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

by Jimmy McDonough

  And then, at 4 a.m. in the carport of the Meyers’ Evanview home, just as Eve is sending RM on his way to Lorna’s location, a funny thing happens. Eve hates that her husband’s getting into actual smut films, perhaps sensing she’ll lose Russ in the process, but she stops pouting long enough to fork over a nearly forgotten test Polaroid she’d socked away of a trashy, melon-breasted blonde, one who’d look good in the back of a pickup in a torn dress. A quick glance at this chick and RM’s head nearly explodes. His fiery eyes lock on the small, shiny picture and don’t let go. Lady Luck, as usual, was on RM’s side.

  He had to act fast—hell, they were supposed to start shooting in a few hours. Scrambling for the phone, Meyer gets James Griffith on the horn, tells him the good news, then instructs him to fire Maria Andre. “Pay off the other frail,” he barks.

  The errand boy is reluctant: “That’s terrible! You agreed to cast her.”

  Meyer detonates. “Fuck! I have to live with this movie! It’s my ass. You think I care ’bout principles? I care about the film. Lay a thousand dollars on her, say goodbye, then tell her Russell says he’s sorry.”

  Shortly thereafter Meyer had his new starlet before the camera, shooting a scene in which, after another dud session in bed with her husband, a nude Lorna rises to stare longingly out the window. “I told her, ‘I want you to be disturbed. He’d been lightning quick. You had no satisfaction. . . . I want to read it on your face.’ What I wanted to say was, ‘Read it on your big tits.’ ” There was a lot riding on this picture—37G, to be precise—and Meyer had yet to see his new leading lady lose her laundry.

  RM and childhood chum Wilfred “Bud” Kues set up the equipment for the shot, then Meyer banished Bud from the room. “I shot without crew because I didn’t want the leading lady rattled.” Meyer also exited, instructing Lorna to disrobe, get under the covers, and call him back in when she was ready to go.

  It was the moment of truth. The movie would add up to zero if she couldn’t deliver the goods, and no doubt RM’s heart was pounding out of his chest as he peered through the camera and whispered, “Roll ’em.” But Lorna Maitland did not disappoint. She lay in bed sulking, then angrily threw back the covers and walked naked to the window, “with her big tits away from me,” said an already relieved Meyer. “From the side I could see the confirmation of those dreadnaughts. Even when she bent forward to put on some sandals the configuration of those pregnant tits did not change one iota.” Meyer, no doubt breaking a sweat as he squinted through the viewfinder, noticed her swollen nipple was brushing against a kneecap. It was just the sort of fetishistic detail Meyer reveled in. Dollar signs danced in his head as he muttered just two words to himself: “Box office.”

  A stiff swirl of cotton-candy blond hair, lips like a pair of overstuffed couches mating, a lethal-weapon body—there was something plain wicked about Lorna Maitland. Her terminally unimpressed scowl seemed to suggest your balls were not long for this world. A man-eater, to quote those fops of pop Hall and Oates. A Venus flytrap in a wighat, Jayne Mansfield’s evil twin.

  Born in Glendale, California, raised in Norman, Oklahoma, Barbara Joy had been one of 132 women to answer a Daily Variety cattle call for a new Meyer skin queen. Initially failing to make any sort of impression—“I was dressed with a rather secretarial look,” the eighteen-year-old admitted—her determined manager, one Clancy Grass III, snapped a couple of Polaroids of the top-heavy Vegas dancer and pressed them into Eve Meyer’s hands. It was RM who christened her Lorna Maitland—Lorna for a secretary who’d bewitched him back in his prewar pencil-pushing days, Maitland to provide classy contrast to the character’s shit-kicker roots.

  From here on out, nearly all of Meyer’s leads would be played by strippers, go-go dancers, and other misfit entities not necessarily in possession of a Screen Actors Guild card. Dramatic ability was a welcome bonus but definitely not first in the job-description department, and over the years this led to some rather idiosyncratic performances. “A good actress! I’d rather have a big-chested stiff who can hardly pronounce her name.”

  Now, with the demise of the nudie-cutie, RM’s films were moving from narration-only to spoken dialogue, and he was forced to deal with actual thespians, regarding them much as he did communists, feminists, and homosexuals. RM began heeding Otto Preminger’s personal advice that actors should be treated like cattle.*1 “From then on I was a very difficult guy.” He became particularly hard on his femme stars, giving direction only through an intermediary, offering no kind words of encouragement and no pats on the back for a satisfactory performance. And so the die was cast, with Meyer routinely playing sadist to his leading ladies, leaving his minions to wipe away the tears.

  Meyer women would last for one film, two tops. Meyer likened the process to an affair. After poring over every inch of their bodies with his camera eye, he’d grow bored—and so would they. They just didn’t glisten with the same excitement or take orders with the same gusto the second time around. “Once you’ve unwrapped them, the thrill is gone.”

  RM had observed ecdysiasts in action since the days of Tempest Storm and the El Rey, and his experiences had provided him with a rather special view of the female race. “Ninety percent of the strippers I’ve known have supported an old man who carries their makeup kits around,” mocked Meyer. “These women need a servant; someone they can pussywhip.”

  Yes, these women invariably came with an accessory the director could’ve done without. The Ace, as Meyer dubbed him, was RM’s bête noire. An Ace was an insecure and frequently unintelligent boyfriend or husband who, acting out of jealousy, would undermine and/or circumvent Meyer’s power over an actress, usually during bedroom pillow talk once the day’s shoot had wrapped. “In the morning when you start up again you can sense someone’s been feeding that chick’s computer,” he groused. Thus RM went to great lengths to quarantine his cast in remote locations that were off-limits to outsiders, where he could lord over all as undisputed king. Outwitting the paramour of his latest glamazon was a never-ending game. “Russ’s whole life was to not give the upper hand to the Ace,” said Meyer, who referred to himself in the third person as often as Garbo. At any rate, Lorna Maitland would arrive at Lorna’s location alone, and by Meyer’s preferred choice of star transport, Greyhound bus.

  Maitland is an interesting case in that Meyer always seemed a little disturbed discussing her. “She did a number on my head . . . she wasn’t going to be pushed around.” Writer Gene Ross reported in the middle of an interview with RM that Lorna was the one Meyer star who “absolutely hated his guts.” On page 84 of David K. Frasier’s Russ Meyer: The Life and Films, there is a revealing production photograph of a nearly naked Lorna throwing a perturbed, angry look toward RM, who appears unsure of himself, maybe even cowering a bit. When Frasier’s book was published, Meyer’s gaze landed on this particular picture and he responded with utter fury, even though he’d personally OK’d each of Frasier’s photo choices. This ugly little glimpse of reality was an absolute violation of the kind of fantasy RM peddled, and when Frasier returned the glossy, Meyer said he’d immediately destroyed it.

  “We find the location and then we write the story” was Meyer’s ass-backward way of doing things, and in this case bumping into old pal Bud Kues led him to explore a couple of depressed Sacramento Delta towns, Walnut Grove and Locke. The oddest places inspired Meyer—the more desolate and forlorn, the better. A sort of rural Chinatown founded in 1915, Locke had a tiny, claustrophic main street (which to this day is lined with dilapidated lean-tos that evoke Depression days) perfect for a Lorna sort of town, a place, as writer Nathaniel Thompson put it, “where everyone quotes the Bible and nobody follows its Commandments.”

  Lorna was shot in a couple of weeks in September 1963 with the usual five-man crew. It was a big gamble for Meyer. Not only was this a story with live dialogue requiring at least some pretense of acting, it was RM’s first try at shooting in 35 mm, and the $37,000 budget was considerably more than any previous e
ffort. This was the start of what Roger Ebert calls Meyer’s “Gothic period,” four mean-spirited pictures that would culminate in the monumental Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

  “Without artistic surrender, without compromise, without question or apology, an important motion picture was produced: LORNA—a woman too much for one man,” went the hype. The picture opens with a frantic tracking shot down a lonely highway, a jazz combo wailing away as the broken white lines fly past. We halt for a preacher standing in the middle of the road who offers an ominous, abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here monologue. The tracking shot picks up speed again, snaking through a dusty, dilapidated town and eventually landing on two reprobates exiting Al’s Bar: sadistic Luther and his short, balding sidekick Jonah. On the prowl for women, they happen onto drunken Ruthie and follow her home. Luther barges into her abode and forces himself on Ruthie; she fights back; he beats her as Jonah, watching the action through a window, salivates. Afterward, Jonah voices tender concern that his friend might be hurt, but Luther waves him off, already lost in evil thoughts: “You know the one I really want!”

  Lorna, the match that lights everyone’s fire, is the sexually frustrated wife of noble but ineffectual James. While James is at work, Lorna is ambushed by The Fugitive, a sex-starved escaped convict. What starts out as rape ends in mutual satisfaction, and together they return to her home for further study. Hubby is ordered to fix his own dinner while Lorna fawns submissively over her attacker. Naive James defends his wife’s virtue to his sadistic co-worker Luther, who delights in lusting after Lorna and undermining the husband’s manhood at every turn. Meanwhile, The Fugitive socks it to wifey right in her wedding bed. Then James and his co-workers arrive for a final showdown during which Luther throws a knife that kills The Fugitive. Lorna falls onto him, impaling herself on a hook in her lover’s hand, then James crawls atop his dying wife’s body, mewling his love for her and asking forgiveness.*2 Our pompous Reverend, returning to wrap things up as Lorna turns into a pillar of salt, does a bit of preaching: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

  Meyer opens his autobiography’s chapter on Lorna with a definition of adultery. It is key to note that the first picture he made after breaking his marriage vows in a cheap Hollywood motel centered on exactly the same subject, only on film the philanderer is a woman who’s punished by death. At times Meyer voiced the belief that his stories were “morality plays. I feel strongly about people getting their just deserts, if you do something bad you gotta pay for it.” More convincing was his admission that bringing back the old-fashioned exploitation square-up ending—i.e., sinners must be punished—made for a bit of Bible Belt insurance. Sayeth RM in 1987, “The moralizing has nothing to do with my feelings . . . it’s the whore that I am.”

  RM maintained to David K. Frasier that this black-and-white melodrama had been inspired by Italian neorealist film fare like Bitter Rice, only to backpedal a few minutes later: “Did I shoot in black and white for the purpose of grittiness and to emulate Italian masters? Horseshit! I didn’t have the money to do it in color.” Typical Meyer, this. He’d make a connection, then berate the interviewer if too much was made of it. RM also referenced ancient exploitation films like 1928’s Road to Ruin when discussing Lorna, adding, “It’s the same thing DeMille’s been doing. Cut the guy’s head off and throw him to the lions. The only thing new I brought was big tits.”

  Start off with Erskine Caldwell and the Bible, add some old-fashioned exploitation ballyhoo, mix in a bit of Lollobrigida-in-a-torn-dress “bending over, tits swaying”—not to mention the inevitable Meyer weirdness—and out comes a squalid, nasty picture, the first of two RM made with Maitland. It is a diabolical little nothing of a film, suffering from bland dialogue, leaden pacing, and, most surprisingly for Meyer (outside of the idiot preacher), little humor. An air of malevolence hangs over Lorna. It has a grimy, crime-scene-photo feel, RM’s camera trailing Maitland like a shark after chum, and this makes for a shadowy, erotic reverie.

  Best of all is a wild, zillion-Dutch-angles montage featuring a vivacious Maitland (dressed to kill in mere beads, a skimpy white fur, g-string, and big black vinyl belt) go-going away as neon signs for such swinging Hollywood hot spots as Why Not? Cocktails and Chicken in the Rough are superimposed one after another—along with a barely perceptible shot of flames leaping out of a burning building! Meyer shot Maitland’s footage in his Evanview home, and Eve being away, the following day RM enjoyed a sweaty interlude à la Lorna, Janet Buxton splaying her meaty loins right in the bed Meyer shared with his wife.

  Meyer’s knack for discovering strange-looking, somewhat unsettling character types was in full force during his black-and-white pictures, and the latest find was Hal Hopper, Lorna’s Luther and Mudhoney’s equally depraved Sidney Brenshaw. Hopper had a lipless, reptilian mug with skin like a thrift-store wallet, lit up by mean, incandescent eyes. Previously Hopper had backed Sinatra in the vocal group the Pied Pipers and had written the theme song for the Rin Tin Tin TV show as well as the pop hit “There’s No You,” used in Lolita (Hal also provided Lorna’s lounge-lizard theme song). Strangely enough, he was also the guardian of Jay (Dennis the Menace) North, all of which somehow led him directly to Meyer. RM cohorts bequeathed him the title Hal Hamper after a startled motel maid found him lying drunk in a laundry basket sniffing panties.

  From this film onward Meyer’s men were basically set in stone, split between the two extremes on display in Lorna: James, the pretty-boy husband who’s “everything that’s nice, but strictly a bum bang,” and The Fugitive, “a real shit, but everything in the sack hubby wasn’t.” The pussy-whipped and pussy-less schnooks in the audience were free to identify with impotent Mr. Yes, Honey, while the Neanderthal in the next row might fancy himself the psychopathic stud. It’s not hard to guess where Meyer’s sympathies lay, as you can’t miss his utter contempt for the husband—listen to the limp, sickening way hubby coos to Lorna, “I love you.” You almost expect Lydia to materialize and and berate one of these poor schmucks in the manner she decimated RM’s stepdad Haywood. Meyer’s take on the American husband would grow more brutal over time. They were lunch-pail-carrying saps, dopes chained to a piece of trim they rarely if ever got, and RM derived great satisfaction from ridiculing them, on film as in real life, where he might gleefully crack some no-tell motel’s bed boards banging another man’s wife. “I feel that it’s important to really give that husband a bad, bad time,” said King Leer.

  “Lorna was the first dramatic naked-lady movie,” wrote author and sexploitation director William Rotsler. “The films with nudity before then were more vaudeville than drama . . . with Lorna Meyer established the formula that made him rich and famous, the formula of people filmed at top hate, top lust, top heavy.” The sex in Lorna (outside of the pathetic husband-and-wife encounter, which Meyer cuts away from) is all vicious, violent stuff—a new kind of combat footage. The goofy innocence of the nudie-cutie got blasted away by this latest breed of sex picture, the “roughie.”

  Meyer is sometimes credited by Roger Ebert and others with starting the “roughie” trend, but the 1963 David F. Friedman–produced, Herschell Gordon Lewis–directed “exposé” of smut photographers Scum of the Earth came first. Shot in black-and-white “so that it would ‘look dirty,’ like an old, scratched 16 mm stag film,” Scum of the Earth is old-school exploitation and possesses none of Lorna’s nudity or stylistic pizazz, but both pictures share the same bad attitude, exemplified by a scene in Scum where the bald, cigar-chomping, pinky-ringed porno potentate rips into an “innocent” girl lured into his ring who wants out. The camera zeroes in for a close-up of his angry, sweaty mouth as he gives her the what for: “You act like Little Miss Muffet and down inside you’re dirty . . . you’re damaged merchandise, and this is a fire sale.”

  That speech is the roughie in a nutshell (Friedman even claimed he coined the term). Once Friedman and Meyer had released the bats, scores of uglier sexploitation pictures were made, some more “roughie” than other
s. The titles speak volumes: Bad Girls Go to Hell, Mantis in Lace, Abnormal Female, Rent-a-Girl, Caged Women, Chained Girls. Between the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and them goddamn long-haired Beatles, the sixties brought attacks from every angle, and the grindhouse/drive-in crowd chose to take out many of their frustrations on the X factor that bewildered them most: women.

  At the same time, these films were one of the only places one could see any sort of outside-the-norm sexuality portrayed, however crudely. One could make the point that exploitation pictures were by default somewhat less hypocritical than much of Hollywood’s holier-than-thou product. Invariably these movies were cranked out by one person very quickly and for ridiculously low sums of money. Therefore you get to see what a time period really looked like and how men and women really treated each other. Nobody had the money or the time or maybe even the talent to hide anything. Meyer is perhaps unique in the exploitation business in that he crafts a very distinct fantasy world and yet you still get all of the above.

  “My eyes bugged out of my head—we almost flew out of our seats,” exclaimed author Rudolph Grey, vividly recalling seeing Lorna’s trailer with a fellow teenager at the Brooklyn Terminal Theater. “This girl coming out of the water with giant tits! It was the type of thing we always hoped to see, but never did. That trailer was meant to have impact, and believe me, it did.”