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

  Jimmy McDonough

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Bigger than Life

  1 Mother Meyer and the Poor Dear

  2 Sgt. Meyer

  3 Tittyboom or Bust

  4 Love and Kisses, Eve Meyer

  5 The Immoral Mr. Meyer

  6 The Handyman

  7 Top Lust, Top Hate, Top Heavy

  8 Klieg Eyes on a Dry Lake Bed

  9 Shit Floats

  10 The Look of Love

  11 The Watusi Gun-Bearer

  12 Strapping On Fox

  13 Run Like a Gazelle, Dear

  14 The Ultra-Vixen

  15 Mondo Meyer

  16 Janice and the Handyman

  Epilogue: Smell of Female

  Endnotes

  Photo Insert

  Source Notes

  Filmography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Tempest

  Eve

  Lorna

  Haji

  Babette

  Alaina

  Erica

  Uschi

  Edy

  Shari

  Raven

  Kitten

  But especially for Tura

  Maybe from the start [Russ Meyer] has just been cashing in on the new freedom which provides new ways of exploiting the mindless audience. I would like to believe that this is not so, that he knew all along not merely how funny but how sad Mr. Teas really was.

  —LESLIE FIEDLER,

  reviewing the 1959 sex film that started it all:

  Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas

  You have to understand, my job is to get people through the night.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Introduction: Bigger than Life

  The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

  —MARCEL PROUST, Swann’s Way

  It was one of those colorless, nothing-happening days in downtown Stockton. Russell Albion Meyer, the dutiful son, stood at his mother’s grave, ready to detonate. He’d paid that damn florist good money to deliver a Christmas tree to Lydia’s grave every year, but this time they’d blown it. No tree. The next morning he’d make a beeline straight for their office. Of course they’d be closed for Christmas day, so Meyer would scribble an angry note and shove it through the mail slot in the door.

  But on this 1991 Christmas Eve, all he could do was stand there apologizing. “Hi, Mom, sorry about the Christmas tree. I’ll get on those people. Merry Christmas, Mom. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Screenwriter John McCormick, RM’s companion on the drive up from Hollywood—Meyer rarely did anything alone—hung in the background, transfixed. “I’d never witnessed anyone speak to a grave before except in John Ford films,” he later reported. But then, Meyer didn’t do anything by the book. He was no ordinary “high-class pornographer,” as he liked to refer to himself. This was Russ Meyer.

  “The song is ended, but the beautiful melody lingers on—Mother, we love you—Russell and Lucinda,” read the white marble tombstone before him. Lucinda—or The Poor Dear, as RM called her—was his half-sister, and she would never see the tribute bearing her name. Lucinda had been institutionalized since her late teens, her brother picking up the tab for her existence. She’d routinely go into paranoid fugues, calling RM’s office endlessly and in a tremulous voice, whispering of dark plots and dirty deeds. Get me out of here, Russ. Save me. But there was no saving The Poor Dear. Perhaps not surprisingly, Russ Meyer grew up minus a strong male role model. His father had split before he was born; his stepfather was a sickly, passive man whom his mother regarded with open contempt. Lydia Meyer was a tough cookie, but she believed in Russ, even hocking her wedding ring to buy her son his first camera. She was crazy about him, and more than a little crazy in general. Lydia and Lucinda—the templates for how Meyer would view the female race.

  The picture is midnight black, save for the visible blips of an optical soundtrack that begin replicating across the screen in a rather ominous, twilight-zone way. An imperious, testosterone-heavy voice intones: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of violence . . . while violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex . . . let’s examine closely then, this dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained within the supple skin of woman—the softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female . . . but a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs . . . who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist . . . or a dancer in a go-go bar!”

  Cut to an eye-popping triad of outrageous, impossibly built women shimmying with frenzied abandon. A swaggering, bargain-basement Tom Jones chest-beater belts out a number on the soundtrack—“She will tease and taunt you and she’ll take just what she wants / You belong to pussycat . . .” Cut! Close-ups of gyrating, disembodied breasts and hips. Cut! A shiny, alluring jukebox. Cut! Leering, predatory faces of cigar-chomping manimals impotently cheering the women on: “Go, baby, go!!! Wail!” Cut! Cut! Cut! Each new shot seems to add another crazy angle, another fabulous detail. The montage makes your head spin.

  Cut to raven-haired, black-gloved Varla—one of the dancers—head thrown back and cackling maniacally as she hammers the gas pedal of a gleaming Porsche. Vrrrrooom! Varla’s an evil bitch. Half Cherokee, half Japanese, and all woman, this heavy-lidded, sneering, ultra-beautiful creature looks more alien than human. The Porsche screams down a Mojave Desert highway, the head of a menacing trio of bisexual go-go superwomen itching to annihilate any man who gets in their way. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! screams the title. And this is just the first two minutes of the picture. Yikes!

  The delirium this little snatch of drive-in opera induces in this author is hard to describe. It’s a visceral, emotional thing, analogous perhaps to experiencing Busby Berkeley at his most berserk or the opening charge of some Roxy Music opus like “The Thrill of It All.” Pussycat knocks you off your feet, the undertow ripping you right out to sea. But beneath all the sneering and leering, there lurks—dare I say it, Russ?—an oddly passionate vision of the world.

  Russ Meyer at his best: as instantly recognizable, as exhilaratingly American as a ride on a rickety state-fair roller-coaster, Chuck Berry’s duck walk, or those addictive little onion slivers on a McDonald’s burger. Meyer’s got a two-fisted, twin-missile attack, approaching filmmaking the way Buick once did cars: fatter curves, crazier fins, bigger headlights, more, more, more. Emerging from the shadows of both Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner, Russ Meyer, particularly in his sixties/seventies heyday, exerted a huge influence on the common man’s sexual psyche. Meyer, a pioneer who represents what’s most seductive and most repulsive about the USA. Think Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley. Meyer: a man who made an empire out of female flesh.

  From 1959 to 1979 Russ Meyer made twenty-three theatrical features, all but two of them independently made and largely self-financed. Nearly all were profitable, and a few made him millions. At one point RM had four films in Variety’s 100 all-time top grossers—not bad for movies in which, as Meyer liked to point out, the only name that mattered was his own. His first smash-eroo was 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, an unapologetic ode to voyeurism that gave birth to an adult film industry that Meyer ultimately scorned. Then came his black-and-white backwoods melodramas, depraved-go-go-dancer documentaries, oversexed-housewife exposés, and apocalyptic girl-group soap o
peras. These are strange movies that radiate, as one critic put it, “a directness, an energy, a certain guileless honesty that was not always seen in Hollywood films.”

  The late, great photographer Helmut Newton, who, like RM, championed big, bad women in his work, once said, “I love vulgarity. I am very attracted to bad taste.” Well, HN, there’s a truckload of it to be found in Meyer’s work. Expect nothing subtle here: half a dozen or so of RM’s titles end in exclamation points.*1 Meyer presents a garish vision of an oversexed America and demands you wallow in it. “I don’t pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist. Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building, and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blond, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician. Films should run like express trains!” For those in the audience, this unrestrained bombast is intoxicating, inspiring. It can also sicken, one french fry too many. It is certainly unrelenting. There is something to thrill, amuse, and offend one and all in RM’s oeuvre. Wrote Alan Brien, “Meyer is both for and against almost everything—liberated women and macho men, faith healing by radio and gay dentists, petroleum jelly and black socks, race prejudice and free enterprise. Tastelessness on this scale eventually amounts to a kind of style.”

  Meyer’s films are so dynamic, so rife with explosive imagery and conflicting impulses, interpretation often depends on who owns the eyeballs viewing them. Perverts thrive on the abundant flesh. Film fanatics savor the craft, and RM has even earned his own brand of deconstructionist critic. “In Meyer’s film world of ‘big bosoms and square jaws,’ it is clear that women possess the ‘big bosoms,’ ” writes Doyle Green in his 2004 book, Lips, Hips, Tits, Power. “It is less clear whether men or women possess the ‘square jaws.’ ” (Green also compares RM to both Douglas Sirk and the Marquis de Sade.) A swarm of less intellectual rockers dig the hallucinogenic quality of Meyer’s color-saturated comic-book visuals. “The first time I saw a film of his, I thought, man, this guy is in sync with psychedelia, the psychedelic state,” said Redd Kross’s Jeff McDonald.

  You will find many a reference to scratchy old 45s of a particular era and attitude in this book. Believe me, I can sling cinematic references with the best of the film snobs, but with Meyer I hear music. RM’s movies possess a monster beat, and by that I mean his intricate montage-style editing builds a groove that could have a Memphis rhythm section nodding in approval. In 1983, nearly twenty years after Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was released, the Cramps unleashed a scorching version of the theme song on a live EP whose title was copped from the same film’s opening monologue: Smell of Female. “That movie is so great,” said the band’s singer (and, in tandem with guitarslinger Ivy Rorshach, songwriter), Lux Interior. “It kinda stands for anything the Cramps stand for.”

  A highly influential band that mixes sex and violence into the sort of garish cocktail a Russ Meyer could appreciate, the Cramps, also like RM, are defiantly original, funny as hell, and often misunderstood by killjoy critics who dismiss their straight-from-the-heart sincerity as “kitsch” or “camp” (two words you won’t find the author using in this book). Interior’s own cheesecake photography for the seedy Smell of Female album is worthy of RM himself, and sullen, sexy cover girl Rorschach could just as well have escaped from the same girl gang as Meyer bombshell Tura Satana.

  This was the first of a legion of bands to pay homage to Russ Meyer, and the fact that the films of an anti-drug, Dixieland-jazz-loving superpatriot could speak so directly to a bunch of misfit reprobates young enough to be RM’s offspring underlines the obvious (if old school) notion: Meyer shares a certain energy with untamed youth. His movies burst forth with the sort of crazed abandon one finds in the most primeval rockabilly recordings—for instance, the frenzy of Meyer’s Mondo Topless brings to mind the wild, pussy-mad shriek by Jimmy Wages known as “Miss Pearl.” I see the malevolent Luther in RM’s Lorna and I hear Lonnie Allen belt out that divine down-home fuck-you “You’ll Never Change Me.” And so on. Meyer’s films crackle with the same swagger, the same urgency, the same I-don’t-care. “I’m laughing at the world,” said RM.

  Love him or hate him, Russ Meyer has left his tainted fingerprints all over American culture. See the sticky evidence on MTV, Howard Stern, big-budget Hollywood, the snobbiest fashion catwalks, and in the work of such comic art illustrators as Daniel Clowes and Chris “Coop” Cooper. He’s influenced a legion of filmmakers from John Waters to Quentin Tarantino. Remember the poster for 1999’s Oscar winner American Beauty—a close-up of a young girl’s naked midsection, her hand holding a rose across her belly, with the tease line “Look closer”? Well, Meyer concocted high-concept shocker ad campaigns long before they were a Tinseltown (or Fox News) staple; he just did ’em with a big-boobed broad, a bombastic title, and a “Wow!” phrase: “MUDHONEY . . . leaves a taste of evil!”

  Go into any rental store’s cult section and you’ll find shopworn copies of numerous Meyer films. He has rabid followings in France, Germany, and Italy. Russ Meyer cannot be denied a place in cinema history. “I believe the serious film historians of the future will discuss him with such radical structuralists as Mark Rappaport, Chantal Ackerman, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean-Luc Godard,” states an unlikely player in this story, film critic Roger Ebert. “That’s if they can see past the heaving bosoms.”

  Ah yes, the breasts. Meyer’s films are filled with them. Giant, unbelievable, sometimes scary appendages. “I won’t become involved with a woman personally or photographically unless she has huge breasts,” instructed RM. Female superstructures that simply defied reality were his trademark, and Meyer was downright rabid when it came to tracking them down: “Like an explorer, Marco Polo or Magellan, I’m constantly looking for bigger bosoms.” As with many a fetish, it was comical, irrational, and, in the end, grotesque. To dismiss Meyer’s films as mere vehicles for a tit obsession, though, is to miss a universe that’s as particular and self-contained as any created by David Cronenberg, Sam Peckinpah, or Martin Scorsese.

  How to describe the Russ Meyer dynamic? “The pneumatic woman, the stupid man,” said RM, whose no-frills recipe for success was “big bosoms and square jaws.” Despite the bold and expansive imagery, the reality is that the Meyer universe is so rigid and limited in its construction it could fit inside a thimble. His is a world of weak-willed masochistic twits and monosyllabic alpha-male brutes, all lusting after the overabundant, oversexed bringers of pleasure, chaos, and destruction that Meyer calls women. The dames in Meyer’s films are “as distinctive as Hitchcock’s icy blondes,” writes Kristen Hatch, who goes on to describe them as “viciously bitchy, flouting nearly every rule invented by man . . . no Meyer heroine is faithful to her husband.” Who wins in this battle of the sexes? Nobody, really, but “the women are always more powerful than the men,” as Hugh Hefner observed. “In retrospect it seems to be empowering rather than exploitive. How much of that was conscious and how much was unconscious? I think it was relatively uncalculated. Quite frankly, most of what Russ did came from the gut.”

  Was RM a Grandma Moses in crotchless panties or something far less primitive—and far more calculated? One runs into an interesting conflict of opinion when it comes to how much of the humor in Meyer’s films is intentional. “It’s not a satire,” maintains RM superstar Erica Gavin. “It’s how Russ sees the world.” David K. Frasier agrees. “I’m not sold on the idea that Russ started out making these films to be ironic. He was dead serious.” Roger Ebert insists that Meyer knew exactly what he was doing, and RM’s longtime editor Richard Brummer agrees. “Even in the earlier films the humor is intended. Russ was very sophisticated. If you think you’re laughing at him, you’re not. He’s laughing at you.”

  Meyer himself didn’t analyze, he just spewed forth. “I have my fantasies. I put them on film,” said he. RM sought instant gratification, and it gave his pictures a screaming-from-the-id immediacy. “I get an idea and I say: next Tuesday at 2:45 I will make a movie.” Likeably unpretentious, RM didn’t try to justify his work with dopey theo
ries or by insisting on their socially redeeming significance—unless it was legally prudent to do so due to the many obscenity prosecutions his pictures faced. When it came to sexual freedom on the silver screen, Meyer fought and won many a battle against the censors, the church, and the squares, but he balked at being declared anyone’s hero. “I’m in it for lust and profit,” maintained the man the Wall Street Journal dubbed King Leer.

  When RM was asked what sort of picture he would make with $20 million, he responded, “I’d probably make twenty Russ Meyer films.” Longtime secretary Paula Parker chuckled over the memory of filling out and mailing a $1 soap rebate at RM’s insistence. The same stingy attitude permeated his productions. “I would hit upon an idea and then impose strict limitations on myself even before considering a budget.” Meyer’s early financial success—along with his miserly ways—afforded him a freedom most directors never even imagine. He did it his way, which usually meant transporting a gaggle of actors, strippers, and a five-man crew off into the middle of a white-hot desert to somehow crank out a movie.

  Although RM would undoubtedly frown on such an arty, highfalutin term, he was the very definition of auteur: writing, shooting, editing, and distributing his films as well as directing them. “It wasn’t so much that he operated his own camera as that he also carried it,” wrote Roger Ebert, who’d contribute scripts for a number of Meyer films, including the now-infamous X-rated outrage for 20th Century Fox, 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Incredibly, not only would RM thrive after being denied entry to the Hollywood establishment, he’d be the one outlaw invited in and handed keys to the kingdom, however briefly. Not that Meyer detected any big difference between Tinseltown and grindhouse row. “Every film is exploitation. We’re all in the same game.”