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Carrie Fisher and actor and director Griffin Dunne shared an unusual and deep friendship.
The pair were onetime roommates in New York City, as Dunne was a working actor and Fisher was about to land her breakout role in “Star Wars.”
In his new memoir, “The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir,” available Tuesday, Dunne details their friendship, including his claim that she lost her virginity to him while dating another man.
In an excerpt published in “The Sunday Times,” Dunne wrote, “First of all, let me cut to the chase and say that Carrie never became my girlfriend. She knew, long before I did, that being lovers would diminish our possibilities. Carrie was a virgin when we met, and she lived for every lurid detail of my own sexual encounters: from my first kiss to postcoital anxieties I shared with no one but her. Her curiosity was so forensic that I felt like a cadaver undergoing an autopsy.”
Griffin Dunne, a friend of the late Carrie Fisher, claims in his new memoir that she lost her virginity to him though they were just friends and no romantic relationship developed. (Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
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He continued, recalling she had a boyfriend at the time who was asking him the best way to win her over.
“Of all her confused suitors, Donald was the one I liked the most, and I was rooting for him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that, shortly into their courtship, Carrie had chosen to lose her virginity to me. As messed up as it sounds, there was a certain logic to Carrie’s approach. For years I’d been walking her through the minutiae of every conceivable sexual act like an ordnance handler telling a housewife how to defuse a bomb. Yes, it can be scary, but not if you know what you’re doing,” Dunne wrote.
He explained more of their friendship, including an ongoing prank war that continued until there was a shift one day and they kissed.
The “After Hours” star wrote, “It all made sense in the moment, and we both understood that everything we were doing under those covers would not alter our friendship one iota.”
Dunne said that while Fisher was dating another guy, they had a sexual encounter and lost her virginity to him, but they both “understood that everything we were doing under those covers would not alter our friendship one iota.” (Getty Images)
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Their encounter took place before they became roommates, at her mother Debbie Reynolds’ request.
In his interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Dunne recalled, “Debbie summoned me and said my daughter wants to move to New York, but I’m not going to let her live alone, you have to be her roommate. So, we became roommates.”
Around that time, Fisher landed her breakout role in “Star Wars,” which he remembered her being initially somewhat dismissive of, saying, “She got this part in this movie, and she goes, ‘It’s ridiculous, but I gotta take it.’”
“Star Wars” premiered in 1977 and was an immediate hit and worldwide phenomenon.
Dunne recalled Fisher saying “Star Wars” was “ridiculous” but she had to take the part. (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
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“I mean, it was like The Beatles came back to life or something,” Dunne said of the film’s success and Fisher’s meteoric rise to fame.
“It’s a very particular thing when you have a best friend who becomes suddenly overnight unbelievably famous. It’s also very tough when you are that person who becomes unbelievably famous,” he added.
Dunne’s memoir looks back at his childhood growing up in a famous family with aunt Joan Didion, uncle John Gregory Dunne, and his father Dominick Dunne.
It also includes another memory of a “Star Wars” star popping up in his life before achieving worldwide fame.
Fisher told Dunne the other two leads in the film had already been cast with Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford when they were discussing the possibility of him being in “Star Wars.” (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis)
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In The Sunday Times excerpt, Dunne recalled asking Fisher if there were any roles in “Star Wars” for him.
She told him the lead was already taken by “Mark somebody,” better known as Mark Hamill.
“The other lead is some older guy named Harrison Ford. You wouldn’t have heard of him,” he wrote.
He continued, “In fact I knew him. He was the carpenter whom my aunt, the writer Joan Didion, had hired to build the deck of her beach house near Malibu when I was 17. Like an eager puppy I’d handed him nails or dug for hardware from his worn canvas toolkit. In return he would slip me one of his Marlboros, the filters of which I clipped off because that’s what he did.”
In his memoir, Dunne also recalled meeting a pre-fame Harrison Ford when he worked as a carpenter on his aunt, Joan Didion’s house. (Getty Images)
Dunne also claimed he smoked marijuana from Ford, and “simply idolized the dude and hated my envy that Carrie would get to spend so much time with him.”
In her own memoir in 2016, “The Princess Diarist,” Fisher said she and Ford did have an affair during filming.
“It was so intense,” she told People. “It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend.”
The outlet reported she sent a copy of her memoir to Ford before publication, and she always remembered him fondly.
“I was so inexperienced, but I trusted something about him,” she recalled. “He was kind.”
