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

by Jimmy McDonough

  One final anecdote sums up the miserable fantasia that was Common Law Cabin. Heading down river on the cramped motorboat with the rest of the troupe, Swofford accidentally knocked Meyer’s annotated script into the water. “That’s the master script!” yelped an apoplectic RM. “Don’t worry, Russ,” said Swofford. “Shit floats!” Everybody on the boat broke up—except of course Meyer, although Ken maintained that he saw the humor in it “eventually.”

  Common Law Cabin was originally called How Much Loving Does a Normal Couple Need? Theater managers complained that they couldn’t fit the damn thing on their marquee (the Los Angeles Times refused to run even the title, declaring it “lewd”). George Costello thought of the new, improved title Common Law Cabin, but the picture failed to set the world on fire under either obscure banner, although somehow this comparatively tame effort found itself banned in Fort Worth.

  Meyer chalked up the picture’s failure to too much hanky-panky on the set, namely, his many mutual exchanges of wondrous bodily fluids with Babette Bardot. Those low body blows had softened his resolve, and even worse, RM had not interfered when others had managed to sow a few wild oats during the production. But no more. Meyer would remain ever vigilant. If he was dumb enough to actually be screwing the leading lady, damn it, they’d just sleep in separate motel rooms until the picture wrapped. Stan Berkowitz, who later wrote about Meyer and crewed on one of his pictures, said that RM truly believed if he slept with his actresses “the movie would be no good. There would be no hunger for her while he was shooting. Russ had to want the actress while he was making the film.”

  Ken Swofford would go on to bigger and better things, including the television series The Virginian and a starring role in Bless the Beasts and Children, a picture directed by Meyer’s old 166th nemesis, Stanley Kramer. Swofford caught up with Russ in the seventies at a memorable party at RM’s swanky manse on Mulholland Drive. Ken walked into the shindig to find that Meyer had installed a bunch of projectors showing his own movies on the walls. “Only Russ would do that. You can’t imagine going to Hitchcock’s house and there’s twenty projectors playing all of his movies!”

  The year 1967 also saw the release of the outrageous Alaina Capri vehicle Good Morning . . . and Goodbye, a picture with an even badder attitude than the one that preceded it. A favorite among hard-core Meyer aficionados, this one really rolls out the blood-red carpet on the subject of man/woman collision. And, boy, does the bile fly. “My people don’t make love, they compete,” said Meyer, and here was the ultimate proof.

  The story of “eleven losers in a game that all of us play . . . high rollers that always crap out,” the focus here is on the lovely Boland family. “A lush cushion of evil perched on the throne of immorality,” the insatiable Angel (Alaina Capri) is “a cesspool of marital pollution . . . a shameless, brazen, bulldozing female prepared to humiliate, provoke and tantalize.” Her hapless, impotent husband, Burt (Stuart Lancaster), a wealthy farmer who possesses everything—“everything except manhood,” as he’s “always staggering before the summit of sexual communion.” Add daughter Lana (Karen Ciral), “the latest version of the farmer’s daughter,” a seventeen-year-old both envious and sickened by her stepmother’s predatory sexuality. “The valley punchboard, that’s my mom,” she mutters to horny boyfriend Ray (Don Johnson—and no, not that Don Johnson).

  There are few Meyer moments as mortifying as our introduction to Angel and Burt—we see the unhappy couple in bed, Angel disgusted with her husband’s sexual shortcomings, weak-chinned and weary Burt frozen against the pillow, the covers pulled up tight to his face, his pained gaze staring into the nothingness of the night while our chilly narrator drones on. “The dead-quiet, complete void of uselessness . . . the giving up, the evaporation of passion . . . the finality of something lost and now leaden . . . the ending of something that never was.”

  Angel spends most of her time brutalizing Burt. “You store your nuts away like a squirrel. Got the message, husband?” She relishes broadcasting the sordid details of her flagrant affair with cigar-smoking hard-hat Stone (Patrick Wright), a loutish, arrogant, amoral fuck machine who hops from bed to bed when not breaking rocks in the hot sun. Angel and Stone spend as much time trading insults as they do in the sack. “Big tipper, big lover, big man, big deal,” she taunts. A dejected Burt jeeps out to the country to drown his sorrow in nature, only to stumble upon the Catalyst (Haji). “A child of Gypsies deserted . . . a honeycomb with no takers,” the Catalyst is a mysterious half-naked sprite—mute outside of an occasional meow—who kick-starts Burt’s limp libido by way of a blood-drinking ritual that culminates in the return of his virility and a spirited romp in the hay.

  A triumphant Burt rides home, instructing his wife, “Turn in your travel card, I’ll be booking all your action from now on.” Their drunken daughter, smoking a cigarette, swilling a beer, and fresh from being deflowered by Stone, crashes the party before they can consummate their connubial bliss. An enraged Burt charges to the gravel pit and, aided by Stone’s white-trash co-worker Herb (who also hates Stone for buggering his wife, Lottie, during a company lunch break), conquers his nemesis with his bare fists.

  Burt returns to the love nest to finally sock it to Angel, as the narrator boils happiness in life down to one thing only: sex. “That three-letter word makes a mockery of the four-letter ones that try to cheapen it.”

  Blasting off with yet another preposterous opening line—“How would you define nymphomania?”—to its final shot of an exuberant Haji bounding naked through the desert in slow motion, Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! is, as biographer David K. Frasier has written, the most potent distillation ever of Meyer’s cracked personal philosophies. Everything wrong in this world can be traced back to Burt Boland’s impotence. “Order is restored only after Burt’s mystical sexual regeneration,” wrote Frasier. “In Meyer’s cinema, ‘good’ healthy sex is the operative imperative that ensures contentment and maintains cosmic order.”

  It should also be noted that cars are very important to the Meyer universe. These garish heavy metal chariots are symbolic of the loveless gargoyles they transport: hungry creatures whose antennae are always at attention to find a new victim or fend off a possible attack, men and women who have reached that point beyond sad and remain desperate to hold on to whatever meager crumbs of power they have hoarded for the rest of their wintry lives. In other words, Meyer people. The women even refer to each other in vehicular terms. “Stay off the shoulders, this isn’t a freeway,” Angel hisses to a clumsy waitress making google eyes at Stone. “I’m sorry,” she blandly replies. “I didn’t see your tail lights.”*5

  Trolling around in a gold convertible Caddy, the ever-superior Capri is a riot as Angel, a character who is, as Frasier notes, “driven to be a whore not because of any choice she’s made, but by the sexual inadequacy of her husband.” Stuart Lancaster is stunning as well, putting a poetic face on Burt, the most pathetic of Meyer’s cuckolded half-a-man husbands. Built like a tree trunk and subtle as a sledgehammer, Patrick Wright is the embodiment of Meyer’s square-jawed macho man archetype, the aptly named Stone (“where other men are mere flesh and blood, he is fashioned of steel”). In a role she was born to play, Haji is the Catalyst, slinking around the woods doing primitive dances with obscure, odd hand movements that bring to mind a belly dancer with a strangely graceful form of Tourette’s. Perhaps channeling Bette Davis circa The Petrified Forest, Megan Timony delivers a memorably overblown performance as hillbilly wife Lottie. And the extreme-looking Karen Ciral, sporting a mug not unlike a sunburned candy apple, appears suitably disturbed as Lana.

  Apparently the dismay contorting Ciral’s face was real, as an event on the first day of the Good Morning . . . and Goodbye shoot suggests. “Meyer had contacted General Motors and got a brand spanking new 1967 red convertible to use in the movie,” said George Costello. There was one problem no one was aware of: Karen Ciral didn’t know how to drive. “This girl was a little afraid of Meyer. Nobody gave
her a trial run, Meyer just said, ‘Get in and take off! Hurry!’ By now the poor girl looked frightened, she was fumbling a bit. Meyer got that look on his face, started yelling at her, stomping his feet. We’d gone through three takes. He likes one take.”

  Costello tried to calm Ciral down, to no avail. “In the background Meyer’s got his eye on the camera lens, and as soon as we stopped trying to soothe her, he would start screaming. This was the fourth take, he’s really pissed off now, and she’s just totally rattled. Meyer yells, ‘Goddammnit, take off!’ So she just guns the fuckin’ car, spins in this gravelly road, and winds up smashing into this bridge abutment.”

  Haji watched in disbelief. “She gets out crying—and Russ is going, ‘Shoot that, shoot that!’ She crashed the car and Russ is telling the cameraman to get her crying so he could use it in the film!” Meyer and Costello ran down to the local Chevrolet dealership and, laying on a thick and greasy ‘We’re from Hollywood’ rap, waltzed out with yet another freebie ragtop. As far as Karen Ciral goes, “Meyer waited for her to recover from her trauma,” said Costello. “I think he felt a tinge of guilt. Meyer was more destructive than the car crash.”

  Wearing not much more than some weeds in her hair and flower petals on her breasts, Haji was definitely in her element as The Catalyst. She never complained about Meyer’s crackpot ideas, even though she tore up her feet running naked through a grove of stinging nettles. “I’d do anything for a great shot, like put fish in my mouth. I did things Russ couldn’t believe. I’m a nature girl. I picked my wardrobe every day. I’d run into the woods and make my costumes out of leaves and rose petals. I was a real loner, I was happy being in the woods.”

  Haji did have a rare disagreement with RM during the shoot—she felt he was chintzy when it came to The Catalyst’s menagerie. Being the symbol of nature, Haji desired an entourage of real animals around her—a mountain lion, rattlesnakes, tarantulas crawling up her arm. Meyer balked, but Haji was undaunted: “I was determined to have a wild creature in the film.” She borrowed a friend’s pet reptile for the shoot, hiding it in a chocolate chip cookie box on the flight to the location. When George Costello picked Haji up, he asked her what was in the box. Due to Haji’s incomprehensible accent, “snake” came out sounding like “snack.” Thinking he was going to score a cookie, George stuck his hand in the container—and freaked. “The box and the snake went flying,” said Haji. “George threw the snake—and it flew, it just didn’t drop. The snake landed on the benches and was slithering on the seats. Everybody cleared out of the airport.” Once the movie wrapped, Meyer took Haji to dinner to tell her she had been right in requesting her personal zoo.

  Stuart Lancaster endured many a Meyer-made agony making this picture. Take the scene where he steps into Haji’s rope snare and hangs upside down from a tree. “When I was screaming in agony, I wasn’t acting. The rope was cutting into my ankles.” Meyer did nearly twenty takes of the scene, much to Lancaster’s chagrin. “I’d eaten a big lunch and I kept throwing up carrots.” During the climactic battle with Stone, an exhausted Lancaster—perched in the boiling sun on the scorching-hot lip of a bulldozer—couldn’t stop squinting, and Meyer went ballistic. Lancaster’s attempt to maintain a shred of modesty in his love scenes with Capri only led to further humiliation. Stuart tried to maintain some decency by wearing brief coverage. “Lose the jockstrap,” barked RM. “Hurl it in the corner!” Trapped in a production-crowded room with the windows locked shut and the hot lights cooking his hairy back as he waited for Meyer to set up the scene, Stuart actually fell asleep atop Alaina. “Lancaster lost interest,” complained RM. “The scene is out of the picture.” Meyer didn’t speak to him for three days.

  There is one more rather humorous detail concerning Good Morning . . . and Goodbye. The bulk of the film was shot in the same house cast and crew stayed in, saving RM a good deal of money. Apparently Meyer scored the location by servicing the young Russian widow who owned the place. “This woman he had the relationship with, my God, she looked more like a man,” said George Costello. “Husky. We referred to her as the Tractor Driver.”

  Jack Lucas was with Meyer the day he clinched the deal. “I remember when Russ came back, he said, ‘Yeah, we got this all squared away. Of course, I had to bed her down. Boy, that broad’s got a clitoris the size of a walnut.’ Russ always was brilliant with words.”

  Good Morning . . . and Goodbye went great guns at the box office (maybe it was the gotcha title, maybe it was Capri’s chassis—in the roll of the loaded dice that was the exploitation biz one never knows), but back at Rancho Meyer, the bodies began to pile up. The demands of success just seemed to bring out the von Stroheim in RM. First the axe fell on cameraman Wady Medowar—who’d also crewed the previous picture—due to a fogged camera shot. Then came the sudden departure of longtime Meyer crony Fred Owens.

  “We’re by the pool one day and we’re having one of those times when our Alaina is simply not getting the dialogue right,” recalled soundman Richard Brummer. “And we get to take eleven—very rare in itself. And Russ turns around to Fred Owens, who was operating camera, and asks, ‘What’s the footage?’ Jack Lucas, the camera loader, says, ‘Eight hundred and forty feet.’ And Russ slowly turns around and says, ‘On a four-hundred-foot magazine?’ Everybody just stopped talking. Because when Russ gets that look of fire in his eyes . . .” Meyer had gone on shooting takes after Lucas had allowed the film to run out. From the smoke pouring out of RM’s ears it was plain to see that someone would have to pay for this most egregious error, and fast. But strangely enough, it wasn’t the head of Jack Lucas that would roll this particular day.

  “You know what Russ did?” said Brummer. “He didn’t fire Jack, because Jack was the loader—his job was simply to watch the footage counter. He fired his good friend and army buddy Fred Owens, because Owens, being the camera op, was in charge of the camera. It was his responsibility. Fred was devastated, almost in tears.” Lucas was relegated to whipping boy for the rest of the shoot, after which he quit, even though he’d worked with Meyer on and off since the early sixties. “By that time I’d just about had a bellyful,” said Lucas. “He rode me pretty heavy.”

  Alaina Capri said sayonara after her second picture because she felt Meyer had betrayed her by showing too much of her flesh. “Russ told me it was going to be alluding to nudity—it even says in the script ‘alluding to nudity’—and I saw the thing, and you could see me. I was really upset. I never really talked to anybody on the set again.”*6

  Next up was Stuart Lancaster, who later related his expulsion to writer Kris Kilpin. One night Lancaster took Meyer to a movie, pointing out some actress he thought was deserving of a part. “Her tits aren’t big enough,” Russ commented in a voice loud enough to be heard by the entire audience. Lancaster tried to stress her theatrical abilities, and Meyer stormed out of the theater to sulk in his Porsche. When Stuart tracked him down in the parking lot, Russ bellowed, “Be at my house at 9 a.m. and bring your attorney. I’m breaking your contract!” They made peace, only to have Meyer snap again when Lancaster gently hinted to Russ that maybe he should put his talents to use on some more worthwhile material. “He turned livid and ripped the phone out of the wall,” Stuart told writer John Donnelly. “He didn’t speak to me for a couple of years.” Meyer wouldn’t put Lancaster in another role until four years later with The Seven Minutes.

  Worst of all was the loss of screenwriter John Moran, who had just burned out completely on RM’s rough and rowdy ways. “Meyer’s main thing was keeping Moran on schedule,” said George Costello. “He’d be constantly on Moran’s ass: ‘Keep writing, keep writing!’ Moran was trying to write as best he could, but it’s hard to do with somebody shouting at you.” Meyer would not find another truly exceptional screenwriter until the arrival of Roger Ebert in 1969.

  Meyer did gain one new dance partner in the midst of all the defections. Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! benefits from a very humorous score, with a very heavy-handed Handel’s A
nvil Chorus—complete with the macho clank of a hammer—trumpeting Stone’s every intrusion upon the screen. For the next few Meyer pictures, Igo Kantor would assemble wry, witty bits of film library music that cut back and forth between a variety of cheesy, ultra-Hollywood “now” sounds, emphasizing Meyer’s montage technique while adding another level of sophisticated humor to RM’s always bold palette.

  Duly noting a trend toward hardtop indoor theaters—much safer bets, RM felt, than drive-ins, where at any given moment members of the tennis shoe brigade might “accidently” peer over the fence, causing some bingo-haired, Bible-thumping old biddy to see her first act of sexual congress in thirty-seven years and experience a heart attack, but not before writing her congressman—Meyer now made a conscious decision to concentrate once more on rougher, sex-and-violence fare. The picture that resulted from this decision was 1968’s Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers.

  Unfortunately, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers is Meyer on autopilot. The story concerns a cheating couple (Anne Chapman and Paul Lockwood) who get caught up in a bar heist. Aside from good performances by new Meyer mini-regulars Lavelle Roby and Gordon McLeod, this is one lackluster cast, headlined by Chapman, an odd Canadian dancer who resembles nothing so much as a wax museum replica of Olivia de Havilland, albeit slightly melted. And the tepid dialogue makes clear that not just any dummy Meyer locked in a closet with a typewriter could concoct his weird brand of talkfest. This is just a TV movie with tits. It has that tired ambience of one of those smoky strip joints that Meyer was so fond of, but only at about five minutes past last call.