“… and her mother was Princess Abudhabi…”
Celebrity Spotlight: Eddie Fisher
Bankruptcy affects people of every age, creed, sex or ethnicity from every part of the country. Even celebrities both loved and disliked have their financial problems and depend on the bankruptcy laws to get out from under crippling debt.
Courtesy of the New York Times:
Eddie Fisher was known as much for his singing career as he was his love life.
Edwin Jack Fisher was born on August 10, 1928, in Philadelphia. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and his early singing experience came at the local synagogue. At 13 he won a singing contest sponsored by the “Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour,” a radio variety show, and he soon became a regular on the Philadelphia radio station WFIL, where his starting pay of 15 cents — the price of two trolley tokens — rose to $18 a week.
While still in high school he sang his way into the Buddy Morrow band, a job that took him to New York and led to an engagement with the Charlie Ventura big band. Too young to appear in nightclubs, he found work as a staff singer at the Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills, where his singing caught the attention of Eddie Cantor, who booked him in 1949 on a cross-country show. A contract with RCA followed.
Between 1950 and 1956 he had 24 top 10 hits and nearly 50 songs in the Top 40. He reached a wide television audience on “Coke Time With Eddie Fisher,” which NBC broadcast from 1953 to 1957, and “The Eddie Fisher Show,” its successor.
Seeking to capitalize on his marriage with Debbie Reynolds, RKO paired the couple in the musical-comedy film “Bundle of Joy” (1956). Mr. Fisher appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor in “Butterfield 8” (1960), in a dramatic role that convinced him and the rest of the world that acting was not his destiny.
His career suffered badly over his very public and messy divorce from Reynolds, whom he had married in 1955, and left for Elizabeth Taylor.
The divorce became a major scandal partly because Mr. Fisher and Ms. Reynolds had been sold as Hollywood’s dream couple, and partly because Ms. Taylor had been married to Mr. Fisher’s best friend, the producer Mike Todd, who had died in a plane crash in 1958.
The gossip columns and magazines feasted on the breakup and the romance for months, and the adverse publicity caused NBC to cancel “The Eddie Fisher Show.”
The divorce of Mr. Fisher and Ms. Taylor was as sensational as the marriage. The smoldering romance between Richard Burton and Ms. Taylor, ignited on the set of “Cleopatra,” burst into flame before an eagerly watching world, and in 1964 the storied Fisher-Taylor marriage came to an end. Mr. Fisher, a worldwide object of derision as the ousted party, bounced back by marrying the singer Connie Stevens, the third of his five wives.
Hits became scarcer after the mid-1950s, and RCA dropped him in 1960. He returned to the label and recorded the minor hit “Games That Lovers Play” in 1966. The album of the same title, made with Nelson Riddle, became his top-selling long-playing record.
Mr. Fisher filed for bankruptcy in 1970.
He died in September 2010 due to complications during hip surgery.
His four children are Tricia Leigh and actress Joely Fisher from his marriage to Connie Stevens, and Carrie Fisher and Todd Fisher from his marriage with Debbie Reynolds.
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Michael Curry is the author of helpful ebooks on bankruptcy and debt relief, available on Kindle: What Bankruptcy Can Do, What Bankruptcy Can’t Do and Finally Be Financially Free.
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