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

by Jimmy McDonough

  During an interview, Napier described the genesis of the scene. “We were in a restaurant one night discussing ways to dispatch the chick. Somebody overheard and called the cops—thought we were getting ready to murder somebody.” The scene was shot not on location but in Jim Ryan’s Los Angeles home—“I still use the bathtub,” said Ryan with a chuckle—and he scripted the dialogue the night before right in the room they used. “I just visualized Edy,” he said once again. It seems that Edy’s ire fueled more than just Meyer alone.

  The final bizarre touch in SuperAngel’s murder scene is the briefly glimpsed two-foot cock Napier sports. The actor said that he came up with the idea, telling Russ it was the only way to show any “redemption” for Sledge. “So we had to stop shooting and sent somebody into town for a dildo. Which we named Wilbur. Kept it in a case. Then Meyer got carried away and wanted to put it on all the guys.” In fact, once Supervixens was finished, RM tested the picture on a tour of six East Coast colleges, claiming that “the girls complained they weren’t getting their fair share, so I re-edited it and put in a lot of shots of male nudity I’d left out.” At least one woman wasn’t so crazy about the inserts Meyer added. According to Haji, “When Shari Eubank saw all this stuff in the finished picture, she freaked out. She ran out of the theater crying.” Meyer’s love of phony phalluses would be carried to absurd lengths in his next picture, Up!

  “Russ Meyer comes bolting out of the burning Sonora desert, with the vengeance of a mad Visigoth lusting to regain his throne!” screams the pressbook for Supervixens. Billboards featuring a heart-stopping image of the criminally abundant Christy Hartburg in her red halter top wreaked havoc in places like Raleigh, North Carolina, where, said RM, “the townspeople insisted they be taken down. That was on a Saturday. By Sunday the film had grossed double what it had before.”

  Meyer, back on top. After debuting at the Rotterdam Film Festival—where, according to RM, Europeans were distressed by the film’s violence—Supervixens had its official U.S. premiere in Dallas on April 2, 1975. The film was a smash hit, eventually earning $17 million worldwide on an investment of $221,000.

  Meyer certainly knew he had a hit after a college campus screening in Austin, Texas. “When it was over, a hysterical woman ran up and told me I ought to have a stick of dynamite up my ass. Any time I generate that much of a reaction I know I’m really doing something right.” According to RM, the funniest response to the film came from Shari Eubank’s father, who—sitting next to his daughter—attended a showing packed with her friends and family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Shari’s hometown. The unbelievable shot of Eubank completely nude atop the mountain pinnacle appeared on the screen. “Mah God, Shari,” the father gasped. “Dad, I told you not to come,” shushed his daughter. The rest of the audience cracked up.

  By the end of 1974, Charles Napier was destitute, living in a trailer he’d parked in a lot Meyer owned on Sunset Boulevard. A truckers’ strike had ended his gig at Overdrive, and other than the work for RM, his acting career had amounted to nothing. “I figured this was about it: thirty-nine years old, pounding the pavement, just another failed actor,” Napier told Roger Ebert. “Then Meyer released Supervixens.”

  Over at Universal, Alfred Hitchcock himself requested a private screening. Next thing Napier knew, somebody was knocking on the window of his truck, telling him he had an appointment to keep. “Hitchcock evidently loved the brutality in this film. His favorite scene was me stomping the chick in the bathtub.” The actor headed for the studio, fearing it was some sort of joke. He was ushered into Hitchcock’s office and instructed not to talk. The director had him turn around once, and Napier suddenly found himself signed to Universal, a check for $5,000 in his pocket. “I went out and rented a little apartment and just sat there for two days, I was so happy to be indoors.” A Supervixens check for eight grand arrived the next day—Meyer had cut the actor in on the profits. Napier never looked back, working continuously in film and TV for such directors as Jonathan Demme, John Landis, and Sylvester Stallone.*4

  The blind fury on display during the Supervixens bathtub murder impressed and disturbed audiences and reviewers alike. “Truly one of the most impassioned expressions of the battle of the sexes ever filmed. Grisly . . . shocking . . . visceral,” wrote Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. In the Hollywood Reporter, Arthur Knight worried that Meyer was encouraging audiences to “enjoy vicariously” Supervixens’ ultraviolence. “Although not hardcore, its X is abundantly earned.” Both critics also favorably compared the sequence to the shower scene in Psycho, although Knight felt it lacked “Hitchcock’s sense of detachment,” attributing to Meyer “a rage in the man that makes him positively revel in violence.”

  Meyer continued to divide critics, with reviews for Supervixens all over the map. “Meyer is the best comedy director working in America today,” gushed Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader, ranking the director with ace animators Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Others felt RM had traded his talent for empty self-parody. The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris saw Meyer as “auditioning for role of the Frank Tashlin of the seventies . . . another talent lost to pop attitudizing.” Perhaps the most interesting interpretation of the film came from Ken Emerson in the Boston Phoenix. Emerson saw Supervixens as a repressed homosexual nightmare and felt Harry was actually in love with Clint, whom the critic saw as the “archetypal gay porn figure—the ingenue in blue jeans.” His conclusion: “Supervixens is for men who hate women and love each other.”

  Meyer had another war to face, the inevitable divorce from Edy, and this would be one gory battle to the death. Jim Ryan had to run interference for RM on the Supervixens set, taking Mrs. Meyer’s frequent angry phone calls. “She was mad about everything,” said Ryan, recalling a particularly rabid tirade during the film crew’s time in Blythe. “She called me up and said, ‘That son of a bitch!’ Not even hello. She said, ‘You tell that son of a bitch I just bought a thirty-eight-caliber and I’m gonna blow his fuckin’ brains out if he comes through the door.’ This is at four o’clock in the morning. I had to call Meyer and say, ‘Look out—Edy’s gonna shoot you.’ ” According to editor Les Barnum, RM was so paranoid that Williams would steal the Supervixens negative, he had a huge vault installed in his home. Meyer also attended dubbing sessions for the picture “disguised” in his 166th combat uniform, apparently, according to Barnum, “so Edy wouldn’t recognize him.”

  The ever-quotable Williams held court for reporters at her now-husbandless Mulholland Drive estate. “Russ apparently expected me to just stay home and be a housewife,” she told the National Police Gazette. “Me? In this day of the liberated woman, this is just not possible.” Edy also claimed RM had “hit me and knocked me down.”

  In July 1975 Meyer had his wife evicted from their home. “Russ gave me the house as a wedding present,” Edy sniffed to gossip columnist James Bacon. “Now he wants it back.” She added that she’d be “waiting for the sheriff in my bikini.”

  “The divorce was very unfriendly,” said Jim Ryan. “Edy had two or three high-powered attorneys there, Meyer had two. It was an expensive thing—I think he had a $100,000 bill.” Edy was demanding not only the house but a share of the profits from Supervixens, saying she’d helped in its creation. It all came to a head in Los Angeles Superior Court before Judge Paul G. Breckenridge in October 1975.

  Much to Edy’s dismay, Jim Ryan testified about the phone call where she’d threatened to shoot Meyer. One press report said that RM had claimed his wife “had attacked him with a knife and kicked him in the groin,” forcing him to obtain a court order preventing her “from using a gun or any dangerous weapon” against him. The day after Ryan’s testimony, Edy, wearing a yellow T-shirt that read “FREE! Almost,” held court for the press, not only to deny she’d threatened Meyer, but to deliver a plea to directors and producers everywhere. “I don’t think my talent is just in being naked,” she said, adding she’d like to “play a person with feelings and not be treated just lik
e a piece of meat.”

  In November, Judge Breckenridge ruled very much in Russ Meyer’s favor. Edy was entitled to nothing from Supervixens, 50 percent from the sale of their home, and $900 a month for only twenty-eight weeks. He noted that Williams had been an actress for fourteen years previous to her marriage, maintaining that “if she has the talents her lawyers believe, most assuredly she will find employment.” A bitter Edy complained to the press that Meyer had “planned the divorce like he was Hitler.”

  Edy went on to date mobster Mickey Cohen—“my Sir Galahad,” she told People magazine—and to a career that mainly consisted of appearances at various public events wearing as little as possible, or, in the case of the Cannes Film Festival, even less than that. An “intercontinental starlet,” Roger Ebert dubbed her. Film roles were few and far between, something she blamed on Meyer and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. “I got typecast as the porn star . . . it makes me really furious.”

  The eighties brought harder times. Williams surfaced in a few porno films, doing soft-core lesbian scenes. In 1995, Edy went hard-core (talked into it by none other than ubiquitous porn fixture Ron Jeremy, according to writer Luke Ford), doing girl-on-girl “with someone half her age” in the unforgettable Snatch Masters 6. As Ford cruelly notes, “The scene reveals more of Williams than most people want to see—including her many liver spots.” Hollywood is a chilly place.

  Russ Meyer lived to count his loot another day. He would never marry again. RM maintained that, yes, he’d wanted each of his three unions to last “the rest of my life, but it never worked out. They all wanted to change me. ‘Why don’t you go straight?’ they’d say. Or they’d complain about my working Sunday. But I’m not about to change.”

  The next addition to Meyer’s stable of tomatoes was the marvelous Raven De La Croix, a stunner with long black hair, big sad eyes, and an unmistakable New York accent. “I’m a strong woman, but I’m not an aggressive male stuck in a female body.” She keeps tabs on the other Meyer dames, offering a helping hand whenever needed. “I’m the cosmic mother.”

  Raven manages to be old-world and outer-space at the same time. She can talk a mile a minute about working with Meyer, break into Mae West for a bit, then veer off into discussions of “goddess energy” that somehow don’t have you running for a vomit bag. Raven’s a searcher, a romantic, but despite the frequent excursions into the fantastic, there’s no bullshit about her. She’s lived nine lives, a few of them even on this planet.

  Raven’s been an ordained minister and spiritual counselor, worked in drug rehab with prison inmates, and rubbed elbows with a Hells Angel or two. “I love the roar of a Harley,” she told Iron Horse magazine. “I dig the iron.” One of her more famous escapades involved sneaking onto prison grounds to make love to her then husband, right under the nose of armed guards in a nearby gun tower. In the eighties De La Croix brought a touch of class to the strip circuit with her mix of elaborate costumes, fantasy, and old-school burlesque.

  Born in Manhattan in August 24, 1947, Raven was one of eight kids. Her exotic looks come from the blend of her father’s Comanche Indian heritage and French blood on her mother’s side. Raven grew up poor with an alcoholic stepfather, losing herself in old musicals on TV. By the time she met RM, she’d worked in the music business and as an exotic dancer and was raising a nine-year-old son, Matoux.

  De La Croix’s entry into the movie biz was “the traditional Lana Turner story of being discovered in Schwab’s.” Raven was chowing down in Joe Allen’s, a West Hollywood eatery, when Meyer’s then casting agent Samantha Monsour spotted her. After one glance at Raven’s 38DD-28-36 figure, RM didn’t even ask her to take off her top and wouldn’t see her naked until she was already parked in front of the camera. “He goes, ‘I’m only paying a thousand dollars a week and we’ll be shooting three to five weeks,’ ” Raven recalled. “I didn’t know I was already hired. He didn’t even ask.”

  Meyer’s next picture—1976’s Up!—is, at least on the surface, his most extreme. Defenders maintain that in his later films, RM is mocking the constraints of plot, but I think it’s just evidence of an increasing indifference (at least one Meyer insider, Stan Berkowitz, sees Up! as early evidence of what would become RM’s long mental decline). Suffice it to say this picture has something to do with the murder by piranha of Adolf Hitler, rape, death by chainsaw, another stupid cop, and the illegitimate daughter of Hitler and Eva Braun. That and naked women chattering endlessly as they run through the woods. Plus loads of aberrant sex, which, from a director who saw any deviation from the missionary position as un-American, is curious indeed. Perhaps a capitulation to smuttier times, this is really the first RM movie to feature plenty of simulated sex, and to no great effect. There’s oral, anal, S/M, homosexuality, much gratuitous violence, and a plethora of freakishly large rubber phalluses. It is also the only Meyer movie that feels a tad sleazy. Like Supervixens, one feels plenty of anger—“Russ has me being thrown and whipped and raped and punched throughout the whole thing,” notes Raven—but this picture lacks the shot-out-of-a-cannon intensity that made RM’s previous film so appealing. Up! is largely a pointless, indulgent spectacle akin to watching punk rock mess G. G. Allin lob his own waste at ducking but expectant fans. You peek in amused but detached disgust, hoping none of it gets on you.

  The editing in Up! is surprisingly languid for Meyer (longtime editor Richard Brummer wasn’t aboard). Without the typical punishing rhythm, the result lacks pizzazz. For me, the best part of the film is the one sequence that plays like Meyer truly gave a shit and that’s the absolute insanity of the first five minutes. In a dark dungeon, a nude Adolf Hitler indulges in some S/M play with a woman in a zippered vinyl face mask while he is whipped, then buggered by a man in Pilgrim drag sporting a ridiculously large unit. An Asian woman named Limehouse stops by to sound a gong and sit on der Führer’s face. A naked black woman looks on and, for no apparent reason, stirs a steaming cauldron. Old pervert Hitler, speaking in German without the benefit of subtitles, provides a nonstop monologue for nearly the entire sequence. It’s hard to fathom what Meyer was intending here, except perhaps the complete alienation of his fans. According to his French distributor Jean-Pierre Jackson, Meyer relished the fact that his followers hated the beginning of Up!

  The doting attention Meyer pays to Hitler’s rape—it feels like it might lurch into gay porno at any moment—and the rather disquieting way RM has his often bizarre male leads strut their stuff raises an obvious question about his sexuality: Meyer, a closet case? This idea will no doubt be heresy to his fans and is definitely a minority viewpoint in the RM camp, but it has its supporters, most specifically Erica Gavin, who felt Meyer’s whole macho routine was a little forced.

  “Russ was extremely homophobic,” said Gavin. “I think he had a lot of feelings that he didn’t understand toward his army buddies and guys—it was almost like if it hadn’t been such a no-no, Russ could’ve easily been in a relationship with a man. He created that closeness in the army—it was his way of doing it without it being sexual. The feeling I always had was if he would’ve allowed himself to have feelings, that his feelings would’ve been for men—and that’s why tits ’n’ ass were such a big thing to him, because that made him definitely straight.”

  Personally, I think it’s an easy pop-psychology out to rely on closet homosexuality to sum up an increasingly complex character. Both Charles Sumners and Jim Ryan—his closest male friends—dismissed any notion of a gay RM. Though Up!, to the shock of many a Meyer fan, is full of actors sporting gigantic prosthetic peckers, and this raised a few eyebrows. “I had to rub my eyes, like in a cartoon,” said a delighted John Waters. “I thought, ‘What?!?’ Really kind of shocking for Russ. I was always amazed that he did that. Russ seemed like the type that big dicks would make a little . . . nervous. I thought that was great.” Of course Meyer maintained that those elephantine cocks were just a little something extra for the ladies. “I don’t care for faggots,” he bluntly informed crit
ic David Ansen in 1975.

  What shocked observers more was the increasing violence in Meyer’s films. RM certainly wasn’t alone in the raping and pillaging department: the seventies had led to ever-violent movies, including two 1971 pictures by filmmakers Meyer greatly admired, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. 1973’s The Exorcist broke more taboos. The ultra-low-budget sicko “documentary” feel of 1972’s Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) had upped the ante for the drive-in crowd. 1976—also the year of Meyer’s Up!—saw the release of both Carrie and the ultimate “art” violence picture of the decade, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. (It should also be noted the MPAA was notably more friendly to violence than sex—most of the pictures listed herein got R ratings.)

  Your academic types might suggest all this carnage was a response to Watergate, Vietnam, and the death of the sixties, but in RM’s case, I’d just say it was PES—post-Edy syndrome. An increasing bitterness toward women had metastasized within Meyer’s films, as Supervixens attests (a picture, let’s not forget, largely inspired by his tanglings with the ex-wife). However preposterous the execution, the way Meyer now combined sex and violence so explicitly and so casually left audiences and critics queasy. “As a dysfunctional, violent-oriented male, Russ is breaking new ground,” said Raven De La Croix of Up! “It doesn’t really have a happy message.”