The Side Of Carrie Fisher You Won't Hear About In Mainstream

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—One can't open a newspaper or news site, or listen to TV news this week without seeing/hearing at least a half-dozen stories having to do with the death of Carrie "Princess Leia" Fisher (or if you're a bit hipper, Carrie "Postcards From The Edge" Fisher)—and the vast majority of them, while mentioning the actress's bouts with bipolar disorder and her use of percodan, cocaine and electroshock therapy to "treat" it, have managed to avoid saying anything about her sexuality.

Enter Penn Jillette, famed magician/comedian, star of the Showtime show Penn & Teller's Bullshit and star of the hopefully-soon-to-be-released film Director's Cut. Penn's a longtime porn fan—he covered the topic at least a couple of times on Bullshit—who's attended both the Adult Entertainment Expo and AVN Awards Show in years past, and on Wednesday, he penned (no pun intended) an article for CNN titled, "Carrie Fisher and me at the porn awards."

According to Jillette, he first met Fisher at the "Adult Video Awards"—actually the XRCO Awards—in 1990 "in Santa Monica in a circus tent." Jillette was "crazy freedom fighter and pornographer" Al Goldstein's "date," and the pair sat at a table with comedy writer Buck Henry and his date, Carrie Fisher.

"I didn't know what to say to Carrie to get a conversation started," Jillette wrote, "but before I even sat down, Nina Hartley came over to say hi. Nina is a porn actor friend of mine, and she had just gotten new breast implants and she wanted to show them off to me. Nina wanted to show them off to everyone and I was so happy to be a subset of her everyone. Nina asked me how her new breasts looked and I told her, honestly, that they looked great. Nina then invited me to give them a feel... I reached up under Nina's shirt, checked out the surgery, and praised Nina's after-market rack. Before Nina even left our table, Carrie said the first words she would ever say to me. 'Penn, would you like to feel my breasts? I've been in legitimate features.'"
 
Veteran XXX actor Tom Byron recalled the event as well, stating on one of his Facebook pages, "The year XRCO held their annual event in a freezing tent on Santa Monica Pier, I met her and Buck Henry. Penn Jillette introduced us and we all hung out. That was a fun night. I won a couple awards and Carrie, Buck and Penn & Teller were my cheering section. Surreal. Plus Tone Loc was there."
 
Apparently, that chance meeting led to a long friendship between Jillette and Fisher such that, 15 years later, when Jillette and fellow comedian Paul Provenza were putting together their film The Aristocrats, Fisher was one of the invited participants.
 
According to Wikipedia, "The Aristocrats is a longstanding transgressive joke amongst comedians, in which the setup and punchline are almost always the same (or similar). It is the joke's midsection—which may be as long as the one telling it prefers and is often completely improvised—that makes or breaks a particular rendition.

"The joke involves a person pitching an act to a talent agent. Typically the first line is, 'A man walks into a talent agent's office.' The man then describes the act. From this point, up to (but not including) the punchline, the teller of the joke is expected to ad-lib the most shocking act they can possibly imagine. This often involves elements of incest, group sex, graphic violence, defecation, coprophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, child sexual abuse, and various other taboo behaviors.

"The joke ends with the agent, shocked but often impressed, asking 'And what do you call the act?' The punchline of the joke is then given: 'The Aristocrats'!"

According to Jillette, "Several years later when she was telling her version of 'The Aristocrats' joke for our movie of that name, she kept asking me—while we were rolling—who had done the dirtiest, most disgusting, depraved, version of the joke we'd recorded so far. She wanted to know whom she had to beat.

"The dirtiest up to that point had been Gilbert Gottfried and Bob Saget. But Carrie beat them fists up. She won and stole our movie."

Of course, Carrie isn't the first member of her family to have experience with sexual intrigue. There's also her late mother, Debbie Reynolds, who passed less than a day after her daughter—and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post was right there with its own sexual remembrance.

Back in 1958, Debbie, already a well-known star for such movies as Singin' in the Rain and Tammy and the Bachelor, was married to that era's most successful pop singer, Eddie Fisher, who had his own TV show and had sold millions of records. Debbie's best friend at the time was Elizabeth Taylor, but Taylor's film producer husband Mike Todd died in March of '58 in a plane crash—and soon after is when the shit hit the fan.

According to the Post, "When news broke in September 1958 that Elizabeth Taylor had stolen Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, the tabloids exploded. Three of the world’s biggest stars had collided in the most spectacular and most public manner."

That was 1958 for ya—and apparently 2016 as well: A famous man doesn't leave his wife for what he perceives as a hotter piece of ass; he's "stolen" away from the wife by the "other woman." (The Fisher/Taylor marriage lasted five years, after which divorce he married pop singer Connie Stevens.)

Debbie married twice more, opened a dance studio in 1979, and in 1992, she purchased a casino hotel in Las Vegas, renaming it the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Hotel. Neither were a financial success. More recently, in June of 2010, she replaced Ivana Trump as the advice columnist answering reader queries for the weekly supermarket tabloid Globe, perhaps most famous for headlines like "Bush On Cocaine In White House!"

Yeah, even a world where sex isn't feared will miss Carrie and Debbie.

Carrie Fisher photo by Gage Skidmore; used with permission.