Like many servicemen returning home after the war, Russ Meyer was at a loose end. The great adventure had come to an abrupt halt, and his comrades were now strewn across the country. No more Hemingway, whorehouses, or heroics. No action at all. In December 1945, just after he received his honorable discharge from Fort MacArthur in southern California, Meyer made the Hollywood rounds looking for motion picture work. A movie camera hadn’t left his hands since he was a kid and surely his experience as an expert combat photographer gave him an advantage. RM found nothing but rejection, however, and it stung. Tinseltown was more interested in protecting its own than hiring outsiders, and there were plenty of men returning who’d already had industry jobs before they were drafted.
RM moved back into his mother’s house at 918 Donovan Street in San Leandro. Mother, of course, was ecstatic to have her son back, but Russ sensed a distinct lack of enthusiasm from stepfather Howard and half-sister Lucinda. To complicate matters, Lydia’s husband had taken up with a nurse he’d met while laid up in the veterans’ hospital, and Lucinda, now a very pretty young woman, was showing more and more signs of having a screw loose.
Meyer had to figure out a future for himself. With funds he’d socked away from his sergeant’s pay, he bought himself a Speed Graphic camera. And he was already on the prowl for women. When RM found out that Evelyn “Treasure Chest” West was scheduled to make an appearance at Don’s Cabaret, an Oakland nightspot, he made sure he was front and center. While, as he writes somewhat creepily in his autobiography, Meyer knew he “couldn’t begin to possess” such a beauty “on a personal level . . . to photograph her remarkable abundance would certainly suffice.” For the time being, anyway.
West, known as the “the Girl with the $50,000 Chest”—she’d had it insured by Lloyd’s of London—and infamous for her publicity-generating feuds with other dancers, had a “very good act, very theatrical,” as fellow stripper Dixie Evans recalled. “She’d come to the microphone and murmur, ‘Oh, my underwear is made of lace / Now, if I remove them before you, would that be a disgrace?’ She had a way of strutting like no other—a certain tune would play and just her boobs would bounce. The audience would stomp and stomp and stomp and nothin’ else would move but these boobs goin’ up and down, up and down.”*1
Wowed by West’s Oakland appearance, Meyer made a pitch to her agent: if Meyer was allowed to photograph the dame, he’d supply them with free eight-by-ten publicity stills. It worked like a charm. There in the club during off hours, West, posing in garter belt, hose, a fur stole, and little else, mimed her act while Meyer snapped away. With his potential distraction safely corralled inside a “sturdy jockstrap,” RM’s first known attempt to combine his two great passions, big-busted women and photography, went off without a hitch. RM was ecstatic, and although he was nervous as hell, West didn’t notice Meyer breaking a sweat. “I thought he was handsome,” she said. “And very sincere about his work.”
And a gentleman with an oddly supportive mother. Lydia’s first glimpse of her son’s lifelong obsession came as shots of the top-heavy model developed in the family bathtub. If Meyer is to be trusted, her only response was, “What a lovely girl, Russell—and what big, beautiful breasts.” Dear old Mom.
Meyer’s modus operandi was now in place: give ’em the old “Can I take your picture?” rap first, and a trip into their shorts might even follow. RM couldn’t believe how well the deal worked. He kept his camera equipment in the back of his Oldsmobile, combat-photographer ready. In his autobiography there is a shot of Meyer backstage among nude dancers in a Vegas revue that is just incredible. The look on his face as he ogles a topless female is so purposeful and intense—RM’s on the hunt for That Certain Female, one in possession of a pair of deadly weapons that just so happen to be made of flesh. “I went at it in a very precise manner,” Meyer told writer Dale Ashmun. “Not any broad, just specific broads. And I went through mountains of shit just trying to find those broads . . . nothing would stop me.”
While shooting strippers was an immense turn-on, Meyer needed an income. Emery Huse, the Kodak bigwig who’d helped RM get into the 166th, wrote a letter of recommendation that got Meyer in with a San Francisco Kodak honcho named Bob Antz, a man who’d play a small but significant role in RM’s early career. Antz sent Meyer to Gene Walker, who ran an industrial film company bearing his name. Gene K. Walker Films churned out 16 mm promotional films for the likes of Southern Pacific Railroad, Standard Oil, and the Western Pine Association. Meyer would work on and off for approximately eight years as one of Walker’s chief cinematographers. “Walker was sort of a father figure towards him,” said Meyer cohort Jim Ryan.
During the war, RM had merely shot raw footage and turned it in, getting feedback only on his cinematography and coverage. At Walker’s, he’d get an education in making a finished product that was edited, had a soundtrack and told a story, however bland. “Industrial films, that’s where I learned my craft,” said Meyer. “You’d go out with three people and do everything.” With an earnest but robotic narrator’s ad-copy prose, intricate product montages, picture-postcard landscapes, and duller-than-white-bread content, this mathematical film style was an essential inspiration to Meyer’s filmmaking, although he’d warp it into something sexual and strange.
A number of Walker co-workers would assist in RM’s early productions, in particular Charles G. “Chuck” Schelling, a balding, bespectacled chap later to function as Meyer’s first soundman, editor, and occasional actor. RM’s job at Walker also provided an opportunity to travel, enabling him to reconnect with his army buddies while checking out local burlesque houses along the way.
Curiously, the one paramour in Russ Meyer’s life who would never step naked before his camera was his first wife. RM met Betty Valdovinos on the bus he’d board at Davis and 14th in San Leandro, bound for Gene Walker’s outfit on Commercial Street in San Francisco. A curvaceous, pint-sized Spanish-French hybrid, Betty worked at Mark Hopkins Hospital. Russ “was a wonderful, wonderful man,” said Betty, who maintained that Meyer was “shy” and not very experienced. “He was just very kind, very sweet, and very generous. He was a big, strong man, and when he’d run after me I’d cringe, because I’m only about five foot two. It would scare me to death. Russ had a way about him that was real man’s man. Macho.”
The pair dated for several years before marrying around 1949. Meyer was fond of recounting amorous evenings spent “parking” with Valdovinos in his Oldsmobile, but as far as marriage goes, he suggests in his autobiography that he acquiesced only after Betty made the announcement to friends and family while he was away on a business trip. At any rate, they slipped off to Vegas to tie the knot, with combat buddy Ralph Butterfield and his wife the only friends in attendance.
The newlyweds settled in San Francisco, renting an apartment Betty had found at 801 Pine Street, right down the street from her hospital job. “We kinda shared whatever we had, and it wasn’t much,” said Betty. Russ bought his wife a yellow Chevy. “We used to gallivant and rush all over at night,” she said. Betty remembered Russ as “always up and at ’em, ready to go, busy, always anxious to do things. He was never depressed. He was definitely driven—he wanted to make himself very important.”
RM’s friends liked Betty. “She was a lady,” said friend Dolores Fox. But Betty says she was left in the dark in regard to Meyer’s obsessions. Maybe it was the times, maybe he was too timid—or maybe he just knew Betty wouldn’t go for it. As associate Jim Ryan saw it, “I don’t think her ideas were theatrically oriented. Betty thought Russ should go to work every day and carry a lunch box.”
Betty would accompany Russ on visits to Lydia and Lucinda in San Leandro. “They never came to visit us, thank God.” Betty didn’t recall ever seeing a man present, so it is possible that Lydia’s marriage to Howard Haywood had already ended. “They were rough people. They were not what you would call the elite.” Betty described Russ’s mother as “a rough housewife, a farm woman who lived and worked hard—she
wasn’t smooth at all. She would say that I was like a butterfly, that I was beautiful. She would make big compliments all the time, and you knew that she was trying to keep me as a friend of hers. I felt sorry for her. She tried too hard to be nice.”
Storm clouds came quickly in the marriage. According to Meyer’s autobiography, Betty unexpectedly became pregnant early in the union. Since she clearly wanted a child, RM hints that it might not have been an accident on her part. Meyer claims that he “browbeat” her into an abortion, arranging the operation through a Chinese American doctor whom Henrye Bowen, an early Meyer mentor, knew in Oakland. Betty, however, has never confirmed either the pregnancy or the abortion. In any case, any dream of a white picket fence was soon shattered. “Betty and RM not living happily ever after,” wrote Meyer in A Clean Breast.
Around 1950 or so, war buddy Don Ornitz, now a photographer on magazine assignment for Globe Photos, came to visit the Meyers for a week with his wife and child. Although RM was still complaining about his friend’s screaming child some five decades later, a momentous discussion occurred one day while he and Don were walking the streets of San Francisco. In the course of an argument over politics—Ornitz senior had been one of the Hollywood Ten, and Don actually had the audacity to invite Meyer to a Communist Party meeting—the conversation somehow turned to Meyer’s future. Ornitz, recalling some natural-light portraits RM had done of his 166th comrades back at Wildbad Kreuth, suggested that Russ take advantage of the new girlie mag explosion by getting into glamour photography. Why, Ornitz himself was making good money from it. When Meyer complained he had no real experience, Don said, “What you lack in ability you’ll make up for in enthusiasm.”
Obviously Meyer needed little encouragement in this area—he’d already shot pictures of whatever strippers he could talk into peeling. Getting paid for such a task would be nirvana. Meyer hooked up with the Globe agency, and while the agency took 40 percent of the take on black-and-white shots and 50 percent for color, they had the skin magazine connections and could extract more generous fees than RM could ever wangle on his own. Meyer took to girlie photography hammer and tongs.
Perversely, Meyer found cheesecake—the most commonly used term for this photo work—offensive, preferring the bland assignation of figure photography. In later years he’d coin a colorful, much more crass, Meyerism for the endeavor: tittyboom. RM would shoot hundreds of layouts for magazines such as Gent, Fling, Escapade, Frolic, and scores of others. In our blasé age it is hard to imagine what an utterly clandestine affair photographing scantily clad women was then. Normal people just didn’t do such a thing. Pulp writer John Bowers recalled “nearly fainting” upon seeing his first nude woman at a photo shoot. “Back then it was done sneakily, and as a result it was more exciting, because it was hidden and outrageous.”
And it could also get you busted. Arv Miller, publisher and editor of Fling magazine, had a retoucher on staff just to excise pubic hairs. “If there was one strand of hair you could have trouble,” said Miller, and you had to be savvy about what could be gotten away with city to city or else you could lose your shirt. Due to a powerful Catholic faction, Chicago was a difficult territory, and Miller recalled a tense meeting with the God squad over an issue of Fling they found particularly offensive. “It was a face-to-face confrontation. They said, ‘Girls with large breasts are pornographic.’ That was an actual quote. The bigger the girls, the more obscene. I thought it was very funny, but I didn’t laugh too much. They convinced my Chicago distributor not to put the issue out. Those were very rough days.”
Selling the photos entailed more espionage. A magazine editor would be visited by a rep, “usually a Viennese guy,” who would be carrying “a briefcase full of sets,” as writer and former men’s magazine editor Bruce Jay Friedman explained. “They were contact pictures of an individual girl, shot by one of his photographers.” The editor would scan the contact sheets, circling with a grease pencil the shots that looked promising, then blowups would be made. The photographer didn’t get to pick what was used; Meyer admitted he would “often completely disagree with the editor’s choice.” The sheer volume of RM’s work meant not every Meyer pictorial is great—there’s also the occasional lapse into “art” layouts (à la “naked girl with watermelon”) or zany gag shots that are moldy at best—but when he connects, look out, because RM could make a dame look like she ruled the world.
Although it would take his second wife Eve to really light a match to his tittyboom career, Meyer met his first superstar in this department in the fall of 1950, and she would immediately (although unknowingly) cause the demise of his first marriage. Her name was Tempest Storm.
A self-described “freak with a forty-inch bosom,” Blanche Banks stood at Third and Main and stared up at the Follies Theatre. It looked less than impressive in the cold light of day with its neon asleep. Blanche had already blown off her first appointment the day before. She had planned on being a Las Vegas chorus girl, not shaking her ass in some smoky flesh palace like the Follies. But this was Los Angeles, not Vegas, and the Follies was the only portal into a world Blanche desperately wanted to be a part of.
Life hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries for Blanche, who was a mere twenty-two. Born March 1, 1928, in Eastman, Georgia, she’d been gang-raped by five men at the age of fourteen, endured attempted molestation at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather, escaped two failed marriages, and survived three abortions, the last of which nearly killed her. According to her autobiography, The Lady Is a Vamp, the only thing that saved Blanche were fantasies of movie stardom: “I did not have to accept a life of pain and degradation. I dreamed my way out of Eastman.” Blanche was a brunette, embarrassed by her crooked teeth, but had been both blessed and cursed with the sort of figure that would put sweat on a man’s brow: 39-24-39.
Cut to downtown Los Angeles, autumn 1950. There, in a shabby office behind the stage, a nervous Blanche came face-to-face with the matriarch of the Follies, a red-haired grandma named Lillian Hunt who also directed burlesque films shot right in her theater. Hunt barked at the young girl to take her clothes off, pronto. Lillian took a gander at Blanche’s outrageous proportions, then bust a gut when Banks inquired as to whether her breasts were too big. Apparently this little sparrow with the big chest hadn’t been in a burly-Q house before. “God didn’t make boobs too big for my business,” replied Hunt, who then instructed Blanche to shake a leg. “Let’s see that pelvis move!” shouted Lillian, who noted the youngster’s lack of grace and declared, “You just haven’t got it.” To which Blanche shot back, “I’m gonna make you eat those words one of these days.”
Struck by Blanche’s moxie, Hunt told her that if she laid off the men, booze, cigarettes, and sweets, she just might be a star someday and gave her the gig. Lillian also conjured up the monicker that made this dark-haired, porcelain-skinned beauty famous—Tempest Storm. Just how tempestuous Tempest could be soon became apparent when the newcomer got into a backstage dust-up with Follies headliner Lili St. Cyr.
Tempest had proved to be a quick study, and after only a handful of shows in the chorus line, Storm ascended to solo status, second-billed only to St. Cyr. The blond bombshell accused Storm of star sabotage, by way of dropping pins on the stage that pierced Lili’s bare feet, and of copping St. Cyr’s apparently trademarked running-of-the-fingers-through-the-hair. A showdown ensued, and Tempest, displaying the steely determination that has kept her afloat for over five decades of burlesque, pronounced St. Cyr a “so-called star.” To keep the peace, Hunt quickly transferred Storm to Oakland’s El Rey Burlesk Theater, where she was now a headliner making three and a half bills a week. Some punishment.
Tempest Storm soon became the star of her dreams, with Tinseltown wags declaring her infamous assets “the two biggest props in Hollywood.” Sensational romances with Mickey Rooney, Nat “King” Cole, Hugh O’Brian, Trini Lopez, Sammy Davis Jr., Engelbert Humperdinck, and Elvis Presley would plaster her pretty mug all over the scandal sheets. But
first came a whistle-stop at the El Rey, where she’d meet two men instrumental in kick-starting her career: Pete DeCenzie and Russ Meyer.
The El Rey Burlesk Theater was a fifteen-hundred-seat venue open from noon to midnight with a late show on Saturday, where mangled prints of B-movies unspooled between three live shows a day. Well known on the burlesque circuit, the El Rey featured the usual motley assortment of dancers, a chorus line, a small orchestra, and some flea-bitten comics.
A scrappy entrepreneur named Pete DeCenzie owned and ran the El Rey from its birth in 1950 until its demise eight years later. Oakland restrictions were such that “you couldn’t take your clothes off as long as the lights were on,” as burlesque queen Tura Satana recalled. Even stranger, “if you were nude, you could not move.” DeCenzie’s response was a contrivance called Pictures in Poses, during which the almost-bare froze in place to depict paintings by “the great masters.” As long as they didn’t move, it was art—and Pete didn’t get busted.
Pete had been around the block a time or two and knew how to grease palms as well as wheels. With his graying buzz cut, bushy eyebrows, and flat, friendly face, DeCenzie looked, as one scribe for the skin mag Adam put it, like a “cross between a retired lightweight fighter who has let the pounds pile up and an amiable racetrack tout.” Leisure time was devoted to his Australian showgirl wife, Yvonne, their two beloved dogs, and chasing skirt. “Pete was kind of a playboy; he loved the ladies,” said Satana.
Born in Seattle, DeCenzie had broken into show business as a kid, working at another Oakland burlesque house as a “candy butcher”—grindhouse lingo for one who hawks sweets in the aisles during intermission. Pete worked carnivals, sold magazine subscriptions, toured with girlie shows, and even did a stint with notorious exploitation film potentate Kroger Babb, appearing as a phony doctor who’d pitch “educational” books to the rubes attending Babb’s birth-of-a-baby shocker Mom and Dad.
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 7