Hilarity And A Helping Hand Carrie Fisher Jokes About Sex And Hollywood And Helps Raise $223,000

Carrie Fisher bashed men, joked about sex and Hollywood and helped raise more than $223,000 Tuesday in Spokane.

Fisher, a.k.a. Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” was the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Women Helping Women Fund luncheon. More than 1,800 women gave at least $100 to attend.

It was a record fund-raiser for the group, which funnels the money to charities that assist women and children.

Fisher’s speech turned into a combination therapy session-life story with hilarious digressions during which she delivered some great one-liners.

“Basically I come from a matriarchal family where the women rule and the men watch sports, and manage to get a word or two in on the side,” she said.

Fisher, an actress turned author turned screenwriter, described how her mother, Debbie Reynolds, recovered from the devastation caused when her father, Eddie Fisher, abandoned the family for Liz Taylor.

It was a typical Hollywood event, she said.

Fisher kept her head down and her eyes fixed on her notes for much of the speech.

“Like I should need notes to remember this,” she said of her family’s breakup. “OK, I’m blocking.”

During a press conference at the Spokane Club earlier in the day, Fisher propped her sunglasses on her head, tucked her feet up under herself and answered questions.

She said her mother is a role model who survived a series of bad relationships while raising her children.

“She was the breadwinner and the bread maker in our family,” she said. “Not that she can cook; she can heat things up.”

Fisher also talked about being a single mother to her 4-year-old daughter, Billie. She doesn’t have a live-in nanny, because she doesn’t want to pawn her daughter off on somebody else, she said.

Instead, she writes for about four hours a day and devotes the rest of the time to raising Billie.

Raising children alone is the hardest job in the world, she said.

“Even when her father and I were together, she could accept that her father would put on a suit and leave at 8 a.m. and not return until 8 p.m.,” she said. “But she craves me endlessly.”

Unlike her mother, who has disavowed men, Fisher said she is still open to relationships. But in the same breath she revealed a low opinion of men in general.

“Aren’t they cute,” she said. “They have it easier than we do.”

Fisher talked about how strange it was to repeatedly run into Liz Taylor at social events, but to never talk about Taylor’s relationship with Fisher’s father.

“It was the ultimate unmentionable, the big dead Buffalo in the room, my father being the dead buffalo, although very much alive sexually,” she said.

When Taylor and Fisher finally did bring up the “dead buffalo,” the conversation ended with Taylor pushing Fisher into a swimming pool, at Fisher’s insistence.

“And I was in my Jill Sanders and still looked good afterwards,” Fisher said.

Fisher said she liked the the idea of women reaching out to other women.

Women are natural care-givers, she said, so who better to help women?

“There is a secret handshake of shared sensibility,” she said. “We’ve got to help one another until we can help ourselves. I sound like a bumper sticker, a wrap-around-your car bumper sticker.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo