

ALAMY

Soon after, the hand made its Broadway debut thanks to Carrie’s part in the chorus of Irene, in which her mother was starring. I snuck into her dressing room and hid it in a Victorian purse she was to open, on cue, to powder her nose in time with the chorus dancing to The Riviera Rage. Wish I could have asked how the show went, but according to our unspoken rule we never mentioned the hand. Somehow Carrie managed to get the bartender at Beefsteak Charlie’s, where I worked, to hide it under the romaine at the salad bar during Sangria Night. Carrie now chucking the hand into the shower was beneath both of us, but I decided to let it pass.

While I was working up a lather, I felt fingers touch my belly and slowly move downwards. When I finally wiped the soap from my eyes, I saw Carrie holding the amputated rubber hand that caressed me.

“You freak!” I screamed as she ran from the bathroom, doubled over in hysterics.

“Griffin got turned on by a dead guy,” she sang. I looked down at the severed limb at my feet, palm up in mea culpa fashion as if to say, “Hey, man, she made me do it.”

I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Carrie was on her bed reading as if nothing had happened, but there was no denying a change had taken place. She looked different to me, or maybe I was just reminded of my impressions of when we first met. I sat beside her on the bed, took the book from her hands, and kissed her.

It all made sense in the moment, and we both understood that everything we were doing under those covers would not alter our friendship one iota.

Fisher and Dunne starring in the TV series Trying Times

ALAMY

Not only did my friendship with Carrie remain unfazed, but so did my relationship with Donald after they finally made love. He remained just as needy and insecure about her feelings towards him, and I never turned down his late-night invitations to watch him cry into his beer. He might not have been her first, but he was the first of many of her boyfriends (and girlfriends of mine) to wrongly assume that the rules of a platonic relationship were so black and white.

In the autumn of 1975 I was summoned by Carrie’s mother to report to her dressing room at New York’s Minskoff Theatre at the end of a Saturday matinee of Irene. Carrie wouldn’t say what the meeting was about except that I was really “going to like it”.

Debbie came to regard me, if not as her son, then as her daughter’s older brother. She was very protective of Carrie and thought nothing of calling to find out whether I thought a particular guy who was sending her flowers to the theatre was bad news or not. I would sound concerned or reassuring depending on how I felt, but usually I didn’t even know whom she was asking about. People had been sending Carrie flowers for as long as I’d known her.

The night of her summons, I pushed my way through Debbie’s fans waiting for autographs at the stage door. “She’s expecting you,” said Edie, the guard who kept the hordes back. Debbie’s wardrobe mistress greeted me with a can of beer as I pulled up a chair next to Debbie at her dressing mirror, where she was sitting in a robe and skullcap, taking off her make-up.

Carrie stood reading a filthy but funny telegram from Sir John Gielgud, the English actor, taped to the wall with hundreds of other well-wishes. Debbie got right to it.

With her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in 1973

ALAMY

“So, Griffin. Carrie tells me you live in a slum downtown.”

“I did not put it that way, Mom.”

“And that you’ve been robbed?”

“Only the first few months,” I qualified. “It’s tapered off now. My place now is really just more of a workshop for thieves learning the ropes.”

“Well, that can’t be good. Carrie, as you know, is hoping to move into an apartment of her own.”

“I can’t in good conscience suggest my neighbourhood, if that is what you’re asking.”

“I have found a place, or I should say we,” she said, nodding towards her daughter, “that is sort of perfect — except for one thing. It is a wonderful building with a doorman, just off Central Park, but the only problem is there are two bedrooms, and Carrie wants to live alone. Which is out of the question.”

I looked to Carrie for an explanation, but she was engrossed in a telegram.

“What we want to ask you, dear,” Debbie continued, “is if you would consider leaving the glamour of your present home and moving in with Carrie.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s the Hotel des Artistes, on West 67th. You could pay what you are paying now if it makes you feel better. I know you want to do the whole bongo-playing Marlon Brando thing, but I’ll tell you something. Marlon used to have a roommate, a dear man named Wally Cox, and I’ll bet if Wally’s mother offered to move them to a safer apartment, he would have leapt at the chance.”

“We have no way of proving that, of course,” offered Carrie.

COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE

I could see that she was hoping I would go for this and that I wasn’t falling in line as quickly as she’d expected.

“This place is amazing, which of course you don’t feel you deserve — even I don’t think you deserve it — but the only way Mom is going to let me move out is if I get a roommate, and there is no one I want that to be more than you. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

West 67th Street was two blocks from Beefsteak Charlie’s and a short walk to the theatre district should an audition ever occur in my lifetime. Plus, I had recently outrun a mugger on Avenue A, an episode I decided not to bring up just then. I agreed.

At des Artistes everyone always knew who Carrie was, but no one was ever quite sure about me, a pattern soon to haunt me throughout the coming years. The building staff called me Mr Griffin and seemed to assume I was the rightful heir to a vast fortune, enjoying my playboy years.

Our apartment took on the appearance of a warehouse for retired artefacts from a turn-of-the-century theme park. Carrie had an incredible eye for found objects and a hearty allowance from Debbie to support it. I placed my keys on the extended tongue of a demented funhouse clown. I hung my coat on a scale that measured whether children were tall enough for a rollercoaster (which Carrie also would have bought, if it fit in the apartment). I had to pass through countless crafts and props and paintings by serial killers just to get to my bedroom.

It was 1976 and one day Carrie said offhandedly that she had landed a job in some science-fiction movie shooting in England. “Is there a part in it for me?” I asked, oblivious to what a normal person would say, like “Congrats” or “That’s great!”

“The only one you would have been right for is being played by Mark somebody. It’s a really stupid script and you would have turned it down, I promise.”

“If I’d known about it,” I said suspiciously, as if she and Mark somebody had conspired to keep their movie a secret from me because now he was her best friend. I was dangerously close to being one of those out-of-work actors who grasps at delusional reasons for their continued unemployment. Of course Carrie picked up on my mood.

“Don’t be like that. The other lead is some older guy named Harrison Ford. You wouldn’t have heard of him.”

In fact I knew him. He was the carpenter whom my aunt, the writer Joan Didion, had hired to build the deck of her beach house near Malibu when I was 17. Like an eager puppy I’d handed him nails or dug for hardware from his worn canvas toolkit. In return he would slip me one of his Marlboros, the filters of which I clipped off because that’s what he did. Harrison cut me off from his endless relay of joints because his stuff was so strong that after one toke I couldn’t tell the difference between a saw and a tape measure. I simply idolised the dude and hated my envy that Carrie would get to spend so much time with him.

Harrison Ford when he was a carpenter in 1970

“He was the guy I told you about, who built the deck at Joan’s house.”

“You mean the carpenter you worshipped like he was Jesus?”

“Yeah, he’s the coolest guy I ever met and is almost as funny as you are. You’re going to love him,” I whined in despair. “And you being away that long is not good news at all.” She went to London a week later.

Carrie often returned from shooting and we fell right back into waking each other up with filthy lyrics from made-up musicals. I’d forgotten how much I missed the phone ringing off the hook and the flower deliveries and visits from friends at all hours. But now that our old life came roaring back, I also kind of missed the quiet routine I’d established in her absence. Not in a bad way — I just needed to oil a few squeaky wheels to get us back in alignment like before.

Carrie grew anxious as the release date for Star Wars — May 25, 1977 — neared. “You should see what they did to my hair!” she had screamed into the phone on location, usually mornings before going to set for her, four in the morning for me. “I look like I’m wearing two bagels over my ears.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about the bagels, and I knew she was warming to a repeated monologue that might allow me a moment to drift off until a response was required. “And I’m acting with an eight-foot yeti and a four-foot Brit in a rolling trash can! We shoot at shit we can’t see on green screens with ray guns that don’t even have a trigger. This movie is going to be a f***ing disaster.”

With Chewbacca, played by Peter Mayhew, in 1983

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The very first screening of Star Wars was at the Ziegfeld Theatre, the largest cinema in Manhattan. It was a sneak preview that attracted a mob of rabid sci-fi fans who lined up along West 54th as if summoned by signals from a distant galaxy. They clearly knew something about this movie that Carrie did not. If John and George came back from the dead to play the Garden with Paul and Ringo for one show only, I don’t think they could have worked up the crowd the way Star Wars did that night at the Ziegfeld.

By the last line of the opening crawl, something about “certain doom for the champions of freedom”, I knew Carrie’s life would never be the same. Not to put a “certain doom” on it, but neither would our friendship. It was just different for a long while, but never really the same.

Overnight I became “Carrie Fisher’s roommate”, a delicious karma that my brother Alex might have appreciated, having been called “Griffin’s brother” all his life.

The off-Broadway actors and chorus girls who dropped by at all hours were soon outnumbered by rock musicians and movie stars I’d grown up idolising. Glenn Frey of the Eagles wooed Carrie with a stadium-quality sound system he had shipped from the Record Plant in LA.

“Which Eagle is he?” she yelled from the shower when I read her the card.

Coming home one evening, I fought my way through a party of coke dealers and hangers-on to find James Taylor crying in my bedroom to Carrie that Carly Simon didn’t love him any more. Richard Dreyfuss could be heard snorting lines while railing about a disastrous review he’d just received for his performance as Iago in an open-air production of Othello in Central Park, a part that I would have killed for.

COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE

I knew I would have to move on. “You’ve arrived, I haven’t even left,” I said to Carrie when I broke the news. She took it badly but begrudgingly understood. I found a place back downtown, where I belonged, and hung with people whose struggles more resembled my own. It was always tempting to accept invitations to Carrie’s parties or watch her host Saturday Night Live from the green room, but I held off until I could tame my insecurities — or at least make enough money from acting to grandly pick up a tab like Carrie had done so many times for me.

In 1982 I thought starring in my first off-Broadway play, Coming Attractions, to good reviews was the straw stuffing I needed to fill the holes to make me feel worthy. I knew acceptance from others was a quick fix — hardly unusual to actors and a flaw I would deal with later — but the minor success nonetheless brought the glow back to my friendship with Carrie.

In the years ahead I was there for her family weddings and she for many of mine. She loved to pretend she couldn’t remember which of my exes was which. But of course she knew, and dug for every little nugget about when and where it all went wrong with the same curiosity she’d had about my proclivities when she was a virgin.

ALAMY

I wish I could remember our last conversation before she left for London on the trip from which she never came home in 2016. At the age of 60, after being in the UK to film scenes for the third series of Catastrophe, she fell ill on the flight back to Los Angeles and died from sleep apnoea and other complications in hospital four days later, having never regained consciousness. That conversation was probably about Christmas plans or our daughters’ shenanigans, but I know, despite not remembering what exactly was said, that we laughed very, very hard
© Griffin Dunne 2024. Extracted from The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne (Atlantic Books £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

Paul Simon and the men who fell for Carrie Fisher

With Paul Simon in 1983

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During filming for the first Star Wars movie, Fisher had a three-month affair with Harrison Ford. She was 19, Ford was 33 and married with two children. She also kissed Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker.

She met the singer Paul Simon on the set of Saturday Night Live in 1978. They married in 1983 but divorced in 1984. “I think ultimately I fell into the heading ‘good anecdote, bad reality’,” Fisher said. They remained in an on-again-off-again relationship until 1988.

SNL was also where Fisher met the Canadian actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd. Aykroyd proposed and she initially accepted before calling it off to reconcile with Simon.

Fisher had a daughter, Billie Lourd, 31, with the Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd. They were together for three years until 1994, when he came out as gay.

The English singer James Blunt became Fisher’s unlikely (and strictly platonic) flatmate in Los Angeles after meeting her through a mutual friend in 2003. Fisher was godmother to Blunt’s son.

Who is Griffin Dunne?

Thomas Griffin Dunne found fame starring in John Landis’s 1981 hit An American Werewolf in London and was the lead in Martin Scorsese’s black comedy After Hours in 1985.

He was born in New York to the producer and journalist Dominick Dunne and the activist Ellen Griffin Dunne, and is the nephew of the writer Joan Didion. He directed the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold in 2017. He also acted in My Girl (1991), Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and the drama series This Is Us (2016). His sister, the actress Dominique Dunne, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1982.