Who would've thought that Eddie Fisher, cheesy pop singer, pipsqueak Mouseketeer to the Rat Pack, speed freak and coke fool, AWOL daddy, discarded Liz Taylor boy toy, and husband from hell, could pen a memoir as entertaining as his talented daughter Carrie's? Granted, he has the help of autobiographer to the stars David Fisher (no relation), but still, it's startling how sleekly readable Fisher's misadventures are, and shocking that he comes off with raffish charm and a sense of humor.

Don't worry, there's not too much about Eddie's dull, madly successful singing career--he wasn't that interested in it either. He preferred women. Warning: as is the case with Robert Evans's comparably entertaining sex-and-drugs tell-all, The Kid Stays in the Picture, we can't know whether it's all true. Some of Eddie's alleged women have denied dalliance. Did he really get naked with Joan Collins ("the British Open") in Dean Martin's pool, screaming along with Dino and Brando until the cops came? Did he share Sue Lyon with Richard Burton and Judy Campbell with Sinatra, JFK, and Sam Giancana? (Eddie doubts Campbell's story that she passed documents from JFK to mobster Sam.) Did Jackie turn JFK onto amphetamine fiend Max Jacobson, the famed "Dr. Feelgood" who destroyed his own life and 30 years of Eddie's? Were Bob Hope's military-base shows really "sex tours"? His bitterness makes one doubt he gives first wife Debbie Reynolds ("the Iron Butterfly") a fair shake. Did Liz Taylor drive away, naked and hysterical, in her Cadillac when Eddie suggested she see a psychiatrist? Did Burton beat her, and did she try to steal My Fair Lady from her friend Audrey Hepburn? In a Munich suite once used by Mussolini to entertain Hitler, did Liz bite Eddie as he dug pills out of her mouth to save her life? Did Liz bed Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift? Read Fisher and see what you believe. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly
Sounding every bit like an old man in an armchair, singer Eddie Fisher dishes out his kiss-and-tell life story haltingly, at times stumbling over the details. He comes across affable, honest, direct as he lays out his "maelstrom of passion and betrayal" as plain narrative. First comes the standard celebrity bio: poor Philadelphia Jewish kid has incredible voice, becomes an instant sensation. But the story's real meat is Fisher's love life. He tells of being seduced by Marlene Dietrich in her Park Avenue love nest. He relates how he was wowed by Debbie Reynolds, wooed her and won herAonly to find her "a phony." Most people will get the tape just to hear the dish on Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Fisher had a hot affair, then wed. He delivers gamely, telling how Liz mourned husband Mike Todd's plane-crash death in a pill-induced stupor. He soon became her full-time nurse, as she bounced from movie sets to hospital rooms. Fisher is tawdry and tender at once, bringing a sweetness to his account of the often ugly scenes inside the high life. Based on the 1999 St. Martin's hardcover. (Dec.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
With no vocal training, teenaged Eddie Fisher jumped from poverty to fame in the 1950s. As a leading pop vocalist, he said, "I was bigger than the Beatles, bigger than Elvis, hotter than Sinatra." While Fisher lacks sound bites, his still available CD hits are powerful and accomplished. Been There, Done That expands on his early career and media-blitz marriages to Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. He praises Reynolds for her career drive but otherwise demeans her. Passionate Taylor fares better, except for her excesses with pills and booze. For 20 years Fisher's energy for nightclub gigs depended on shots of amphetamines or cocaine. After losing his big voice, health, and money, he recovered at the Betty Ford Center. Fisher's clear reading is lax at drama and better at ironic humor. These stories are good for "golden oldie" fans who enjoy gossip.-Gordon Blackwell, Eastchester, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Michele Orecklin
What makes this memoir engaging is Fisher's sharp, often self-deprecating wit and his willingness to dish about his cohorts and conquests.

From Booklist
Crooner-actor Eddie Fisher may be ripe for rediscovery. In his 1950s^-60s heyday, he spewed out hit after hit and was a serviceable actor and a skirt chaser supreme. Ignoring his father's advice to "never fall in love with a shiksa," Fisher romanced a succession of gentile Hollywood lovelies and married Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Connie Stevens, which is enough to make him notable. Of course, he recorded that monument of musical kitsch, "Oh! My Papa," too, but today the most pop-culturally significant thing about him is tabloid memories of his very public dumping of Reynolds for Taylor and his own even more public dumping when Taylor shed him for Richard Burton. Oh, and he is the father of Carrie and Joely Fisher. He tells his stories crisply and confidently, as if he has a good time setting the record straight, and delivers Hollywood dirt with panache and authority. Nowadays, when the Hollywood Rat Pack and its discredited swagger constitute a retro fashion statement, Fisher's book affords a chic learning experience. Mike Tribby

From Kirkus Reviews
The teen idol, singer, former husband of Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Connie Stevens, father of actresses Carrie and Joely Fisher, pens a tell-all memoir with the help of celebrity profiler David Fisher (no relation and co-author with George Burns of All My Best Friends, 1989, among others). Fisher is quick to point out his many successes, saying on the second page, ``I had more consecutive hit records than the Beatles or Elvis Presley, Ike loved me, Jack Kennedy and I shared drugs and women, and [my voice] transformed me from a shy little boy into a man who attracted the most famous and desirable women in the world.'' That sets the tone for the rest of the book, as he goes on to name-drop brazenly, particularly about his numerous romantic conquests. In addition to writing about Reynolds (``A self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony''), Taylor (``Among them all she stood alone), and Stevens, he discusses affairs with Marlene Dietrich (``To have been seduced by Marlene Dietrich is to have been taught how to make love by the expert''), Mamie Van Doren, Dinah Shore, Kim Novak, Juliet Prowse (``granted'' to him, he claims, by Frank Sinatra), and Ann-Margret. He also opens up about mobster Sam Giancana, Marilyn Monroe, producer Mike Todd, Audrey Hepburn, Richard Burton, and practically everyone else in Hollywood during that era. Underneath all that bravado, however, is a surprising amount of remorse, particularly for the money he wasted and his 30-year battle with drug addiction. At no point is his regret stronger and more poignantly recounted than when he discusses his kids. I was their father only biologically, he admits. Though all of Fishers misfortunes were self-inflicted, he does become a sympathetic protagonist when writing about his children with love and pride. An aptly titled tale of a lecherous, often narcissistic, star run amokyet by the end readers will end up rooting for, and even liking, Eddie Fisher. Now that's talent. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Eddie sang at local fairs, talent contests, and bar mitzvahs, until at age fourteen, he got a job singing on Philadelphia radio shows for twenty-five dollars a week. A few years later, a stint at the Copacabana lunched him into Dreamland. By the time he was twenty-one he was one of the most popular entertainers in America, bigger even than Frank Sinatra, with an income in the millions. His life quickly evolved into a whirl of women, money, and fame.. "Eddie's story is more than just an entertainer's memoir: it's the insider tale of two decades of American pop culture and celebrity royalty. Here is a man who romanced, charmed, seduced, and married Debbie Reynolds, Connle Stevens, and Elizabeth Taylor. He drank and caroused far into the night with the likes of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. His affairs with women from Ann-Margret to Mamie Van Doren were legendary. He shared mistresses with JFK, Sam Giancana, and Sinatra, and was welcomed everywhere from the White House to Las Vegas, back when such a thing actually meant something.

FROM THE CRITICS

Bruce McCabe - Boston Globe

Dive into this farrago at Chapter Five, the one that begins: ''Nothing in my life could have prepared me for my love affair with Elizabeth Taylor.'' Work your way through a miasma of freewheeling sex, pain, heartache, drugs, and alcoholic debauchery until Taylor, who was making the movie ''Cleopatra'' with Richard Burton in Rome, has exchanged her has-been pop singer husband Eddie Fisher for Burton. Fisher was being paid $1,500 a week by the studio to be ''Mr. Taylor,'' a job that entailed seeing that his wife reported for work on the set no more than her usual two hours late.

Now go back to the first four chapters, taking Fisher from his impoverished childhood (he was born in Philadelphia in 1928) up to and through his success as a pop singer and swinger nonpareil. Read up to where he's packing his bags to leave his well-appointed Hollywood home while Debbie Reynolds, whom he's in the process of divorcing, tells him she's pregnant by him.

You don't have to read much of the final three chapters of Eddie Fisher's Been There, Done That unless you're curious as to whether there's any insight, let alone redemption, in what you're reading. Hint: Fisher, who may be the clinical sex addict case that experts are looking for, barely has room left for his apparent escaping from a lifetime drug habit and/or for a seemingly happy marriage to his fifth wife, a businesswoman with a level head. Of course, she's ''beautiful,'' too.

This book implies that it tells all, when what it really does is tell too much about what could be an addict's hallucinations and not enough about what we really want and need to know, such as, why is the author taking such peculiar revenge on what seem to be the scores of women he slept or consorted with?

For those of you who don't know, Fisher became known for his skewed relationships with two wives-turned-ex-wives, actresses Reynolds and Taylor. He left Reynolds, his first wife, for the married Taylor, who left him for the married Richard Burton. It was the backdrop to Taylor's filming of ''Cleopatra,'' a shoot he characterizes this way in one of his run-on sentences: ''It changed the life of just about every person who was associated with it, it destroyed careers and marriages, even by the most outrageous Hollywood standards it got completely out of control, and it almost bankrupted one of the great Hollywood studios.''

This is an X-ray of a superannuated show business ego that was overwhelmed and cast into the shadows by other even larger egos. The turmoil and wanton profligacy is so pervasive and constant in this memoir, ghost-written by David Fisher (no relation), that it's exhausting. By the time he was 21, Fisher was one of the most popular entertainers in America, bigger even than Frank Sinatra. He called himself the ''Jewish Sinatra.'' He had several top 40 hits in the mid 1950s. Guess what? In this book, all that counts for little or nothing. What does count, up until the time he leaves them, is the women he loved too well, if not wisely; all the while, he boasts, they loved him back. In fact, to hear him tell it, he had to fight them off.

Here's an excerpt from Fisher's scorecard of women:

''Elizabeth and Connie Stevens, Debbie Reynolds, Kim Novak, Mamie Van Doren, Marlene Dietrich, Merle Oberon, Ann-Margret, Angie Dickinson, Stefanie Powers, Sue Lyon, Abbe Lane, Michelle Phillips, Dinah Shore, Judith Exner, Pamela Turnure (Jackie Kennedy's press secretary), models, Playboy Playmates, New York showgirls.'' He adds: ''I didn't even have to pursue them; gorgeous women were constantly coming on to me. Men used to hang around with me just to get my cast-offs.''

He says he ''ran from'' Joan Crawford, Stella Adler and Lucille Ball and that he had a tryst with Joan Collins during a bacchanal at Dean Martin's house.

The nastiness of the book is foretold on page 3, when Fisher says the only time he ever heard his father's family say anything good about his mother was ''in the limousine on the way to her funeral.''

Beyond the sleaze, there are some funny moments and intriguing character assassinations. Fisher laments to Jeff Chandler that he can't play cowboy roles in the movies because he's Jewish. Chandler replies, ''I'm Jewish and I play cowboys.'' Fisher writes that Arthur Godfrey, whose ''Talent Scouts'' made and broke show business aspirants, was ''one of the best-known anti-Semites in show business.''

But in the end, the sentiment boils down to the salacious George Jessel's toast at the Fisher/Reynolds wedding: ''I only hope you will be as happy as I might have been on several occasions.''

Lorenzo W. Milam - Salon

By the time he was 15, Eddie Fisher was on three different radio shows in Philadelphia. By the time he was 21, his records were selling in the millions. "I had more consecutive hit records than the Beatles or Elvis Presley," he says in Been There, Done That. "I had 65,000 fan clubs and the most widely broadcast program on television and radio."

After returning from the Korean War, Fisher married Debbie Reynolds, the girl next door. Theirs was the ideal marriage, at least to the media. "I've often been asked what I learned from that marriage," he says. "That's simple: Don't marry Debbie Reynolds."

Soon enough, he left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. And when that marriage collapsed, he got hitched to Connie Stevens. Throughout all these musical chairs, he was singing, pouring out records -- and the money was pouring in, along with the women. Queen Elizabeth asked him to dance; Bette Davis "made drool eyes at me." He knew, sometimes intimately, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Sue Lyon, Lana Turner, Margaret Truman. So much fun, so many parties. One wonders how he was able to find time to record songs between his bouts of passion.

In anyone else's hands, this would be your typical ho-hum let-me-tell-you-about-being-a-star-and-getting-laid routine. But there is something else going on in Been There, Done That. First, Eddie Fisher and his co-writer know how to put words together. The story is fascinating; the one-liners are funny; the vignettes are out of this world. Especially when he is telling us exactly what it was like to live with Elizabeth Taylor: "She was drinking and taking pills and passing out. She was constantly passing out. It was just awful; not awful enough to make me miss my life with Debbie, but awful."

Once when he threatened to leave, Taylor swallowed an entire bottle of Seconol. "I tried to stay calm," Fisher writes, "although it's hard to stay calm when foam is coming out of your wife's mouth." Another time, he dared to venture the opinion that she should do something about her addictions. "Elizabeth, what would you think about going to see a psychiatrist?" he asked.

"As it turned out, not very much," Fisher recalls. "She erupted. She started screaming at me...She got out of bed, totally naked, and ran down the stairs. I ran right after her. She got into her Cadillac and turned on the engine. It was crazy, this hysterical naked woman trying to drive while I ran alongside the car, holding on to her door. I was begging her to stop, telling her, 'It's not you, it's me. I'll go to the psychiatrist. I'll go, I'll go, it's me...'"

There's a genuine juvenile enthusiasm in Been There, Done That. It's the sense of wonder that you or I would have if we woke up one morning as a star. And we get the feeling that Fisher's still stunned that a poor kid from the streets of Philadelphia could end up, all of a sudden, living "under the bank on the hill, where the money just rolls down." With Elizabeth Taylor.

The tale of Elizabeth and Eddie -- they called him "Mr. Taylor" -- is enough to make a grown man cry...and, often, to laugh: "The one thing that it was impossible to ever forget when you were with Elizabeth Taylor," he tells us, "was that you were with Elizabeth Taylor...She was smart and funny and beautiful. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Sexually she was every man's dream; she had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver."

Fisher did not marry Elizabeth Taylor. Rather, he entered into a contract with her to let her run his life, and to be subject to her every whim, to deal with her incessant pill-taking, her endless boozing, her tantrums, her sulks, and her impossible Jezebel nature. "I had successfully made the transition from one of the country's most popular singers to Elizabeth's companion and nurse," he writes. "I was caught in a magnificent trap, and even though I was madly in love with her, it was still a trap. I'd forgotten who I was...The only singing I was doing was around the house."

And what did he do when he she ran off with Richard Burton? "I couldn't stop loving her, and needing her. I missed her more than I had ever missed anyone in my life. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sit still, so I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I appeared on the television quiz show What's My Line as the mystery guest."

Fisher's final meeting with Taylor gives him a chance to reflect on what he had been to her -- and what Burton was now to become: "We met at their suite at the Regency. I was surprised at how the balance of their relationship had changed. Elizabeth was in complete control, Burton had become almost docile and very domesticated...As Elizabeth and I were talking, he was performing all my old duties: He was picking up, giving her a pillow, pouring drinks. He had become her nurse. Maybe he was doing Hamlet onstage, but in real life he was playing my role."

Fisher's first experience with drugs came from one Dr. Max Jacobson. He remembers the date with exactitude: April 17, 1953. And he didn't stop for 37 years. Most of the famous people he knew -- in show biz, in music, in politics -- were doing it. Even John Fitzgerald Kennedy: "I had arrived at Max Jacobson's office for my shot and found the place in an uproar. 'Come wit me,' he ordered. 'I haf to see the President.' I knew Max had very powerful friends, but the President?...With Max, anything was possible. Max could make night into day. Max with his filthy fingernails and his magic potions treating the President of the United States?"

According to Fisher, the president took Dr. Max with him when he went to Vienna for a summit meeting with Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. "Looking back on it, it's amazing how we all just accepted the fact that the President was taking Dr. Feelgood with him to a meeting that would affect the entire world. The fate of the free world rested on Max's injections. I can still see Max taking a little from this bottle, a little from that one, and 'pull down your pants, Mr. President.'"

What sets Fisher's tale apart from the thousand-and-one other I-Was-A-Star books is the fact that he is obviously no dummy. He's someone who can tell us his funny-sad tale with wit and a certain amount of astute introspection. And occasionally, he will stop and make a cogent summary of the foolish things he's done with his life: "By the time I was thirty-three years old I'd been married to America's sweetheart and America's femme fatale and both marriages had ended in scandal; I'd been one of the most popular singers in America and had given up my career for love; I had fathered two children and adopted two children and rarely saw any of them; I was addicted to methamphetamines and I couldn't sleep at night without a huge dose of Librium. And from all this I had learned one very important lesson: There were no rules for me. I could get away with anything so long as that sound came out of my throat."

Who would ever suspect that Eddie Fisher, the man who made so many awful records -- songs he himself calls "bubble-gum" -- the man who was shooting meth and cocaine for 37 straight years, the one who bungled several marriages with several of the most gorgeous women in Hollywood -- who could ever guess that he would create an autobiography that is such a kick in the pants?

This is a man who, literally, got a shirt off of JFK's back; one who loved the loveliest women of our time; one who hung out with all the stars and the mafioso kings; one who turned down part ownership in Caesar's Palace ("I wanted nothing more to do with Caesar and Cleopatra"); the man who abandoned all his children, the man whose third wife would write, "I wish you good luck, good health and wealth and happiness in your own time on your terms -- I do not wish you love as you wouldn't know what to do with it."

Fisher is a man who shot up with the stars, and who ended up, in his most desperate days, travelling with "Roy Radin's Vaudeville Review," also known as "The cavalcade of has-beens," along with Tiny Tim, Georgie Jessel and Donald O'Connor, "who was whacked out of his mind most of the time."

When he was on top, he says, "I walked into theatres and championship fights without a ticket. I could make a phone call and have airplanes wait for me. Now I had to learn how to lead a normal life."

Fisher is now 70. Surprisingly, he survived. He makes it quite clear that even now, his main regret is that he wasn't able to hang onto his No. 1 shiksa, Elizabeth Taylor. This juvenile passion and his endless roll-call of sexual conquests are not very impressive. But we are impressed that Fisher is able, at this late date, to come up with a brand new act, one associated neither with his music nor his weenie.

Here we have a faded pop star who has, out of the blue, developed a brand new trick that he doesn't even mention in his book: The ability to write winningly and well. Been There, Done That is self-deprecating, and droll -- and sometimes very sad. But all the while it's honest, and very, very good.

Michele Orecklin - NY Times Book Review

What makes this memoir engaging is Fisher's sharp, often self-deprecating wit and his willingness to dish about his cohorts and conquests.

Publishers Weekly

Sounding every bit like an old man in an armchair, singer Eddie Fisher dishes out his kiss-and-tell life story haltingly, at times stumbling over the details. He comes across affable, honest, direct as he lays out his "maelstrom of passion and betrayal" as plain narrative. First comes the standard celebrity bio: poor Philadelphia Jewish kid has incredible voice, becomes an instant sensation. But the story's real meat is Fisher's love life. He tells of being seduced by Marlene Dietrich in her Park Avenue love nest. He relates how he was wowed by Debbie Reynolds, wooed her and won her--only to find her "a phony." Most people will get the tape just to hear the dish on Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Fisher had a hot affair, then wed. He delivers gamely, telling how Liz mourned husband Mike Todd's plane-crash death in a pill-induced stupor. He soon became her full-time nurse, as she bounced from movie sets to hospital rooms. Fisher is tawdry and tender at once, bringing a sweetness to his account of the often ugly scenes inside the high life. Based on the 1999 St. Martin's hardcover. (Dec.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal