“The movie was being shot in England, so I could drop out of school but wouldn’t have to leave the scene of the crime. My friend Riggs let me use his flat in Kensington, behind Barkers department store, and that’s where I stayed for the three-month duration of the film.

I remember arriving on the set that first day, attempting to seem as benignly unobtrusive as I possibly could. I showed up at the studio in Borehamwood—about forty-five minutes outside of London—where they fitted me for wardrobe and did hair and makeup tests. (The crew was mostly men. That’s how it was and that’s pretty much how it still is. It’s a man’s world and show business is a man’s meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.)

The hairstyle that was chosen would impact how everyone—every filmgoing human—would envision me for the rest of my life. (And probably even beyond—it’s hard to imagine any TV obituary not using a photo of that cute little round-faced girl with goofy buns on either side of her inexperienced head.) My life had started, all right. Here I was crossing its threshold“

So I went to a fat farm. In Texas. Weren’t there any fat farms around Los Angeles? The only answers I can think of are (1) no, because everyone in Los Angeles was already thin, and (2) no, because this was 1976, years before the whole exercising, body-obsessed, fat-farm thing would take hold. The only exercise guru then was Richard Simmons—a flamboyant fuzzy-haired creature who vaguely resembled a gay Bozo the Clown, unless that’s redundant, which I, thank God, have no way of knowing, having no, thank God, direct experience with Bozo the Clown.

My mother recommended the Green Door in Texas, but it was probably called the Golden Door or something else because the only Green Door that anyone had heard of was a porn film, Behind the Green Door, which was known for making its star, Marilyn Chambers, if not a household name then a whorehouse-hold name. (I had seen it at fifteen, not having heard the phrase “blow job” before.)”

Excerpt from: Fisher, Carrie - The Princess Diarist (2016)