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

by Jimmy McDonough

  When Finders Keepers comes up, the philandering sex scene intercut with demolition derby crashes is touted as an example of moralizing Meyer—cheating couples, colliding cars, the wages of sin is death—but RM cares like the PTL Club cares. It just feels like a crass joke whose only purpose is to enliven an otherwise dull movie. The film’s most memorable scene involves Jan Sinclair shaving Paul Lockwood’s chest as she rambles on about her Mennonite childhood and incestuous relationship with her brother (the sex later in the scene is intercut with childhood flashbacks of the siblings—in full Amish costume—flying a kite). “Who told Meyer that watching a plump girl shaving a guy’s chest is exciting?” complained one reviewer.

  “Meyer loved that scene,” said George Costello, present in some anonymous, fetid room above a Santa Monica bowling alley where the foul deed was committed for the benefit of celluloid. “You had to be there. Meyer was smacking his lips filming that one. He was really into it. It went way beyond just normal filming, it became personal. The crew just gave each other looks. We were used to it.”*7

  Costello himself pops up in the strangest places in this film, if you know where to look. As usual, once he got into the cutting room, Meyer polished the film with some pickup shots, in this case adding some close-up gropes to a scene with Chapman. “Meyer was doing a closeup on her breasts,” said Costello. “He had me stick in my hand and feel her up. That’s when I discovered her breasts weren’t real.”

  George was again utilized—below the neck only—to stuff more flesh into a sex scene with Chapman in the pool. “Meyer had me go nude in the pool because the actor didn’t want to lose his toupee,” reported an amused Costello. For such a technical perfectionist, RM sure didn’t mind some very sloppy, mismatched underwater inserts. (Check out the scene with Babette and Ken Swofford tangling in the river during Common Law Cabin. During postproduction he added footage of Costello and some woman in a blonde Babette wig bumping pelvises to beef up the nudity. They were obviously not shot in a river, but paddling around back home in Meyer’s pool!)

  But more important, what’s a Meyer film without a meltdown? “The maddest I ever saw Meyer get was the time Nick Wolcuff took his bacon,” said Costello. Wolcuff had played a sheriff in Mudhoney and returned as the cathouse bouncer in Finders Keepers. “Nick was a lovable, heavyset Russian guy—a gentle, nice man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Meyer’s cooking breakfast, and he set on a plate some just-cooked bacon. Nick and I were standing in the kitchen prepping to do a scene.” RM turned his back, and it was at this moment Nick Wolcuff made a fatal error. He innocently filched a piece of the fried pig fat and happily began to munch. Meyer went absolutely mad. “Without any warning, Meyer jumps up and screams, ‘Goddamn it, keep your pisspaws off my bacon! I hate you bastards always eating my breakfast!’ Meyer took the whole damn plate and and smashed it against the wall, bacon and eggs flying everywhere. Poor Nick. He just melted.”

  For some unknown reason Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers was a big hit, even hitting the legit houses in May 1969. The Meyer imprint delivered a certain sort of jolt, and right now America was buying. Russ Meyer was a brand name, and he simply refused to go away. He kept cranking out pictures, and they kept making money. Lots of it. Meyer was on a roll. Big shots like Vincent Canby of the New York Times were reviewing his product. RM was making more and more cross-country pilgrimages to tub-thump his latest release. Although he still couldn’t curb his impulse to answer a bad review with a curt missive from his own angry hand, Meyer had learned a thing or two about handling the press since the days of The Immoral Mr. Teas, when reporter Mike Wallace had taken a bite out of our high-class pornographer during a mysterious and rarely spoken about “hatchet job” in the fifties. “I used to defend my films. Now who cares?” said RM. “They can call me whatever they want. I admit to everything.”

  Cognizant that many of his critics were merely poor working stiffs surviving deadline to deadline, he’d take reporters and reviewers out on the town for steak dinners while regaling them with tales of the flesh. Here was a smut peddler who was refreshingly blunt and not one to hide behind lofty ideals. Consequently, Meyer got oodles of ink. He could trot out set-piece anecdotes—Hemingway assisting in the loss of his virginity, dear mother Lydia pawning her wedding ring for little RM’s first camera—and the press ate it up. “When people meet me they expect to find some slimy guy wallowing in his own pool of saliva,” Meyer told Ellen Goosenberg. “I’m just some guy from Oakland living out my fantasies on film, foisting my personal tastes on the world. I give the people what they want.”

  By the time of Finders Keepers, RM had made fourteen pictures, and outside a few financial flopperoos (primarily Mudhoney plus Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Common Law Cabin), most had made bank and a few had made a fortune. Meyer was forty-five years old. He answered to no one. It wasn’t the Battle of the Bulge, but hell, it wasn’t bad. He’d made a pile of loot and conned a lot of beautiful woman out of their big brassieres. The fact that he’d exchanged wondrous bodily fluids with more than a few of them was just icing on the cake.

  Meyer had grabbed the world by the balls with The Immoral Mr. Teas. He’d reinvented himself and the sexploitation game with Lorna, then reached a creative plateau with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It was time for Sgt. Meyer to lob another hand grenade.

  The Look of Love

  The Great American Dream is to run into a woman that has no principles whatsoeve r— and a greedy pussy.

  —RUSS MEYER on Vixen

  Her tangle of long brown hair barely held at bay by a loud seventies brown scarf, Erica Gavin is Vixen, and she’s seducing a new victim. This time it’s Janet, the tipsy, unsatisfied wife of a friend. Vixen is one scary but entirely irresistible creature, the siren on the rocks, and she’s cheerfully bedded everyone in sight, including a Mountie and her own brother. “Basically this is a woman that is a racist, a sex fiend, an incest partner, a lesbian,” said Gavin. “[And] an all-American girl that saves a plane from being hijacked by the communists.” In other words, your typical Meyer heroine.

  The first female whom Meyer would allow to drip sweat on-screen, Erica Gavin remains the most natural of his superwomen, and what she may lack in heavy appendages she certainly makes up for in heat. Vixen-era Gavin is fleshy in the most delectable way, lust personified, sporting a pair of thick, antennaelike eyebrows more appropriate for one of those disquieting translucent masks hanging by an elastic band on the joke shop wall. Her inviting lips alternate between bratty smirk and sullen pout, those bottomless brown eyes radiating “Danger Ahead.” Hardheaded, none too consistent, and utterly magnetic, Gavin’s most important asset is passion: whatever the complications, when Erica decides to give all, look out. Gavin, like Meyer, doesn’t kid around.

  Gavin’s partner for Vixen’s thespian lesbian tango is one Vincene Wallace, who plays Janet, a clueless redhead with all the depth of a puddle of rain. RM has swathed her in vivid red lingerie and parked her atop an equally blood-colored bedspread. There could never be enough red in a Meyer picture—it was his favorite color—and with her pale skin, insouciant lips, and moronic, sexy little topknot, Vincene’s the dumb cherry atop a maroon cake.

  The ever-sensitive Meyer has taken to calling Wallace “baby” when directing her on the Vixen set. “My name’s Vincene,” mutters the redhead. RM has already torn Wallace a new one for wanting to whip up steak curry for the cast in her downtime. Meyer sentenced her to slate takes instead. “You’re being paid to make a movie,” barks the maestro. Decades later Meyer would claim that Wallace was the first actress to defeat his no-casting-couch policy, staining the Vixen laser disc commentary with a rare tale of post-shoot hanky-panky.

  Wallace looks a bit dazed, but who wouldn’t be when faced by Meyer as well as with the human tornado that is Erica Gavin? This girl-on-girl scene is Vixen’s deal-closer, and it is far from running smoothly. RM has provoked Gavin to the point of hysteria. For weeks she’s been trapped with an all-male crew in a cramped re
d farmhouse on six acres straddling the California/Oregon border. A million miles from nowhere, the joint is owned by Meyer childhood crony Wilfred “Bud” Kues, a man who is said to get a big kick out of eyeballing the smutty proceedings. As usual, RM is utilizing natural light, but silver reflectors brighten the small room to a painful degree. It’s a scorcher of a day, over a hundred on the thermometer, and even the walls seem to be perspiring. A reporter and photographer from the very manly True magazine huddle in the corner. The atmosphere is tense. Will Gavin deliver the goods, or flake once more?

  Thus far Meyer’s terse instructions have been high-concept: “Turn on the sex. Be voluptuous, evil, sinful. Look satanic. Conceive of yourself as a female animal.” Gavin is nervous about the lesbian scene and, clueless as to the inner workings of actual Sapphic love, Meyer regales Gavin with a tale told to him by some AC/DC jailbird. Both her and her cellblock paramour achieved climax by “banging pussies,” legs locked like “two scissors.”

  But thoughts of human shears only serve to send Erica into an inner freakout, and she grows more passive with each take. “You’re ruining the most important scene in the movie!” screams Meyer. She runs for the shelter of her room, where, between crying jags, Gavin is comforted by George Costello, ever the good cop to RM’s bad.

  The sympathetic Costello goes so far as to slip Erica a can of Treesweet grapefruit juice purloined from Meyer’s private booty, unleashing a juggernaut that eventually dooms Costello to a thirty-year exile. George commits the unpardonable sin of fraternizing with the enemy, and with one of Meyer’s prized fillies yet. As Gavin saw it, “Once you become a Russ Meyer girl, in his mind you almost become like the Virgin Mary—no one can fool around with you.” But Meyer would have no one but himself to blame for the Gavin-Costello affair. “He pushed her right into George’s arms,” said Haji.

  Sick of waiting for his erratic starlet to get it together, Meyer’s fuse is burning shorter by the second. But some dumb little bit of wisdom Costello imparts to Erica clicks. It’s a simple idea: just treat little Miss Vincene like she’s the woman and you’re a man. We have lift-off. Vixen pounces on the woozy redhead like a vulture, barely pausing to spit out the bones, the room silent save for the two dames kissing and pawing each other. Big belly to the floor, Meyer’s in a trance, his Arriflex camera gently swaying to the crotch opera unfolding before him. It’s what Meyer referred to as “umbilical cord” moviemaking—just the actors, the camera, and Russell Albion, humming together like a thousand beehives. Yeah, he’s definitely feeling it in the old grinch, and after the scene oozes to a halt he yells, “Cut! I’ve gotta change my shorts.” RM has broken the bank on this one.

  One of Meyer’s most amusing creations, Vixen is a calculating bitch, but she pulls the strings with such gusto you want to surrender. And in a direct reversal of fates befalling Meyer’s past heroines, she is not punished for her sinful ways, but celebrated—Vixen is sixties sunshine to Varla’s black night. “She’s a healer,” proclaimed RM. “She makes everybody well again through sex.” Meyer, once again cannily adapting to changing times, created a heroine who not only played upon men’s fears but offered female viewers a vengeful chuckle or two, and RM maintained that women in particular readily responded to Vixen’s calling-all-the-shots attitude, turning the movie into a racy but acceptable couples date. “This was the basis for Vixen’s huge success. Once you have that happen, your gross doubles, even triples. It’s not just the raincoat brigade.”

  Ground out in six weeks, the picture cost a paltry $72,000 and earned $7 million in its first year alone, $1 million of that from a record-breaking forty-three-week run at Chicago’s Loop Theater, a 606-seat grindhouse with a $2 admission. A fifty-four-week stand at the Starlite Drive-in in the tiny town of Elgin, Illinois, made the Guiness Book of World Records. “The film that put Meyer on easy street,” is how RM described Vixen. “It was a barn-burner.”

  By Meyer math, Vixen eventually returned a whopping $15 million plus. That’s a lot of clams, and the attention of a sleeping giant known as 20th Century Fox was definitely aroused. No matter how much he wanted to strangle her, Meyer would always credit Erica Gavin for achieving his improbable entrée into the Big Time. While at Fox a few years later making Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a puzzled tech noticed Erica wandering the set and asked RM who was the spaced-out ingenue in the doorway. “She,” replied the man who never forgot a favor, “is the reason I’m here.”

  Russ Meyer and Erica Gavin: a clash of wills the likes of which had not been seen since Meyer and Tura Satana locked horns. Unconquerable women brought out the best in Meyer, and Vixen in particular was a bloodless boxing match between director and star. By her kooky nature alone, Gavin pressed every button RM had; he in turn went out of his way to torment, belittle, and bedevil his latest nude ingenue. So much so, in fact, that some witnesses went as far as to declare it love.

  Vixen was birthed in a West Hollywood Laundromat located at Santa Monica and Robertson. Inside, Meyer and Jim Ryan were shooting the shit while tending to RM’s soiled boxers. Meyer had been addled—maybe even panicked—by the big guns muscling in on his territory.

  An ill wind was blowing out of the world’s ass, and its name was hard-core pornography. A fascinating 1969 profile on Meyer in True magazine*1 found him wringing his hands over whether the explicit Swedish “art” film I Am Curious (Yellow) would make it through customs. All of a sudden people were having sex, Doing It, right on screen. “The whole business will be ruined,” RM moaned. Pass it did, and it would rip the panties right off Meyer’s world. Meyer had promised everything and shown nothing—that was an essential part of his con. Now they were passing the stuff out on street corners like a Port Authority hooker. By 1970’s Mona, hard-core features would be shot in America.

  Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: RM was not against the showing of hard-core—he was no hypocrite—but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He detested it for aesthetic reasons. For Chrissakes, it was all pimply asses and motel lighting, nothing more than “roping sperm” meeting “an open-faced oyster.” No sirree Bob, not RM’s style at all. Meyer is not interested in What Lurks Below the Waist. No mystery there. Besides, said RM, if he did make hard-core, “I don’t think my mother would like it.”

  It had been Meyer who’d invented the game, Meyer who’d upped the ante, and now any talentless hack capable of zooming in on some garishly lit gash splayed open in a no-tell motel could trump his hand. From now on, Meyer would be continually lumped in with such charlatans, and it stung. Did these imbeciles care about machine-gun editing, razor-sharp focus, the beauty of the female form? You wouldn’t find a Meyer girl spreading her legs in some no-budget porno.*2 (Although John Lamb’s successful court battles over his 1965 nudist documentary smasheroo The Raw Ones made full frontal nudity legally A-OK for the exploitation crowd, and furtive glimpses of pubic hair would soon start showing up in Meyer films.)

  Threat number two was Tinseltown itself. “It is hard today to stay one step ahead of the majors,” he complained. “Why should the man on the street shell out to see a Russ Meyer movie when he can see nudity in Blow Up, lesbianism and masturbation in The Fox, and blood ’n’ guts in Bonnie and Clyde?” The upscale Canadian R-rated Keir Dullea–Sandy Dennis lesbodrama The Fox in particular wound Meyer’s clock.

  All this meant that the competition was closing in. But Russell Albion Meyer was at his best with his back against the wall. It was strike-first-lest-ye-be-struck time. “Jim, we got to make the sexiest film ever made,” he announced to Ryan, his ever-present consigliere, and as the big coin-driven dryers hummed, Vixen’s story was plotted. A script was quickly fleshed out from the Meyer-Ryan treatment by another one of RM’s improbable scribes, this time actor Robert Rudelson, one of the Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers thugs. This would be no hard-core film, but it would have wall-to-wall sex, including lesbianism, incest, and interracial couplings. Not to mention the fish fondling.

  Meyer ran off to scout location
s, leaving the impossible task of finding the lead in the hands of George Costello. “I wanted a girl to come on like the Superchief,” said Meyer, and George would deliver the goods. On May 16, 1968, Daily Variety ran Costello’s tiny casting call ad for “Vixen, the Female Fox.” Erica Gavin, yet another dancer at the Losers, saw the ad while sitting in a dentist’s office and decided to audition for the role of a “technically interesting young Caucasian woman.” Why not, she thought—“the seed of Russ Meyer’s name had already been planted” by Haji and Tura. Erica showed up for the cattle call, where a sheepish Costello—who’d already seen over three hundred women—snapped a topless Polaroid, and soon she was summoned back to meet the boss.

  “George and Russ were both there,” she remembers. “I think George knew he had a good one—he was sorta proud to present me to Russ. Russ wanted to see my tits. I felt that he was harmless. When he asked me to take my shirt off, it was like a doctor . . . very clinical. There was nothing sleazy about it.” Dismissing her supposedly lacking rack (Erica: “Here I’m thinking, ‘These are small??’ ”), Russ explained his big idea, which had been imparted to him by Costello: women would relate to Gavin because of her “normal” (by Meyer standards) body. RM had a hunch George was right. As simply as that, Erica was hired. She was now a leading lady, albeit a $350-a-week one.

  Gavin was a true Hollywood starchild, the kind RM would soon poke fun at in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Born Donna Graff on July 22, 1947 (the name change occurred at age nineteen when she needed a fake ID to dance topless at the Losers), Erica’s parents were both actors—before being blacklisted, Fred Graff starred opposite William Holden in the 1950 noir Union Station. Following a traumatic split between her parents, teenage Erica was hell on wheels, smoking pot and dropping LSD “almost every day.” She fled home at seventeen, running off with an artist she met at Hollywood High. When drug dealing landed him in the joint, Gavin began dancing for the Models A-Go-Go agency to pay the rent.