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

by Jimmy McDonough

  *2 One more odd detail about Margaret Sullivan Freud might’ve taken an interest in: she lived in fear of snakes. “She had big stacks of magazines in the dressing room,” said Dixie Evans. “I’d have to go through every magazine, and if there was a snake in it, I had to tear it out of the magazine or throw it away. She was terrified of snake photos.”

  2 Sgt. Meyer

  *1 Years later, when Meyer came to Philadelphia for a distributor’s screening of his 1964 sexploitation picture Lorna, he invited a few 166th alumni living in the area to attend, Harding among them. A religious man, uncomfortable with RM’s brand of smut, Warren attended the screening to avoid hurting his friend’s feelings, but stared at the floor the entire length of the picture. “Anything for Russ,” he told me. “He was a real good friend.”

  *2 Adds Jim Ryan, “Meyer didn’t have any really firm views—of anything. Not enough to send anybody a hundred bucks, or buy ’em a placard. Anything Meyer thought that would be better for Meyer he was for, regardless of the party. He didn’t like the Kennedys, probably because they were Irish—Meyer never cared much for the Irish. I think his mother taught him all that stuff.”

  3 Tittyboom or Bust

  *1 Although West insists the story isn’t true, fellow stripper Tura Satana said West once worked with a reptile, which slithered into Satana’s dressing room one too many times. “I finally told her, ‘If that snake ends up in my dressing room one more time, you’re gonna feel sorry for it.’ I took it and swung it until it died, broke the snake’s back. Evelyn had to go out on stage with the dead snake, trying to make it look like it was still alive. She learned not to screw with me anymore.”

  *2 Meyer told Fling magazine’s Arv Miller that French Peep Show never got beyond pasties. Being this was 1952, it’s hard to believe Meyer could get away with showing women completely topless, but who knows—the film hasn’t been seen in nearly fifty years.

  *3 Tempest chuckled when I related Meyer’s version of events. “A lot of men are like that. I had one guy who was crazy about me in Tahoe. I mean, he was a fabulous-looking guy, a big businessman. He made an appointment with a psychiatrist, and he said, ‘Would you go with me?’ and we get there and he said, ‘Doctor, I’m in love with her, but I feel she’s just too much woman to handle. I don’t think I can follow all those powerful men she’s had in her life!’ I guess I intimidate men.” Tempest and Russ would remain fond friends, though, and even decades later she was known to refer to him as “my photographer.”

  *4 Like so many women whom Meyer immortalized, La Mont would disappear into the night. Dixie Evans bumped into her in Providence, Rhode Island. “She was staying at this cheap broken-down hotel,” said Evans. “She turned me on to gin, we were drinking a lot of it.” Dixie was to accompany the then-governor of New York and his pals to a wild shindig upstate, and he wanted her to whip up a date for a congressman friend. After seeing Lilly La Mont on a burlesque poster, the fellas demanded Dixie bring her along. Evans tried to talk them out of it due to La Mont’s appetite for destruction, but they wouldn’t have it. “We got about ten miles and she said, ‘I gotta have a drink!’ We had to stop all the way there. These guys were a little annoyed. And we got there and boy, was Lilly happy. Man, the booze was flowing—and Thomas Dewey was there!” No one’s seen La Mont since.

  4 Love and Kisses, Eve Meyer

  *1 Meyer liked to tell an awful anecdote concerning their honeymoon night at the Highlands Inn on the Monterey Peninsula. Eve was on her period, and by the time they had finished screwing from one end of the suite to the other it looked like “a goddamn butcher shop.”

  *2 Eve tells a different tale in a 1958 Modern Man article, maintaining that Meyer was after her to model from the very first phone call.

  *3 Eve Meyer accompanied him for this assignment, and Russ would tell more than one person that Gardner had eyes for his wife. One dares not even imagine that red-hot entanglement.

  5 The Immoral Mr. Meyer

  *1 Years later, Meyer called Ed out of the blue for another score. “By the way,” said RM, “you are getting a raise—$300.” Lakso, painfully aware Teas had gone on to make a fortune, wasn’t amused. “I said, ‘Stick it up your ass,’ and walked out. Meyer was tight as a bastard.”

  *2 At times Meyer said the the chewing of the ear was censored in Los Angeles and that Seattle passed the film without a cut. I could find nothing concrete on the subject. The history of the film’s release is problematic to say the least, as Meyer suggests that the San Diego engagement was the very first public showing of Teas, with Seattle second. But newspaper articles attest to Teas opening in Los Angeles in January 1960, followed by Seattle in midsummer of that year. Outside of San Diego, the picture was subject to very little in the way of obscenity charges. Meyer ultimately prevailed in a legal action taken against the picture in Philadelphia. Teas had to lose sixteen minutes before passing the tough New York censor board, yet played uncut in nearby Atlantic City.

  *3 Meyer claimed that Bill’s paranoia was unwarranted, and if he’d hung in there he probably would’ve made ten grand or so. As it was, the exit of Bill Teas from the partnership meant a bigger tax cut for those left. “Teas made a lot of money, but the taxes that we had to pay were obscene,” said Meyer, who maintained that his and DeCenzie’s cut of the million-dollar gross amounted to “maybe $30,000 or $40,000 apiece.”

  *4 The big exception to the rule here, I guess, is Meyer’s depraved 1976 picture, Up! But even then it’s all played for laughs.

  6 The Handyman

  *1 Actually, Floodbank existed; he was an old baggy-pantsed comic at the El Rey Burlesk.

  *2 David Friedman’s late wife Carol knew and liked both RMs. According to her husband, she felt neither sexploitation director “had much use for” the female race.

  7 Top Lust, Top Hate, Top Heavy

  *1 For the record, the actors/cattle comparison is usually associated with Alfred Hitchcock.

  *2 You might ask exactly what James has to be sorry for, since he’s used and abused during the entire movie. His sin is sexual inadequacy. Meyer’s mind works like this: if James had only been able to satisfy his wife, none of this would’ve happened, so it’s all his fault. This philosophy would be taken to its absurd zenith in Meyer’s 1968 film, Good Morning and Goodbye!

  *3 Mudhoney, Meyer’s next picture, was seized in Long, Texas. RM was informed he could have the print back if he admitted the picture was obscene. Allegedly, it remains there to this day.

  *4 According to John Furlong, one of Mickey Foxx’s favorite RM tales came courtesy of some female who’d bedded Meyer. “Oh, Russ, I love you, I love you!” she exclaimed during the mutual exchange of wondrous body fluids. RM responded, “Look, just empty the balls and never mind all the dialogue!”

  *5 As of 2004, Haji is engaged to impressionist/comic/actor and (as far as I know) earthling Frank “The Riddler” Gorshin.

  8 Klieg Eyes on a Dry Lake Bed

  *1 Moran’s benders no doubt interfered with RM’s deadlines. “He started getting on the sauce pretty good,” said Meyer, who’d drag him over to his place, throw him in a room with a typewriter, and bolt the door. “I said ‘I’m locking you inside. I’ll be here in case there’s a fire. When you’re finished for the night, you get your jug.’ He worked like a steam engine.” According to John Furlong, Jack didn’t always respond cheerfully to his internment in the Meyer labor camp. “Moran was always sayin’, ‘I’m gonna punch him right in the fuckin’ face. In the shithouse, because he won’t be able to get up.’ ” Jack got sober in the last years of his life and counseled others suffering addiction problems. To my knowledge Moran was never interviewed about his work with Meyer, which is too bad.

  *2 Williams confessed that like most everybody else, she was “a little afraid” of Tura. “One time she had words with Russ, who’s pretty imposing himself, and I thought, ‘Whoa! Back off from this one.’ I kind of treaded softly around her.” Williams found Haji to be “completely in her own world
.” Here’s one for trivia buffs: Williams said that Carol Wayne—the busty “dumb blonde” who frequently appeared on Johnny Carson’s late-night talk show—also auditioned for the role of Billie.

  *3 Susan disputes this, insisting that since she was a minor her mother had to be present. Other crew members memories are vague, but they recall Brandy fading away after the salt flats racing scene. “Russ really liked her,” maintained Susan, who said that during a Pussycat reunion at the Egyptian Theater in the nineties, Russ went on about how great and supportive Brandy was. “I remember him acknowledging that in front of all these people,” said Susan. “Russ was very much a gentleman.” According to Susan, her mother was cognizant of Faster, Pussycat’s power right from the get-go. “I remember my mom saying this is going to be an important film one day.”

  *4When Tomko realized how rough a picture Pussycat was, he pled with Meyer to take his name off the film. It remains on the credits.

  *5 Waters was happy to elaborate when it came to Russ Meyer’s impact on his filmmaking style. “Looking back on it, that kind of monotone that Tura talks in really was an influence. My characters speak in the same great loud, shouting tone. Certainly Female Trouble has some Russ Meyer in it—how Divine looked as Dawn Davenport, that kind of evil Las Vegas homicidal showgirl with those arched eyebrows. And yet, my star was a man with big tits.

  “I’m surprised somebody hasn’t remade Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It’ll be terrible, but I bet someone very definitely will remake that movie in the next ten years.”

  9 Shit Floats

  *1 The utter failure of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! had drained Eve Productions dry. “By the time we got around to Mondo Topless, we were in dreadful shape,” said Meyer. “We barely had enough money to produce a film that cost $12,000.” As Eve had been against Faster, Pussycat from the get-go, one can only imagine the screaming matches that took place in its aftermath.

  *2 The narration was done by the great John Furlong, who said that Meyer just threw a legal pad at him covered with long, scribbled monologues, then pushed him in a closet, covering him with a blanket to deaden the sound. Aided by a flashlight so he could see the words, Furlong bellowed into a mike and hoped it would all soon be over.

  *3 It’s crew member Jack Lucas in drag doing the actual jump. Meyer wanted Lucas to shave off his very unwomanly goatee for the shot, but he refused, so it was photographed in a long shot. As Lucas recalled, “I put the godamn fright wig on and this Babette bra and away we went.”

  *4 Swofford’s wife visited the set, and of course Meyer immediately put her to work moving gear with the crew. As Ken recalled, “We go out in the boat and Russ turns to me and he goes, ‘Jesus Christ, you made a good choice. My wife can’t lift anything!’ That was how he rated her. A good lifter.”

  *5 A little observation on Meyer’s women courtesy of John Waters: “They act like female female impersonators. I have never met a woman that just walks around acting like that. My favorite scene in Good Morning . . . and Goodbye is where Alaina Capri’s so horny she just drives to a construction site all dressed up in a Cadillac and leans on the horn till somebody comes over . . . that’s so great. If it was played by men, that could be a gay porno movie scene. A man going to a construction site and having sex with construction workers is in plenty of gay porn. But this is a woman doing it.”

  *6 A schoolteacher after leaving show business, Capri hid her infamy as a Russ Meyer superstar. Despite receiving a ton of fan mail, RM honored her wishes and never gave out any information on where to find her. “I was embarrassed by those pictures because I thought, ‘Oh my God, if my family or anybody sees me in these pictures, they’re gonna think I’m a bad person,’ ” she said. Throughout the years Capri lived in absolute fear she’d be outed one way or another to her friends and family. When tracked down by the author for an interview, she finally gathered the strength to tell her now-grown children. “They said, ‘Mom, we saw them. You hid them in your closet.’ I said, ‘You mean you know about this?’ ‘Yeah, we’ve known ever since we were twelve years old.’ ” Capri was both floored and relieved.

  *7 Discerning viewers will note that Paul Lockwood’s chest looks hairless to begin with and certainly doesn’t match the hairy-chested close-ups RM cuts in. “You know whose chest got shaved?” said Costello, laughing. “Jim Ryan’s. Meyer volunteered him. The other actor had no hair on his body!”

  10 The Look of Love

  *1 Author Burton H. Wolfe (who also penned the introduction to Anton LaVey’s notorious Satanic Bible) was called in to make the rather bland men’s magazine more “now,” the initial attempt being the Russ Meyer profile. The first in-depth portrait of Meyer, it provoked the usual angry response from the man himself, who wrote in to suggest that Wolfe just might be a dirty commie. “I have a hunch the guy who wrote is a little on the pinko side,” he told Roger Ebert at the time. The article also resulted in a deluge of negative letters from readers, and, according to Wolfe, the magazine folded shortly thereafter.

  *2 Meyer actually convinced himself there were no big-busted women in porn. He got into a heated argument over the matter during a 1990 interview with Fling magazine’s Arv Miller. “They’re all built like a hoe handle,” snarled Meyer. “I just don’t even want to think about it.”

  *3 In 1997, Meyer would express his admiration for Harrison Page, stating that in the middle of the scene where he tries to attack Gavin he paused to ask RM if he really wanted to go through with it, as it might alienate the “white folks.” Meyer also said he was hurt that the “well read” Page (who made “a good income”) rebuffed his attempts to maintain a friendship, as Meyer “needed a good dose of the Negro to be able to understand their problems.” When I related this info to Page, he seemed nonplussed.

  *4 RM would forever sing Elmer Gertz’s praises after he waived a large chunk of his fee upon losing the case. Perhaps the funniest moment of the legal battle came during a screening of the film for the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Upon witnessing the ridiculous capitalism/communism argument that occurs in the hijacked plane at the end of Vixen, Justice Thurgood Marshall drolly muttered, “Ah, the redeeming social value.”

  *5 Sheriff of Cincinnati since 1987, Simon Leis has remained unrelenting in his prosecution of obscenity cases. In 1990, 121 sheriff’s deputies in SWAT uniforms halted a museum exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Leis lost the case. In 1995, his Computer Crimes Task Force raided the home of a local cyber bulletin board operator, seizing twenty-three computers and the e-mail of six thousand people. The result was a class action suit filed against Leis that may cost the city a fortune. Still, Leis does have his fans, even in the smut industry. “I think he’s probably done more for the adult industry than any single person in America because of the national attention he gave Larry Flynt,” said Larry’s brother Jimmy. “Simon has been more responsible for the success of Larry Flynt and Hustler than any other person.” Speaking through a representative, Leis maintained that he had “no clear recollection” of the Vixen case.

  11 The Watusi Gun-Bearer

  *1 “Meyer loved crashin’ all those cars, blowin’ ’em apart,” said Charles Napier. “He hated anything mechanical, except for the camera. Once I was with him in Hollywood in a brand-new Porsche, and he couldn’t figure out how to shift gears. He literally ripped the gear shift out of the thing, broke it.” Napier said Meyer went berserk. “We got out and he kicked this car—and kept kicking.” A crowd gathered to watch RM bash the car with his shoe.

  *2 In the confusion, they hadn’t gotten the proper reverse angle shots of Napier looking down at Ashton. Back home in West Hollywood, Meyer took Napier up on the roof of his house, shooting close-ups of Charles so all that was visible was the actor and sky. Down below in the house Brummer ran the scene back and forth on the Moviola and shouted out descriptions so Meyer could match the footage shot in the desert. The scene plays seamlessly in the movie.

  *3 In countless intervie
ws as well as in his own book, Meyer told a much different tale of how he landed at Fox. He claimed Richard’s father—legendary mogul Darryl F. Zanuck—was the person initially responsible for bringing him in. Allegedly Zanuck senior wanted to see Vixen and was told by RM’s distributor that no prints were available for a private screening. So Zanuck and playwright Abe Burrows ventured to 42nd Street to see the film. “If this putz can do that for $70,000, imagine what he could do with a million dollars!” was the infamous quote Meyer attributed to Zanuck senior. Both David Brown and Richard Zanuck told me there was no truth to the story and that at that time Zanuck senior was no longer actively involved in moviemaking at the studio. Roger Ebert had no memory of his involvement, either. Nor did his New York distributor Marvin Friedlander, the one Zanuck supposedly contacted for a print. Another Meyer mystery.

  12 Strapping On Fox

  *1 With Susann on the offensive, Fox was anxious to distance any claim that Beyond was the offspring of Valley. Ads for Dolls read, “It’s not a sequel . . . you’ve never seen anything like it before!” In his autobiography Meyer revealed that an alternate ad campaign was prepared that had the movie titled Russ Meyer’s Dolls.

  A disaster for Fox, Susann’s suit wasn’t settled until after her death in August 1975. “The trial began in Pasadena with twelve old ladies who drive very old cars, and for whom Russ Meyer was anathema,” said David Brown, who believed that the simple act of showing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to the jurors sank their defense. “They exhibited the picture and that was enough. We lost everything.” Susann’s widower Irving Mansfield collected $1,425,000 in a settlement from Fox.

  *2 “If he was a woman,” notes Ebert. “I don’t know what Z-Man was . . . maybe he was a transsexual. I never answered that question in my own mind.” In the October 27, 1969, draft of the script, Z-Man/Superwoman is described as a transvestite.