Hellspawn writes: Gene, I was friends with Sasha Gabor www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=28982 for 18 1/2 years, since the day I met him, as my next door neighbor in Pacific Palisades in February of 1990.

The three of us, you included (straight men all) sat together at the first GayVN awards at The Universal Hilton in 1998. As I’m sure you know, Sasha REALLY thought highly of you Gene. I remember Gabor at Heatwave telling him, when they had business dealings, “Sasha, don’t fucking tell Gene Ross everything we discuss. He doesn’t have to know everything you and I talk about!” Incidentally, I’m not sure Sasha DIDN’T die ON the operating table, during his latest face-lift. Sasha had more plastic surgery operations in Thailand during his life then I have pairs of socks.

Sasha Gabor died on June 27th in Thailand, reportedly of a heart attack. He was 63. He had lived in Norway for the past 7 years, but was in Thailand on vacation. This was Sasha’s second visit to Thailand this year.

He liked to visit the massage parlors there and also enjoyed Thailand’s reputation as a destination for low-cost plastic surgery, which he frequently availed himself of.

Sasha lived a crazy, chaotic, colorful life, and anyone who knew him knew he loved the porn business and all its inhabitants. Sasha was born in Hungary on D-day 1945 but moved to Norway when he was 12.

After subsequently moving to Germany in the 60’s, he was driving a car one day, and was involved in an accident that left three people dead. I believe the deceased were in another vehicle that he struck. He was never charged with a crime.

After Germany he then moved to the US, became a US citizen and enrolled in the army. When they found out how good he was with languages (he was fluent in English, German, Norwegian, Hungarian, Swedish and Danish) they immediately shipped him off to study at the Army’s Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, Ca.

An accomplished pilot, following the Army, he was hired as a commercial airline pilot for a short time by Nigerian Airlines in the 70’s. Sasha candidly admitted that they forced him out of that job after they discovered he had a drinking problem. Saying Sasha had a “drinking problem” is like saying China “has some people”. Alcohol and drugs would seriously bedevil Sasha his whole life.

Sadly, the one “language” Sasha could never master was sobriety. That was also the last time he would ever work as a full-time salaried employee for any company. He then moved back to California and began to work freelance as a “Burt Reynolds look-a-like” for Ron Smith Celebrity Impersonators; at the time the real Burt was the biggest movie star in the world. That then led, at ripe-old-age of 39, to porn. Sasha’s first film, was “Every Woman Has a Fantasy,” in 1984.

Along the way Sash got married and divorced 3 times, and fathered 5 kids. He also picked up a stunning nine DUIs, six in California and three in Florida, including one on a bicycle.

He eventually served prison time for drinking and driving in Florida where he moved in 1990 from L.A., after his porn career essentially ended, while at the same time escaping a six-month jail sentence for his last California DUI in 1989.

He moved back to L.A. after his third divorce in 1997, and worked loosely for a short time doing sales for Jim O’Brien at Voyeur Video. (Voyeur Video, incidentally, was forced out of business after Jim was sued by the owners of the Burning Man festival for selling tapes that they alleged he had made by illegally filming at their event. Jim won the case, but his huge legal fees led to the end of the company)

Sasha was always one small step above homeless. By the 1990’s he was too old for porn, and far too proud to work for anyone but himself. Eventually the money ran out and he left the US for good in the summer of 2001. He returned to Norway where his elderly mother still lived. The Norwegian government, in their version of welfare, gave him about $1000 a month to live on.

Every old-timer in the business knows of Sash. IAFD lists 205 adult credits for Sasha. I think that number’s probably fairly accurate. It also lists one directing credit, a parody of Boogie Nights, that you Gene, eviscerated in an AVN review (it wasn’t THAT bad) co-staring Phoenixxx Blacque and Ron Jeremy, and that preceded Kurt Lockwood’s version by a decade.

In 1999 after having been back in California for a few years that 1989 DUI finally caught up with him, and he spent two weeks in the L.A. men’s central jail before being release with an ankle bracelet on house arrest. He was represented briefly by noted L.A. criminal defense attorney Andrew Flier, who had previously been one of Eddie Nash’s lawyers in the John Holmes / Wonderland murders.

Sasha was a decent writer, and helped pay his bills for many years by writing and conducting interviews with porn stars for European and Scandinavian adult magazines. Ironically, he claimed to have been the last person to ever interview John Holmes, for a magazine in Finland. Sasha once talked his way out of an arrest by an LAPD officer, by showing him a VHS boxcover of a porn movie where Sasha was dressed as a CHP officer.

Sasha was close friends with Ron Jeremy. The two were buddies for well-over two decades. Like Ron, Sasha was also Jewish. Two old-school Jewish porn stars. Also like Ron, Sasha was incredibly out-going and friendly. Sadly, Ron was planning on seeing Sasha in less than two months at the Finnish “Turkkusex” festival, where Ron will be appearing as a featured celebrity.

Ron and Sasha had not seen each other since we all traveled to Iceland in October 2002 for that country’s premiere of Ron’s biographic documentary (Ron and I from L.A., and Sasha from Oslo, Norway). Our first night in Iceland (Sasha had gotten there 12 hours before us and proceeded to COMPLETELY empty his hotel room mini-bar), Sasha, STILL drinking, got progressively more blitzed and ended up passing out, at an elegant dinner at one of Reykjavik’s nicest restaurants, while drooling on the shoulder of our host.

He then shit his pants, while still passed out, in our crowded limousine returning to our hotel after dinner. Everyone in the limousine could smell the foul odor. Now, passed-out drunk, completely out of money, and over-the-limit on his credit card, the hotel kicked him out of his room. He had an unchangeable plane ticket (for a flight leaving in three days back to Oslo). Were it not for the generosity of Ron, telling Sasha he could stay with us in our (tiny) hotel room, Sasha would have had to sit in the airport….for three days, waiting for his return flight home. Incidentally Sasha appears several times in Ron’s biographical documentary. Sasha and Ron had previously traveled to Finland together in 1989.

After he left the U.S. for good in 2001, Sasha refused to return because there was a warrant out for his arrest from the state of Florida for failure to pay child support. His court-ordered financial obligation for THREE minor kids (he also had two grown children, fraternal twins, in California) was a whopping $62.50 a week. He never made one payment.

Sasha had two mainstream credits in the 1980’s that he was enormously proud of. He was a body-double for Burt Reynolds in an episode of “C.H.i.P.S.,” when he was filmed (as Burt) riding in a limo on the Pacific Coast Highway while reading a movie script; and in his biggest mainstream role, he had a one-line speaking part as “Olaf Denker” a good looking fire-chief of Danish ancestry in an episode of “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” in a scene with Barbra Eden.

Sasha also loved the fact that Johnny Carson once inquired of Burt Reynolds when he was a guest on “The Tonight Show,” “I hear there’s a porn star who looks just like you.” To which Burt quickly replied, “yeah, and he’s having a lot more fun than I am.” The audience howled with laughter.

Once in 1990 Sasha, drunk off his ass, jumped out of my MOVING car in downtown Santa Monica, and ended up with a nice gash on his forehead. The next day at his apartment he attempted to temporarily patch it with some gauze he had found. He knew a dentist who also had medical training, and I will never forget the sight of him walking around, severely hung-over with blood seeping through the sloppily-applied gauze on his forehead, as it hung over one of his eyes, continuingly muttering to himself…”I have to see the dentist.”

Sasha bragged that he was the second person in line at Metro’s “Houston 620” gangbang in February 1999 (Ron Jeremy was number 620). “But the first person to pop,” Sasha always added.

He participated in all of JM’s early versions of “American Bukkake” that were filmed at his friend’s, (the late Bobby Gallagher) studio at Chandler Blvd. & Tujunga Ave. When Bobby Gallagher bought the studio, the seller, to cover up the fact that the building had no fire sprinkler system – a clear building-code violation, and one that was going to cost him thousands of dollars to fix, simply GLUED sprinkler heads to the ceiling.

By the time Bobby found out, the seller was long gone, and Bobby was left holding the tab to install plumbing.

The plans were for Sasha’s body to be cremated in Thailand and the ashes returned to his mother in Norway. In addition to his mother and five biological children, he is survived by his sister Agnes, who lives in Germany.

Gene sez: Hellspawn, you brought up some great stories even I had forgotten. Thank you so much for sharing them. That CHP boxcover anecdote is priceless.