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

by Jimmy McDonough

  The star of this tiny opus was Paul Fox, who played a husband with a wayward eye. Before taking a nap, his wife ties a string from her toe to his in order to alert her that her mate is attempting to run off after some tramp, which of course he does. When it came to filmmaking, Meyer “was a natural,” said Downard. “He took to it like fish to water.” But when it came to still photography Harry “could never see his way of doing things. The commercial photographer usually has just one chance to get the picture. Russ worked on a different premise—he shot a hundred pictures, and hoped to Christ he got one that could be used!”

  One cloud hung over Meyer’s head at Las Palmas. “He mentioned that his mother had problems,” said Downard. “She was mentally unbalanced, I guess. As it came across to me, he thought a great deal of his mother and tried to take care of her. It was difficult for him just to know she was goin’ the way she was.”

  Meyer attended classes at both Eastman Kodak and the MGM School of Motion Picture Photography, where he was taught to thread 35 mm Mitchell cameras, a piece of equipment they’d never even use during the war. Meyer found the studio’s involvement dubious at best and felt they were sharing their knowledge only in order to score teaching deferments for their employees.

  But RM excelled at the big assignment, which was to utilize a hundred-foot roll of film to shoot a short scene—all under the tutelage of one of MGM’s top-notch photographers, who would then grade their footage. RM took his assigned actor out to a set for one of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy movies on the MGM lot and shot a sequence involving a window washer that was to culminate in a through-a-window shot of the washer throwing the contents of his bucket at the glass. Unfortunately, the window shattered, drenching Meyer, his teacher (noted studio cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg), and the camera. But the resulting footage was sharp and the exposure right, allowing RM to place second-highest in his class. Ruttenberg’s assessment of Meyer’s talents boiled down to one apt word: “aggressive.”

  Meyer returned home to Oakland to await word on his future. On November 10, 1944, Harry Downard wrote to slip RM some advance good news. He had been appointed staff sergeant with the 166th Signal Photographic Company. At the end of December Meyer boarded a train for Camp Crowder, Missouri. Arriving a week early for training, RM headed straight for the Kansas City burlesque theaters, where his eyes were singed again, this time by a stacked blonde and former Miss St. Louis whom he was to see again after the war under much more personal circumstances.

  To say that Meyer connected with the men of the 166th is putting it mildly. They were an extraordinary bunch, among them the gentle Paul Fox, who kept everybody laughing; poker-faced Jim Ryan, who’d physically hold together the intestines of a wounded soldier until help arrived; short, dapper Ken Parker, who, according to fellow serviceman Tom McGowan, “got more snatch than anybody” and later became a police photographer when not shooting pinups alongside Meyer; big, burly Fred Owens, later known for playing cameos in Meyer films, usually some sort of hapless hayseed victim; Don Ornitz, whose father had been one of the Hollywood Ten and who’d become a renowned magazine photographer; goateed William Ellis “Bill” Teas, a brilliant lensman who did as little as possible during the war but somehow managed to take the best pictures in the process. Three of the 166th—Charles Sumners, Ralph Butterfield, and Meyer—would write about their World War II experiences, although only RM’s book would alternate shots of tanks and explosions with pictures of busty naked women.

  Meyer spent World War II filming and photographing the advances of General Omar Bradley’s First Army and General George S. Patton’s Third Army as they battled their way from France to Germany. As he would say over and over throughout his career, there was no greater experience in his life. Central to this was the iron-clad bond he felt with the men of the 166th. “If you’ve never been in combat, it’s hard to explain why a lot of guys remain friends,” said Joe Longo, head of the International Combat Camera Association. “Combat draws people together.” As any crony of Russ Meyer’s will tell you, first came the films, then came the combat friends, and last came the women. “His army buddies were the brothers he never had,” said Charles Sumners. “They were his family.”

  For Russell Albion Meyer, World War II meant freedom. “I don’t remember him ever telling stories about growing up and doing this or that with his mother—to me, it was like Russ’s life started when he was in the army,” said Meyer star Erica Gavin. “He was born, he popped out in a uniform. There was no childhood.”

  Sgt. Meyer

  I really didn’t want the war to end. It was the best time I ever had.

  —RUSS MEYER

  “Russ would get so involved in makin’ the picture that he would forget about the danger,” said Charlie “Slick” Sumners. “He was a perfectionist.”

  January 1945—it was a bitter cold day in the Ardennes forest outside of St. Hubert, Belgium. A bloody fight was raging, the one they’d call the Battle of the Bulge. Newsreel Unit 1’s Meyer and Sumners had joined the 87th Infantry Division in the pines and snow. Germans were firing on the company from a church steeple. RM saw it as a perfect opportunity to try out his new lens, a Cooke 20-inch telephoto. He grabbed its long wooden case out of the back of the jeep and jumped into the fray. The barrel-shaped lens was so huge that it required a bulky tripod—RM’s 35 mm Eyemo camera had to be screwed into it instead of the other way around.

  The big black lens made Slick nervous. Some Nazi in the distance might mistake it for an artillery barrel and blow them both to hell. “You’re gonna get us killed!” muttered Sumners, who pointed the jeep away from the action to ensure a quick getaway, then waited. There was one advantage the combat photographers had over the other GIs—if the furnace got too hot, they could split. But Meyer wasn’t going anywhere. He was fearless, even reckless. All that mattered was the shot. “The excitement of getting some footage that you knew was good—that really looked like war—it overcame any kind of fear, really,” he’d say decades later.

  Screaming artillery fire flew overhead as Meyer ripped through hundred-foot rolls of Ansco Supreme, stopping only to frantically reload the magazine. The GIs scored a direct hit on the church. The Germans fought back, sending a shell in on the left of Meyer and Sumners about a hundred yards away. Blammo! Another landed directly in front of them. That was it for Sumners, who was certain they’d been spotted. “You better get in now, or I’ll come back and pick up the pieces!” he barked at RM, throwing the jeep into gear. Meyer was fighting mad, cursing a blue streak, but he gave in, diving into the back of the vehicle, the camera still attached to the tripod. The jeep had gone about twenty-five yards when a shell exploded smack dab where they’d just been, blowing the area to kingdom come. “It just looked like a sawmill had been through there,” said Sumners.

  It was there in the Ardennes that Sumners and Meyer would come upon a couple of American tanks under fire in a clearing. They lay on their bellies in the snow, peering out from the relative safety of the woods. One of the tanks took a direct hit, then another. It rolled toward them and stopped. The turret clanked open and a wounded soldier climbed out. Slick started off to help, but Meyer held him back. If they ventured out into the clearing, they could be hit next. RM waved the soldier in their direction. He staggered toward them and fell. Sumners and Meyer dragged him into the woods, trailing blood in his wake. The soldier’s body was torn apart by shrapnel. He moaned, “No, God, not me. Not me, God, not me.” A few minutes later he was dead, a pool of blood spreading across the snow.

  For the man who’d admit, “I’m probably the greatest voyeur of all,” the war must’ve held a strange fascination. “Nothing can match the truth of seeing a man die and knowing his terrible secret—that he’s dead and that the people who loved him don’t know that yet,” Meyer later said. When recording casualties—part of the combat photographer’s job—RM tried not to include the deceased’s face in the frame. The footage might wind up in some newsreel, and Meyer figured it would be a h
ell of a way for the soldier’s family to find out he was no longer alive.

  Combat photographers from the 166th Signal Photographic Company stuck with the combat troops like lampreys on a shark, documenting the war with Speed Graphic 4-by-5-inch still cameras and spring-loaded Eyemo 35 mm silent motion picture machines (they were originally equipped with Wall single-system sound units, but the roar of battle rendered soundtracks unusable). The 166th was right in the thick of it, M1 rifles their only means of protection. It is estimated that one of every four combat photographers never made it home. The 166th was comparatively lucky, going on to become one of the most decorated outfits in the European theater of operations: fifty-five Bronze Stars (one going to Russ Meyer), two Silver Stars, thirteen Purple Hearts, one Air Medal, one Legion of Merit, one Croix de Guerre. “They saw a lot of action, and they were in the right places at the right time to get good pictures,” said Air Corps combat photographer Joe Longo.

  Originally the 166th was made up of six-man teams—a driver, a motion picture photographer, a still photographer, a clerk, and an officer. As the demand for their presence grew, the units were broken into two- and three-man teams that now had to do the work of six. After a full day on the front lines, they’d caption their photos, fill out their exposure reports, and stick the raw film in a press bag.

  The footage was gathered up and flown to London (later in the war, France), where the Army Pictorial Service developed it. If a picture was deemed newsworthy (and unclassified) it was radioed to the States. A combat photographer’s work could be on the front page of a newspaper within thirty-six to forty-eight hours after turning it in. Motion picture film was flown to the States for use in newsreels. The 166th sent some three hundred thousand photographs to the Army Pictorial Service during the war. Another twenty thousand feet of motion picture footage was shot each week.

  Five prints were made of each picture to disseminate among various departments of the military, with one going back to the photographer alongside a terse, one-page critique of his efforts. Known somewhat derisively among the photographers who received them as “good-good-complete,” the reports were made up of one-word commentaries for each of six areas: focus, exposure, camera steadiness, composition, coverage, and captioning. Each sheet was signed by one Captain Fred “F.F.” Fox, later to be a Hollywood producer and obviously a man not easily pleased. Often the picture was marked with a grease pencil indicating a spot where the photographer could’ve taken a closer or more dramatic picture. “They say you should’ve been over here,” said Sumners. “If you’d have been over there, you’d be dead!”

  Now a novice motion picture photographer, Meyer got a similar critique with a Cinex strip of still frames from his footage attached. “Ninety-five percent of his critiques were good,” said Sumners. “Russ was that good.” Meyer’s combat footage wound up in an Oscar-winning 1945 short subject, Eisenhower: True Glory, and a pair of 1970 films, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Patton (two frequently seen Meyer war shots include one of a tank battering its way into a building and another of a terrified young German soldier surrendering as he is kicked in the pants by an American GI).

  Already present in his wartime work was a glimmer of Meyer’s talent for montage, later to be a hallmark of his filmmaking. On a report concerning footage RM shot of General Patton in June 1945, Captain Fox compliments Meyer’s inserts showing Patton’s gun and the stars and horn on his jeep. RM was particularly proud of the material he shot documenting the destruction of the French town Maizieres-les-Metz toward the end of a nearly thirty-day battle in 1944. Meyer and Ralph Butterfield crawled through the demolished Hermann Goering Steel Mill, coordinating their coverage like a Hollywood production. The pair even climbed atop a railroad trestle to get better coverage of the fight, fully exposing themselves to enemy fire.

  A year before the events in the Ardennes, at boot camp in Camp Crowder in January 1944, Russ Meyer went through technical training with newsreel cameraman Major Gatskill and cinematographer Arthur Lloyd. Lloyd—who’d shot many Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang comedies—imparted a lesson that would stick with Meyer the rest of his life. “He would always hold up five fingers to us and say, ‘If you get a long shot, medium shot, closeup shot, insert and reestablish action, you’ll always be able to cut that scene.’ ” Despite being a low-budget filmmaker, Meyer was a stickler for coverage, often shooting extra inserts to cover flubs or beef up lackluster footage, yet another way his films later outclassed the competition.

  Sloughing off his mama’s-boy adolescence, Meyer was now becoming Meyer—a brash, take-charge guy who wasn’t afraid to tell you just how talented he was. “RM had an attitude that served him very well,” said Tom McGowan of the 166th, who’d later coproduce and write Meyer’s 1969 feature Cherry, Harry and Raquel. “He was a rather egotistical show-off type.”

  Fellow soldier Warren Harding related a story involving members of the 166th taking a break from technical training in Astoria, New York. A few of the men—Harding and Meyer included—decided to go into Manhattan, where they visited Toots Shor’s swanky nightclub. “The waiter came over and asked everybody what they wanted to drink. He got to me and I said, ‘Milk.’ He said, ‘What did you want to drink?’ ‘Milk.’ He said, ‘Are you sure?’ Well, Russ stood up, and Russ is a big guy. And Russ goes, ‘The soldier said he wanted milk!’ The guy turned around and I got my glass of milk. That’s the way Russ was.”*1

  Away from his crazy, fractured family, Russ grew up in the 166th. “He became a man,” said Harry Downard. “It kind of brought out the macho in him. Where before he was a nice, quiet guy, now he had that raise-his-eyebrows look down at you.”

  At the completion of their training, the 166th boarded the USS Susan B. Anthony for the North Atlantic crossing. On March 9, 1944, the ship pulled into Belfast Harbor, the 166th bound for a two-hundred-year-old castle in Groomsport, Northern Ireland, for practice sessions with Master Sergeant Fred “Fritz” Mandl, a newsreel cameraman who would become a lifelong friend to Meyer and would later contribute cinematography to a couple of his movies. On May 6 the group moved on to Mobberly, a small village outside of Manchester, England, for six more weeks of training. By June, the 166th had been together six months and were thick as thieves.

  Amid swarms of General Patton’s Third Army, gearing up for the invasion of Normandy at Omaha Beach, the 166th boarded a landing ship tank and headed across the English Channel to France, “destiny wonderfully upon us,” as Meyer wrote in his autobiography. Assigned to film the troops landing, RM got lost in the ensuing chaos. Meyer, his Eyemo, and his M1 rifle wandered for two days before rejoining the 166th at their Nehou command post.

  After another combat photography outfit—the 165th Signal Corps—suffered heavy losses covering Bradley’s First Army, five men from Newsreel Unit 1 were sent to assist in covering the 29th Infantry, battling in St. Lô, France, Russ Meyer among them. Not assigned to any particular division, Newsreel Unit #1 hopped from battle to battle, and, according to Charles Sumners, saw “more combat situations than any other unit.”

  On July 19, 1944, RM shot his first combat footage—an infantry platoon chowing down on their first meal in two days. The next day he photographed medics tending to a soldier’s foot, which had nearly been blasted off by a land mine. Meyer even had time to write an editorial for Stars and Stripes, declaring, “Until a man has done a dogface’s job he doesn’t know the score.” Typical Meyer—one day in combat and already an expert.

  On July 21, Newsreel Unit 1’s commanding officer, Lt. Gene Moore, brought bad news. “We were getting ready to go down the hill the next morning into St. Lô with the infantry, and we received word that Lieutenant Shaddon’s unit had been wiped out,” said Charles Sumners. In the struggle, a German mortar shell had hit a five-man unit of the 166th. Two men had been killed (one beheaded), another two lost a leg each, and the only survivor had gone crackers. “The whole unit, just gone,” Sumners recalled. “That solidified the company. We realized a
photographer could get killed as easily as a guy with a M1.” The hijinks of basic training seemed light-years away—the 166th was now at war.

  “It really shook us up,” Meyer recalled. “And we were scared.” RM mulled over the situation with Charlie Sumners, an Alabama recruit who’d first encountered Meyer back at Camp Crowder. “Russ called me aside and said, ‘What are we gonna do?’”said Sumners. “I replied, ‘Well, if we don’t go down the hill tomorrow, we won’t be worth a damn the rest of the war.’ We went down into St. Lô the next day, and from that day on we’ve been very close.”

  On the surface, Charlie “Slick” Sumners and Russell Albion Meyer were one odd couple. Charlie was a diminutive, laid-back Southern Baptist gentleman, Russ a clumsy, hyperactive bear soon to become a high-class pornographer. And while Meyer would later spend years writing a thousand-page autobiography, Sumners was a man of few words. “Charlie didn’t talk about the war,” said his wife Floyce. “I would never have known that he saved Russ’s life if Russ hadn’t come and told me himself.”

  The two were lifelong friends regardless of their differences. The first image you see in Meyer’s massive autobiography is a picture of Charlie Sumners. And while Sumners granted that Meyer’s movies “were not the kind that you would show at your PTA,” he’d shrug off disparaging comments from his fellow churchgoers in Alabama. “It was a Mutt and Jeff deal,” said fellow 166th member Warren Harding. “They were inseparable. Charlie was very devoted to Russ, Russ was very devoted to Charlie.” “We never in all the years had a disagreement that amounted to a hill of beans,” declared Sumners, laughing. “I’m probably the only one he didn’t fight with. Russ was real bullheaded, stubborn. He resented authority. He didn’t want people telling him what to do and how to do it.”