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

by Jimmy McDonough

  The Meyer-Napier relationship was a combustible combination. Take the ill-fated Blitzen, Vixen and Harry, a picture Meyer was planning to do in the early eighties. According to Roger Ebert, “Napier was reluctant to commit, because he had been doing a lot of work with Jonathan Demme and others. I think that Napier always had his eye on a mainstream career and was conflicted about working for Russ. Russ felt this was disloyal.”

  Napier has his own version of the story. “We were gonna split this thing fifty-fifty, and that was Meyer’s idea, because he got on a guilt trip—let’s face it, I made the guy a lot of money, right? We’d worked on it a year, and we were out in the desert scouting locations, and finally he just said, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’ I stopped the car. I said, ‘How come?’ ‘I just can’t stand to think of an actor having that kind of money.’ ” Despite the squabbles, these are two men cut from a similar cloth, and Napier would give RM his beloved wolf-dog Harry, one of the more significant partners in Meyer’s life.

  Napier ran into Russ Meyer by accident, as chaperone for a friend on her way to an audition. “I had a lady friend who worked as a stripper. She goes, ‘You go down there with me, I don’t trust this guy.’ West Hollywood off Sunset, as I recall. New Cadillac convertible outside, good neighborhood. Russ was a pretty formidable-looking guy in those days, y’know. Big bearish guy, very brusque and abrupt, had that World War II pencil moustache. You could tell he was eccentric just by looking at him, which sort of interested me.”

  RM immediately zeroed in on Napier. “Who are you and what do you want?” Napier explained that he was there to play bodyguard for his friend.

  “Are you an actor?”

  “Well, yeah, I’m trying to be,” replied Napier, whose career up till then consisted of one episode of Star Trek, a couple episodes of Mission Impossible, and two nudie westerns.

  “You been in the army?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been in the army, why?”

  “I’ve got a part here that you might be interested in,” said Meyer, totally ignoring the girl.

  “How ’bout her?” asked the actor.

  “Tits aren’t big enough.”

  “Right in front of her!” marveled Napier. The dancer stormed out, and RM had himself a new leading man. “It sounded like fun, man—get a buncha chicks with big tits and run around the desert,” Napier recalled.

  On location in Panamint Valley, Charles Napier quickly learned that making a Russ Meyer movie wasn’t exactly “fun.” “I didn’t see a lot of people around—it began to take on a thing more like a commando raid than a movie, y’know? Secrecy. Whispers. Secret telephone calls. We shot from daylight to dark, and all my scenes were in the middle of nowhere. Maybe Jim Ryan or Richard Brummer would be there and that would be it. He could’ve hired a full film crew, but he wanted to control it himself. You’d be locked in the room of some neighborhood house for an interior with the people who owned the place in the living room, wondering what the hell is going on in there—or you’d be planted under a yucca tree in the middle of Death Valley, with Ryan standing there with binoculars and a thirty-ought-six. Pretty bizarre film training.”

  When cast and crew gathered for meals, no one spoke. “Tension started building from day one, because Meyer made it build,” said Napier. “He had control over everybody from the beginning. And you couldn’t leave because there was no place to go. There’s no way back, there’s no way out.

  “He got you out there alone and started pitting one against the other. Calling the chicks, telling them we were faggots—and telling us the women were dykes. By the time you got ready to film, we were all ready to kill each other. When we were havin’ a kiss and a hug and a hump, you did it with gritted teeth.”

  Drug boss gangster Franklin (Franklin Bolger) wants another smuggler killed, a mysterious Native American known as the Apache (John Milo), so he enlists the services of crooked sheriff Harry (Charles Napier) and second in command Enrique (Bert Santos) to bump him off. Harry emerges from a bloody showdown in the desert to write a book about the tale. That’s ostensibly the plot of Cherry, Harry and Racquel, but don’t pay too much attention to it, because RM didn’t.

  As with any Meyer production, injuries were inevitable on the front lines. In one scene a white ’55 Plymouth was supposed to careen down a hill and explode, but the car refused to die. “I was the powderman on that show,” said Richard Brummer. “We threw that car off the cliff three times. The first two times it still ran.” Finally Brummer took a five-gallon can of gasoline, doused the car, then wrapped some paper around a rock, lit the paper, threw the rock and ran like hell. “Before I could get far enough away, it blew up and blew me five or six feet.” Brummer wound up with a concussion.*1

  Near the end of the film, in a scene where Napier is shot by Apache, they ran out of blanks. Meyer started frothing at the mouth, and Brummer again came to the rescue. “After the yelling and screaming about how negligent everybody is, I said, ‘Russ, I think I can do something. I can make a fake blank, but the Indian has to miss.’ ” Brummer emptied out some shells, then replaced the gunpowder with wadded-up toilet paper held together with chewing gum. Once again he cautioned Meyer that the shot would have to miss, because it would still pack a punch. “Get to the first take, the Indian aims, he shoots, and Napier does a complete flip in the air! Down on the ground and he doesn’t get up! Russ says, ‘Cut! Terrific, terrific!’ And Napier says, ‘I’m shot!’ ”

  “Man, that was brutal,” Napier recalled. “This thing hit me in the shoulder and flattened me. A knot jumped up on my shoulder the size of a baseball. It hurt like hell after I got up. I knew I’d been shot, I started bitchin’ and screamin’ and yellin’. Meyer didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything. After I finally stopped cussin’ everybody out, I said, ‘Let’s go.’ I wasn’t about to wimp out on him, and we went on and finished the scene. Nothing was ever said about it. It’s pretty bloody in the movie. If shit like that happened today, it would wind up on the front of the L.A. Times and people would get fired.”

  Toward the end of production came the scene that nearly derailed the movie completely: Charles Napier finds Linda Ashton buried naked in a dune and gradually uncovers her sandy body. Meyer was already at odds with Ashton over her pets, a pair of Pomeranian pooches she’d lock in the room of the dive motel where the cast and crew were trapped. The dogs crapped everywhere, and the motel owner—according to RM, “like Chill Wills, only fatter”—was going nuts.

  Things went from bad to worse doing the scene in the dunes. “While it was being shot, Russ was putting different lenses on, including long lenses,” said Brummer. “Of course, she’s nude in that scene. Between takes the girl looked very strange at Russ. And after we got back, she was getting testier and testier. She starts in on Russ—‘You were using a telephoto lens in that scene. You were photographing my private parts in close-up!’ He couldn’t convince her what he was doing was taking close-ups of an elbow or a hand, which is exactly what he was doing. It certainly wasn’t her box—Russ isn’t interested in that.”*2

  Ashton walked off the production, leaving Meyer in deep shit. Not only did he have an incomplete movie, but once Brummer had finished cutting it as tight as possible (per RM’s wishes, missing scenes or no) the picture ran short. The footage Meyer added simultaneously increased the running time and decreased any possibility for a comprehensible story. He hauled his camera to the San Diego–Mexico border, shot one of his best industrial film montages of signs, boats, fences, and nude women, then slapped on a drug-smuggling narration that afforded Meyer the opportunity to go on a rather whimsical anti-marijuana rant. After that, he came up with an even nuttier idea: dragging his new cast addition, Uschi, into the desert to “symbolically act out the missing footage” as the nonsensical character Soul, which supposedly “added an air of mysticism” to the film.

  More like an utter absurdity. Cherry, Harry and Raquel is the point in Meyer’s work where melodrama meets abstraction head-on—it’s as if
a Man’s Adventure hack had been slipped a tab of Ecstasy halfway through writing some macho action tale. Thus there are gleefully nonsensical blasts of Uschi Digard throughout the picture: Uschi nude save for a huge Indian headdress and leather boots, galloping through the desert, jumping up and down on an outdoors couch, striking poses atop various cars; Uschi nude in a pool with a French horn atop her head, beating water with a tennis racquet; Uschi as a nude switchboard operator who speaks no English stationed in the middle of railroad tracks. Personally, my favorite tableau is an exquisite shot of a buck-naked Meyer in the pool (looking businessman-serious, despite his lack of laundry), using an old black phone to ring his film distributor Jack Gilbreath while Digard rests her imposing jugs next to a poolside champagne glass. The image is so preposterous and beautiful.

  The first opening of the film—there are three—is a complete assault. An obtuse text crawls up the screen as Meyer bombards us with lightning-fast cuts of Uschi bouncing off the walls of his house, rubbing breasts with some chick, and chomping on phallic vegetables, all intercut with the Hollywood sign, Coit Tower, the Capitol Records building, planes taking off, and God only knows what else. Here is Meyer revisiting the maniacal abstraction of Mondo Topless and putting it to a (tenuous) narrative—something he’d take to the max on his next picture, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. This is a good thing, since the rest of Cherry, Harry, and Raquel—aside from some ingenious visual touches like a striking car-chase-as-bullfight—suffers from anemic dialogue and a pedestrian plot. Only when the TV movie disintegrates and Uschi explodes upon the screen does the film come to life. Digard’s crazed exuberance matches Meyer’s rampaging camera to a tee.

  Robert Pergament, the son of one of Meyer’s distributors, was anxious to get into the film business. RM put him to work cleaning prints, running errands, and learning the ways of the cutting room. Pergament dropped an armload of film cans when he first glimpsed the daily routine at RM’s Vista Grande home. Meyer was cutting film poolside as Uschi floated nearby, both stark naked. Said a nonplussed Pergament, “I don’t know how he could see the Moviola out there in the glare of the sun.”

  It was in the cutting room that Pergament learned one of the great secrets of RM’s editorial style: the removal of blinking eyes. “His movies got kind of cutty because he didn’t want anybody blinking their eyes—so all of a sudden, bam! And I thought, ‘Gee, well, okay, this is something I’m learning—when I start cutting, don’t let anybody blink.’ I’d go watch a movie in a theater and say, ‘God, he missed an eye blink. Look at all those eye blinks.’ It’s a good thing I wasn’t cutting!”

  Cherry, Harry and Raquel was another smash for Meyer, and right on the heels of the red-hot Vixen. Said distributor Fred Beiersdorf, “When you had a new Russ Meyer picture comin’, the screening room would be packed. Every exhibitor in the world would wanna see what’s cookin’. You were a major player, a big, big gross.”

  Meyer was on a roll. Even the hoity-toity critics were taking note. “Zabriskie Point in gym socks,” wrote Roger Greenspun in an enthusiastic New York Times review. “Cherry, Harry and Raquel is a rotten film, yet the celluloid stinks with harsh vitality,” sniffed Aljean Harmetz in the same paper.

  A most significant article on RM appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 24, 1968, a little before Cherry, Harry and Raquel’s release. Beneath the title “King Leer: ‘Nudie’ Filmmaker, Russ Meyer, Scrambles to Outshock Big Studios,” Steven M. Lovelady reported a detailed overview of Meyer’s career and the impact of his films on Hollywood. We are also told that RM’s first movie had a forty-to-one return on his initial investment, a record that “has been matched only by Gone With the Wind.”

  Hollywood took note, and 20th Century Fox executives Richard Zanuck and David Brown (a team later responsible for such blockbusters as Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy) read the Wall Street Journal story with particular interest. The mainstream picture business was in a near-fatal slump—America just wasn’t buying what Hollywood was selling (by 1970, unemployment in the industry reached an all-time high of 42 percent). Fox in particular was coming off a string of big-budget flopperoos and desperately needed a hit. Zanuck and Brown decided they’d talk to this guy Meyer.*3

  RM drove down to the Fox lot in a beat-up Jeep Charles Napier had piloted in Cherry, Harry and Raquel, its police flasher hidden beneath a snood. Meyer wondered what all the hubbub was about, figuring it would amount to zilch. Yep, just some Tinseltown bullshit, like the time American International Pictures tried to rope him into doing that Beach Blanket Bingo crap. In fact, if Meyer is to be believed, he fell asleep while waiting in Zanuck’s office, daydreaming about the previous day’s liaison with Miss Mattress.

  Zanuck told Meyer the score. Valley of the Dolls had been a big moneymaker for Fox. They wanted to make a sequel, but the scripts churned out by Jacqueline Susann, the author of the Dolls book, were losers. A small fortune had dribbled down the drain, and Fox still had nothing more than a title: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Now they no longer wanted Susann, but they sure wanted to exploit that juicy title. Zanuck gave Meyer five grand and told him to come up with a treatment.

  After the meeting, Meyer drove his Jeep “like a yahooing cowboy” around Fox’s New York City set for Hello, Dolly! What was happening was truly unbelievable. Russ Meyer, the self-described high-class pornographer, was being given free rein to create a movie at a major Hollywood studio. In no time at all he’d have a million-dollar budget, plus a hundred-man crew to do his every bidding. “I’d been trying to get into Hollywood through the back door all my life, and suddenly the red carpet was being laid out for me.” The mountain had come to Meyer.

  “As I drove out of the studio after Richard Zanuck said go ahead, I was overcome by this insane laughter. I felt I had pulled off the biggest caper in the world.” The caper had just begun.

  Strapping On Fox

  They’re all whores, those Hollywood people. They wouldn’t do anything good for anybody.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Richard Zanuck and David Brown were not the only ones who’d taken notice of Russ Meyer’s appearance in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. On May 8, 1968, two weeks after the article appeared, came a short letter to the editor commending the paper for acknowledging RM, whom the author compared favorably to Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway. “Is it not time for a major studio to sign Mr. Meyer? His films are more alive and interesting than most current action pictures costing twenty times as much. And his heroines, heaven knows, are technically interesting as well.” It was signed Roger Ebert.

  Long before becoming America’s thumb of cinematic judgment, prior to winning the first Pulitzer awarded for movie criticism in 1975, Roger Ebert was Russ Meyer’s unlikeliest partner in crime. He wrote the screenplay for what Meyer considered his masterpiece, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and, under various aliases, contributed to three more Meyer pictures, and at least an equal amount of unrealized scripts. It was Ebert who came up with the final title of RM’s autobiography, A Clean Breast. Other than John Moran, Roger Ebert was Meyer’s greatest screenwriting collaborator. “He writes the words, I put in the music,” said RM. “Just like Rodgers & Hammerstein.” Although he stopped reviewing Meyer’s pictures once he became involved in them, Ebert remained an outspoken supporter of RM’s work in the press, authoring the first major in-depth appreciation of Meyer’s entire oeuvre in a landmark 1973 article for Film Comment.

  “An odd and talkative kid,” Roger Ebert was born June 18, 1942, in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. He was a movie buff early on. “Television came late to Champaign-Urbana, and so, for my age, I spent more time at the movies than most other American kids.” He started his newspaper career at the tender age of fifteen, as a sportswriter for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. “His father died while we were working there,” said co-worker Betsy Hedrick, who maintained that Ebert suddenly became “an instant grown-up.”

  One day around 1959 or so, Ebert ventured across the street from the New
s-Gazette’s offices to the oldest and smallest theater in town, the Illini, and wandered into a showing of the The Immoral Mr. Teas. “College students jammed the place,” said Ebert. “There were lines down the street. I think the movie ran for two years.” Sitting there in the dark theater, Ebert connected with Teas. “Russ’s film was unlike any similar adult film that had ever been made—it wasn’t smutty, it looked great, it was positive, and it was cheerful, like all of Russ’s other films. Russ had a very healthy, go-ahead, unapologetic way of celebrating the female form.” Ebert followed RM’s career with interest, unaware he’d become a major player in it after that one little letter to the Wall Street Journal.

  Eagle-eyed Meyer took notice of the dispatch and wrote Ebert an appreciative note, suggesting they meet. “I found him to be, as everyone did, one of the most fascinating men I ever met—he was smart, funny, extroverted, robust, no bullshit,” said Ebert, who made the trek to California, where he watched RM and 166th buddy Fred Owens shoot an underwater pool scene with Uschi Digard.

  Ebert was also on hand when Meyer came to Chicago with Erica Gavin and Harrison Page for the opening of Vixen. His most distinct memory of that visit was watching RM and army cohort Gene Abrams teeter on a ladder in downtown Chicago in zero-degree weather, struggling to affix giant plastic letters spelling out “VIXEN” to the Loop Theater’s marquee (Ebert said the letters were so large, the city made the theater remove them, lest the wind blow them off to whack some poor passerby in the head). This was quintessential Meyer: anything for the movie. Ebert was impressed.

  Meyer and Ebert shared a certain satirical sense of humor, not to mention a love of movies and food. But perhaps most important, Ebert had, to Meyer’s delight, “that wonderful sickness about him. Bosomania.” Yes, Roger Ebert was “freako over tits.” RM went to great lengths to elaborate this point for the benefit of the press. “Ebert is more debauched than I,” Meyer told Kristi Turnquist in 1979. “Ebert is truly a Jekyll and Hyde. We’ve got to make that clear. He is more into breasts than I could ever hope to be . . . he is absolutely possessed. He’s always nudging me, saying, ‘Look at that girl!’ ” The pair were known to heatedly debate the finer points of their fetish with the grave import of art historians arguing the authenticity of a newly unearthed Van Gogh: RM chided Ebert for liking dames with “pendulouso” hanging breasts instead of the up-thrusting, rounded bosom Meyer preferred. Ebert described RM’s particular taste as “the guns of Navarone.”