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

by Jimmy McDonough

  One person Meyer did routinely clash with was his commanding officer of his unit, Lieutenant Gene Moore. RM would load up on film and disappear into the field for days, only to be chewed out by a frantic Moore on his return. Finally Moore gave up, letting Meyer and Sumners plot their own course. Other GIs were afraid to venture out with them, figuring those two cowboys were bound to get themselves plugged. As future RM film editor Richard Brummer said, “Russ believed once he was looking through the lens that nothing could hurt him.”

  Initially, Charlie was just the man behind the wheel. “Meyer was a terrible driver,” said Sumners. “He’d scare the hell out of me, so I did all the driving.” In St. Malo, France, Charlie would drive straight into the thick of battle to save Meyer, Lt. Moore, and another GI from heavy shelling. Although the jeep sustained two bullet holes and a cracked windshield, nobody was hit, and Sumners was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery. Under RM’s tutelage, Charlie quickly became not just a wheel man but a fine photog himself. A shot Sumners took in Oberdorla, Germany, of GIs advancing up an alley while a dead German lies in the foreground landed on the front page of the New York Daily News in April 1945 and was chosen as one of the 100 best photos of the European theater by the International Association of Combat Cameramen.

  Meyer had found his element in the 166th. He loved the romance of it all—jumping into a jeep with an loaded Eyemo, heading off for God knows what mayhem with his buddy Charlie by his side. Every day was another town, a new adventure. “In the war I felt like Tom Swift and his Electric Underwear,” said Meyer. “It was a great and wondrous game.” There were also dark laughs to be had amid the more hair-raising events. Outside of Labitz, Germany, Meyer and Sumners came upon two seemingly dead soldiers near their abandoned tank. When they stopped to get it on film, Charlie thought he saw one of the stiffs move, which led to a little expected fun. Sumners cocked his .45 while Meyer announced in broken German, “This soldier is not dead. Shoot him in the head!” Up jumped the former corpse, begging for mercy. Now Russ and Charlie had their very own POW—not to mention a Luger pistol as a souvenir. “We had a lot of good times together,” said Sumners.

  Sumners even spent a few weeks as RM’s nursemaid. Outside of Metz, France, the jeep in which Meyer was riding skidded on an icy road and overturned. “Russ was pinned underneath the jeep, and it knocked him out for a few minutes.” Meyer’s leg was badly mangled in the accident, but he refused to get into the ambulance with the two other Gis injured in the crash. “Russ discovered they had stolen his watch—he was mad and he wouldn’t go to the hospital. He was afraid he’d miss something, I suppose.” With Charlie’s help, Meyer hobbled back to the old, unheated house the unit had been staying in. Sumners had to take care of RM for the next three weeks while the rest of their group convalesced in a proper hospital. “I burned up every stick of furniture in the house except the bed he was on and one chair tryin’ to keep him warm.”

  The liberation of Paris was a heady time for those of the 166th who were present. When the Second French Armored Division marched into Paris on August 25, 1944, Sumners and Lt. Moore drove right in with the tank division. The streets of the city were mobbed with ecstatic civilians, and when their jeep was overrun by pretty French girls anxious to kiss and squeeze an American soldier, Meyer was on the hood, movie camera in hand, getting it all. In perfect Meyer fashion, and much to Charlie’s amusement, RM promptly ripped the seat of his pants open on a windshield knob and spent the next few hours being goosed by the exuberant French women swarming all around them.

  When you’re talking Russ Meyer, breasts have to poke into the picture sooner or later, even during a world war, and the moment finally came in Rambouillet, France. Meyer, Sumners, Moore, and one other GI were holed up there for a week and a half waiting for the French to orchestrate the August Paris takeover. A number of war correspondents were there as well, including Ernest Hemingway, who was holding court at the Hôtel du Grand Veneur. He’d send a few Free French soldiers out to ferret out stories for him, then everybody would meet back at the hotel for a booze fest with such luminaries as columnist Ernie Pyle and photographer Robert Capa. Charlie Sumners remembers all sorts of weaponry stockpiled at the Grand Veneur, lending credence to rumors that Hemingway was running guns for the French underground. Sumners didn’t care for Hemingway—“He was arrogant and just a big blowhard.” Perhaps, but this particular blowhard would, believe it or not, get Russ Meyer laid for the first time.

  Meyer and three 166th cronies were camped behind the overbooked hotel in a pup tent when Hemingway apparently took pity on them. On the morning of August 23, 1944, the GIs were relaxing in a bistro when one of Hemingway’s flunkies—a short Portuguese man—extended a rather generous offer from the eminent scribe. The four were invited to visit the local cathouse that night, on the house, courtesy of Ernest Hemingway, who was pals with the local madam. Meyer no doubt broke into a sweat. The twenty-two-year-old couldn’t admit to his comrades that he was still a virgin. It was do-or-die time, like when he was back on that hill above St. Lô.

  That night, under a full moon, the men sauntered over to the house of ill repute. A short, heavy-set French woman with her hair pulled back ushered them through a neatly manicured garden and a candlelit vestibule, then into a shadowy bar filled with women in various states of undress. Meyer couldn’t believe his eyes. “It was like something out of de Maupassant,” he said. “Fifteen girls, their children, a woman with a bun sitting in the back.”

  With visions of Margie Sullivan dancing in his head, RM picked the dame with the biggest balcony. Little else is known about Babette, but Meyer has said that she seemed to recognize his inexperience and was happy to take the lead. She beckoned him to follow her up the stone staircase, holding aloft a GI-issue Zippo lighter as a torch. A brass bed with Russ in the missionary position followed, sending the novice straight to heaven, albeit a little too quickly: “The quail flew early that night, as the boys from the South used to say.” Russ and Babette went at it again—at which point, if RM is to be believed, he heard Lieutenant Moore shouting to his men, “Let’s pull out!”

  Meyer never grew tired of telling this story, which merits the most purple of prose in his autobiography. “A newfound tingling . . . the emptying of sacks . . . a logjam burst asunder” (alongside stills of a high-heeled foot crushing a cherry). As if there had been any doubt before, RM was now hooked on superstructured women. From here on in, Meyer would insist that when faced with a flat-chested frail, he’d “rather play cards.”

  Now that RM had popped his cherry, he had to share it with the world. “It was so thrilling, he had to tell somebody about it,” said Sumners. “’Course, we went back again. And again.”

  Decades later, Meyer returned to the scene of this glorious conquest, documenting the visit on film with the solemnity of a trek to Stonehenge for the Discovery Channel. He was happy to find a large marble monument to the Third Army not far from the doorway of the old whorehouse. Tits and war—was there anything better?

  Meyer loved to regale listeners with his war tales, and Charlie Sumners is not the first to suggest that a bit of embellishment went on. While in England, Meyer and Sumners were sent to a remote area to photograph the inhabitants of a prison stockade. Inside were some ornery-looking creatures—according to Charlie, considerably more than a dozen, and most of whom were African American. They were heavily guarded, not allowed to talk, and bound in leg chains. Once Meyer and Sumners had shot film, the colonel in charge confiscated the footage.

  In June 1959, Meyer recounted the visit to E. E. “Mick” Nathanson, a freelance writer who worked as an editor at Adam and Sir Knight, skin magazines RM had been shooting pinups for during his postwar career. Meyer called the inmates “the Dirty Dozen,” and Nathanson writes that the group comprised “a black man, an Indian and ten white men of various ethnic backgrounds . . . soldiers who had been convicted of capital crimes or major felonies while in the Army, had been sentenced to death or long prison terms
, but had been given the choice of . . . going on a secret, extremely dangerous mission instead.” Nathanson did his best to investigate the matter factually, with Meyer even writing letters of inquiry to Army officials on his behalf, to no avail. Instead, Nathanson wrote a 1965 novel based on the idea, which led to the hugely successful film of the same name. (Meyer got 10 percent of Nathanson’s Dirty Dozen deal—ten grand—for his trouble).

  More curious is a war tale Meyer told more than once concerning an event he said happened while he and Sumners were stationed in Leipzig, Germany, near the end of the war, in April 1945. RM claims he was rousted out of bed in the middle of the night and sent to S2 (intelligence), where he came face-to-face with a Sixth Armored Division colonel—and General Patton. Intelligence had revealed that Hitler and Goebbels were heading for a hideout in Weimar. Patton wanted them both assassinated—not taken alive—and he barked at Meyer, whose “knees had turned to jelly,” that he’d better be “damn careful” about what he filmed. The next morning both he and Sumners joined the regiment heading to Weimar, their jeep shielded between a couple of tanks. RM figured that if he could capture this momentous event, he’d be assured of a future career as a newsreel cameraman. The troops arrived only to discover, by “beating the Burgermeister, the Mayor,” that Hitler and Goebbels had indeed been there but had decided to return to Berlin. The assassination mission was aborted.

  It’s a tremendous story and, according to Sumners (whom Meyer placed right in the middle of it), “a fabrication. He made up the story. There’s not one ounce of truth in that.” When I asked him why Meyer would feel the need to spin such a yarn, he laughed and simply said, “I don’t know.”

  On May 7, 1945, Eisenhower signed for the Allies in Germany’s unconditional surrender in Reims, France. Waiting to return to the States, the 166th was sent to Wildbad Kreuth, a former health resort thirty miles from Munich, at the base of the Alps. It was a beautiful location for blowing off steam. A few of the men built their own darkroom, while others went fishing (sometimes with grenades). In June, both Meyer and Sumners received battle stars for each of the five major campaigns they’d been part of.

  For a moment, it looked like the 166th wasn’t quite through, as word came in that their presence was required for the invasion of Japan. On July 5, the company moved to Camp New Orleans, a ratty tent city in France. There they awaited further instructions until the atomic bomb brought what Meyer called “the last good war” to an end.

  RM and Paul Fox, another 166th comrade, then killed time by hawking contraband film to finance more trips to the brothel, but by November 21, Meyer was aboard the Cody Victory, sailing home to the States. Leaving Europe was bittersweet. RM wasn’t kidding when he said he didn’t want the war to end. What was there to go home to—an accounting job?

  Charlie Sumners said that during his war duty Meyer told him the same thing over and over again, and it’s significant because this is the first time RM had communicated his mission in life: he was gonna make it big in the Hollywood movie business, he was gonna be rich, and he wasn’t gonna answer to anyone: “I’m going to be the one telling people what to do.” Little did Sumners know that RM had big plans for him. “When we said goodbye in France, Russ said, ‘Oh, this is not goodbye. I’ll see you again.’ ” Charlie thought he was crazy. After all, the war was over.

  But Russ Meyer was crazy like a fox. Back in California, he kept in constant touch with all the members of the 166th. He tracked down their numbers and addresses and organized their reunions, and once his films started earning the big dough, he’d occasionally spring for travel fare when somebody didn’t have the funds. He even went as far as to get a couple of old pals suffering in sexless marriages laid. When out on the road, Meyer sought out members of the company he barely knew and sprang for dinner. When it came to the 166th, Meyer was unrelenting. “I love finding and meeting up with these guys again. It’s more exciting than finding a broad.”

  “Russ Meyer was the father of the group. He would make the decisions,” said fellow 166er Bill Tomko, laughing. “Nobody else made a suggestion!” Kay Hively, a Missouri reporter who wrote a history of Camp Crowder and helped the 166th organize reunions at their former training ground, remembered Meyer as “the charismatic leader” and mother hen of the group. “He was always worrying that somebody was gonna be left or somebody didn’t wake up, that everybody was on the bus, everybody was comfortable.”

  At the same time, even at these reunions Meyer was “a bull charging ahead.” In the eighties, when the 166th had an emotional reunion at their training camp, he had to document the gang’s every move on film. As Kay Hively recalled, “RM was directing a movie the whole time we were here—‘Don’t get off the bus until I get this camera up. And then when I yell, you can start getting off the bus. I’ll film you coming off.’ When it was time to go, it was, ‘Don’t get on the bus until I get the camera set up.’ ”

  Of course, even among 166th alumni Meyer would be a source of controversy. He quarreled with nearly all his combat buddies; sometimes the tiffs went on for years. There were spouses in particular who didn’t care for RM or his line of work, and the feeling was usually mutual. “By and large if I’m with friends and they’re with their wives, the wives are very secondary,” he’d tell biographer David K. Frasier. “I really don’t embrace them.”

  Forget breasts—there is no greater key to Russ Meyer than the 166th Signal Photographic Company. Patriotism was now a central component of Meyer’s personality, along with a deep hatred of the Red menace—“I am a rabid anti-Communist,” Meyer told Roger Ebert in a 1968 interview. RM would use the commie tag to tar any enemy, perhaps most amusingly with ex-166th member Stanley Kramer, producer-director of such “liberal” Hollywood fare as On the Beach and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, although Meyer right-hand man Jim Ryan maintains that the real reason RM “didn’t like Stanley [was] because they were both successful people—but Stanley was on a real higher level.”

  In the hands of Meyer, a self-described “vicious capitalist,” “patriotism” and “communism” seem to function as vague, comic book concepts at best, white hats versus the black hats in a Technicolor western. “I don’t think he was the shrewdest political thinker you’re ever going to run across,” said David K. Frasier.*2 “He was too busy lusting after tits, making money, spending it on himself, and moving on. RM looked upon America as a place someone from a disadvantaged background could, with hard work, make a fuck of a lot of money.” Frasier felt that Meyer’s hatred of communism simply boiled down to “the idea that he would work his ass off and then have to share it with someone,” someone who he felt couldn’t or wouldn’t put their nose to the grindstone like our natural-born workaholic RM. The bottom line was the war had freed Meyer from home, taught him a craft, and got him laid. It was just one big bang of big bosoms and square jaws, not unlike the many pictures of nude women mashed together with combat shots in the wartime chapters of his autobiography, and RM would express his love for country in the exuberant jumble of neon signs, car dashboards, and giant knockers that crowd his movie montages.

  “Meyer uses his productions, I believe, to recapture the joy he felt during the formative and most enjoyable period of his life—the war,” wrote Roger Ebert. During his career, Meyer made movies with jeeps, cameras, even guns, and certainly a feeling of battle. As RM actor Charles Napier so aptly put it to writer Nathaniel Thompson, “Working with Russ Meyer was like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse.” Members of his Hollywood crew frequently came from the 166th, and they continually pop up in the films as bit players. There are some very amusing stills from Meyer’s 1963 film Heavenly Bodies that show a bunch of RM’s combat cronies with cameras slung around their necks—but instead of clicking away at a burning tank or dead Nazi, they’re pointing their cameras at naked women.

  In the eighties, when Meyer’s movie career had essentially dried up, he’d head back to Europe again a
nd again to retrace each and every step of his war experiences with a movie camera, invariably with Charlie “Slick” Sumners by his side. Thirteen chapters of RM’s autobiography deal with the war, and a few are simply titled with the names of 166th men who played influential roles in Meyer’s early years.

  French distributor (and Meyer’s first biographer) Jean-Pierre Jackson maintains that for RM, “women were just pleasure, and that’s it. His real interest was remembrance, friendship with his army buddies. He’s a very sentimental guy, nostalgic. He cried a lot.”

  Jackson, also a film buff, was at one point in Los Angeles working on a book about the old cliffhanger serials. While visiting Meyer, he mentioned he was heading off to Arizona to interview William Witney, director of such forgotten epics as Dick Tracy’s G-Men. “Russ said, ‘Oh, that old guy from Republic Studios?’ He had tears in his eyes and said, ‘It’s very good that you are going to see him. Don’t let him alone.’ ”

  That was Meyer. A tough guy, but one who wept when somebody gave a shit about a old, forgotten filmmaker. A man who not only covered his walls with cheap, funny little plaques commemorating each and every movie he created, but who also built small shrines in his home to celebrate dear, departed pals. According to actress Alaina Capri, “Russ acted tougher or meaner than he really was—he tried to be tough on the set, but he had a big heart and was really kind to everyone. He was a complete gentleman—always.”

  And a man desperate to hold on to the one thing that no one can keep: the past. “I have never been able to recapture those moments,” he said of his combat duty to a reporter in 1969. “You never can.”

  Tittyboom or Bust

  Tits are a means to an end. —RUSS MEYER