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Eddie Fisher

By Lucie M. Winborne, ReMIND Magazine
“I opened my mouth and this beautiful sound came out and, for me, the world was changed forever.” It certainly was — though Edwin Jack “Sonny Boy” Fisher was little more than a toddler at the time.

Eddie was the fourth of seven children born to impoverished Jewish immigrants, and his family moved frequently in his youth to dodge eviction, subsisting for a while on welfare. Yet the self-described “skinny Jewish kid from the streets of Philadelphia” firmly believed fate had better things in store for him, thanks to a voice that owed nothing to formal training.

“I didn’t have to work at it,” he recalled. “I didn’t even have to practice.” After her 4-year-old took top prize in his first children’s talent show, mom Kate Fisher entered Eddie in “every amateur contest she heard about and I usually won.” His professional debut came at age 12 with a spot on the Philadelphia radio program When I Grow Up, and five years later he was a local star, dropping out of high school to pursue music full time.

With multiple chart-topping hits, TV and nightclub appearances and two variety series, the dapper teen idol would later remark, “I was bigger than the Beatles. Bigger than Elvis. Hotter than Sinatra.” But life offstage was largely a head-spinning series of disasters. His first marriage, to American sweetheart Debbie Reynolds, ended after a scandalous affair with the recently widowed Elizabeth Taylor, who in turn succumbed to the charms of Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra. Two of Fisher’s next three trips to the altar also ended in divorce (fifth wife Betty Lin predeceased him in 2001). The rise of rock ‘n’ roll helped to end his reign on the popular music charts, and much of the $20 million earned in his peak years was swallowed by drug and gambling addictions. Fisher courted further controversy with two tell-all books, the second of which, Been There, Done That: An Autobiography, so infuriated daughter Carrie that she threatened to change her surname to Reynolds.

Still, at the heart of it all was that glorious tenor. “Everything that has happened in my life … everything I owe to the fact that when I opened my mouth this sound, this music, came out.” The music was silenced on Sept. 22, 2010, when Fisher passed away at his Berkeley, Calif., home following complications from hip surgery. He was 82.

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