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

by Jimmy McDonough

  But Meyer belongs neither to the exploitation world nor to mainstream Hollywood. His movies are much too exuberant and far too striking technically and visually to be lumped in with the usual lugubrious drive-in fare. “Meyer films don’t produce the oppressive grindhouse sense of shame in their audiences,” noted critic David Ansen, yet RM’s overtly sexual content, haphazard scripting (“I don’t let the story get in the way of the action,” he boasted), and gleefully juvenile attitude often preclude his work from being considered alongside that of the big boys. Meyer’s a lone wolf, an odd and solitary figure in film history. Said RM, “It’s my genre. If you like it, fine. If you don’t, it doesn’t really matter.”

  However raw the content, Meyer was a savvy filmmaker. RM was a tremendous cinematographer and editor, equally seasoned by previous careers as both combat and cheesecake photographer. Meyer’s early experience and expertise making industrial films not only imbued his own movies with a velour professional gloss sublimely at odds with the raunchy content matter, it inspired a cosmically absurd narration style all RM’s own. With a Meyer film, the script may be crap, the acting might have you howling at the moon, but in the middle of it all will be some preposterous, highly charged, not to mention boob-driven image of some chick watusiing away atop an oil rig, and it just takes your breath away.

  “I deal with women who are archetypes—in fact, they’re beyond women.” Indeed, the Russ Meyer women are an extraordinary bunch, and this is as much their story as RM’s. Even their names are otherworldly—Lorna, Tura, Uschi, Haji, Kitten, Eve—and their lives are as compelling as their measurements. Nearly all were strippers, and many had escaped abusive backgrounds, fending for themselves in a man’s, man’s, man’s world that regarded them as little more than a disposable outlet for sexual frustration. “Women like us have been thrown to the sharks since we were babies,” said Raven De La Croix.

  Meyer took these already outrageous dames and—instead of downplaying the attributes that by their very nature practically branded them the scarlet women of their day—amplified them to almost Wagnerian extremes. RM let ’em all hang out, and again, when the Meyer movie machine is firing on all eight cylinders, these gals utterly transcend the inherent limitations of his often tawdry and infantile sprocket-holed comic strips. “We’re all cartoons—every one of us,” insisted De La Croix. “ ‘Cartoon’ doesn’t mean ‘wrong,’ it just means bigger than life.”

  At times Meyer was not only coldly dismissive but even downright sadistic to his fleshy femmes fatales, yet his women invariably manage to make something positive and noble out of their characters despite the many unspeakable horrors inflicted upon them. I don’t think I’m alone when stating there are times when I find Meyer’s women heroic. The first thing you notice when you meet any of them is the fierce dignity with which they carry themselves. They’re hot stuff, these women, and they don’t pussyfoot around. Their alliance with RM had to be uneasy at best—this was a man who boasted his philosophy was that of the “Four F’s: find ’em, film ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em”—but his women remain loyal, even now expressing the sort of bittersweet affection for Meyer one has for a wayward and often exasperating crackpot member of the family. Despite his frequently tasteless antics, Meyer has made their stars shine, given them immortality.

  “He portrayed women as a work of art,” said Charles Napier. “It’s like classic photography on film—there’s no mussed hair, smeared lipstick, stuff like that. Almost posed scenes. He’d say things like, ‘Get your tits up, honey, they’re sagging.’ But that wasn’t meant to be offensive—Russ just wanted her to look good.” Said Haji, star of numerous RM epics, “Russ not only brings out the breast in women, he brings out the best in women.”

  There are those who even dare to declare Meyer feminist-friendly. “His women had an exuberance and vitality you rarely see in films anymore,” writes Camille Paglia, who’s alleged to be a big Tura Satana fan. B. Ruby Rich boasts that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! “deals a body-blow to the idea that women are victims” and saw the film as “an unexpected celebration of bad-girl empowerment.” Well, trust the art and not the artist. “I’ve never seen a good-looking feminist,” maintained Meyer, who often groused he didn’t get enough resistance from the women’s movement, despite doing his best to incite its wrath. Sayeth RM, “I don’t care to comment about what might be inside a lady’s head. Hopefully it’s my dick.” And yet in a day when such credits weren’t exactly plentiful, a woman ran Meyer’s distribution company and co-produced his films.

  You will find extreme opinions within these pages when it comes to what Meyer really thought of the opposite sex. He worshiped; he hated; he was ambivalent. “I think Russ loved women,” said Tura Satana—perhaps his most intense femme fatale, and one of the very few who battled him and won. “He always put women on a pedestal. Even though he exploited the figure part of them, their sexuality, he still adored women. You could tell that from the way he always talked about his mom.”

  In my mind, the sexual tension in Meyer’s movies is not dissimilar to that within such classic Ike and Tina Turner records as “You Got What You Wanted” or “I’m Gonna Find Me a Substitute.” Ike Turner—another infamous control freak who worried every detail down to the fringe on the Ikettes costumes—crafted tense, tough, tightly constructed songs for Tina, with melodramatic and often masochistic lyrics that portray a mythical dream woman willing to subjugate herself to Her Man at any expense. At times Ike deliberately puts the number in a key out of Tina’s range, and she struggles to stay on top of the number, singing like there’s a gun at her head. The song is a cage, built for Tina to bust loose from. Her desperate, impassioned, angry vocals often seem at odds with the words, adding a layer of divine complexity to one very bizarre and moving puzzle.

  A similar conflicted dynamic goes on in Meyer’s work: he pushes his women to the end of their rope, then another three feet farther. They are constantly in motion, running, dancing, jumping, fucking, all the while spewing forth (often at top volume) Meyer’s you-Tarzan/me-Jane manifestos. Yet these she-demons overcome by sheer, sexy brute force. Not unlike Ike and Tina, the best moments in RM’s movies come when he’s working with a high-voltage dame he can neither vanquish nor drown in his cockamamie philosophies, as we shall see is particularly the case with Tura Satana in Faster, Pussycat or Erica Gavin in Vixen.

  In Meyer’s films, men and women enjoy only a momentary truce, and it comes during quick, animalistic copulation that is more wrestling match than any expression of affection. “I love to put sex in outrageous locations,” said RM. “Up a tree. In a canoe. Behind a waterfall. Screwing under tremendous odds strikes me as both erotic and funny.” Scheming, seducing, and survival of the fittest: in Meyer’s world the sexual combat never ends, and if RM’s movies are about anything, it is that the cavernous abyss between the sexes just cannot be bridged, except for brief moments of depraved need. “The cleansing of sex—that was his theory,” said actor Charles Napier. “When things got really rough, you just went out and got a hooker, got sucked out, and this took care of all your problems. For Meyer, sex is something like a bowel movement.”

  “Who knows more about sex than Russ Meyer?” he’d challenge, and the answer turns out to be just about everybody. As we will learn, RM was no Don Juan, despite his carefully manufactured reputation. “I portray sex in my movies as I perform sex in bed,” he boasted, king of the no-frills motel fuck. “I love to see men and women go at it in a ratty old room like a couple of warthogs. It reflects my own personal tastes—fast and quick.”

  At the same time, there is something weirdly wholesome about Meyer, particularly if you compare his work to hard-core pornography, which, much to RM’s displeasure, is where the unknowing often dump him. Graphic sex appalled Meyer. “He was not a sleazy porn merchant,” said Roger Ebert. “He was more of an All-American kind of a guy.” Half W. C. Fields, half Sgt. Rock, Meyer could’ve stepped right out of one of his films—a burly, moustached, and mac
ho former combat cameraman who wore his patriotism on his sleeve and suspected all enemies of commie leanings. The press loved describing his paunchy belly, jug-handle ears, and Clark Gable–gone-to-seed mug. John Simon likened RM’s look to that of a “former prizefighter now operating a successful chain of South American brothels.” It all contributed to a persona that was, as Richard Corliss wrote, “genuine, impure, adulterated, no-bullshit working class American.”

  World War II is the key to Meyer, and his combat life is described in detail in these pages. His war experiences galvanized him in a way he could never transcend. RM’s movie productions resembled military operations, and he’d fill cast and crew with beloved combat buddies whose mission was now to document another kind of battle—the one in the bedroom. Meyer spoke loudly to postwar males made both anxious and hungry by the chaos of the sexual revolution. RM was one of them, albeit slightly demented. He had crazy, insane lust for his female ideals, yet he was disinterested and disturbed at what actually lurked inside that flesh. Meyer was all about surface, and anything betraying the fantasy was an enemy.

  There is a photo I keep on my desk, an old black-and-white still from Please Don’t Touch Me, a 1959 no-budget exploitation picture made by the Ormonds, a Nashville-based family who’d cross over from the drive-in pits to the church, making Christian scare films starring the likes of Jerry Falwell (the packaging and particulars from grindhouse to pulpit might have been different, but the product was amusingly the same).

  The still shows a scantily clad couple in a room; the harsh lighting’s suitable for a crime scene, the forlorn furniture looks like motel resale, and the angle of the photo is slightly askew to suggest (take your pick) art or ineptitude. An amply endowed redhead, her bust barely contained in skimpy black lingerie, leans over a shirtless man—a faint, crude tattoo (“Mirtle”) on his arm—to light his cigarette. Across the top of the image a rather suggestive line of dialogue flirts: “And after the cigarette we’ll—.”

  Now, fortunes are made, careers ruined, and lives lost over just what’s expected after that “we’ll,” and this tawdry image says much to me about the sheer folly of male-female relations. He looks very appreciative, very excited, a bit desperate; she seems calm, cool, and collected, in utter control of the situation. Despite the crassness, there is something alluring about the image, somewhat akin to your hand discovering a garter affixed to a silk stocking that just happens to be clinging to the leg of someone you’d like to investigate further. It’s the game of sex. For its time, Russ Meyer’s work offered the most visceral, yet technically refined portrait of this nerve-racking dance, and the choreography of all that sex-wrestling somehow transforms into a bizarre, even epic tango. Which is not to say Meyer’s any more aware—quite the contrary—he was just the one who packaged his wet dreams with the kind of commercial sheen acceptable to middle America.

  Meyer came along at exactly the right time. Critic D. K. Holm pits RM against Walt Disney: “Like Marlon Brando versus Doris Day or Elvis versus Pat Boone in the 50s, they accounted for the weird and incoherent tension in an America experiencing a difficult transition. And they both made cartoons . . . Meyer unearthed what Disney attempted to bury, the roiling sexual subtext and supertext to everything in the culture.” But most of all, RM made people laugh at sex, creating a kooky cartoon universe that touched a chord. “I figure if it’s good for RM it’s good for the world,” he boasted.

  In the heady, world-domination affluence of the postwar era, America was bursting at the seams in a way that was not unlike the tortured bodice on one of RM’s abundant femme fatales. Everything became supersized, from the Cadillac Coupe de Ville to Jayne Mansfield, and, somewhat symbolically, Meyer was the classic consumer. “He liked big things—big women, big steaks, big Mixmasters, the biggest vacuum cleaner,” said longtime editor Richard Brummer.

  The kind of man who discovers that slapping a leg of lamb is a perfect sound effect for a breast striking a face has to be somewhat unusual, and RM does not disappoint. “Russ Meyer could have a friendship with God and a friendship with the devil, and at the same time,” said childhood friend Lou Filipovitch. Biographer and friend David K. Frasier saw RM as a Dickensian character, Mr. Micawber with a movie camera. Meyer loved language and invented an arcane, hard-boiled vocabulary straight out of a never-made film noir—shoes were “ground grippers,” a helmet was a “brain bucket,” breasts were (among a thousand other such assignations) “ticket sellers,” a toilet “the growler,” his own crotch “the grinch.” Meyer had a bittersweet style, and it got to you. As Frasier fondly recalled, “When getting dressed he’d say, ‘Let me put on my Sy Devore jacket’ and shoot the cuffs like Art Carney.”

  As of 1990, one would find six tubes of Mennen #29 hair dye in RM’s bathroom and eighteen identical burgundy V-neck sweaters in his closet. Charles Napier once accompanied RM on a footwear run to Hollywood Boulevard. “He wore a type of shoe that buckled on the side you don’t see anymore. The shoe guy says, ‘Can I help you?’ and RM goes, ‘You see these shoes I got on? I want every pair you got.’ ‘Every pair?’ ‘All of them.’ The guy had about twenty-five pairs. We bought ’em all.”

  Meyer, a man of often ridiculous extremes, would weep while watching Casablanca, yet thought nothing of terrorizing cast and crew with a loaded gun. A sneering iron man, RM was so thin-skinned he’d write voluminous, murderous diatribes to critics who dared to pan his work. Meyer was fanatical about restaurants—with a battle cry of “Let’s go cut some meat” he’d charge off for an hours-long drive to some ancient steakhouse, treating his pals to a bacchanalian feast—but God forbid you didn’t pick up the tab when RM divined it time. Such a perceived slight could result in a thirty-year banishment.

  Different people knew different Meyers. Some insisted he was exactly the image he sold to the world—jolly Mr. Blue-Collar Tit Lover. His combat buddies knew RM as a devoted if controlling friend who’d do anything necessary to keep their group together. Others saw him as an outright monster. You will encounter all these Meyers in the pages that follow.

  “Meyer’s life is as thoroughly documented as Churchill’s,” wrote Roger Ebert, and the one with the eye for posterity was Meyer himself.

  RM’s Hollywood home was a shrine unto himself, packed to the gills with framed memorabilia from his films—posters, pictures, articles, and tributes. Huge nude portraits of the women he’d worked with covered the walls, the ones he’d bedded earning a special inscription affixed to their image—“To the Mutual Exchange of Wondrous Body Fluids.” Each film got its own plaque, and attached to each was some symbolic production prop—the straw hat worn by Bill Teas in The Immoral Mr. Teas, Tura Satana’s black leather glove from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Every little scrap from his life became a treasured memento, down to his dead mother’s car and his late sister’s wheelchair. Meyer was one of those guys who longed for the past even while it was still the present. “He was always referring to his old films,” said Ebert. “They were things that he had lived.”

  Intoxicated by his own history, Meyer tried to control any and all interpretations of it. German biographer Rolf Thissen wrote the first in-depth biography of the director in the mid-eighties. After perusing a rough draft, RM insisted on numerous deletions and then went to court to prevent the book from ever being published outside of Germany. Meyer trashed his biographer in the press, and, when contacted by this author, Thissen made it clear he never wanted to discuss Russ Meyer again. Defiant that only he could tell the tale, Meyer spent over a decade writing A Clean Breast—a massive three-volume autobiography he published himself. “Who’d know more about Meyer than Meyer? My joke is mine.”

  Despite its very colorful 1,213 pages, there is one thing missing from A Clean Breast—Russ Meyer’s life. The book, not unlike his movies, is unashamedly skin deep.

  A few problems present themselves when writing a biography on a character like Meyer. Brutally honest, he was also a master of disinformation. “Everybody gets a different
story,” he admitted to biographer David K. Frasier. If myth suited him better than the truth, it had a way of creeping into the record. To this end, RM once recounted a highly amusing anecdote to interviewer Harvey Fenton concerning a fishing trip to Ireland and a pair of cowboy boots. RM noticed the adolescent in charge of rowing him around staring longingly at the boots he was wearing. Meyer asked the kid if he’d ever heard of John Wayne, and the youngster piped up with an emphatic affirmative. RM then told him he’d done some photography for Wayne, that they were close friends, and that the Duke had even given him the very cowboy boots he was wearing—boots that Meyer now gave to his boat boy in appreciation for his hard work. Mused RM, “I wonder how many times he got in some bar and said, ‘See these boots, they used to belong to John Wayne . . .’ Untrue, of course.” Quintessential Meyer, this.

  RM revealed only what he wanted to reveal, which wasn’t much. Meyer never took his game face off, never flinched, never cried for the TV camera or unloaded his innermost to any scribe. “Never let the chink in your armor be exposed,” RM advised David K. Frasier. “He was a crude, smart individual,” said Arv Miller, who conducted a series of combative, in-depth interviews with Meyer in 1990 for Fling magazine. “He’d be a psychoanalyst’s dream. Sort of like Tony Soprano going to Dr. Melfi.”

  When I grilled David F. Friedman on his long friendship with RM, he reflected on how little he really knew about the man. “This is almost like a mystery novel,” he mused one cool night in Alabama. “You’ve got to find the real Russ Meyer. There are so many anomalies there that you can’t put it together.”