Why Dolly Parton’s Father Never ACCEPTED The Way She Looked

Carrie Fisher stopped breathing in her seat about 15 minutes out of Los Angeles on December 23, 2016, and never woke up. Four days later she was dead at 60. By the following afternoon her mother was in a house in Beverly Hills choosing a casket and a burial plot, 84 years old, no sleep, telling her son she wanted to be with her daughter. That mother had been in the business since a friend entered her in the Miss Burbank contest as a joke in 1948. Warner Bros. signed her within weeks, MGM bought the contract two years later, and underneath it sat seven year terms built from six month options the front office could drop whenever it liked. She was 19 in Singin' in the Rain, singing and dancing in a film that still plays 70 years on, and she never saw a percentage of it. Tammy went to number 1 in 1957. Then a husband who lost the savings at the tables, a second husband and a casino hotel that went underwater, a movie museum on land near the Las Vegas Strip that never opened, a bankruptcy, and a two day auction in June 2011 where Marilyn Monroe's white dress from The Seven Year Itch brought $4.6 million. Her daughter ran a parallel track: Princess Leia at 19, cocaine and drinking through the Star Wars sequels, a bipolar diagnosis, hospitals and rehabs, then a novel called Postcards from the Edge that turned the household into material everyone in town recognized in about a minute. The two of them finished up in houses next door to each other in Coldwater Canyon, talking most days. The death certificates named an intracerebral hemorrhage and a long standing heart condition on one side, sleep apnea with drug use as a contributing factor on the other. Neither document mentions a broken heart. What came after was two probate cases in the same week, thousands of costumes still paying storage, a trust, a court petition from Carrie's half sister Joely Fisher, and a 24 year old granddaughter who decided most of it would stay off the record.