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

  Lucinda started having serious problems with mental illness in her teens, and some say it was schizophrenia. She would be shuttled from institution to institution the rest of her life, the bills paid by her brother, who’d made a promise to Lydia to take care of Lucinda.

  “I had seen her a couple of years before she was committed,” said Meyer producer Tom McGowan. “Absolutely lovely girl—she could’ve been a young starlet. Meyer escaped by filmmaking; she was a prisoner of the house. She hooked up with some cabdriver that was a lot older than she was and tried to escape. The mother went after her and took her right back into the torture chamber.”

  It is hard to glean any concrete details about Lucinda’s condition. She’s the ghost in Meyer’s life. RM’s first wife Betty became anxious discussing Russ’s half-sister. “Lucinda, she was a beautiful girl. Poor thing, I felt sorry for her. I think she went man-crazy. Got with the wrong people, I guess. I often thought maybe if I had taken her under my wing she might’ve ended up better. It’s a terrible thing. I knew she was gonna have a bad ending. I could just tell. And it was her mother and Russ’s fault. I don’t think he even paid attention. He was busy, he was busy.” When I said Russ had paid for her keep after she was institutionalized, Betty said forcefully, “He should’ve.”

  Those who knew the family blamed Lydia for Lucinda’s illness—even, at least on one occasion, RM himself. Said associate George Costello, “It came up one time—‘Where’s your sister?’ And he said, ‘My mother drove her into a nuthouse.’ Lydia rejected all of Lucinda’s boyfriends, wouldn’t let her go out with guys, and was constantly on her to the point where the poor girl was destroyed. The mother should’ve been in the nuthouse, not the daughter.”

  “I don’t really think Russ got a good feeling for women from his mother,” said Meyer star Erica Gavin. “I think he felt that they were all whores and that his mother was a whore. Was she not sleeping with other men in front of him and bringing home different men all the time? Didn’t she have a lot of sailors around? I don’t know why, but I get the feeling that she was extremely promiscuous in front of him.” More than one of Meyer’s intimates hinted at sexual abuse in the family—even farfetched tales concerning boarders taken in by Lydia and given sexual access to Lucinda in exchange for money. Thus far the stories have amounted to nothing more than wild hearsay, but they don’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility. Jim Ryan vaguely recalled Lucinda having been molested by a stepfather.

  Others got the impression from Meyer that Lucinda had been the victim of a gang rape while institutionalized. Family friend Dolores Fox said that RM had told her that as adults, Lucinda had asked her brother if he’d have sex with her. “She’d never had sex. He told her, ‘No, I’m your brother, I can’t do that.’ ” Curiously, Meyer declared a brother-sister shower sex scene in his 1968 picture Vixen as his all-time hottest. “We quit doin’ that when you turned twelve,” brother Judd protests in vain to sister (and instigator) Vixen.

  Meyer tried to be kind to Lucinda, occasionally freeing her from her institution home for hamburgers and ice cream, but invariably there would be some awful scene. “I was always wary of any kind of situation with her along,” said RM right-hand man Jim Ryan. “A couple of times she’d lock herself in the toilet in the restaurant and wouldn’t come out.” They put Lucinda into a residential facility where she could venture into the outside world, but “she got out and was wandering in the street without her clothes on,” said Ryan. “The other time she kicked open a door and the glass cut her leg. They finally sent her to full-time confinement in Camarillo. Lucinda was combative towards the other patients. She’d hit somebody first to make them hit her.”

  “Lucinda got kinda large—and she got mean,” said Meyer combat buddy Charlie Sumners. “She talked like a ten-year-old and she wanted Russ to stay there with her. Of course, that was impossible. Later they had to almost put her in a straitjacket.” Tom McGowan recalled a foggy drive up to northern California to visit Lucinda. “I’d never been in a madhouse. It was a horrifying experience. It wasn’t like a first-class operation—it was state-run, smelled of urine. All these nuts were walking around. They were in these dressing gowns, shells of people. It was like a Boris Karloff insane asylum. She was very docile.” McGowan claimed that Lucinda had been subjected to “more electroshock treatments than anybody in the history of California at that time. She was zombied.”

  Not surprisingly, Lucinda slowly disintegrated over the decades. Kitten Natividad accompanied Meyer on visits to see his sister in the seventies and eighties. “She had had some strokes, so she was in a wheelchair. She couldn’t enjoy eating certain foods because she was on medication and she was a diabetic. And sometimes she’d get her schizophrenia really bad, and she’d cuss everybody like you wouldn’t believe! And she had been beat up and raped in there. That was no life. It was very, very horrible. Russ used to cry over it.” Said Charles Napier, “I’ve seen him suffer over her. One time on location I had a tent set up and I went in and he was sitting there sobbing. I asked him what was wrong and he mumbled something about his sister. Never got into it, but heaving sobs and whatnot. Never said much about her.”

  Several close friends and ex-girlfriends independently raised the notion that Meyer himself suffered from some sort of mental illness. “I just felt he was a little crazy, he was just too bizarre,” said longtime secretary Paula Parker. “His thinking wasn’t normal at times. I had a very hard time communicating with him, quite frankly.” Longtime associate George “King” Carll agreed. “You saw flashes of—I wouldn’t say insanity, but some mental things. The fact of his sister, it was easy to relate the two.”

  No wonder Russ was afraid.

  Once RM was an adult, he took care of his mother’s needs but kept her at a comfortable distance. The older Lydia got, the weirder and more difficult she became. Lou Filipovitch remembered taking his family to visit her around the early sixties, when Lydia was living in Vallejo, California. His wife, Darlene, recalled that Lydia served them all dinner in the dark, “which was a strange experience. One of my little girls went over and turned the lights on. Next day I received a phone call about how terrible we all were. I think I hung up on her.”

  Meyer associate George Costello visited Lucinda in the mid-sixties and found her living in “one of these houses where there’s pictures of Jesus Christ all over. The mother would treat Russ like he was still fourteen. An old-lady version of Meyer—plump, wearing a 1940s dress.” The only positive review anyone can recall Lydia giving to one of her son’s raunchy movies came when she saw 1965’s Motorpsycho, in which Russ has a cameo as a moronic, corrupt, pro-rape cop. “His mother went to see the movie and said, ‘Oh, Russ, you were such a wonderful policeman,’ ” said actor John Furlong. “ ‘Your father would’ve been proud of you.’ ”

  It’s no shock that Lydia tangled with nearly all of her son’s women. “Russ said his mom would always refer to women that she didn’t like as an old rip—‘Eh, that old rip,’ ” said biographer and friend David K. Frasier. “Meyer always laughed about that.” According to Jim Ryan, Lydia was partial to males but “didn’t like women too much. I think she saw them as rivals for Russell. She called his women with big breasts ‘cows.’ She’d say, ‘I don’t want you bringin’ home any of those cows around my home.’ ” If Meyer let a few too many days pass before calling Lydia, she’d call the sheriff’s office. Said Ryan, “They’d come over and say, ‘Why don’t you call your mother?’ ”

  And what effect did Lydia have on her son? “I don’t think Russ liked women,” said George Costello. “They were all no damn good. I think they were all representative of his mother, who failed him or did something to him. Or drove off his father.”

  “I noticed when Russ talked about his mother he idealized her, but he was very controlled by her,” said Meyer actress Raven De La Croix. “But he controlled the last straw. He took care of her minimally—saw her minimally—all at arm’s length. I think Russ could never win wo
men’s approval, really. He was gonna make all the women pay for how he felt through his films. He made a point of making them the strong characters, but they always had to go through hell and high water.”

  Pete Filipovitch felt it was one case where the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. “Lydia was predominantly controlling; Russ did the same thing.” As far as the women in his life, “he’d control them the same way she controlled him. He was definitely his mother’s son.” While RM put his mother on a pedestal, he would treat the other women in his life—women who were often playing characters in his films who shared more than a thing or two in common with Mother Meyer—as little more than nude doormats. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that RM was on some level coping with a relationship he could never confront in life by making movies. That’s one reason his antiheroines are so compelling—they charge at you like fully formed nightmares from a raging subconscious, the sirens on the rocks whose come-hither whisperings serve only to get your ship crashed.

  Unfortunately, it must also be noted Lydia liked to give her son enemas, and this made a lifelong impression on Russell Albion Meyer.

  “Shit is very important to Russ’s life,” said girlfriend Kitten Natividad. “Mr. Poo-Poo! He was obsessed with this enema thing. He’d tell me, ‘My mom was a nurse, and whenever I was sick, she’d just put me on her lap, put that in me, and just hose me out.’ ” In later years everybody was subjected to Meyer’s infantile interests. “He would talk about it a lot—‘a good shit,’ ” said actress Erica Gavin. “I would think that Russ wouldn’t mind taking a shit in front of you. Basically I think he was sexually abused—he was taking it up the ass in an enema from his mother.”

  “I love farting,” admitted Meyer in an interview, and for his 1979 movie, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, he’d tape his own gassy emissions, then play them in reverse for use as sexual sound effects. “I get a lot out of a fart, don’t you? I’d get the feeling of a fart coming on, and I’d yell, ‘Bonus fart’ and I’d put the mike to my ass. . . . I’d hate to come across as too . . . fecal, you understand, but next to a good fuck give me a good fart any day.” Meyer slipped a laxative to at least one pal before he got on a plane, and for years after had a good belly laugh over his friend’s “brownout over Denver.”

  “Sexually I was a late bloomer,” said Russ Meyer. As an adolescent he was shy and not adept with the opposite sex. Pete Filipovitch recalled how he bumped into the Meyer family at a nearby lake and snuck off with a neighborhood girl who had come with Russ. “I got acquainted with her, and that kinda upset him,” said Filipovitch, who noticed Meyer had followed them and was spying from the woods. “I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I wonder how long Russ was out there watching us.’ ” Meyer, already a little voyeur.

  Even in his youth a large fantasy world hovered around Meyer, much of it involving Al Capp’s satirical comic strip, Li’l Abner. It is not hard to recognize a link between the overheated females and dumb hillbilly hunks of Dogpatch and the creatures inhabiting Meyer films. While RM was loath to admit influence, he didn’t mind referencing Li’l Abner, stating, “I make Al Capp cartoons come to life.” The pneumatic Daisy Mae was of specific interest to young Russell, and as an amateur cartoonist himself, he’d try to draw the blonde in the polka-dot halter top and cutoffs. “I’d always make her breasts twice as large, and when my mother came in I had to hide the stuff, because she thought I was doing things that might affect me later in life.” No kidding, Russ. Lydia had bought him a drafting set, and he used the compass to make huge round breasts on his cartoon women. Only fourteen, RM was already “obsessed with boobs,” said Lou Filipovitch. “He had some kinks and quirks.”

  Around this same time Meyer and a few of his teenage buddies managed to slip into the President Follies, a San Francisco burlesque house on McAllister Street. A stacked stripper named Margaret Sullivan was on the bill, and when RM laid eyes on her it lit a fire in his crotch. He was transfixed by her top-heavy build. “If she moved too fast she could throw herself right down to the deck—the centrifugal force was enormous,” said Meyer, who trekked over and over to the President Follies “just to worship at her shrine.” Margie Sullivan functioned as a mammary Rosebud for the rest of RM’s life: “From then on, she’s been the carbon copy that I’ve constantly been looking for.”

  My efforts to find a picture of Meyer’s first inspiration came to naught. The other ecdysiasts of RM’s time had never even heard of her, save one. Veteran burlesque stripper Dixie Evans chuckled when I asked about Margaret Sullivan. “ ‘Sully’ Sullivan—she was just a tacky old stripper with sandy blond hair. She’d come back in the dressing room and go, ‘Get a load of the sax man’s basket.’*2 That’s a typical kind of thing that Sully would say. She was strictly what we call house. Didn’t travel. Typical straight strip. She would strut right across that stage, she could really move and dance the old-fashioned way, the way those men liked. She got a big hand. She had very big boobs. Sully and her watermelons—they were like two huge cantaloupes.”

  And thus it was that a life’s work was set in motion for Russell Albion Meyer. Or was it a life’s curse? “Most people who develop fetishes have lower self-esteem, or they’ve developed a unique pattern of sexual arousal that doesn’t include people,” maintained psychologist and fetish expert Dr. Kevin McGovern. “If you’re into objects, you don’t need to have a personal connection with someone.”

  There was one escape hatch for Russell Albion Meyer from all the misery and misanthropy of his family, and it came in the form of a cheap 8-mm movie camera he received at age fourteen or so. “$9.95 Movie Camera Makes Memories Live Forever,” shouted the ad for the UniveX Cine 8. It was a tiny, no-frills unit with a crude viewfinder and f 5.6 Ilex lens made in 1936 by the New York–based Universal Camera Corporation, a company run by a banker and insurance man that was regarded with disdain by “real” photographic equipment companies such as Kodak. But the UniveX took the relatively new 8 mm format and made it affordable for the poor and unwashed. Thirty feet of orthochromatic black-and-white film cost only sixty cents a roll and a buck to process. As legend goes, Lydia pawned her wedding ring to snag the camera for Russ, who’d been entranced by an ad. “All the other kids had roller skates, Russ got a camera,” said Pete Filipovitch, who maintained it “gave him an excuse to get the hell away from her.”

  Up until this time Meyer’s chief interest had been model planes, and he daydreamed of being a pilot. But something clicked when he had the UniveX in his hot little hands, just as it had when he saw Margie Sullivan shaking her stuff at the Follies. In the years to come the industrious RM would combine both obsessions and invent a career, but for now Meyer just went nuts with the camera, shooting pets, sporting events, parades, and, if he is to be believed, a few neighborhood girls whose parents weren’t happy about it. “He did make a movie with Lucinda,” said army buddy Charlie Sumners. “Some fifty years later I saw that. It was in color, just her playing piano and doing girlie things around the house.”

  In 1969, Meyer would tell the New York Times how at age fifteen he earned $66 painting a bakery, enough to fund a trip to Catalina Island to shoot a little film and enter it in an Eastman Kodak contest. En route in Los Angeles, a stranger slipped him a mickey, swiping his hard-earned loot. Meyer said that for four days he lived only on crackers, made it to Catalina anyway, and won the competition. In his autobiography there is no mention of this tale, only that RM won fourth prize in a local Kodak contest. Maybe one of the stories is actually true.

  RM had grown into a strapping, handsome kid. He worked as an usher at the Fox Oakland Theater and as a mattress carrier for a department store chain (“It’s kind of a curious connection there, my films and the mattresses,” said Meyer). He then got a job as an assistant messenger at the U.S. Army Engineers office in San Francisco, where he’d work his way up to accountant. Whatever money didn’t go into helping Lydia pay the bills went into new 8 mm movie equipment. At nineteen Meyer registered for th
e draft, but fate would intervene at the last second, offering a real escape from family life—and entry into a new brotherhood that would last a lifetime.

  Meyer subscribed to Popular Photography, and there he saw a small ad placed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looking for men willing to volunteer as combat photographers. “Action . . . Camera!” shouted the headline. “My heart jumped,” said RM. “Here was a chance to train in Hollywood at something I had always been interested in. It certainly beat accounting.”

  He waited forever to hear back, and was heading to the mountains for some fishing when word came in that the Academy requested his presence in Los Angeles. He hopped a Greyhound to Los Angeles, getting off at Hollywood and Vine. After a couple of preliminary interviews—most notably with Eastman Kodak’s Emery Huse, a man who’d assist Meyer once the war ended—and an army physical in downtown L.A., RM was inducted into the Signal Corps Reserve. At his side was Paul Fox, another inductee who’d become of one Meyer’s closest friends.

  For the first time RM was on his own, away from Lydia, living in a little Hollywood rooming house on Las Palmas near Sunset Boulevard with Harry Downard, another Signal Corps volunteer who like many in the troop, already had experience in filmmaking and photography. “He was a young kid then, pure as a drift of snow,” said Downard of Meyer. “He was not forward at all, but quiet and demure.” Meyer wanted to shoot a short movie on the beach with his 8 mm UniveX, so Harry helped out.