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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Wilkinson first appeared onstage at age twelve as a ballerina but soon abandoned ballet, as she’d “begun to develop too much. Big bosoms and Swan Lake don’t go together.” By age sixteen June had a forty-one-inch bust and was already a striptease sensation in London. While touring America as “Miss Plastic Houseware,” June happened to flip through a copy of Playboy in Chicago and came to the conclusion her body looked better than any of the women displayed. She promptly rang the magazine, and Hugh Hefner himself answered the phone. They shot a layout in the wee hours of that same night, due to which Hefner dubbed her “The Bosom.” She was just seventeen years old.

  Just prior to her Chicago trip Wilkinson had signed a movie deal with Seven Arts, and the studio hit the roof when they found out about the Playboy layout. Their solution was to capitalize on it, hiring the Rogers & Cowans publicity firm to make Wilkinson “the most photographed nude in America.” The person they called upon to assist them in this quest was Russ Meyer, who was given a six-month exclusive. Due to the Seven Arts contract, Wilkinson made nothing, but according to one account Meyer reaped fifty grand from the endless photo sales. The pictures RM shot of Wilkinson are particularly electrifying. There’s something unbridled about June, like a Roman candle in hot pants, and Russ was just the man to light the fuse.

  One thing Meyer excelled at was the photo essay, a ludicrous little story that provided an excuse (however scant) for some female to drop her drawers. Typical is “Beauty and the Bust,” a 1958 layout for Adam starring June. Meyer accompanies Wilkinson on a trip to “a smart modern building located in Van Nuys,” Paulette’s Custom Made Brassieres. Paulette Firestone is a cheerful Australian whose genius lies in making industrial-strength uplift sexy via such contraptions as “the Accentuator.” “You’ve got to remember they’re nothing but two big balls of fat,” instructs Paulette. “No bone structure, no muscles—that’s why they need support.” Looking at this layout in these seen-it-all times is tantamount to decoding hieroglyphs—absurd, innocent, ignorant fun. At one point in the story Wilkinson is noted as having nicknamed her most famous assets “my chubbies.”

  Russ Meyer approached glamour photography with his usual fiendish intensity. Charlie Sumners recalled standing in a field with RM for three hours getting eaten alive by gnats waiting for the right cloud formation. He had a bugaboo for razor-sharp focus and would later fire a few camera operators and argue with an award-winning cinematographer over the same. That was Meyer—no detail spared, nothing left to chance. Meyer ripped out the passenger seat of his little German DKW so he could pack it full of equipment, then use it as a work space in the field. He’d load film into three M-3 Leicas, each ready with 125 mm, 50 mm, and 35 mm lenses. A Rollei camera was dragged along for color work (for still work, Meyer preferred black and white).

  The artifical feel of studios and strobe lights left Meyer cold. Meyer preferred the flattering, warm look of open shade and natural light. Coarse textures were often his backdrop: big rocks, sand and surf, the weathered wood of old barns. Locale was all-important. An untamed landscape revved his engine. He went for simple but dramatic effects, such as a spirited close-up of a girl chewing on the ends of her hair. Meyer shot wide apertures—usually f 5.6—which made for shallow depth of field, resulting in soft backgrounds and a dramatic composition centered on the model. It was all about the girl.

  If complete nudes were to be done, Meyer demanded that the model not wear undergarments for three hours before the shoot—they left wrinkles in the flesh. Russ liked makeup and lots of it. He combed through the model’s wardrobe beforehand, leaning toward form-fitting capri pants, short shorts, and the boost of a merry widow corset. He liked nothing better than a too-snug sweater, a few buttons undone to highlight the treasures within.

  “We never had a concept, we just had locations,” said June Wilkinson. “It wasn’t like doing a big Playboy shoot today. There was never a makeup artist, never a hairdresser, never a clothes consultant—it was ‘OK, there’s the camera, here’s me, let’s see what we can get.’ ” Wilkinson found RM to be the opposite of master Hollywood portrait photographer George Hurrell, who’d spend hours laboring over one shot. Meyer was in a frenzy to capture the moment, throwing himself into each shoot with the gusto of an action painter. “With Russ it was clickclickclick,” said Wilkinson.

  The shoot would start out early in the day with Meyer splurging for breakfast, invariably at “some kind of hole in the wall,” as June recalled. “Russ was not comfortable in fancy restaurants.” The pair would then zoom off to some remote locale where the entire universe boiled down to just a passionate, somewhat crazed shutterbug, one beautiful naked female, and the wild blue sky. Give RM a saucy dame, a transparent negligee, and a backlit clearing in the woods and anything was possible. There are Meyer shots of Anita Ekberg with only a towel as a prop that are hot enough to pop a thermometer.

  “My glamour is of a very provocative nature,” wrote Meyer. “There are those who say I have a reputation for exaggerated posing. . . . I heartily concur.” Meyer liked his women to be comin’ at ya, thrusting, stretching, kicking, bending their bodies into curve-crazy displays that make a mouth water. It’s a pity Meyer never shot any kind of 3D, as his compositions beg for it. And all those low angles—his women look fifty feet tall, flesh skyscrapers. It’s fitting that June Wilkinson would remark that Meyer came across like a little boy, because frequently the females in his photos and films are shot from precisely that kid’s-eye view.

  Meyer preferred intensive three-hour sessions with no break for lunch. Candy bars and a thermos of ice water were the only available fuel. “I have learned fron unfortunate experience that taking a lunch break leads to difficulties,” wrote RM. No sleepy or sluggish models for him. Nor was he keen on blasé, seen-it-all types. As the shutter whirred, he’d force them to count their toes or do something equally pointless just to break them out of their mental rut. He’d cajole a model into endless chatter to free her mind. If she was an actress, he’d have her recite lines from her last part. The goal was to “direct her into expressing herself in a manner of ‘unawareness’ ” to reach “plateaus” where the poses came fast and easy.

  Meyer was a powerhouse. What all of RM’s women remember—and what they all responded to—was his galvanic energy. He’d hurl one compliment after another at his models, and there was no doubt he was genuinely excited to watch ’em strut their stuff. “Russ was like a big kid. He would be so enthusiastic—‘Oh, June, that is great! Stick your breasts out, oh, oh, oh—huge! Oh, you look great! That is fabulous!’ And he’d make you feel like you were fabulous.”

  But for all his lust, RM didn’t lech. Wilkinson echoes the words of many a Meyer model when she says, “Russ never made any moves towards me, there was never any time that I felt uncomfortable. If he touched my naked body to move me, it was never sexual.” At this point, dare it be said, there was still something innocent about Russ Meyer. And one woman was never far from his mind. “Russ used to talk about Eve all the time, all the time,” said Wilkinson. “How wonderful she was, and that he never met anybody like her in his life. He was so in love at that time it was unbelievable. He could not wait to get home to Eve every night.”

  Despite his smashing success as a photographer, Russ Meyer had another dream gnawing at his soul—that of the mighty silver screen. Sometime in the early to mid-fifties he joined Local 659, the San Francisco branch of the Hollywood cameramen’s union, shooting some military training films. More important, Meyer then participated in his first exploitation movie, a tawdry, decidedly nonunion abortion exposé entitled The Desperate Women. “The abortion racket,” said Meyer, was “a very safe way to deal with sex—showing it as a real crime.” This sixty-nine-minute adults-only feature, circa 1954–55 (dates vary), dealt with “innocent women who put their lives and reputation into the shameful hands of men whose alliances are with the underworld,” that is, the fiendish backstreet abortionist. (Meyer would revive this clichéd character—complete wit
h Coke-bottle glasses—for a short scene in 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.)

  RM shot the film completely on location, allowing its makers to peddle it as “a jolting documentary.” A disapproving police chief chased the production out of San Francisco, into Berkeley and Oakland, but Meyer, always happy to outfox a cop, flashed his old war cinematographer’s card to gain access to some army land at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately the film is lost. All that remains is a handful of stills and a lurid campaign pressbook.

  “Shall I Take the ‘Easy’ Way Out?” blared shrill ads featuring an angst-ridden Eve Meyer, for whom Russ had finagled a small part. It was the classic exploitation attack—prey on the ignorance and fears of the general public while simultaneously titillating them with promises of seeing the unshowable, in this case “facts of life heretofore only whispered [about] behind closed doors.” The distributor helpfully provided copies of a cheap pamphlet whipped up for the film, “Sex—Happiness or Tragedy?” (written by an alleged doctor from the American Institute of Family Relations), to bilk the rubes in the audience out of a buck under the guise of “education.” No doubt Meyer had learned a thing or two about the carny approach of the grindhouse world from Pete DeCenzie.

  It was time for Russ Meyer to invade Tinseltown. After a brief stop in Canoga Park, he and Eve moved into a smart Hollywood home on Evanview Drive just down the street from Sammy Davis Jr. Meyer had done industrial films, cheesecake, and an exploitation picture. Now he’d combine all these disparate elements in one very idiosyncratic film. After a late-night poker game between Meyer and his cardsharp cronies, a plot would be hatched to pool some pocket change and make a rinky-dink flick starring a bevy of naked broads and one somewhat odiferous combat buddy. Who could’ve predicted the outcome? As no less than Ed Wood Jr. himself wrote, “The Immoral Mr. Teas changed the look of the nudie movies once and forever.” Cinema would never be the same, and neither, certainly, would Russ Meyer.

  The Immoral Mr. Meyer

  Each film must begin with me. I am the idea. I’ve got to have the hard-on.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Pete DeCenzie was down on his luck. He’d been chiseled out of the El Rey Theater by political skullduggery. “It took a freeway to put me out of business,” he said. “They built it right through the theater.” Stopping in San Diego with his shopworn traveling girlie show, Pictures in Poses, he gave Russ and Eve a ring at their Hollywood home. Russ and Eve hopped in the car and headed south. Pete was still squeezing the last bit of juice out of French Peepshow, schlepping a tattered print from town to town. It was a far cry from the halcyon days of the El Rey and Tempest Storm.

  Over dinner that night in a tony joint called Anthony’s, DeCenzie, still gaga over Meyer’s way with a movie camera, broached the subject of another collaboration. He wanted Russ to make a nudist picture. One of the stranger exploitation genres to hit it big in the fifties, nudist films were just that: cheap documentaries of average citizens awkwardly hiding exposed genitalia behind volleyballs. Meyer felt they generally escaped being busted on the grounds that bodies this fucking ugly couldn’t possibly appeal to anybody’s prurient interest. Posters for nudist films pitched beautiful and unlimited skin, but that was part of the grindhouse tease: promise them everything, show ’em nothing. Sagging asses were not for Russ Meyer. It was a matter of aesthetics. RM was about beauty; that is, a male fantasy of female perfection. As he so poetically put it, “The man on the street gets sick of seeing oatmeal on his wife’s housecoat and curlers in her hair.” Thus, no nudist colony exposé for Meyer. There had to be another way.

  Meyer dropped Pete back at a flophouse too depressing for a nightcap. Bidding his friend DeCenzie adieu, he and Eve drove off into the night. But the seed had been planted—somehow Meyer was going to make his own movie. Once it was one for the history books, RM would fully credit his partner, even though he’d fall out with Pete like just about everybody else in his life. Meyer had to admit, “Pete DeCenzie supplied the fire, the urge, the desire.”

  DeCenzie went back on the road with his threadbare girlie show while a vague idea for a motion picture fermented in Meyer’s fertile mind. Life on Evanview Drive was good. Meyer was shooting scads of tittyboom photos for Globe and, despite going out of their way to discourage him upon his arrival in town, the Hollywood cameramen’s union now needed him. The advent of live TV shows meant more work than available bodies, and because of this Meyer was drafted into a very lucrative gig shooting stills for shows such as Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and The Fugitive.

  Out on location to cover the filming of James Dean’s last picture, Giant, Meyer endeared himself to the sullen superstar by lending him a tripod for his after-hours amateur work. When it came time for Dean to do a scene pacing around his oil well, he took one look at the gaggle of still men clicking away and lost it, screaming, “No pictures! No pictures!” until he spotted Meyer: “Except for him.” Ever the bull in the china shop, RM would actually disrupt a Giant dialogue scene with his noisy Hasselblad, earning him a polite admonishment from director George Stevens. Once he’d seen the resulting magazine cover shot, Stevens sent Meyer a note saying that the annoyance had been worth it. Yes, life in Hollywood was damn good for Russell Albion Meyer. He’d even bought Eve a spanking new T-bird. And yet, movies . . .

  Russ Meyer cut quite a figure in the mid-fifties. A tall, imposing beefsteak of a man with a buzz cut and black, bushy brows knit together over an apelike face, to say nothing of the knockout blonde on his arm who was not only his wife but an income-generating nude model, this commie-hating former combat photographer could’ve easily passed for one of the testosterone cartoons that burst off the cover of For Men Only or one of the other pulpy rags in which his pictures sometimes apppeared. Somehow the guy charmed you.

  Those who knew Meyer at the time attest to his infectious enthusiasm, not to mention his unbridled appreciation for naked ladies. “Russ was a larger-than-life character, as odd as can be, very quick and quirky,” said his friend Irving Blum. “I really adored him. His movies were funny—not always in the way he intended—and he was like that in real life. Droll at times and at others gravely serious—to the point of hardly being able to deal with him. The guy had a very short fuse.

  “Russ took his game seriously, and if you took it as seriously as he, you were on his side. If somehow you stepped outside of that circle, he got pissed off. It could be anybody—a wife, a girlfriend, a business associate. Russ was a tiger. He wanted more than he had—and was determined to get it.”

  Pete DeCenzie showed up again a week or so later at Meyer’s Evanview Drive doorstep, just in time for the weekly Wednesday night poker game. It was a tight bunch: a few of the usual combat buddies—Ken Parker, Paul Fox, and Bill Teas—plus new friend E. E. “Mick” Nathanson, editor of the skin mag Adam. And the lovely Eve, of course. “Her laugh was extraordinary,” said Nathan-son. “I’d be at some party with a roomful of people and hear this deep booming laughter. I’d say, ‘Eve is here.’ ”

  William Ellis Teas is a curious character in Meyer history. A member of the 166, Bill Teas took some of the most riveting combat photos of World War II. But Bill liked his vodka and orange juice more than any tour of duty. Visitors to his home saw stacks of pictures tossed aside, many with first-place ribbons attached. A shy, stout fellow with a quizzical Sylvester P. Smythe face adorned by a salt-and-pepper goatee, Teas didn’t drive, dance, or swim. He had poor luck with women, with a tendency to fall for prostitutes. Bill “was always in love,” said Meyer. “He was the ultimate gamesman.” In Meyer’s autobiography there’s a Polaroid (no doubt snapped by RM) of a very elderly Teas resting his head between the naked silicone knockers of Meyer’s latest flame. He looks rather happy there.

  After the war Teas had worked for Meyer’s boss Gene K. Walker, doing what RM called “bong films,” slide shows that advance a frame every time a bong sounded. He’d lived with RM and his first wife in their San Fran
cisco apartment, much to the annoyance of Betty. “Teas is the kind of guy that comes to have dinner and he stays a year,” said Meyer. Bill had earned a reputation for being addicted to booze and poker, not to mention poor hygiene. “I couldn’t stand it—he wasn’t exactly a clean guy,” said Betty. “We’d have to say things to get him to take a bath. Poor Bill Teas. He was a fine guy, but he was a dirty man.” This flaw would not stand in the way of the very dubious sort of stardom that was about to descend on William Ellis Teas.

  This night, with Teas the only remaining straggler from the Evanview Drive poker crew, DeCenzie and Meyer spent the wee hours kicking around movie ideas. Russ wanted to do something along the lines of a girlie-mag layout he’d just shot featuring some lech ogling a naked girl—the look-but-don’t-touch game. Voyeurism was the technical name for it. In addition to Meyer’s personal fascination with the subject, there was a built-in element of self-protection. Meyer was game to push the nudity content but knew that any touchy-feely stuff would land him in the joint. If DeCenzie was brokenhearted over his nudist documentary idea heading south, there is no record of it. Whatever Russ wanted to do was OK with Pete, who’d match him dollar for dollar. The two created a motion picture company named for their initials—PAD-RAM Enterprises—and the making of Russ Meyer’s first real feature film was set in motion.

  Now they’d have to round up some women, of course, but they’d also need a memorable doofus to play the Peeping Tom. Meyer’s steely gaze landed on just the human question mark he needed, Bill Teas. “Teas had a satanic beard, liked orgies, hated water in any form and punched his hammy fist through windows when drunk,” Meyer recalled. “I thought he would be perfect for the role.”