Jerry Butler was the first porn star I ever interviewed. But Sasha Gabor, aka Samuel Guttman, was the first porn star I ever spoke to. Sasha would call me at least once a week back when I was working out of Philly and AVN was still housed in a Castor Avenue row home in the northeast section of the city.

Sasha, an articulate and intelligent man would always refer to himself in the third person. Besides screwing for a living, Sasha wrote articles for men’s magazines and spoke something like eight languages.

Sasha in his distinctive accent would regale me with tales of his gonzo drinking exploits, his splendid Pacific ocean view, as opposed to, say, my Castor Avenue view, and news of his latest toupee.

Sasha knew the best place in LA to get rugs which was in Studio City, he told me. When Burt Reynolds had his good ol’ boy run in the movies, Sasha also got some face work to look like him. Porn picked up on this fact and made some abominable Smokey parodies with Sasha getting lead parts.

Otherwise, Sasha was part of the then-Video Exclusives glamour troupe which included Ron Jeremy, Billy Dee, Ray Victory, Frank James and the bleach blond bimbos of the week.

But I think Sasha got to the point where he actually believed he was Burt Reynolds. He certainly adopted the mannerisms. And what was equally amusing was the fact that Sasha would show up at adult trade shows in a cowboy hat with a Star of David dangling from his neck.

Later, when playing Burt was no longer feasible, fashionable or enviable, Sasha grew a beard and got some more work done so that he could look like Sean Connery. Sasha lived for the Connery comparison and invited it before you had even thought about it.

And Sasha kept the toupee, albeit a lighter color by now, so he was more of the Sean Connery from Finding Forrester than Sean Connery in Rising Sun. In the interim, Sasha managed one last Burt hurrah by playing his character in a truly rancid porno version of Boogie Nights. Made in Florida, I believe. It was Sasha’s project, and this may have been the worst porn movie ever made, if you don’t include the one Fart Queens feature where Nina Hartley exhales from her ass.

Sasha often said he loved my writing style and compared me to humorist P.G. Wodehouse but where he got that I’ll never know.

The last time I talked to Sasha in person was at the Sabrina Johnson 2,000 man gangbang in 1999. He gave me some story about how he was the traditional first man up in such events. Which was news to me because I hadn’t realized there was a tradition attached to these multi-secretion spectacles which began only recently with the Annabel Chong event. But Sasha insisted this was true. He had to be the first man in.

Later Sasha would move his town drunk act to Oslo. The phone calls were lest frequent after that since Fjord long distance is a killer. From time to time, though, I’d hear about some scandal emanating from his neck of the Norwegian woods.

Like the time Sasha was banging this young girl named Catherine and became her suitcase pimp. What distinguishes this story from the usual generic trailer park pimp tales is the fact that Bill Clinton had apparently put some move on her when he spied Catherine at a TGI Friday’s in Oslo.

As any suitcase pimp in those sets of circumstances would, Sasha made instant rumblings about Catherine coming to America and becoming a porn star. Except Sasha was also trying to hold back on some of the facts of the Clinton story, claiming that he could sell it on the world market and thus cash in. But after giving it some thought, Catherine decided against the idea and Sasha lost his gold egg laying goose.

Booze was Sasha’s propellant, and one of the more colorful Sasha Gabor drinking stories goes back to when the adult conventions used to be held in Chicago.

Bobby Genova, Ron Jeremy, my buddy from the business, Jack Stephan, Sasha and some other people dined out at a Greek restaurant one evening while in town.

“It was an adventure,” I remember Stephan telling me.

Sasha began drinking Ouzo and lots of it. He had told everyone at the dinner table he needed to go to the bathroom but disappeared to the bar where he began knocking down shot after shot. When he returned to the table, Sasha passed out face down in his food.

Jeremy apologized to the owner who informed him what Sasha had been up to. By the time Sasha was taken back to the hotel where he was sharing a room with Genova, he was reasonably coherent. Sasha then explained to Genova that he gets drunk a lot like that and that Genova should hold on to his American Express card or else he would do more stupid shit with it.

Genova said fine. But when Sasha tried getting it back from Genova he went off the wall, left the room and came back with a small caliber gun, cocked it and demanded that Genova give him the card back. Genova, however, remained cool and unruffled.

“You’re sober as a church mouse I can see,” Genova told Sasha, obviously lying, and then handed the card back to him.

Another great moment was when Sasha was robbed of $2900, $2000 of which was an advance from Gabor at Heatwave. Sasha was going to shoot scenes for Gabor in Estonia. Except Sasha entertained thoughts of attending a sex expo in Finland with Kylie Ireland and then take a 45 minute hydrofoil ride to Estonia.

Unfortunately, Sasha, who elected to stay at a commune, decided to keep the money under his pillow.

“Well, this guy who lives here, at 3 am knocks on my window,” Sasha told me.

“’Hey, Sash, Sash, can you open up the window? I need to talk to you?’ I said I need to sleep, what do you want? He says open the door. I open the door, and there’s a gun to my head. He makes me go down face on the floor telling me to give him the money. I said I don’t have the money. I left it in the bank because I needed to convert it into Travelers’ Checks – which I intended to do but didn’t want to pay the fee. But I was going to do that later. I had a total of $2,950. The Sicilian guy brings in this other guy. The other guy says if you don’t give me the money, I’ll shoot you. I said I don’t have the money.’”

According to Sasha, the Sicilian guy who also lived at the commune kind of looked through the place and looked under the obvious place, the mattress.

“That’s where I had it and was robbed,” Sasha continued. “The police came minutes afterwards. A helicopter was flying overhead looking for the guy who disappeared into the night.”

Afraid to tell Gabor about what happened, Sasha mentioned something about borrowing the money from his mother to make up for his loss.

On another occasion, Sasha’s balls swelled to the size of a grapefruit. Apparently he had developed an ecoli condition when he got some shit on his dick from butt fucking a girl.

Perhaps the best story was the time Sasha called me from a jail cell collect. He was being held in downtown lockup and explained how he got there. Was it a simple story? Of course not. It was a porn story and Sasha had retained a lawyer who was involved in the Eddie Nash- Wonderland case. Sasha explained that the charges against him stemmed from an incident eight years earlier.

“It’s [jail] like being inside a casino,” Sasha told me.

“There’s no daylight. No windows, no idea what the weather is like outside. The 5,000 people capacity is at 7,000. So it’s overcrowded beyond belief. I’m in a small room that is housing 150 people in an area meant for 75. We’re doubled up. A lot of people are sleeping on the floor. There are five toilets, three showerheads and five sinks for brushing teeth and shaving. You don’t get to move. Either you sit on your bed or you stand. I do have a bed. I managed to navigate myself into a corner. I’m very claustrophobic.”

Sasha explained that his tale of woe began when he went to LAX to pick up Ron Jeremy. Jeremy’s flight was delayed, and Sasha who hadn’t eaten anything was starved.

“He doesn’t get there until after 12,” Sasha recalled.

“I’m starving. Ronnie goes, ‘Oh, Sasha, let’s go rent a car. Can I borrow your American Express, so I doesn’t have to pay for the collision damages waiver..’ I say Ronnie I’m hungry. He wants to go rent a car. We go to North Hollywood. He rents a car on my credit card [though Jeremy paid him in cash] so he can save the $9 or $11 waiver. I tell him let’s go eat something, I’m falling down.”

“At the time Ronnie lived up in the Topanga area,” Sasha went on to say.

“He told me, ‘You haven’t seen my house, yet.’ So we drive up in two cars. We should have stopped someplace to get a hamburger, but, no, we get out there. The house doesn’t have one cracker in it. Not one sugar cube. Not one cup of coffee. The house is desolate. The toilet was stopped up. You couldn’t take a pee. You had to go outside and take a pee. I’m furious and I’m hungry. There’s a bottle of vodka in the refrigerator, three-quarters full. I took a sip, then I took a sip, then I took a sip. I’m feeling better and better but I’m drunker and drunker.”

“Meanwhile I hear Ronnie saying on the phone, ‘I’m back in town, baby, how are you, I’ll meet you at the Comedy Store,’ this and that. Now it’s about 5 o’clock in the evening. I say, Ronnie, this is bullshit. Fuck you. I was rude to him. I jumped into my car went down the street and rear-ended a lady.

“I gave her my information, da da da. Now I head down the road to go across Topanga Canyon, back to Pacific Palisades. I’m too woozy. I can’t make it through Topanga Canyon. Too many curves. Let me go on the freeway. I rear end a tow truck. I gave him the information, sorry.

“Then on Ventura Freeway by Encino I rear end a couple. By this time the police came in and arrested me. I went to court with an attorney. This was my sixth DUI. I was sentenced to six months in the LA County jail.”

Although he had just been involved in three separate traffic accidents as well, Sasha decided it was more prudent to skip town rather than face the music. His daughter was just born. He had a two-year old son and his wife didn’t have a work permit

“So I decided to leave California and never come back,” Sasha remembered.

So Sasha goes to Florida where he now collects DUI’s seven and eight and spends 1 ½ years in prison. No sooner did he get out of jail, Sasha is caught riding a bike drunk and gets a ninth DUI. Then he returns to Los Angeles figuring he’d get this whole complicated mess resolved. Little did he know.

“I have lived in fear of the police all this time,” Sasha told me.

“I can’t do anything. I can’t drive a car. I don’t dare too. Even at the CES or one the AVN shows I had fear that the police would come to pick me up. I’m pretty high profile. I’m pretty recognizable. This time I decided I was going to go in and take care of the matter. They arrested me right on the spot. Little did I know the same fucking judge who was there in 1991 was there today.”

“Sasha Gabor, I remember you. One year,” the judge told him.

“My head was spinning,” relates Sasha.

“I got a year to sit in the county jail. There is a lawyer team, this is hell of a coincidence, that handled the Wonderland Ave. Murders – Andrew Flyer and his father. I don’t know the father’s name. They defended Eddie Nash. I was also the very last guy to interview John Holmes for a magazine in Finland.”

“The Flyers want $6,000 to help me get house arrest which would be wonderful. That’s not a problem. This is a madhouse. There are fights every single day. There are some riots. People get killed. The officers don’t come into the dorm here at night after 11 pm.. So if somebody gets into a fight, nobody interferes. You slug it out. The flood is abysmal. The tooth brush is 4 inches long. You can fashion it into a weapon. And it is so course and so horrible, you can scrape rust from your fender with it.”

Sasha was always convinced that Jeremy was a little bit at fault.

“Imagine how different the situation would have been if Ronnie weren’t so fucking obsessed with calling every girl and telling them he was back in town and calling every producer for work instead of taking me for lunch like he promised,” Sasha complained.

“I wouldn’t be in this fucking predicament. The circumstances he put me into were that I was getting pissed off. I was hungry, angry, lonely and tired.”

Jeremy later visited Sasha in jail.

“Ronnie came down here to visit me,” Sasha recalled.

“The news of that spread like wildfire, people asking me, ‘you know Ron Jeremy?’ That was funny. I said, Ron, number one, I need money. No money from him. Ronnie, I said it’s pathetic. For a couple of thousand dollars you could save my life. I said, if the doctor told you $2,000 and we’ll save Sasha’s life, would you pay the money? He said that’s a tough one. It’s not like it isn’t pocket money for him. He knows he would have gotten it back.”

In the end, Sasha wound up doing house arrest because the jail was overcrowded, but not before he gave his attorneys $2400 as a retainer.

“And all they did for it was accept two collect calls,” he moaned.