Ghostbusters writer-actor Dan Aykroyd has written a tribute to Carrie Fisher, to whom he was briefly engaged in the early 1980s after they appeared together in The Blues Brothers.
Aykroyd’s essay appears in Empire magazine’s farewell to the Star Wars actor, who died in December aged 60. In it, Aykroyd sardonically recalls their meeting and subsequent relationship – “when we were both in our 20s, Carrie and I associated as intimates” – as well as their breakup.
In what may not be an entirely serious article, Aykroyd says he met Fisher on TV comedy show Saturday Night Live, but “fell in love” during the making of The Blues Brothers (in which she played a murderous ex-girlfriend of John Belushi’s character, Jake Blues).
Later, he says “we obtained blood tests for compatibility from an East Indian female doctor” and exchanged presents: he gave her a sapphire ring and she gave him a Donald Roller Wilson monkey painting which he “kept for years until it began to frighten my children”.
Aykroyd also describes a Christmas they spent together at Lake Tahoe as their “love was soaring on laugh-filled exhilaration and a vibrant, wholly satisfying physical intimacy”; they took LSD (“original Owsley [Stanley]”) and “checked in for three days of full-on weeping to Christmas classics”.
Aykroyd’s finishes the essay by describing their relationship’s end, which occurred when they moved from Chicago to a new home in Martha’s Vineyard, which Fisher apparently took against. “Carrie wasn’t shallow, we had a great time.” Fisher would reconnect with musician Paul Simon, whom she married in 1983, while Aykroyd married actor Donna Dixon in the same year.
