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

by Jimmy McDonough

  The incident hit papers across the country. When Rob Schaffner went to see how Meyer was holding up, RM seemed unfazed. “Like usual, Russ opened the door in his bunhuggers, scratchin’ his ass. He had a huge shiner and a gash on his head—he was totally amused by the thing—‘Wow, can you imagine? I really haven’t done a flick in, like, twenty years and look, I’m still in the fuckin’ paper.’ ” The one thing that annoyed Meyer was the “elder abuse” idea.

  The trial took place that July and painted a bleak picture of Meyer’s present state. Meyer was barely coherent on the stand but still somehow managed to be his amusing self. When asked if Mounds was after his money, he responded, “Well, it’s a natural feeling on the part of people that don’t have as much money. They’d like to get some.” His account of the assault was rather elegant. “I can recall I was laying on a couch. And I was attacked on that given evening or afternoon, whatever the case may be. And I felt severely injured. . . . I was being struck by a very strong person, and I think probably by a strong woman.” The court testimony is frequently compelling. Cowart expounded on RM’s condition: “He gets confused. He doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t like to address it.” Mounds got in a dig or two at Cowart: “She has manipulating [sic] him before. She is coaching him.” Meyer defended Cowart: “She has been a very close confidante and honest lady.”

  In early August 1999, Melissa Mounds was convicted of all three counts against her and sentenced to sixty days in jail, forty-five days on a work crew, 104 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, one year of domestic abuse counseling, and three years’ probation. There are those who feel that Mounds got a bit of a raw deal, pointing out that in his condition, Meyer couldn’t discern reality anymore. “That disease started settin’ in so bad, he started getting really weird,” said Paula Parker. “He used to say things like, ‘Paula, last night people were chasing me, beating at my door.’ He was makin’ up things that couldn’t possibly have happened. I think that maybe Melissa got railroaded a bit.”

  Melissa Mounds did not walk away empty-handed, though. According to Jim Ryan, Meyer’s lawyers were concerned about any future legal action involving her and whatever photographic or film work she did for RM. To send her on a permanent vacation, she was given Meyer’s Palm Desert home plus a sizable amount of cash. (Curiously, RM’s will still lists the residence among his holdings.)

  In August 1999, David K. Frasier was summoned to Meyer’s home in hopes of salvaging the autobiography RM was no longer capable of finishing. He was shocked to find Meyer limping, being carted around by a driver. The morning after RM had welcomed Frasier, he greeted him with, “Dave! When did you get here?” Frasier was troubled by what he saw. “Russ’s dementia was pronounced.”

  The situation only became more grim as Frasier looked over the latest incarnation of the autobiography. Meyer had ripped pictures out of porno magazines and slapped them into the layout. Photographs of the recently departed Melissa Mounds were shoved in everywhere.*8 Dave took Janice aside and told her he was wasting their time being there. The book was already done. Russ was just monkeying around.

  “Well, are you gonna tell him?” asked Cowart.

  Steeling himself, Frasier sat down and told Meyer there would be no more additions or changes to the book. They’d worked on it for a decade and it was over and done.

  “Well, I guess we don’t have a book then, right?” asked RM.

  Frasier assured Meyer they had a great book, they only had to go back to the previous finished version. Ever so delicately Frasier explained the situation to Meyer, assuring him they had a fantastic tome. To his relief, RM seemed to accept the news.

  “I’m thinking, ‘Great, it’s settled,’ but then an hour later Russ said, ‘Oh yeah, I found somethin’ else I want to put in the book.’ ”

  It was beginning to dawn on Frasier just how far gone Russ was. “We tried to put together a millennium calendar, and he had thousands of slides. They had tried for months and months to make selections. We couldn’t even get through that. He’d get distracted. We couldn’t even get thirteen shots.”

  There was a sad goodbye between the two men at the airport. “I realized that was the last time I was gonna see him,” said Frasier. “See, the one tragedy vis-à-vis Russ and myself is that we never got to celebrate the book coming out. Because that was our war.”

  Friends worried that no one was looking after Meyer. During his last visit, David K. Frasier noticed that RM was wandering around in shit-stained shorts and voiced his concerns to Cowart. “Most people don’t want to walk around in fecally encrusted clothing . . . that bothered me. I didn’t come right out and tell her—I did say, ‘Well, I hope that if Russ is going to be kept here there’s going to be more of an attempt to manage his hygiene.” Frasier said Cowart later apologized in regard to Meyer’s appearance.

  The fact that RM was limping during that last visit also concerned Frasier. Talk of a stroke was making the rounds. But nobody really knew the facts, because Cowart—allegedly to protect Russ—not only insisted on keeping his condition a secret, but legally threatened anybody who talked about it in the press. “One thing that sort of hurts me a little bit is they never told me any of this—the fact that Russ had a stroke, or that he was developing dementia,” said Frasier. “I’m not the sort of person that would’ve talked to Entertainment Tonight. If they needed somebody to go out there tomorrow, I’d go.”

  Cowart admitted in an email response that she kept many of Meyer’s intimates in the dark. “Everyone is entitled to his privacy. There was nothing to be gained by publicizing his decline, nor would Russ have wanted it. Let me ask, did you hear all the details of Ronald Reagen’s [sic] ‘long goodbye’? There is a reason for that.”

  There were other complaints. Paula Parker related the time Cowart got upset because Meyer had suffered an accident, taking a dump on the floor and blaming it on an invisible friend. “Well, she threw a fit—‘Russ! Come up here!’ And she got mean with him. That upset me. She started reprimanding him like you couldn’t believe—‘I can’t do this, this is disgusting.’ She talked to him like a mother to a two-year-old. I was very embarrassed for him. And I cleaned it up. She didn’t want to touch it. She said it was a health issue, she didn’t want to get sick.” Kitten Natividad said that Janice called her up in a panic to help with another accident, even though Kitten had already been fired from her job. She arrived to find Meyer covered in his own waste. According to Natividad, Cowart “just let him wallow in this shit for five hours because she didn’t want to go in the room and clean him up. She would let him die in shit, because she doesn’t wipe her own ass, y’know?”

  Haji backed Natividad up. “I saw Kitten wipe the crap off the floor from one end of the house to the other. And Janice would be in the other room yelling.”

  Cowart doesn’t deny these incidents occurred. “Early on, there was a time when Russ was suffering from diarrhea on several occasions and there was no way to convince him to get cleaned up. I did hire carpet cleaning services several times.” Janice credits Natividad with coming to the rescue. “She bathed him and cleaned him and it was not a pleasant situation, but she did it in a very caring way. She loved Russ and was very, very nice to help. I was never involved with Russ in an intimate manner and it would have been very uncomfortable for him and inappropriate for me to be bathing him or even seeing him undressed.”

  At least three of the Meyer women (who requested not to be named for fear of repercussions) told me that in 2001 they called the authorities over their concerns about what was going on inside the Arrowhead Drive home.

  “Someone called the Adult Protective Services on several occasions to report some sort of mistreatment of Russ by me,” said Cowart. “We never knew who called. However, since this wasn’t true, the social workers that came out thought that Russ was very well cared for and the calls were not merited.” According to Cowart, on the third alleged complaint the then “head honcho” of Adult Services came out for an inspection and told
Janice that she was “very impressed with RM’s living conditions and his appearance. I mentioned, ‘Well, I guess we’ll be seeing you again,’ and she asked me what I meant. I told her this was the third visit, and she got very upset and said, ‘We don’t allow people to use our office to harass someone,’ and that was that.

  “None of the actresses like Kitten, Raven, Haji, Erica, Tura, or any of the ‘girls’ were aware . . . that [Meyer’s home] had been cleaned up, straightened up, and simplified to help with RM’s care and well-being. RM’s doctor wanted a calm serene atmosphere so Russ would be able to cope with what was to come.”

  The Melissa Mounds assault case had set loose a juggernaut in Russ Meyer’s life. Because of the elder-abuse charges that resulted from the Mounds beating, Meyer’s case was turned over to the California Department of Welfare. Complicating matters was the fact that RM had no immediate family. Jim Ryan said that if Meyer’s lawyers hadn’t acted fast, the company’s assets could’ve been seized and RM might’ve wound up in a home. But Meyer had put a living trust in place. Around the time of the assault it involved just a handful of people—Jim Ryan, accountant Phil Cooperman, lawyer Glenn Alperstein, and, last but certainly not least, Janice Cowart, who would testify that she was added to the trust “probably as a direct result” of the Mounds case.

  The matter wound up in court, and while the Welfare Department backed off—“they had already started the procedure to seize,” said Ryan—the one thing the court insisted on was that Meyer have around-the-clock care. RM was legally declared to be suffering from dementia and incapable of managing his own affairs. He was said to be suffering with Alzheimer’s or multi-infarct dementia—clots blocking small blood vessels in the brain, leading to destruction of brain tissue. Doctors wouldn’t know the exact cause of RM’s dementia until an autopsy was performed. “We haven’t got a firm diagnosis,” said Ryan in 2003. “I told Meyer ‘A pubic hair is growin’ in your brain.’ ”

  What all this meant was that somebody had to officially watch over Meyer and manage his health. “We had a meeting at the lawyer’s of the people named as conservators in the living trust,” said Ryan. “They said, ‘Somebody’s got to take over the physical problems with him being declared incompetent.’ ” Ryan already had his hands full trying to maintain his photo business while tending to his own ailing wife. “I didn’t open my big mouth—it ain’t my bag, as they used to say.”

  Apparently it was Janice Cowart’s bag, because she volunteered. On June 19, 2000, she was granted conservatorship of Russ Meyer’s physical being, which, according to the court documents, gave her absolute control over six very interesting points:

  1. Power and right to fix the residence or dwelling of the Conservatee.

  2. Power and right to access confidential records and papers belonging to the Conservatee.

  3. Power and right to consent or to withhold consent to marriage.

  4. Power and right to give but not withhold medical consent.

  5. Power and right to limit the Conservatee’s right to control his own social environment and contacts and/or sexual contacts and relationships.

  6. Power and right to contract on behalf of the Conservatee.

  According to Meyer’s friends, the effects of the conservatorship were immediately felt. “When Janice came to power—when Russ signed the papers—I’m telling you a demon came out, and she became very mean,” said Haji. RM’s cronies no longer felt welcome. George Carll took Meyer out for dinner with Jim Ryan: “We drove all over East L.A., places he remembered. He enjoyed the ride. We ended up in Chinatown, had some food. We were gone for two, three hours. I didn’t realize anything was the matter. Well, Janice was all over my ass for takin’ him out—she says, ‘You’ve got him all riled up.’ After that it was strictly cold city.”

  David K. Frasier felt that he was expendable once Cowart had gotten his help in extracting the final version of A Clean Breast out of Meyer. He got very little information out of the company afterward and felt, like so many others, that his calls inquiring as to RM’s health and well-being were blown off. “I guess I called at inopportune times, because I was always told, ‘Well, we’re busy here now.’ After a while it’s like hitting your thumb with a hammer. I can see where people would feel they have been cut off and they’ve been distanced. Ideally, I don’t think it would’ve taken much effort to say, ‘Well, Russ is doing well today, we’re taking him out.’ That’s all I wanted.”

  Even Charlie Sumners—Meyer’s best friend since World War II—got the cold shoulder. Intially he liked Cowart and sympathized with her attempts to protect RM. “I think Janice is afraid that all of this will just snowball, so she’s kinda built a wall around him and kept everybody away—including me. I try not to think about it. Last time I talked to Russ, Janice would tell him what to say. . . . I’ve tried to call out there, but I can’t get through.”

  “Many of RM’s friends could not understand the concept that, as he became more ill, Russ could not talk on the phone anymore,” said Cowart. “Instead they liked to believe that I was preventing him from contacting them. Russ could not dial the phone anymore. You don’t know how many times I dialed Charlie Sumners and brought Russ to the phone to attempt a conversation. I did this with many other friends as well . . . I know at one point Floyce Sumners viciously attacked me on the phone, accusing me of ‘preventing’ Russ from talking to her or Charlie, which really surprised me, since he had seemed so nice before. I repeatedly asked her and Charlie to come out to visit Russ one last time and even offered to pay their plane tickets, as Russ often did, but they never came. Russ loved Charlie like a brother so it was very sad that they didn’t visit one last time.”

  Floyce Sumners, widow of Meyer’s closest buddy (Charlie passed away in 2004), and who herself was by all accounts a dedicated friend to Russ Meyer for over forty years—in his will, Meyer left his mother’s belongings to Floyce—was emotionally devastated upon hearing Cowart’s statements. “That’s a lie. She never invited us out and offered to pay our way*9 . . . I can’t believe she’d talk about Charlie like that . . . this breaks my heart.” Floyce pointed out if it hadn’t been for her late husband, Janice wouldn’t have even met Russ, as Charlie had saved his life during World War II. As far as a trip out to California for “one last time,” Charlie Sumners was simply too ill to fly the last year of his life. “But [Janice] didn’t know that, because she would not answer our calls . . . Janice shut everybody away. She did. Everybody.”

  Fearing that her access to Meyer would soon be cut off, Haji talked fellow Pussycat Lori Williams into a clandestine visit one weekend when Janice wouldn’t be there. “It was just really sad,” said Williams. “He was sitting in a chair, like a hard card-table chair. The pictures were taken off the walls, all the posters, everything—but there were all the remnants of what had been there, all the glue marks and the holes and the tape. It looked like somebody had moved and he was sitting in the middle of it. It was pretty bad. And he had this nasty lady that was cooking some kind of slop for him. I definitely did not get the idea that there was lots of TLC going on. I don’t think that anybody was abusing him, but it was grim.” But at least Meyer seemed to remember them, posing for pictures to document the occasion. According to Haji and Lori, Cowart went ballistic when she got wind of the visit. “As soon as she heard that, the rules all changed—‘Nobody’s allowed to ever come here.’ And that was the end of it.”

  To one degree or another, Cowart had made enemies with all the Meyer women I spoke to. RM’s friend Rob Schaffner listened as she badmouthed one after the other.*10 “She’d go, ‘Y’know, these whores keep callin’ me. . . .’ I go, ‘Y’know what? They’re not whores, Janice—they worked with Russ.’ ” Said Kitten Natividad, “It’s very, very strange. She thinks it’s terrible that we girls make money with our clothes off—but it’s not terrible for her to get a paycheck every week from it.”

  Meyer had often supplied his former stars with videos, posters, and stills at cost s
o they could pull in a meager income from fan conventions, but Cowart has all but cut that off. “She became so penny-pinching and cheap!” said Haji in 2003. “Didn’t care about the girls anymore, didn’t help us out or anything.” Lori Williams concurred. “Janice makes you pay for every little thing, which is really sick. Then she threatens us when we do the shows. Russ would be outraged if he knew, especially if he knew she threatened to sue Tura. It’s unbelievable . . . she has no limits to how far she goes with this nonsense.”

  Counsel on behalf of RM Films sent threatening letters to Kitten Natividad, Tura Satana, and Rob Schaffner, instructing them not to talk about RM’s health even though his illness was a matter of public record. Sometimes the aggression has been downright comical, as in a March 3, 2003, e-mail Julio Dottavio—acting as a representative of RM Films—sent to the Webmaster of the Velvet Hammer burlesque troupe site, which had posted an old interview with Meyer. Dottavio accused them of selling stills (which they clearly weren’t) and making up the interview (which had been previously published in 1995), then threatened legal action within forty-eight hours. Nothing came of it.

  Meyer may have been an egomaniac and a brute, but he always publicly acknowledged his debt to and affection for the women in his films, and the fact that his estate disrespects and even harasses the women that made him famous strikes many as a disgrace. It has caused a great deal of hurt and anguish among RM’s former stars. “I am part of Russ’s life and his legacy and all that, and I shouldn’t be thrown to the trash like this,” said Kitten Natividad.

  “The women who starred in RM’s films were not allowed to see Russ for many reasons,” said Cowart. “Most of them did not respect his privacy and spoke about his illness to the press just so they could get attention. Many of them tried to take advantage of him financially and brought around uninvited guests who often tried to get RM to enter into some sort of business project that was not in his best interest . . . The women you mention wanted to visit for themselves, not for Russ. It was not a positive thing. The court appointed me to protect Russ and his privacy, which is what I did.