“When I was a small child….I opened my mouth and this beautiful sound came out and, for me, the world was changed forever.     Eddie Fisher

Edwin John Fisher, their child with the unusually beautiful voice, was born to a Jewish immigrant family in Philadelphia a year before the start of the Great Depression. Singing helped his family through hard times and catapulted him to Hollywood and the top of the popular music charts during the 1950s and 60s. His much-publicized career ended in relative obscurity in Berkeley, perhaps in part to be near a grandchild who was attending the university.

When he was four years old, Eddie won the first prize of a large cake in a local talent show. After that, his mother entered him in every event she could find. He usually won. By the 1950s he was a teenage idol who had his own television show, 32 hit songs and had famously married two of Hollywood’s most popular film stars, Debbie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor.

His enormous success as a singer was not paralleled in his personal life. The first of his five wives was Debbie Reynolds, often type cast as the wholesome “girl next door.” In one of his two autobiographies, Been There, Done That Fisher bitterly wrote that Reynolds was the nice neighbor girl only “if you lived next door to a self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony.” Many years later, on Oprah, Reynolds’ rancor toward him was still alive. After making a gesture implying Eddie’s lack of sexual endowment, she says “…and his brain wasn’t that big either.”

Fisher and Reynolds had two children, daughter, Carrie Fisher, well known in her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars trilogy, and Todd Fisher, actor, director and cinematographer. Todd Fisher was named after Michael Todd, Eddie’s close friend who died in a plane crash while married to Elizabeth Taylor. Fisher’s widely publicized affair with his friend’s widow while still married to Reynolds was the notorious Hollywood love scandal of the time and resulted in the cancellation of his television and recording contracts with NBC and RCA Victor records. Taylor’s career didn’t suffer. but Fisher’s went off the rails and never entirely regained traction. They divorced after she met Richard Burton.

Periodically, Fisher had been treated for back pain by Max Jacobson, also known as Dr. Feelgood or Miracle Max. Before Jacobson’s license was revoked in 1975 he’d treated many famous people, including President Kennedy, with what were called “miracle tissue regenerator” shots. They proved to be a cocktail of amphetamines, animal hormones, bone marrow enzymes, human placenta, painkillers, steroids and multivitamins.  

Fisher’s addiction to drugs and alcohol followed him over the years. Carrie, seriously addicted herself, called her father “Puff Daddy,” alluding to his four-joints-a-day cannabis habit. Though he periodically tried to revive his career and continued to perform, headlining in venues in Las Vegas, at New York’s Palace Theatre and London’s Palladium, over time both age and drugs darkened and coarsened his voice and he never adapted to newer popular music styles. When he died at 82, he was perhaps best remembered more for his marriages to famous and beautiful women, including singer/actress Connie Stevens, and as the father of “Princess Leia” than the voice that had made him a star in his own right.

Fisher relocated to the Bay Area after marrying his fifth wife, Betty Lin Fisher, a San Francisco business person who died in 2001. He wasn’t often seen in public in Berkeley though he was spotted several times at Berkeley Rep when Carrie was doing her autobiographical solo show, “Wishful Drinking“ at Berkeley Rep. Fisher died several weeks after undergoing hip surgery at Alta Bates Summit Hospital. Obituaries differ as to whether he died in the hospital or in his Berkeley residence. So far we have been unable to locate the address where he and his wife lived in Berkeley.