In 1958, Eddie Fisher was the most beloved young singer in America, a man whose warm tenor voice had made him the bridge between the era of Frank Sinatra and the arrival of Elvis Presley. Presidents invited him to perform, teenage girls sent him fan letters by the hundreds of thousands, and a single Coca-Cola television sponsorship had been worth $1 million. Then his best friend, Mike Todd, died in a plane crash, and in the months that followed, Fisher made a choice that cost him his reputation, his marriage, his career, and his place in the world he had worked his entire life to enter. Fisher was born Edwin Jack Fisher on August 10, 1928, in South Philadelphia, the fourth of seven children of Russian Jewish immigrants.
His father worked as a vegetable and fruit vendor, and the family lived in the cramped, working-class immigrant world where talent was celebrated at local amateur shows. The family called him Sonny Boy, and he was singing on Philadelphia radio by age 15. His break came when the powerful entertainer Eddie Cantor took him under his wing, bringing him onto his radio program and opening doors across the industry. Drafted into the Army in 1951, Fisher served until 1953 and used the years to his advantage, performing for troops and making television appearances in uniform.
By 1953 he had his own show, Coke Time with Eddie Fisher, and was recording hit after hit for RCA Victor. In September 1955, Fisher married Debbie Reynolds, the young MGM star who had become famous in Singin’ in the Rain. The press called them America’s Sweethearts, and they seemed to embody the prosperous, optimistic promise of postwar American life. Their daughter Carrie was born in October 1956, and their son Todd arrived in February 1958, named after Fisher’s closest friend, the flamboyant producer Mike Todd.
Todd had made his name with the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days and had married Elizabeth Taylor in February 1957. Fisher and Reynolds had stood at the wedding, and the two couples were inseparable. On March 22, 1958, Todd boarded his private plane in Burbank, California, bound for New York, while Taylor stayed home with bronchitis. The plane crashed near Grants, New Mexico, killing everyone onboard.
Todd was 49. Fisher was devastated. In the weeks and months after the crash, he became the person who spent the most time with Taylor in her grief, flying to her, sitting with her, sharing the loss of the man they had both loved. Debbie Reynolds was at home with a newborn son and a two-year-old daughter.
By the fall of 1958, the press knew that the consolation had become an affair. The scandal was explosive because of its geometry. Fisher had been unfaithful with the widow of his best friend, the friend whose death he was supposedly mourning. He was leaving Debbie Reynolds, America’s Sweetheart, and their two small children, one of them named for the dead man.
The public had a clear villain and a clear victim. The gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons wrote about the situation extensively, and the coverage was almost entirely sympathetic to Reynolds and condemnatory of Fisher. Radio stations received mail demanding they stop playing his records. Fans mailed back the records they had bought.
His television show was canceled in 1959, sponsors withdrew, and Eddie Cantor publicly broke with him. Fisher divorced Reynolds in February 1959 and married Elizabeth Taylor in Las Vegas on May 12, 1959. He was 30, and she was 27. Taylor’s career survived the scandal because her fame rested on her work on screen.
Fisher’s career was built on public affection itself, and when the audience withdrew that affection, the product ceased to exist. His records sold progressively worse, then barely at all, and the venues for his live performances grew smaller and smaller. The marriage lasted five years. In 1962, Taylor was in Rome filming Cleopatra, the most expensive film in Hollywood history to that point, and she began an affair with her co-star Richard Burton.
Fisher was in Rome, read the Italian newspapers, and knew what was happening. By March 1964, Taylor had divorced him and married Burton just 11 days later. After Taylor, Fisher’s life became a succession of marriages and financial struggles. He married Connie Stevens in 1967, and the marriage lasted two years.
In 1970, he filed for bankruptcy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, listing more than $900,000 in debts against $40,000 in assets. A fourth marriage to beauty queen Terry Richard lasted ten months. His fifth marriage, to Betty Lynn in 1993, lasted until her death in 2001. He kept performing through all of it, in smaller Las Vegas venues, and his voice remained a genuine instrument even as it aged.
He published his memoirs, My Story in 1981 and Been There, Done That in 1999. His daughter Carrie Fisher became one of the most beloved and candid public figures of her generation, writing openly about her complicated relationship with her famous father. Reynolds, meanwhile, built a long and successful career of her own and eventually reconciled with Taylor. Eddie Fisher died on September 22, 2010, in Berkeley, California, from complications following hip surgery.
He was 82. The obituaries all led with the same sentence: the singer who left Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. It was the sentence his life had been organized around since 1958. Six years later, on December 28, 2016, his daughter Carrie died at age 60, four days after a cardiac event on a transatlantic flight.
Debbie Reynolds died the following day. What the public never fully forgave was the specific cruelty of the timing: Fisher abandoned his family for the widow of the best friend who had just died, and the friend’s namesake was an infant at home. The affair was not, in the most honest accounting, an act of malice. It was what happens when grief, proximity, and desire operate on people who have not developed the capacity to resist what they are feeling.
But whether that excuses the consequences for the family he left is a question that only the people who lived it can answer. What the record documents is the permanent cost of a single decision made at the peak of fame and the depth of grief, a decision that the American public made into the defining fact of his life.