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

by Jimmy McDonough

  It was there on the second floor of the Violet Apartments at 725 Leavenworth that Eve poured Russ a Scotch and soda, informing him right off the bat she absolutely detested moustaches. His offending facial hair would soon be duly sacrificed. For this was the beginning of a volcanic love affair, the greatest this self-described cad would ever know. For here stood the one woman who could handle Russ Meyer.

  “Eve was a great intimidator,” said Meyer proudly. Years later, when she worked behind the scenes hawking his skin flicks and collecting the take, he’d witness Eve angrily fling a $86,000 check in the face of a hapless Boston distributor who’d fallen behind. Declaring him a crook, she stormed out, leaving Russ to pocket the check with a smile.

  One of very few women capable of swimming in the sea of finless predators known as the exploitation film business, Eve could spew forth the most vicious, vitrolic letter to a deadbeat distributor only to sign off “With love and kisses, Eve Meyer.” More often than not they anted up. Few could resist this charming and sometimes diabolical southern belle. She possessed a high degree of financial acumen, had a throaty, unforgettable laugh, and was known to greet reporters wearing a Stetson hat and boots that pushed her already prodigious stature over six feet. Eve Meyer was a woman ahead of her time. As friend Floyce Sumners put it, “Eve was the first person that I ever saw wear pants and high heels.”

  And the first model to linger for any length of time in front of Meyer’s still camera. Eve would quickly become, as RM succinctly put it, “a national institution,” gracing the cover of countless men’s magazines as well as the centerfold for June 1955’s Playboy. Along with Betty Page, Diane Webber, June Wilkinson, Irish McCalla, and a handful of others, Eve Meyer was one of those archetypal amazons capable of giving many a fifties male fever dreams. Truly, she is as much a symbol of that decade as a pink Cadillac or a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Her image somehow conjures up those desperate drive-in fumblings with Bertha Lou’s brassiere as well as the smell of the best ballpark hot dog you ever gobbled down. As American, the saying goes, as apple pie, Eve’s living-doll figure and palpable joie de vivre made her the absolute perfect foil for Meyer’s full-on style. She oozed wanton carnality, with what RM lovingly describes as “purported insolence” lurking never far from that tempestuous surface. You definitely got the idea that if a poor, unwashed sap such as yourself was lucky enough to be in the actual physical presence of such a beauty, a slap to the kisser was at some point not only possible but probable.

  She was born Eve Turner in Atlanta on December 13, 1928. Working for Western Union, Eve was transferred to San Francisco, where she became a legal secretary for Pepsi company bigwigs. Eve liked to play poker, packed a fishing rod, and was a formidable cook who loved her turnip greens. Like Meyer, she’d been hitched once previously. RM fell for her “like a tall tree” but was somewhat flustered to find himself on the receiving end of a healthy dose of sexual aggression, with Eve “gang-tackling my jockeys from the outset.” When he begged off during a particularly hot and heavy late-night session at her apartment, timidly suggesting they wait for their wedding night to close the deal, she sent him packing. Arriving home to Lorraine Court, a deflated Russ discovered the half-carat engagement rock he’d given her earlier that night in his pocket. Wily Eve had slipped the ring off her finger and back into his pants as a protest against his sexual restraint. When Russ rang, hoping to cool her down, she hung up. Things remained just as fiery for the duration of their relationship. He called her Peach; she called him Punkin. “They were absolutely astonishing together,” said friend Irving Blum. “Where he was strong, she wasn’t, and where she was strong, he wasn’t. Eve was just right for him.”

  As RM’s beloved Li’l Abner wed Daisy Mae in the funny pages of 1952, so too did Russell Albion Meyer wed Eve Turner at 2 P.M. on August 2 of that same year at the Swedenborgian church on San Francisco’s Lyon Street. In attendance was a horde of Meyer’s combat buddies, their wives, and his mother. In his autobiography there is a picture of a radiant and delicate Eve checking her outfit in the mirror as Lydia lurks in the background, a grumpy bulldog in a drab dress. To say the least, Eve and Lydia would not become bosom buddies. Eve came to detest Meyer’s meddling mother and she let everyone know it. No doubt Lydia considered Eve just another “cow” not good enough for her Russell.

  Dolores Fox remembered the wedding as a stunning affair. “They had written their own vows. Eve was in a beautiful brown sheer shirtmaker’s shirtlace dress.”*1 Their betrothal led indirectly to Eve Meyer turning cheesecake. Eve had dabbled in a bit of modeling before but scoffed when RM asked her to disrobe for his Leica camera. He pestered her for months. “At first, Eve was cool towards my suggestion that she be my model,” said RM. “In fact, you might say she was downright nasty.” But Eve’s picture on their wedding invite had caught the eye of Meyer’s Globe Pictures rep, who, knowing Russ needed funds for the ceremony, suggested he shoot a few four-by-fives of his bride-to-be to see if they could peddle some glamour shots.*2 Eve relented, and on the very day of their nuptials Russ and Eve learned they’d sold their first cover portrait. It was far from the last.

  Eve Meyer in her birthday suit meant money in the bank. From 1952 to 1958, Eve’s body was on display in just about every men’s pulp on the newsstand—Night & Day, Fling, Modern Man, Photo, Frolic, Ogle—and RM peddled 8 mm films and stills of her mail order as well. “From Eve I can obtain results that I cannot as a rule get from any other model,” wrote RM in his 1958 quickie paperback girlie photo opus, The Glamour Camera of Russ Meyer. “Call it closeness.” Husband and wife, photographer and model. Meyer astutely realized that his desire for Eve charged their photographic collaborations in a particular and powerful way, something that went beyond shoot number 457 with model 168. RM found the arrangement with Eve thrilling, and not just because of the dough. “When you were through shooting you laid down the camera and jumped on her bones,” said Meyer. “It was so good for our marriage.”

  But Russ could be an absolute bastard. All that mattered was the picture. He was not above referring to his models as props and remained indifferent to their discomforts, even when said model was his wife. Eve recalled cracking during one particularly grueling session. Meyer had her nude, kneeling in various contorted poses under Death Valley’s white-hot sun. “The salt dug into my knees and the sun was cooking my bare back like a Fish[erman’s] Wharf lobster,” she said. Intent on finding just the right angle, Meyer ignored her complaints. “Finally I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I just got up and stalked away, bloody knees and all.” Meyer thrived on getting a rise out of his feisty wife, boasting that he had “obtained some of the most exciting pictures” right when she was ready to clock him.

  Meyer was utterly obsessed with photographing Eve. “I’d ride her ass to get her to pose,” he boasted. She’d eventually burn out on what she dubbed their “photosexual” relationship. “I got so I just hated that darkroom,” she said in 1971. “For six years we never had a vacation from it, never went anywhere without Russ’s camera.” Indeed. Shortly after their wedding, he’d even be compelled to photograph the empty postcoital bed in Eve’s apartment, publishing it almost fifty years later in his autobiography.

  “I am a romantic,” said Hugh Hefner. “My life has been a quest for a world where the words to the songs are true. A quest for that impossible ultimate romantic experience.”

  In November 1953, Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, and lurking within its pages was a nude shot of cover girl Marilyn Monroe, posing rather exuberantly against a red velvet backdrop, one of three such photos she’d done as a struggling actress hard up for cash in 1949. Hefner had bought the picture for 500 bucks, leaving only $100 in the budget to actually put together a magazine. The issue sold fifty thousand copies, thus enabling Hugh Hefner to quickly become “the first man to become rich by openly mass marketing masturbatory love through the illusion of an available alluring woman,” wrote Gay Talese. “Prior to Playboy, few men in Americ
a had ever seen a color photograph of a nude woman.”

  E. E. “Mick” Nathanson, later the editor of several girlie books Russ Meyer shot layouts for, recalled the very moment he first laid eyes on a copy of Playboy. “I sort of looked over my shoulder to see if anybody was watching this pervert reaching for this magazine. I picked it up and quickly flipped through a couple of pages. I thought, ‘My God!’ ” Nathanson put the magazine back and ran home to tell his wife what he’d just seen—“Nudity! Full nudity!”

  These days it is a bit hard to grok the effect Playboy had on an unsuspecting nation. It was a strange time. “The Fifties were not Happy Days and Grease,” said playwright Robert Patrick, who maintained the decade was “more like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Americans were automated. All thought was suppressed. No one was honest with anyone. It is possible that during the entire 1950s not one true word was spoken in the United States.”

  Into this button-down arena marched Playboy. Pipe-smoking, never-break-a-sweat Hef offered men an irresistible package deal, a world of scarily flawless women, nifty appliances, and a fully equipped rumpus room. It all seemed to whisper, “Follow my direction, my boy, and ye too shall have pussy, plus a Cadillac with fins.” “Hef’s genius was to associate sex with upward mobility,” said the Kinsey Institute’s Paul Gebhard.

  For its eighteenth issue in June 1955, Playboy’s centerfold would be none other than Eve Meyer, shot by husband Russ. Although he’d at least double the number in interviews, RM shot only three gatefolds for Playboy—Marguerite Empey (aka Diane Webber), Yvette Vickers, and Eve—plus a handful of other non-foldable layouts. The most significant pinup would be his wife. Prior to the Eve centerfold, Hefner had just bought already existing shots from cheesecake photographers, invariably studio-shot “art” poses like the infamous Marilyn nude.

  Hefner had other ideas. “I’m the guy who wanted to put it into a different sort of setting, make it less a sort of impersonal pinup, actually tell a little story.” He had art director Arthur Paul sketch out a blueprint for Meyer, who turned it into a photograph: a nearly nude Eve lying alone by a roaring fireplace, not one but two wine glasses nestled in the shag carpet before her. Most potent of all, Eve stared back at the viewer as if to say, “Hey, buster, I’ve reserved this very spot for you.” With this centerfold, Hefner had catapulted the voyeur directly into the story, intensifying the deadly illusion of possibility. It was just one of those dangerous ideas whose time had come, like heroin or Twinkies.

  Another man on a quest to turn the impossible into flesh, Meyer would follow Hefner’s lead. They would not become friendly until some years later, after RM became a filmmaker. Although very different creatures, they would share a certain intensity and single-mindedness, as well as the curious fact that both lost their virginity relatively late in life at age twenty-two. And they seemed as impenetrable as their creations. If you spilled your deepest secrets, would either of them notice? These guys were owned by their dreams.

  Booty from men’s magazines enabled the Meyers to move into an ocean-view apartment on 47th Avenue. RM continued working for Gene K. Walker, but more and more the emphasis was on his own photography. One day Walker called him into his office and informed him that some of his clients weren’t too thrilled to learn that Meyer had a second life cranking out skin shots for the likes of Peep Show magazine. Gene offered Russ a financial incentive to jettison the girlie mag work for good. Meyer was at a crossroads—back down, or finally go solo. He talked it over with Eve, but there was never a question what Meyer would do. Freelance work promised no steady paycheck, but Eve backed her man 100 percent. No longer able to slip into Walker’s after hours to mooch off the photographic resources, RM assembled a darkroom in his apartment and taught Eve the ropes. Soon she was not only posing in the buff for his pictures but getting dressed to develop them herself.

  “I am clearly in the business of producing glamour pictures for magazines for the express purpose of making money,” wrote Meyer in 1959. “I won’t go as far as to say this is the only reason; but I will say it is the primary one.” But Meyer noticed a funny thing when it came to selling his product. Pictures of a modestly endowed model like actress Joan Collins sold only once, while more superstructured models sold over and over. RM’s tastes seemed to jibe with many of the Joe Six-Packs of the world, so he zeroed right in on the area that interested him most. “I stress the bosom department in all of my photographs because I believe that this more than anything else says to me ‘This is woman.’ ” The obsession was only beginning.

  The zillion or so images Meyer snapped of Eve provided a very useful purpose: RM learned how to photograph a woman from every conceivable angle and in every setting. This allowed him to master the craft of photography. If the 1950 El Rey shots of Tempest Storm are the Meyer version of the Sun Studios sound—crude, gloriously rough around the edges, and straining to contain a thunderous energy—by the mid-fifties RM was early Elvis at RCA: a bit slicker, perhaps, but in full command of his talents.

  Simply put, during his marriage to Eve, Meyer learned how to nail the big personalities of the women he was photographing on a tiny piece of film. At the same time he also figured out how to refine a sexy idea down to its barest essence. The best example of this is what I call the “female explosion” pictures, the penultimate of these being RM’s cover shot of Virginia “Ding Dong” Bell for the August 1959 Sir Knight (volume 1, number 8, to be precise). The picture is deceptively simple: Bell, in an outrageously skimpy burlesque costume, looking at the camera, hands behind her head, sucking in her gut and sticking out her most ample stuff, standing in front of some paint-splashed “beatnik” mural. Other photogs shot Bell, and, well, there’s times when she looks like—forgive me, Virginia, wherever you are—maybe she traveled a little too long with the carnival (producer Dave Friedman, who made a nudie movie with her, maintained she exuded zero sexiness in person). In Meyer’s photo, Virginia’s a fleshy firecracker, way too hot to handle. Everything about this shot is perfecto: the pose, the garish color, how Bell’s crazy tangle of red hair sits on her head, and, most of all, the way her big red lips are open much too wide to suggest anything less than a misdemeanor. I mean, she’s too damned hot. It’s so over the top it’s funny. You know when you drink a Coke too fast and it zaps your brain? That’s the feeling this writer gets, only head a little south. I look at this picture and see those mythic Party Lights Claudine Clark sang of so desperately. I hear far-off voodoo drums beating in the night. And I want to ride Miss Bell like a pony, don’t you?

  Not too far in the future Meyer would apply these skills to motion pictures, and the effect would be deadly.

  With photos of Eve selling like hotcakes, Russ Meyer’s career with Globe Photos exploded. West Coast Globe rep Charlie Bloch took a liking to Russ and threw many an assignment his way. Along with Andre de Dienes, Peter Gowland, Bunny Yeager, and others, Meyer was one of the top glamour photographers of the fifties. He also started shooting movie stars, although in a rare admission of failure he admitted that he did “a very inept job” with his first assignment, Ava Gardner.*3 He quickly found his feet, though, and went on to photograph some of the most beautiful women of the decade, among them Elizabeth Taylor, Tina (Gilligan’s Island) Louise, Joan Collins, Lili St. Cyr, Ruta Lee, Mamie Van Doren, Barbara (I Dream of Jeannie) Eden, Fay Spain, Sabrina, Greta Thyssen, Gina Lollobrigida, Cleo Moore, Jill St. John, Joi Lansing, Jayne Mansfield, Yvette Vickers (as she sprawled bottomless on a couch near a turntable and records while shooting her scintillating Playboy centerfold, RM instructed her to sneer like Elvis), and Anita Ekberg, who Meyer declared was hands down the most beautiful female he ever photographed. This was the apex of his tittyboom period. Three women in particular from this era really lit up Meyer’s viewfinder: Eve Meyer, Diane Webber, and June Wilkinson.

  Meyer struck glamour gold for the second time with Diane Webber, a fine-featured, long-haired brunette whose earthy figure fit Meyer’s rugged landscapes like the last pi
ece in a jigsaw puzzle. She’s the first of his nature nymphs, a reoccurring figure in his films best essayed by the actress Haji. A serious nudist, Webber possessed the slightly wacky appeal of an artsy, somewhat ethereal beatnik chick who’d dropped out of some East Coast Ivy League school to play bongoes and find the inner she. There’s an offbeat glint in her eye, as if she might suddenly start talking about shamans or break into an inopportune interpretive dance at your parents’ fiftieth-anniversary dinner.

  RM shot Webber’s second Playboy layout for the February 1956 issue, part of a slew of Meyer photos that show her at her most astoundingly voluptuous. The secret? According to Meyer, she was a few months pregnant, rendering her breasts even more enormous than usual. (Meyer would develop quite a knack for the knocked-up model, starring at least three slightly swollen females in his films.) He later shot a short feature of Webber entitled This Is My Body to accompany his 1959 opus The Immoral Mr. Teas, but later pulled it from circulation, bemoaning the crude fact that her body just wasn’t the same after childbirth. She disappeared completely from the limelight once her modeling days were through, becoming a Van Nuys dance instructor, surfacing briefly as a somewhat unwilling interviewee for Gay Talese in his 1980 study of sexual mores, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. As far as modeling went, Webber “did it for the money,” said Meyer. “She looked upon the whole thing as being ridiculous.” On to the next dame.

  “This is the third girl I’ve found who is going to make me a fortune,” said Russ Meyer of British model June Wilkinson in 1958. “The first was Eve, the second Diane Webber. Man, this is IT!” A tall, cocky blonde with a wicked smile, obscenely long legs, and a figure that would turn Barbie green with envy, Wilkinson had a good-sport aura that suggested she not only wouldn’t mind a dirty joke but might know a few filthier ones herself.