Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film

by Jimmy McDonough

  Russ Meyer, who loved the arcane language of the carnival con, saw Pete as a master. “He had this great hype, and he was able to pique the curiosity of the unwashed. He was a real showman. It harkened back to when he was a carny man, a barker. ‘Leap like a tuna, bark like a fox. Run up the stairs, rob your own trunk. Step right up here. Stop the sales. Everybody hold back. What we’re going to do is pick out six boxes, three of which will contain genuine Elgin watches. The others, of course, will have rewards not nearly so munificent.’ ” According to an amused Meyer, the booby prizes DeCenzie stuck in the loser containers were “torn pictures from film magazines of girls in shorts.”

  Pete DeCenzie would be a major catalyst in Russ Meyer’s life. He believed in RM’s talent and encouraged him, one added bonus being the nose street-savvy Pete possessed for sniffing out low-down movie titles and publicity campaigns. The two were off and on until 1963. “I liked him personally, he was honest,” said Meyer. “Without DeCenzie and his farsightedness I would never have had the courage to go ahead.”

  Meyer first met DeCenzie, as he put it, “through the breast of Tempest Storm.” In a fever after seeing Storm perform for the first time, RM phoned DeCenzie and launched into his free-prints-if-the-chick-will-pose rap. “I shot pictures of her and Pete thought that was just great. He was going to get publicity. I could’ve been some charlatan just trying to get into the girl’s box.” An amateur lensman himself, DeCenzie was knocked out by the quality of RM’s work. A gargantuan Tempest in sweater and shorts soon graced a billboard that startled motorists on their way into town from the airport. “They’d have accidents,” recalled a gleeful Tempest. “They had to take it down.”

  For the public at large, the first indication of Meyer’s genius for capturing the female form is the dozen or so pictures he shot of Tempest strutting her stuff onstage at the El Rey that fall of 1950, some of which ran in the girlie mag Follies and which Meyer and DeCenzie sold via mail order. Fifty cents would get you a five-by-seven postpaid, and $2.50 bought the complete set of fourteen—“mailed in a plain envelope,” promised the copy. Today they’re not easy to find—there is no definitive book collection of Meyer’s still work—but you can see them printed (albeit way too small) on a page of his autobiography. Eight-by-tens sometimes float through the ether of Internet auctions, and while not all of them are stunning, a handful are just fantastic.

  There’s just a girl, a stage, and some curtains in these black-and-white photos, but Meyer’s dramatic, high-contrast lighting, razor-sharp focus, and bombastic sense of composition make for an event. This is the name of the game, ladies and gents. Tempest doing a backbend, barely touching the stage with her fingertips, her black mane cascading toward the floor as her pasties point heavenward. A low, wide-angle close-up of Tempest’s astounding torso as she smiles innocently into the camera and pulls off her minuscule lace top. RM emphasizes her assets, but in a way that isn’t freakish but mythic. She looks godlike, magnificent, an explosive figure of fun. One look at these photos and you completely understand Meyer’s obsession with Tempest—lust looms large in every frame. Tittyboom, indeed. You can practically hear RM shouting, “Go, baby, go, go, go!”

  Just for the hell of it, Russ decided to shoot a two-hundred-foot roll of 16 mm Kodachrome after hours at the Gene Walker facility. Meyer was playing with fire. Only Kodak itself could process the new film stock, and any non-clothed Tempest Storm shots coming through their lab in those very prehistoric days ensured that, as Meyer put it, “bells rang, lights flashed, a big sign probably went on and off on the wall winking, ‘tits, tits, tits.’ Everything would come to a halt.” But RM schemed a way around it. The film was delivered very personally by a sexy young French girl named Susie, who gave the Kodak lab man a little something extra for sneaking the film through. According to RM, ol’ Susie “took the seed” from the lab man right there “on Eastman Kodak’s linoleum.” “The power a woman packs between her legs,” marveled Pete DeCenzie. Russ would repeat this line for years after.

  But the crafty Meyer had made one dumb mistake. The can containing his footage bore the sticker of his employer, Gene Walker Films. When the inevitable gossip spread around the lab concerning RM’s nudie movie, Kodak’s Bob Antz put in a call to Gene Walker himself. “I got a roll of film, Gene. What kind of pictures are you doing these days?” Walker, a straitlaced type who served on the board of Stanford University, was not amused by Meyer’s latest antics. “The chief called me in on the carpet and really read the riot act to me,” said RM. “Bob Antz really enjoyed it all because he knew Walker was a little on the stiff side . . . he did that to needle Walker.” The Kodak man then did an unexpected thing. “Antz normally would take film like that and put it in the bio-shredder,” said Meyer. “For some reason he gave it to me.” That little roll of celluloid would take RM a long, long way.

  “When I showed this film to DeCenzie, he shit,” said Meyer. “What really got him was the fact I shot it on good industrial film with inserts of close-ups of lips and nipples and so on.*2 He just said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ” From all descriptions of the now-lost footage, RM had made a standard short industrial film—only the product on display was a nearly naked female. DeCenzie then asked Meyer to shoot a filmed version of an El Rey show. So, directly after the day’s shoot for Standard Oil’s Safe Every Second!, RM smuggled the boss’s Cine Special II 16 mm camera into the El Rey to crank out The French Peep Show. Approximately one hour long, the film is credited in a 1952 promotional pressbook as being directed and photographed by Russ Meyer—his first such credit.

  The picture was a family affair, produced by Pete DeCenzie and written by the El Rey house press agent Ed DeVere, with sound and editing by Meyer’s co-worker at Gene Walker, Chuck Schelling. It featured eight dancers, among them Lilly La Mont and Tempest Storm, plus a bunch of comics doing blackout bits. Even Pete’s wife, Yvonne, sang a number. The elaborate two-color thirty-two-page publication made to promote the picture, filled with Meyer-shot El Rey girls alongside actual production photos of RM, DeCenzie, and Schelling, was undoubtedly sold in the aisles at intermission to rake in some additional dough.

  DeCenzie distributed the movie himself, and Meyer no doubt learned a trick or two about film exploitation from this one-man band. Pete would travel from city to city, renting empty theaters, putting up banners, and drumming up publicity himself. DeCenzie brought a stripper along who’d get as naked as city ordinances allowed. Pete invariably gave his traveling companion the stage name Nana. When asked why, he said, “Who knows? She’s my Nana, that’s all. She puts on the poses for my spiel.” After a few months spent squeezing every dime out of the locals, he’d move to a new town and start all over again. According to a 1958 Adam article, DeCenzie was still milking the picture six years after its release.

  That same Adam story declared that French Peep Show had been “a small-but-rich uranium mine for the trio that shot it.” Meyer maintained that both he and co-worker Schelling got a flat fee and that even Pete saw no real money from the enterprise due to the creative bookkeeping of some of DeCenzie’s shadier burlesque cohorts. A mail order business DeCenzie and RM set up to sell pictures of Tempest Storm from ads in the back pages of girlie magazines met a similar fate. “Pete entrusted it to one of his lieutenants to keep track of the orders and send out pictures,” said Meyer. “I owned ten percent of it . . . so I brought myself to say, ‘Hey, where’s my cut?’ The lieutenant came up with the limp excuse that just the night before, someone had broken in and taken all the receipts. I knew the guy was lying, but Pete said, ‘Gee, that’s terrible, Ed.’ These were his friends.” DeCenzie’s lackadaisical business approach would later cause a great deal of acrimony among the partners, particularly with Meyer’s second wife Eve.

  Unfortunately, French Peep Show is gone with the wind, a lost film. No copies have surfaced since its original run. Even pack-rat Meyer failed to hang on to a copy. RM later claimed that Yvonne DeCenzie was yet another wife “hostile” to him, and that after
Pete’s death she destroyed any remaining prints. It would be a fascinating document to see, as it is the first celluloid expression of Meyer’s mania. Burlesque films from that era—check out Irving Klaw’s Varietease (1954) and Teaserama (1955)—are static one-camera/one-angle affairs, watchable only because of their historical value, and for the chance to see legends like Tempest, Betty Page, and Lili St. Cyr do their thing. But if the still photos of Tempest are any indication, RM had given French Peep Show his all.

  RM was completely smitten with his new mammary muse. “Meyer used to borrow my Cadillac to take Tempest out,” said Jim Ryan. “I know Betty never thought much of that idea.” But Meyer was too far gone to care. As he admitted, “I took pictures of Tempest and became enflamed with the woman’s tits, absolutely enflamed. It was the thing that nudged me away from my first wife.” Indeed. Decades later Russ would confess to a passing business acquaintance that he outright walked out on Betty. He was a shit, a cad, a heel, and what’s more, he knew it. Said Meyer years later, “I remember thinking, ‘Leave my wife and go off with this girl? Seems like a good idea.’ ” Maybe RM wasn’t so different from dear ol’ Dad after all.

  “He was a good man,” said Betty. “I never ever could complain of anything Russ did. He was a very good husband and he behaved properly, until all of a sudden it became the parting of the ways. All I knew is Russ wanted to do his thing and I let him—in fact, I never tried to stop him. He decided he was gonna go. All of a sudden Russ wasn’t interested anymore, and I told him to take all his belongings and to disappear. I was going over to my folks. That was the end of it. I didn’t hang around, that’s for sure.”

  Betty never remarried, and she spoke to RM only once more some years later, under rather unusual circumstances. “The FBI or the police did call me about his character. They said something about him making pornographic movies, and I said, ‘I don’t think Russ would do that.’ Russ called and thanked me—he was very pleased to hear that I said that.”

  Betty professed to know nothing about RM’s forays into the world of girlie photography while they were together. This was to be the first and last time Meyer kept his personal life and his work separate, and it was a miserable failure. Curiously, the only wife to get along with Russ’s mother didn’t last. No doubt Lydia saw some of herself in the “cows” that followed, and no doubt the same attribute attracted RM to these women like metal to a magnet.

  RM was simply determined to do whatever the hell RM wanted to do, and right now he wanted to be cavorting between the sheets with the mighty Miss Tempest Storm. The very evening his marriage collapsed he spent the rest of the night with Tempest at the California Hotel, a flophouse across the street from the El Rey. She was conked out in bed, unaware of his marital woes (when interviewed for this book Storm wasn’t even aware Russ had been married before his second wife Eve). The next day RM drove her down to L.A. for a return engagement at the Follies, taking his Olds convertible since the jealous frau of one of Storm’s other paramours had dumped sugar in the gas tank of her spanking-new red Caddy. During the trip, an exhausted RM began to nod off, nearly plowing into the rear of a semi. When they arrived at the Follies, Meyer found his new assignation as stripper’s escort immediately humiliating. He wasn’t cut out to be a suitcase pimp, the kind of poor slob who trailed behind a dancer, rushing to gather up bits of discarded costume from the stage floor. “Peeler’s retriever” was RM’s derisive term for such a sap.

  Worse yet, later that night in the sack, RM’s pencil contained no lead. Blanche’s beauty simply overwhelmed him. No doubt this was the closest he’d come thus far to his old dream girl, Margie Sullivan. Unbelievably, the great Meyer felt inadequate.*3 RM spent the rest of the night wandering the empty streets of seedy downtown Los Angeles, mulling over the mess that his life had become.

  In the sobering light of day, Meyer drove Storm to the theater, passed the stripper her makeup kit, and bid her adieu. Gazing into the rearview mirror of his Olds, he watched this magnificent hunk of female sashay her shapely ass into the Follies and out of his life. Tempest was already riding high, but Russell Albion Meyer was going to be a star, too. He didn’t yet know how, but somehow it would involve his two great loves: movies and tits. Really big tits. And it was gonna make him a shitload of money.

  Once he had that moolah the women would come to him. Mother had always told her Russell he was special, and he wasn’t about to prove her wrong. He’d show them all, even those Hollywood infidels who’d slammed door after door in his face after he’d returned from the war. RM stepped on the gas of his ragtop and headed north to Frisco.

  With his first marriage demolished, Meyer moved in with his old 166th buddy Bill Teas, the two of them living in an apartment above a gay nightclub called the Black Cat. When that got to be too much, RM relocated to a two-room flat at Lorraine Court, where his new roommate was Franklin Bolger, a highly amusing cabbie, cocksman, drunk, and sometime actor who’d later appear in a few Meyer films.

  RM bounced around with a series of dames, all of whom he’d initially asked to photograph. There was Ysobel Marli, a hot-blooded waitress who nearly got RM killed when her ex kicked in the door of their fuck pad. When the cops arrived and asked for his name, Meyer, not wanting to besmirch his own sterling rep, responded, “Bill Teas.” Meyer landed Marli in the sack but never got her to disrobe for the camera.

  “Miss St. Louis” was an alias for a married blond dancer Meyer had first seen during the war and happily rediscovered at the Burbank Follies a few years later. The inevitable photo shoot took place somewhere in the valley in the middle of the night, RM heaving his equipment right past her indifferent mother, whose eyes remained glued to the living room TV late show. Next time he met Miss St. Louis it was for hot sex in her Chevy.

  Meyer had first encountered stripper Lilly La Mont, the “Alaskan Heat Wave,” at Portland Oregon’s Star Burlesque while on business there for Gene K. Walker. Brunette, half Native American, “she had very soft white skin, like a marshmallow,” as dancer Dixie Evans recalled. La Mont told Meyer a tale that he was eternally fond of repeating.

  It seems that La Mont performed an occasional private show for a wealthy Portlander of German descent. He’d pick her up in a Mercedes-Benz and whisk her off to his fancy home in the suburbs. There he’d climb into a coffin, hidden under a sheet. With the flip of a switch inside the casket, “Night Train” began to blast away, Lilli dancing naked save for a pair of seven-inch heels. He’d peek at her through two eyeholes in the sheet until his trumpet sounded. According to RM, La Mont’s summation was “I felt a little strange, but he gave me $200 and treated me like a lady.” Meyer later brought this depraved tableau to life in the opening of 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.*4

  For Meyer, excitement now came in the form of motels, cameras, and exposed film. RM liked nothing better than to gaze upon some top-heavy wench caught in the slatted light of venetian blinds. “Smile for the birdie” was his constant mantra. Too much was not enough, nor would it ever be. This was a man with a big appetite, and everywhere he looked was something fleshy to bite.

  In A Clean Breast, Meyer documents each and every one of his conquests in mind-numbing detail. Can it all be true? Hard to say. RM’s tales got bigger with every telling, and in maintaining the legend he had an image to hawk. Many of his tittyboom layouts featured the photographer in action—framing a shot, touching up a model’s makeup, carrying a tripod. Meyer was mythologizing himself from the very beginning. There is a stunning self-portrait from the early fifties taken with the aid of a timer. A somewhat depleted bottle of Old Bushmill’s Irish whiskey in one hand, a lit cancer stick in the other, and a Rolleiflex around his neck, Meyer gazes heavenward while resting his head upon the truly nude bosom of Lilly La Mont, who looks upon her benefactor lovingly. The sheer ego on display is impressive. Like any true artist, Meyer’s real subject was Meyer. Years later he’d boast that there were only two directors whose names would sell a picture to the American publi
c when placed upon a marquee. One was Hitchcock. The other? Russ Meyer, of course.

  Love and Kisses, Eve Meyer

  I just don’t find it very fascinating to look at something that isn’t a fantasy.

  —RUSS MEYER

  “Don’t just stand there with your bare face hanging out,” said Eve Turner on her first encounter with her husband-to-be. There was a lotta moxie packed into that throaty rasp. Russ drank in the dame as she invited him in. She was a real wowser—wasp waist, blond hair, blue eyes, “a face to sink a thousand Dungeness crab boats,” and, most integral for boob scientist Meyer, a devastating pair of breasts that RM was wont to describe as “conically maddening.” Dressed in a smart gray flannel suit, her beautiful, nylon-swathed gams sweeping down to stiletto heels with ankle straps, Eve had a soft, join-me-in-the-hayloft beauty. “I knew I’d marry her the minute we met,” said RM, who’d refer to her as his Marilyn and name his filmmaking company Eve Productions.

  Meyer had snagged her number by default one boozy night after seeing Dave Brubeck at a Frisco jazz club. Bill Coshow, the lawyer who handled his divorce from Betty, spoke of a sexy secretary he’d had in his employ, then scribbled her number on a business card he gave to Meyer pal Ray Grant. Ray, being a happily married man, palmed it off on Russ, who found the card a few weeks later as he was cleaning out his wallet and decided to give it a shot. Outraged her number had been bandied about amongst strangers, Eve let Meyer have it. “She was really pissed at me,” recalled an excited RM, and thus hooked, conned her into a date.