In retrospect, perhaps Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels characterizing himself as being close by and “praying for death” when you proposed isn’t the greatest omen you would ask for in terms of the wedding itself, however as Paul Simon is aware of, generally you’ve simply gotta dwell and be taught.
A new documentary about Simon, 82, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, archival interviews supply 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 have been divorced.
In one clip, Simon characterizes the union as, “All types of mistakes on top of mistakes on top of mistakes.” Michaels, a longtime pal of Simon, was current—and extremely seasick—for the proposal, which occurred on a chartered boat in Greece. See the sooner dying prayers.
“Other than that, it was a really fun time,” Michaels mentioned of the jaunt. He was additionally Simon’s greatest man on the marriage ceremony, and apparently additionally joined the couple for his or her honeymoon, the place in his phrases, “we went up to Egypt, went up the Nile.”
While Fisher was in what Michaels characterised as a “complete fame bubble because of Star Wars” on the time, Simon was actually not sitting idle: He had already received 10 Grammys by then, and was on a reunion tour along with his musical companion Art Garfunkel. He characterised Fisher as adept at dealing with the media consideration continuously turned her method, saying she may “make it work for her. She was really good at it, and I wasn’t.”
While Ben Affleck famously mentioned in an Oscar acceptance speech that “marriage is hard work,” Simon speaks of his former ties that now not bind much less euphemistically.
“I mean, what was I thinking?” he mentioned in a single 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 mentioned.
Not that Fisher, who died in 2016, minced phrases herself when discussing the transient union in her memoir Wishful Drinking. Asked if the wedding 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 mentioned together 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 mentioned that Simon’s songs “She Moves On” and “Hearts and Bones” have been each impressed 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.