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.
"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.