Princess Carrie : Books: Carrie Fisher seems to have mastered the art of turning a troubled and glamorous life into bestsellers.

Carrie Fisher is getting high.

Not, mind you, on Percodan, Fisher’s nasty drug of choice in headier, darker days. Right now, her vehicle for getting a buzz on is, well, a vehicle, a majestic black BMW to be exact. It is flying down Coldwater Canyon Boulevard, Fisher at the helm, on a particularly glorious day in Los Angeles. There is no fog anywhere, and even the smog is detectable only in a faint burn at the back of the throat. The scratchy strain of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” comes on the radio, and Fisher leans over to pump up the volume.

“This is the great part of L.A.,” she shouts above the roar. “L.A. Rock ‘n’ roll. The car. It’s simple. I like the philosophy of medicine. The philosophy of medicine is, take this and you’ll feel better. I like the philosophy of driving, which is, get in this and you’ll get somewhere.

“So even if it’s not a definitive destination, to me, it’s a groove to go.”

Carrie Fisher is truly riding high these days. Her second novel, “Surrender the Pink,” is being unpacked in bookstores this week.

The film “Postcards From the Edge” opens next Wednesday, with a script penned by Fisher based loosely on her first, best-selling novel about a young actress who goes through drug rehab; Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep play mother-daughter movie stars at odds and Mike Nichols directs. She’s writing a screenplay of “Surrender the Pink,” the story of a woman obsessed with her ex-husband’s new relationship, which Steven Spielberg has already bought for a cool million. And another Fisher screenplay-in-progress, “Christmas in Las Vegas,” about under-age kids on the run, has been snapped up by producer Dawn Steel.

The once-beleaguered daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher is no longer just another Hollywood princess. Her well-documented Angst, “that Jewish thing,” as her mother calls it, is finally serving Fisher well. (She wonders idly whether Sylvia Plath would have lost her gift if she’d ever been treated with lithium.) Because these days, Fisher’s own mishegoss, her extreme need for control that once prompted her to reach for drugs, is now making her reach for pens and yellow legal pads, so she can write out in longhand the books and screenplays that become instant bestsellers and major Hollywood movies.

Under the circumstances, Carrie Fisher would like to take this opportunity to tell you that the “emotional stuff” in her work is mainly true, particularly when it’s about her, but many of the events and characters are fiction. Get it? Fiction.

“They trivialize me one way or the other,” she says. “Either I don’t write anything and it’s all just my life and everyone is everyone I know and I just write it all down or I didn’t write it at all.”

It really makes her angry when she hears rumors, which are rife in Hollywood, that she has ghostwriters. Mirabella magazine reported that Fisher’s editor Paul Slansky was the real writer of the book “Postcards,” but later printed a retraction. Heaven help the soul who dares suggest that Carrie Fisher’s work was written by anyone other than Carrie Fisher.

“Listen to what I did. Gavin (de Becker) is a close friend of mine from high school and he’s at this party with (comedian/director) David Steinberg and David Steinberg says, ‘Oh, she didn’t write “Postcards.” ’ He said that Paul Slansky was the real writer of ‘Postcards.’ I think this is sexism. Like women couldn’t possibly do anything.

“So I call my agent, and I write this letter. It says, ‘Dear Mr. Steinberg: It has come to my client Carrie Fisher’s attention that you were not the sole director of ‘Paternity’ but that it was ghost-directed by a Mr. Paul Slansky. Miss Fisher wanted to check this rumor with you before chatting about it gaily at her next Hollywood event.’ ”

Steinberg, who once worked with Slansky himself, says he merely suggested De Becker ask Fisher about their editor-in-common. “I would never characterize Carrie’s work as belonging to somebody else,” he says. “The letter she wrote me, I would put it in a book of mine, it’s so good.”

As for the usually tight-lipped De Becker, security consultant to the stars, his lips are sealed: “I will not go on record about something discussed at a dinner party.”

Slansky, who thinks Fisher is “brilliant,” says, “I’ve heard these rumors, but she wrote every word of that book. . . . People have trouble dealing with the fact that people are talented in a lot of different areas.”

Trouble is, Carrie Fisher, 33, has grown up to be something even more horrifying than a mere Hollywood princess. She has looks, brains, wealth, heritage, numerous talents, vast success, friends, fame and wit. So what if she’s her own worst critic, exceedingly introspective and so troubled at times that she spent years on drugs, therapy and human potential seminars? Who cares that she has literally jumped off cliffs, rappelling toward whatever it is that seems to elude her?

Carrie Fisher writes a book, it’s a bestseller. She writes a screenplay, she gets Nichols, Streep and MacLaine. After years of turmoil and some torment, Fisher has become that most annoying, fascinating and unlikely creature--the Woman Who Has Almost Everything.

Fisher parks her BMW in front of a low-slung brick home on a leafy North Hollywood street. She is wearing a twirly, black cotton dress. She’s petite at 5 foot 1 “and a half.” Her mahogany hair is cut in the short, gamin do that she rips apart in her novels.

Fisher is greeted at the door by a tall woman in an apron, her grandmother’s housekeeper, whom Fisher addresses as Mrs. French. She passes through a hall lined with celebrity photos with inscriptions dedicated to her mother. At the end is a dark bedroom governed by a painted portrait of Debbie Reynolds, where her grandmother, Maxene Reynolds, is resting, felled by a headache.

Fisher perches on the side of the bed. “You’re sick.”

“I woke up with what feels like an oversize watermelon,” her grandmother says. “It starts back here in my neck. But I was so dizzy. I don’t think I’m dizzy now. I’m always dizzy. I’m a dizzy broad.”

“No, you’re not,” Fisher says.

“You always tell me that.”

“No, I say you’re fat and you’re old,” Fisher says. “But you ain’t dizzy.”

“I’m all right. I just wanted to rest today,” says the grandmother. “A poor excuse is better than none, they always told me.”

But later, Reynolds admits her pain has almost gotten the better of her. “You’ve never had a headache before. Not like this, honey. It just feels like something inside that’s got bigger than the skull.”

“The Alien,” says Fisher. “Remember the one? I don’t think you saw that one where the alien bursts out of somebody’s chest?”

“Oh, God,” the grandmother says. “Maybe there’s something growing in there. Maybe I’ll get a brain, do you suppose?”

“You’ll get two,” Fisher says. “You’ll have an extra one.”

“I’ll give it to you if I do,” Reynolds says sweetly.

“Oh, thank you. Then I’ll have a headache. I think you should have made them give you more drugs.”

When Reynolds women, a particularly strong, upfront breed, get together, conversation instantly becomes dialogue. “On holidays,” Fisher says, “I said the women were so potent that there was not enough oxygen, you just had to breathe less. The dynamic was so powerful.”

And when it comes to sheer impact, Fisher places Maxene at the top of the generational pile. “She came and visited the set of ‘Postcards’ and as she left she said to Gene Hackman and Mike Nichols, ‘It’s still as boring now as it was four years ago.’ And then she said to me as we were going through the door, ‘Well, I didn’t want them to think I was thrilled.’ ”

If the snappy comeback is Fisher’s forte, she comes by it honestly. Repartee was the main course at the family dinner table when Fisher was growing up, the subject of intense public scrutiny. When, in one of Hollywood’s most notorious divorces, her father left his mother for Elizabeth Taylor, Fisher was only 2.

Fisher was an intense, observant child weaned on a diet of old movies and books. She began scribbling poetry and prose in journals, which are now piled in Debbie Reynolds’ garage. In fact, when her mother punished her, Fisher had little else to do.

Some of Fisher’s youthful musings took on a curious form. When she was 14 or so, she put pen to paper to instruct her mother on how she should manage her life, weighed down as it was by money and marital woes during her second marriage, to shoe magnate Harry Karl.

Reynolds later returned the favor. When Fisher dropped out of Beverly Hills High School in the 11th grade, Reynolds suggested--strongly--that Fisher bag her plan to perform in nightclubs and attend drama school in London. Fisher says it was the last fight she ever had with her mother. Her mother won. And as things turned out, mother was right.

“I regard that as the one time in my life where I was part of a group, and I was happy to do that,” Fisher says. “I think that’s also why I also like those est things. Everything I grew up around is about being noticed, doing things on a grander scale. I like being a necessary part of a group, which is my background peeking through, but part of a group. I like being mayor of a group.”

Fisher made her film debut at 17 as the precocious nymphet to Warren Beatty’s promiscuous hairdresser in “Shampoo.” Soon she was plucked to play the part of Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” a role that gave her the dubious but notable opportunity to sport “insane-asylum” hair. She recently returned from Minnesota for the filming of “Drop Dead Fred.” Ever the “Eve Arden character,” she plays Phoebe Cate’s best friend.

All the while, she was keeping track of things in her journals, treating her bigger-than-life life as though it were a screenplay. The opening line of “Surrender the Pink”--”Dinah Kaufman lost her virginity a total of three times”--came from entries Fisher jotted down when she was 18.

Fisher lived in New York in her early 20s, joining the “Saturday Night Live” crew and through them, hooking up with Paul Simon. Like the alliance between the fictitious Dinah and her ex-husband Rudy, Fisher’s relationship with Simon lasted seven years, less than one of which they spent as troubled husband and wife. Still, Fisher says that the self-absorbed and disturbingly certain Rudy is a composite of strong men who are in her life in various capacities--Simon, Don Henley, Richard Dreyfuss, producer Dan Melnick. And, Fisher says, unlike Dinah, she never hid in her lover’s closet, a spy in the house of love, the pathetic observer of her ex’s happily nested new state. And yet there is a strong emotional resemblance between Fisher and her soap-opera writing counterpart.

“I always feel that I’ve been a disappointing partner in a relationship because I’m on the phone too much and I don’t pay a lot of attention. I always say, ‘If you go out with me expecting to get a lot of homemade food, I offer another service, which is that I like to talk and I like exchanges and I like the contact made through communication . . . and my veal piccata is suffering because of that.’ So anybody that I’d be with, you’d see them starved and overstimulated and their shirts are wrinkled. I’m just another kind of companion.”

That conventional way to be female, which Fisher somehow thinks she lacks, is the “pink” of the title. It also has a vaguely unmentionable meaning.

Fisher’s New York years were her wild and crazy and druggy years, when the only thing people could count on about her was that she would get loaded, years when she would scout out medicine chests in a hunt for prescription drugs as a self-styled “Robin Hood--I’d rob from the rich and give to the potentially stoned.”

Her problem, she says, was in part her hyperactive mind, which insisted on providing Cliffs Notes to everything she was experiencing. “I will tell myself nine stories about what I’m looking at. It’s a way of orienting myself. It can be fine because I’m never bored, but you can’t turn it off so when it fastens itself on the negative, it’s less pleasant. My drug thing was, if I tell seven stories about every situation, it was to take it down to maybe a three.”

Not that Fisher blames her Hollywood upbringing. “I think there are certain people born a certain way. I was always an upset kid and my brother was not. Same childhood. Same parents. Same setup. My thought on this is, it’s not what you’re given. It’s how you take it and what you do with what you’re given. And what I did with what I was given is I was upset by it. In part. And what I did about that was make jokes. So I’m funnier than my brother but he’s never ended up in an emergency room.”

Fisher did, which is where both the book and film versions of “Postcards” begin. While the 1987 book is heavy on the drug rehab experience, the film, under Nichols’ hand, went on to explore the conflict between mothers and daughters, a mission that prompted Nichols and Fisher to study the generational clash in Ingmar Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata.”

In Fisher’s film, the mother, Doris, is always right and yet is fraught with weaknesses herself, as much a boozer as the daughter, Suzanne, is a druggie. Still, Doris is not too shy to deliver her stinging insights: “I came from nowhere and made something out of my life. You came from somewhere and are making nothing out of yours.”

Says Fisher: “Most lives are, in part, some kind of an odyssey away from where you originated. But in my life, I started where I wanted to end up potentially. And someone once suggested to me in one of these workshop things that my drug addiction was a form of initiation back into rich and famous.”

After Fisher completed rehab in five years ago, she became a former addict with a vengeance, or, as she likes to say, “Joan of Narc, patron saint of the addict. I said if I lived with the Pope, I would have thought he had an alcohol problem because he drank that wine every day.”

In fact, when it was suggested that Fisher go on lithium, she refused. “When they told me not to take drugs, I took them. They they told me to take something, and I was, ‘I don’t think so.’ To me, it’s another way of being truant.”

A truant, maybe, but mostly in her heart and mind. Fisher is doing very well for herself from her base above Beverly Hills, in a fancifully furnished, Southwestern-style three-bedroom ranch that once belonged to David Soul. She shares it with plastic cows, “Hairdryer Head”--her name for one of her paintings, Buddy the dog and Joan and Dean, two parrots who live in “the bird zone,” from which they loudly and often broadcast “the radio show from Venus.” Her current boyfriend is an agent for Creative Artists Agency.

All in all, it’s a pretty good gig. And there seems to be no end in sight. So maybe Fisher’s modus operandi--”good anecdote, bad reality”--is giving rise to a reality that really isn’t half bad. Why, she might even grow up to be like one of her heroes, the Dorothy Parker of Hollywood.

Look at it this way: “My skin can break out like it is now, and I don’t have to worry about retaining fluids. You can’t grow old gracefully in Hollywood. You can’t grow old at all. See how many women tell their age after a certain age. Women I know are lying about it at 30, starting to counting backwards. Whereas men never have to. As a writer, I can be 33.” Or, for that matter, 34. Or 35 or 36. . . . After all, to use a Fisher-ism, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”