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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Meyer traveled yearly to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, a big shindig for the home video market where RM personally hawked his tapes from a little booth, a couple of his posters providing the only fanfare. Porno veteran Bill Margold frequently had the space next to Meyer, who’d “sit in his booth scowling, writing voluminous notes on his book.” RM had no use for the porno sellers surrounding him, and the feeling was generally mutual. Said Margold, “Meyer couldn’t keep up with the adult industry, and it passed him by.” David F. Friedman recalls making the rounds of Vegas strip shows with RM, landing in “a real typical greaseball joint—great-looking broads, table dancing, lap dancing. Russ is watching this, and he said, ‘These girls are degrading themselves. This isn’t stripping.’ Russ wanted to see an old-fashioned strip. A lap dance turned him off. We had one drink and blew the joint.”

  It was at the 1987 CES show that Meyer met his next tit-throb. A recent divorcee in her early forties parading around in an Elvira get-up, Jane Hower was clearly looking for a good time. When the big-balconied blond part-time strip-o-grammer sailed past Meyer’s booth, RM took one look at her cleavage and threw her a business card. When Hower returned home to Seattle, she promptly won a celebrity look-alike talent show by performing as Dolly Parton, miming a wicked “9 to 5.” The prize was a trip to Hollywood. Accompanied by a Liza Minnelli doppelgänger she’d befriended, Hower decided to look Meyer up when she got to town.

  They met at the hotel bar, Meyer inquiring as to Hower’s age. Forty-three, she told him. “His face kind of sagged.” RM then “leaned over the table to get a better look—he picked up the candle on the table and held it up on one side of my face, then on the other. He was impressed.” Meyer then told her he was fifty-eight. He was actually sixty-five.

  Heading out for dinner in Meyer’s white TR3 roadster, the talk naturally turned to Hower’s own headlights. RM asked if they were real. When Hower responded in the affirmative, he asked for a feel. “So he’s driving with one hand and grabbing me with the other. He’s got ahold of the left breast, trying to feel with his fingers for the nipple, and I said, ‘Three inches more to the right.’ He just about went off the road.”

  Hower was more than a little nervous. As far as she knew, Meyer was just some Hollywood porno guy—but they clicked immediately. “We ended up in the hotel room and I took my top down. Oh my! The first time he saw me naked I thought he was gonna collapse. Yeah, breasts are a big thing to him. No act.” Soon Hower was experiencing sex at the hands of the master. “Very straightforward—hug, kiss, touch, and put it in. It lasted a fair amount of time, not three strokes and you’re done. Nothing too bold. The minute we were through makin’ love, it was up out of the bed, into the bathroom, hot soapy water—I never saw a guy move so fast. He was fastidiously clean.”

  Hower assumed it was just a one-night stand, but Meyer began calling her nightly. On December 16, 1987, eagerly anticipating their second rendezvous, he sent two bras—34E and F—along with specific instructions to wear whichever fit best under a tight sweater. During their time together RM snapped some pictures of Hower in the buff, carrying one in his briefcase next to the beloved shot of Mom. Jane made frequent trips to Los Angeles on Meyer’s dime, and he’d visit her in Seattle as well. He’d brag to pals that the trips north were a write-off since he had a working history with a local film lab, Alpha Cine.

  When she’d visit Meyer at his home, he’d sit by the pool, immersed in revising The Book. One day Hower, swimming naked so RM could click the occasional picture, decided to stimulate herself with one of the water jets. “I liked it a whole lot—and it pissed him off a whole lot. Russ didn’t like the fact that I could get pleasure off a stream of water.”

  Hower got the full measure of Meyer’s eccentricity when she and RM spent time at Roger Ebert’s Indiana vacation home with a few other couples. “We all couldn’t sleep, because Russ and Jane made so much noise,” said fellow guest Paul Fishbein, who insisted that Ebert was still talking about it when he bumped into him some ten years later. Oddly enough, it had all been an act. “When we got alone in the bedroom, Russ wanted to make noise—we weren’t actually making love, but he wanted it to sound like we were. Oh God, he wanted to put on a show. I didn’t know if I could stand the embarrassment of it. But I moaned and groaned.” Jane then whispered to RM, “Are you happy now? Can we go to bed?”

  Despite such charades, things seemed to be getting serious between the two. Meyer met Jane’s parents and Hower met the combat buddies, a few of whom were amazed that RM was dating someone relatively close to his age. But after a year and a half, Meyer suddenly cooled. Phone calls became infrequent, visits were postponed. Hower’s next trip to Los Angeles would prove to be her last. “When he picked me up at the airport, I just sensed that somethin’ major had changed. We went back to his place, and of course made love as soon as we got there, and that was the dead giveaway. ’Cause as soon as he took his clothes off I could tell he’d been with another woman. Big time. He smelled of it. In fact, Russ commented on it. He says, ‘Aaaaah, it even smells like sex!’ I felt terribly insulted that he would come to me unwashed from another woman.”

  Once his seed had been spent, RM told Hower that he’d have to take her to a hotel, as he was “having some work done” at the Meyer manse. She knew it was a ruse. By this time Jane had fallen hard for Russ and was deeply hurt. Hower tried to keep the relationship going, but Meyer finally admitted in a letter that there was another woman, boasting that he’d met and impregnated this new conquest on June 26, 1989, and was looking forward to fatherhood.

  The romance kaput, Meyer continued to write Hower now and again for nearly ten years, trying to talk the already beyond-abundant Hower into getting augmentation surgery.

  Two women would come to dominate RM’s life in the nineties. One was a rather harsh-looking stripper sporting a wicked, feathery mullet and lacking the crazy class of previous editions; the other was a ruthless secretary with a voice so shrill it could drive you to drink. In a twisted scenario that could have come straight from the poison pen of Meyer’s old screenwriter John Moran, the stripper would be convicted of brutally assaulting RM, starting a bloody chain reaction that left the assistant in complete charge of his very being.

  Both women were somewhat undersized and not particularly well liked by the RM crowd. They were certainly not your typical Meyer broads. You could almost call them the Anti-Vixens.

  Janice and the Handyman

  I am chauvinistic. I don’t care to have business with women in the film game.

  —RUSS MEYER

  It was a little before 2 a.m. on May 27, 1999, when Paul Fishburn heard his doorbell ring. As the dog barked, Fishburn went downstairs to check the peephole of the front door to see just who was out there at this ungodly hour. “It’s Russ Meyer,” said a voice in the night. Fishburn opened the door to find his seventy-seven-year-old neighbor standing there, his head covered in blood that had oozed down onto his shirt. “I have been assaulted.” Fishburn let his wounded neighbor in, asking whodunit. “Well, I’m not sure,” said a dazed but guarded RM. Paul’s wife Donna got a towel and tended to the wounds. The old guy looked pretty beat up. There were cuts and bumps all over his noggin, a big gash near his eye.

  Paul asked if there was still somebody in his house. “There could be,” mused Meyer. Ten minutes later the police and paramedics arrived on the scene. Officers Miller and Hightower tried to pry out of Meyer just what had occurred, and once again he vaguely suggested there might be someone lurking within his home. When the officers entered RM’s house, they came face-to-face with one Melissa Mounds, a blond, unsmiling former stripper who stood five foot three, Meyer’s current paramour. “She was emitting an odor of an alcoholic beverage,” Miller would testify in court. “Her eyes were bloodshot and watery. Speech was slightly slurred.” As a final touch, he added that there was a “wobble to her walk.” Mounds, who did not appear to be hurt, feigned ignorance regarding Meyer’s injuries. She would change
her tune a few hours later when the police returned to slap on handcuffs.

  They took Mounds over to Fishburn’s house, where Meyer sat in a breakfast nook with a coffee. “She was frightened,” Donna Fishburn later testified. “And she said, ‘I hope they do not arrest me.’ ” On the way to the hospital, RM told Officer Miller he was starting to remember: he had awakened on his couch to find Melissa looming over him, pummeling his face with her fists.*1 Mounds then explained that she had grown tired of being yelled at and had decided to fight back. The next day a restraining order was granted to keep Mounds away from Meyer and his home.

  It was a pathetic turn of events for the once mighty and seemingly indestructible Russell Albion Meyer. I’d once discussed with Erica Gavin the defining characteristic of the men in RM’s films. “Weak,” she maintained. Now Meyer had been pinned to his own canvas. “God, what a person won’t do to have sexual access to a women with mammoth majungas,” said friend and biographer David K. Frasier.

  Born Debra Masson on October 9, 1959, the owner of these particular majungas had posed for men’s magazines as Angela Parker before reinventing herself (and her bustline) as Melissa Mounds, appearing as the first centerfold for Hustler’s Busty Beauties in 1988. According to agent Eleanor Bucci, Mounds made $3,000–$3,500 a week in those days, not counting tips and money from fan Polaroids. “Melissa could be booked fifty-two weeks a year. Everybody liked her. There wasn’t a club owner or a fan who didn’t like Melissa. She was just a sweet person. Didn’t have a scheming bone in her body, although I tried to put some in.”

  Mounds would testify in court that she first met Russ Meyer in Las Vegas around 1979 and initiated a relationship with him five years later, although nobody in Meyer’s camp remembered seeing her around until the end of the eighties. In his autobiography, Meyer dates their first photo shoot together as April 4, 1988, at his vacation home in Palm Desert. RM became absolutely obsessed with Mounds, intent on making her his next star. “She was greedy for penis, very greedy,” he told the press. Meyer insisted that the saline implants inside her huge, terrifying orbs were embedded deep behind the breast, attached to the rib cage. “You can dig your fingers in there up to four or five inches and not encounter a foreign substance,” he enthused. Mounds was the woman RM had told Jane Hower he’d impregnated at age sixty-seven, on a mission “to get some sort of heir going. It would have pleased my mother, God bless her soul.” Melissa lost the child, reportedly miscarrying after a fall during a trip with Meyer to the Moscow Film Festival in July 1989.

  Melissa was an odd addition to the Meyer menagerie. “She was kinda simple,” said RM friend Dolores Fox, who took Mounds shopping for a dress at the request of Meyer, who’d set her up with a bank account. “When we went to pay for it, she did not know how to write a check.” Richard Brummer saw Melissa as “a homebody. Liked to cook, clean. She could’ve been a terrific mother. She wanted that kind of a life. That’s not Russ’s life.” But many friends were dubious about her intentions. “There was a sort of classlessness about her,” said David K. Frasier. “I don’t think Melissa cared very much for Russ. It was the money.” Meyer complained to friends that Mounds had a lot of needy family members.

  The romance was on and off for a decade. In January 1991, Meyer shot footage for a Melissa Mounds feature film that was to be narrated by her. RM tinkered with it for years, abandoning it whenever he was pissed off at her, which was frequent, as Charles Napier attests. “He’d call and say, ‘Sweet Melissa this, sweet Melissa that.’ Then it turned to ‘That bitch, she tried to kill me with a hammer. Have her locked away forever.’ The usual Meyer love triangle.”

  Meyer bought her cars (including one van he christened the Moundsmobile), wedding dresses, and glittering baubles. “He gave her three engagement rings,” said Jim Ryan. “They’d get in a fight and break up. She’d be gone out of his life, and suddenly they’d be back together again. I’d say, ‘Meyer, you bought her an engagement ring for three thousand dollars and she loses it?’ He said, ‘It’s worth it.’ ”

  In Roger Ebert’s opinion, “Melissa was bad news.” But there was no convincing Meyer. David K. Frasier said their one and only argument took place when RM asked whether he should marry Melissa Mounds and have a child. When Frasier told him it wasn’t a good idea, RM erupted. “I’ll have anything I want to have, because Meyer’s a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch.” Frasier recalled Meyer hunched over the Moviola, transfixed by Melissa’s image. “He said, ‘Look at the evil. The evil!’ Russ just thought that she had a real demonic presence, a real sexual rapaciousness. He loved it.”

  “Russ had this cassette,” said screenwriter John McCormick. “The Righteous Brothers singing ‘Unchained Melody.’ He and Melissa, that was their song. He was fishing for the cassette in the back of the Suburban, and while he was fishing for the cassette, he cut himself on a piece of broken neon tubing. His fingertips were bleeding as he put it into the tape player. It was supersentimental for him—I was more concerned about the blood. He wasn’t even fazed. ‘That’s our song.’ ”

  By 1990, RM had abandoned his gargantuan, umpteen-hour anthology film The Breast of Russ Meyer. “It was totally unmanageable,” he admitted at the time. “I would have never completed it.”*2 Instead he threw himself deeper into the autobiography, now a maze with no exit. Although many around RM would be driven over the edge by the project, the burden fell mainly on three men: George “King” Carll—who’d worked with Meyer since the mid-sixties, creating advertising campaigns for the majority of his films—helped RM assemble the initial text and layout, then retouched the twenty-four hundred photos in the book; biographer David K. Frasier worked on the editing; Larry Christiani attended to the final layout and typesetting. “I thought this was going to be a little job. ‘Maybe I’ll make a few thousand bucks on it,’ ” said Christiani. “What I thought was gonna be a short thing turned into ten years.

  “We would sit down, shoulder to shoulder, hours on end, going through every single line and every single word,” Christiani continued. “Russ was directing us. I would have no doubt his fingerprints are on every single movie frame that he ever shot. That’s the way he treated the book—every word.” If Christiani slipped in a typeface that varied even minutely from what had come before, RM caught it. “He was a real eagle eye.”

  Once Meyer became aware of the process called kerning—adjusting the space between letters and words—there was no controlling him. “He would get a printed page, and let’s say there’d be a word like develop. He’d say, ‘The e is too close to the d, the line doesn’t look right,’ ” said Frasier. By changing the spacing of words, it often threw the line off visually. Amazingly, the way the text looked to RM suddenly took precedence over what it meant. Meyer would whip out a thesaurus and replace words on the spot, rewriting the book as Christiani was trying to put the layout to bed. “He would change words,” said an exasperated Christiani. “He would change words. We went through every single page doing this.”

  Near the end of the book, Meyer included an interview Frasier had done with him that had already seen print in a film journal. RM started monkeying with the text, replacing and changing words as he saw fit. The fact that he was rewriting an already published interview didn’t concern him in the slightest. “The amount of hours we spent kerning and changing, I don’t know,” said Christiani. “It was hundreds of hours. It just got out of hand. It was just crazy.”

  Meyer demanded that the thousands of black-and-white photos he wanted to include be printed in duotone, a prehistoric process involving a one-color overlay that added a sense of depth to the images—and which computers couldn’t assist with at the time. As the years went by, Christiani faced another problem as he tried to keep on top of the latest software innovations. “If I updated my files to newer versions, it would cause the text to reflow, and we’d done so much manual kerning that I couldn’t have it reflow. I ended up keeping an old computer that was just ready to die, because I couldn’t run the older so
ftware on the newer computers.”

  RM would disappear for months, maybe even a year, then suddenly materialize with a new version of the text in his hands. According to Frasier, Meyer kept “every incarnation” of the book around, so they all began to bleed together. “You never knew what version you were working on. It was impossible . . . If there’s a telephone pole fifty feet away, rather than walking directly to the pole, Russ would dig a hole, go underneath the pole to the next town, then parachute in. Meyer loved hardship. And when there wasn’t hardship, he’d create it.”

  There was more than enough hardship to go around on A Clean Breast. First to fall was RM’s longtime associate George Carll. “He was with Meyer constantly—literally like a scribe,” said Frasier. “Ninety percent of what I was doin’ was photo retouching,” said Carll. Meyer was a maniac about the pictures, particularly when the subject was breasts. Each pair had to look firm and round and be pointing heavenward. “It was a bitch. He was pretty critical about it.”

  Carll, separated from his wife, was not only working with Meyer, but also living with him at the Arrowhead Drive house. When RM and Melissa Mounds ran off to Russia for a retrospective of his work, Carll was left with nothing to do. He wanted to take a couple of weeks off and reconcile with his wife. Of course, Meyer accused him of holding up his book. “We had a violent argument in the garage,” said Carll. “He stood right in my face. I swore he was gonna hit me.” Carll was then excommunicated, joining the ever-lengthening list of Meyer Betrayers.*3 “The irony of this was that the book didn’t come out for over eight years past that time,” said David K. Frasier.

  RM poured an endless amount of time and his own funds into the autobiography project. Meyer got into a dispute with his Hong Kong printer over damaged paper, taking them to court. Printing costs alone ran into the hundreds of thousands. “I think he knew all along he would probably never make money,” said Christiani. “We ran the book out three or four times for printing, and then he would change things. It kept looking like we were at the end—I kept hearing over and over, ‘This is the end, this is the end,’ and he’d come back with a huge rewrite.”