Actresses Sittin’ Around Smokin’ In ’77
This is a great series of shots…
They were taken in New York City, on November 21, 1977 – nearly 42 years ago – at a Thanksgiving party at a place called Sybil’s, “a new disco and backgammon club inside the Hilton Hotel”. (Cuz, as everyone knows, after dancing the night away and doing cocaine there’s nothing better than sitting down for a long dull game of backgammon. On Thanksgiving.) Mostly it just looks like an excuse for three hot actresses of the moment to hit the town together.
The beautiful and talented trio – Amy Irving, Carrie Fisher, and Teri Garr – are lighting up cigs in black-and-white like their own private French movie. Carrie was 21, Amy, 24, and Teri, 29. Amy had just done Carrie (the movie, not Fisher – get your mind out of the gutter) and was dating Steven Spielberg, Carrie was hot off Star Wars and dating Dan Ackroyd, and Teri, of Young Frankenstein and Close Encounters fame, was just a few years away from flirting faux-angrily with David Letterman on national television.
They are all caught here at peak adorability…
And the sequence of the photos gives you a real feeling of being there. You can almost hear them laughing and talking over each other. Loose and having fun. Clearly aware of the photographers, but enjoying the attention.
This shot was probably the only one that made the press at the time. Notice how the cigarettes are discreetly cropped out.
Further Googling brought up this COLOR sequence…
I love this last faded one where Amy seems momentarily sad and spaced-out (even more French!). God, she was sexy… Just gorgeous. That mane of curly hair. But then, Carrie is kinda’ glowing too. As is Teri in the shot before – then turning shy and wary just as quick, in that oddly self-conscious way of hers. At one time or another, I had a movie-geek crush on all of them.
What makes it sad is when you remember that, of the three, only Amy is alive and well in 2019. Carrie, of course, died of a heart attack at the end of 2016, and Teri is very ill with advanced Parkinson’s Disease.
I don’t know if smoking has any connection to Parkinson’s, but Carrie’s lifelong habit most likely played a role in her premature death (an anti-smoking group actually used her image in their ads afterward). But she also had plenty of other contributing factors. I don’t think 20 cans of Coke a day were much help. There were years and years of hard drugs, her ballooning weight, and simply being manic-depressive takes a pretty heavy physical toll all by itself.
But then, all that Quirkiness-Without-A-Cure, the vices, the pain, all of it, also made her a brilliantly clever novelist and screenwriter.
And in these pictures at least, she is still young and cute, happy and healthy… They all are. Frozen that way.
It’s nice to see our space princess smiling…
In any case, she would probably tell us she had no regrets.
And to fuck off.
