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

by Jimmy McDonough

  DeCenzie made only one demand: first they had to have a title. Meyer was annoyed—they didn’t even have a goddamn movie yet. But the old exploitation carny would turn out to be on the money. And right there on the spot, looking over at their improbable leading man, DeCenzie came up with The Immoral Mr. Teas. It was just odd enough to stick with you.

  And so there on Evanview Drive, a stone’s throw from the gleaming, moneyed studios run by the Hollywood big boys, came a loose plan to make a girlie picture: Meyer would direct and DeCenzie would produce, with Bill Teas their unlikely star. The only one left with nothing to do was Eve. But Russ Meyer was too lost scheming and dreaming to notice.

  Take a peek at The Immoral Mr. Teas today and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. It’s just a quaint period curiosity featuring a bumbling dolt doing stale comedy of the sort associated with the baggy-pants burlesque comic. Although many of Meyer’s irks and quirks are already on parade, the best that can be said for the film is that its colorful photography intoxicates in a warm, noonday-sun kind of way. But one has to keep in mind again that the late fifties were a time, as critic Kenneth Turan has written, “when nothing more than a glimpse of female flesh was enough to send strong men reeling and begging for more.”

  1959: Eisenhower was president, Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur was the top movie draw, and Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” wafted out of transistors everywhere. This was the year of the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, a gas-guzzling luxury car with a monster V-8 engine that cost as much as a house and sported foot-high tail fins. Suburban sprawl was spreading everywhere. Americans had money to burn.

  Overt sexual content was creeping more and more into the culture. Somewhat tamed by 1959 (although Link Wray’s “Rumble” managed to be banned by many radio stations, despite its being a mere instrumental), the salacious content of R&B and rock and roll had outraged powers that be everywhere. The beatniks had raised their own particular brand of ruckus with 1957’s On the Road and Naked Lunch, published (albeit in Paris) in 1959. Still two years away from his first obscenity bust, Lenny Bruce made his television debut on Steve Allen’s talk show, the host introducing him as “the most shocking comedian of our time.”

  The Hollywood motion picture business was busy coping with all sorts of new changes. The studio system was coming to an end, television was a dreaded competitor, and exhibitors had been trying every gimmick to keep audiences coming to theaters, including 3D and various widescreen attempts. The big studios were also turning to adult fare that couldn’t be shown on the family TV—films like The Moon Is Blue (1953), Baby Doll (1956), The Apartment (1960), Psycho (1960), Elmer Gantry (1960), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962) meant sticking a toe into areas once reserved for that reviled strip of celluloid known as the exploitation film.

  A 1961 newspaper article discussing efforts in the California Senate to reform the movie industry (which also references an upset parent who’d seen teenagers attending a drive-in showing of The Immoral Mr. Teas) paraphrases a Democratic senator angry over the previous year’s Oscars, which had been given to two actresses playing prostitutes (Elizabeth Taylor for Butterfield 8 and Shirley Jones for Elmer Gantry), Burt Lancaster’s “preacher-seducer” (Elmer Gantry), and to Best Picture of the year, The Apartment, a movie “based on a man permitting business associates to use his apartment for clandestine affairs.”

  Operating in the shadows of the Hollywood studio industry, the exploitation picture business had already been around for forty years by the time Meyer made Teas. Originally a scrappy bunch known as the Forty Thieves—“itinerant carnival people,” as producer David Friedman describes them—these celluloid confidence men made their living off the taboo. The lowdown titles of their films told the story—Damaged Goods, She Shoulda Said No, Please Don’t Touch Me, Is Your Daughter Safe?, The Road to Ruin, Race Suicide, Around the World with Nothing On, Fear of Childbirth, Test Tube Babies, Narcotic Dens of the Orient. Abortion, unwed mothers, sexually transmitted diseases, burlesque strippers, drug addiction, nudists, bloodthirsty rituals of faraway tribes . . . whatever Hollywood couldn’t show you, the exploitationers sold you—although what wound up on the screen rarely delivered all the lurid poster had promised outside. These were “films that showed absolutely nothing, but had a heavy advertising pitch,” as Meyer noted.

  Cranked out over a long weekend while no one was looking and sometimes even sold from the trunk of a car, these two-bit pictures starring yesterday’s almost-stars were down-and-dirty affairs. They played inner-city grindhouses, drive-ins, and theaters that happened to have a hole to fill or were available for rent. Distributors would shuttle their product state to state, cutting the tattered print according to whatever local censorship laws would allow, and in the case of sex hygiene pictures, a bogus doctor was enlisted for an intermission spiel that ended in hawking “educational” booklets to the rubes. These independent rogues were marginalized and detested by the mainstream film world, and yet Hollywood would directly benefit from the censorship battles they fought—and often wound up imitating their product once any smoke had cleared.

  Sex, or more accurately some promise of sex, was a major ingredient of the exploitation picture. Until Meyer showed up, those looking for illicit thrills got their fix either via stag films—short, illegally made hard-core sex reels that were privately shown (and which had been around since the beginning of the movie industry)—or from such exploitation fare as the aforementioned nudist documentaries, sex hygiene pictures, or saucy melodramas that had a moral tacked on the end condemning any hanky-panky that had come before it (a device to blunt public outcry and censorship harassment). Sheathed in a velvet glove for the more sophisticated set was the foreign “art” film, like Roger Vadim’s 1957 Brigitte Bardot wowser, And God Created Woman. Before she was Hedy Lamarr, Hedy Kiesler first appeared on these shores going for a nude swim in 1933’s Ecstasy, and after numerous free-publicity court battles, the picture was a smash exploitation hit. Meyer ridiculed these films as well, complaining, “There’s a lot of promise but never . . . fulfillment. They would always cut to the curtain blowing.”

  With the utter craziness of the sixties right around the corner, times were ripe for change. And while Meyer might’ve regarded the nudist film with derision, producer Walter Bibo’s costly courtroom battle to free his 1954 color nudist epic The Garden of Eden from legal harassment eventually led to a federal judge declaring that “nudity per se is not obscene,” a statement that certainly changed the rules of the game for the moviemakers like Meyer, and similar court cases were helping put state-run censor boards out of business everywhere.

  Russ Meyer had arrived on Hollywood’s doorstep at just the right moment to raise a ruckus. Meyer would bring increasingly higher budgets, a new level of technical sophistication, and a high-profile presence to the exploitation business. He’d be the link joining the exploitation world to the Hollywood studios. But first he’d birth a new sort of picture, called for obvious reasons the nudie-cutie, and this begat an entire genre known as the sexploitation film, unleashing new sexual freedom on the screen, not to mention the complete fury of those fire-and-brimstone types desperate to control what the general populace can see. Russ Meyer would drive them all crazy, and he’d relish every minute of the battle.

  “It mustn’t come across as some kind of great planning,” instructed Meyer years later while discussing The Immoral Mr. Teas with biographer David K. Frasier. “I did it as I went along.” He’d stress again and again that the movie was just a dumb idea whose time had come. “Teas was a fluke, an absolute fluke. I had no real idea when I started. All I had was Teas, three girls, and my dentist and my attorney for assistants.”

  Irving Blum—a habitué of the Evanview poker soirées later to become a renowned art dealer—recalled the hazy origins of Meyer’s movie. “A bunch of us evolved the idea of Teas. Virtually all of it was hatched at these poker games. I helped a little bit in writing it. It all evolved from a James Thurber story, The Secret Life
of Walter Mitty.” Mick Nathanson recalled Meyer’s enthusiasm for French filmmaker Jacques Tati, to whose bumbling, bicycle-riding M. Hulot Teas certainly bears a passing resemblance. Nathanson remembers Meyer screening a bunch of unfinished footage for his friends and asking for their story input. Some woman whose name no one can remember offered up the psychiatrist ending that was used.

  “Written on the back of a laundry ticket,” the actual story of Teas didn’t amount to much. Our straw-hatted hero Bill Teas delivers false teeth via bicycle. Mr. Teas is a figure of ridicule—even children bean the sad sack. The world at large fails to note his existence. He wanders around like the invisible man, staring at women who don’t even notice he’s alive. A shot of painkiller in the dentist’s chair leads to naked reverie: Teas now sees women without clothes, even after the shot wears off. He spends the rest of the film helplessly ogling every woman in his path. Not one of them does he approach. “There was no contact, no attempt at lovemaking, no sex,” said Meyer. And shockingly unlike the grindhouse wonders that preceded it, there was no punishment or apology for his behavior. The end of the film has Teas returning to his female psychiatrist’s office for help. Instead she too appears before his eyes naked as a jaybird. “Some men just enjoy being sick,” says our chipper narrator.

  Nobody took Meyer’s folly too seriously, except of course RM himself. “Frankly, I didn’t have the most extraordinary conviction regarding the thing; it was absolutely a lark,” said Irving Blum. “It was really Russ who had the drive and the will to see it through.” Nathanson remembered Meyer—who smoked at the time—being so involved in a shot he didn’t notice a lit cigarette butt burning away under his feet. This was what RM was born to do, and second-degree burns weren’t going to intrude.

  Meyer was also determined to shoot Teas on color Kodak film stock, and given the conservative nature of the company and the times, it might not have happened had it not been for a friend Russ had at Kodak, Ray Grant. “He put his job on the line,” said Meyer. “He told his supervisors that we were making an experimental comedy filled with nudity and that he would personally be on the set at all times to make sure nothing objectionable was being done.” In addition, Meyer had hooked up with a man named Adrian Mosser, who had just developed a revolutionary liquid gate process that minimized emulsion scratches in 16 mm to 35 mm blow-ups. Not only was Meyer making “an experimental sex comedy,” he was now a technological guinea pig of great interest to the industry. “Even Walt Disney was curiously interested in what would happen,” bragged RM.

  So far, so good. But where was the female flesh? Rounding up women for The Immoral Mr. Teas wasn’t as easy as RM had hoped. Models for still pictures were one thing, but if “you put ’em in a movie, it smacked of heinous stag films. It was almost slammer time,” Meyer said. Earl Leaf, a well-known Hollywood glamour/celebrity photographer who lived in a thatched-hut Hollywood Hills hideaway and who appears as himself in an unbilled cameo (a number of the men in Teas didn’t care to have their faces shown, adding to the odd, disembodied feel of the film), supplied one of his own models, Ann Peters, a Las Vegas showgirl and Meyer’s favorite in the movie.

  Pete DeCenzie brought in a pair from the burlesque circuit, Mikki France and Alaskan beauty Marilyn Wesley. Doris Sanders had modeled for Adam, Michelle Roberts arrived courtesy of a young guy Meyer described as “the heir to a vast fortune,” one Paul Morton Smith, who Meyer claimed was “interested in breaking into photographing girls naked. And he wanted to get laid.” Dawn Denielle was found walking down Sunset Boulevard. Meyer was ballsy and relentless: if he spotted a woman who measured up to his demanding requirements, he would “come on like a steam engine, telling them that they would all be stars. Lying through my teeth.” Each of the women got a hundred dollars a day. “If any of those girls had lines to speak, [they] would’ve been dead,” said Teas at the time, who felt compelled to remind the world at large that these beauties were “not actresses.”

  There would be one more nude, albeit uncredited and headless. June Wilkinson’s naked torso materializes in a door panel as Teas juggles melons. In deference to her Seven Arts film contract, “Russ said to me, ‘June, I beg you—I’m doing my first movie. I just want your breasts. I swear to you I won’t show your face.’ ” Wilkinson was so grateful to Meyer for boosting her career that she even did the shot gratis. Many recognized that extraordinary cleavage anyway. “Breasts are like fingerprints,” said Wilkinson. “No two are alike.”

  Padding the rest of the cast were friends Mick Nathanson, Pete DeCenzie (seen in the dentist’s chair and managing a burlesque theater whose in-joke banner trumpeted past glory French Peep Show), combat buddy Ken Parker’s daughter Paula as the Hula-Hooping brat who nicks Teas in the head with a rock, and Meyer himself, who appears as part of a burlesque show audience hollering for the main attraction. In lieu of a salary, Bill Teas was cut in for 2 percent of the gross (a deal Pete and Eve objected to that would cause a little anger down the line). “I got a lot more out of him because he had a piece of the action and I didn’t have to pay him,” said RM.

  Discreet locations were another concern. Meyer’s dentist Don Couch offered the use of his Van Nuys office (he also plays himself in the film, which he crewed on as well), an army buddy snagged a secretarial office in Brentwood, and Teas himself scored an ice cream parlor in Westwood. The rest of the interiors were done at the Meyer home, much to Eve’s annoyance. RM also required outdoor locations, which obviously had to be free from prying eyes. An attorney friend offered his beachfront land in Malibu, and a lake was rented in the Malibu Mountains for a hundred dollars a day. Everything had to be done on the QT, as Meyer had to keep the cops at bay. Ken Parker, who worked as a police photographer, “had heard a rumble that they were going to bust us,” said Meyer. Luckily they didn’t quite know where the shoot was taking place (RM kept locations a secret until cast and crew had driven there), allowing Parker to act as a decoy, leading the police in the wrong direction as Meyer charged off in an Econoline van full of equipment and women.

  The main shoot for The Immoral Mr. Teas was done over a long weekend sometime in 1958 and lasted approximately four days. “I always started with the girl with the biggest tits, and that was Ann Peters,” said Meyer. “She had the best body, the most conical breasts.” Teas recalled RM directing the silent “like one of the old timers” with a megaphone. “Sometimes we wouldn’t even rehearse a scene. Russ would start his camera and yell at me, and something would come of it.”

  “I just had that built-in ability like any so-called photo-journalist to make something out of nothing,” said Meyer, who needed only the secluded lake, three naked girls, and a schlub in a straw hat to shift his imagination into high gear. Innocent shenanigans of the women paddling by in a canoe while Teas ogles not one but a trio of live naked women would constitute the film’s big finale. Mick Nathanson remembers having to hide out of camera range behind the boat, physically propelling it as none of the nude girls inside could actually row. Nathanson also had to coax a dubious Teas to take a pratfall into the drink, and when viewing the movie later, members of the 166th were more excited by this accomplishment than by any epidermis on display.

  The wild card was the immoral one himself. “Teas, to a large part, was a drunk when we were making the movie,” grumbled Meyer, who maintained that the actor “was never terribly enthusiastic about anything. Unless it was crawling between the sheets with some chick.” Just such a scenario nearly undid the production on the third night of shooting. Keen to control the minions, RM had cast and crew stay at his house in sleeping bags and on cots, with two of the women cordoned off in a bedroom. Late one night after shooting had wrapped and Meyer was asleep, Ken Parker and Teas demolished a fifth of vodka as Bill whined that since he was the star of the show, he was entitled to some girlie action.

  As Parker drifted off to dreamland, Teas tried to slip into Marilyn Wesley’s bed. When she pushed him away, a frustrated Teas decided to quit the production and, after
calling a cab, charged into the bathroom, determined to shave off his now much-filmed goatee. At which point Parker—awakened by all the commotion—grabbed Bill’s mitt mid-razor, “wrestled him back into the sleeping bag, paid off the cab driver, and saved my career,” attested Meyer, who only learned of the incident later (Teas forever denied it occurred). After a mere half hour’s sleep, Bill was back before the camera, doing, RM stated, “his best work on a blistering hot day at the beach, nursing a vodka hangover.”

  With the help of Gene Walker crony John Link and editor Igo Kantor, Meyer began to edit his “glorified home movie,” and tinkering with those many bits and pieces of celluloid is an area where Meyer excelled. Don Couch, who worked on the picture, says the picture really had no script and that the actual story took shape only when RM started cutting.

  “What made these films—what made any of my films—is all the post production,” said Meyer. “Looking at what I had and saying, ‘That ain’t enough, we need more,’ and then you go back and shoot a sign or a tin can or a lamppost.” The original shoot might’ve been only four days, but once the picture began to take shape in the cutting room, Russ went to work methodically devising reshoots designed to polish any rough edges. In what would quickly become a Meyer tradition, Teas opens with a humorous industrial-film-style prologue. “Modern living is driving an ambitious civilization ever forward,” intones the narrator as grand images of Meyer’s America go marching by, such as a close-up of Mick Nathanson’s fingers operating the push-button transmission of his shiny Nash station wagon.

  Meyer had a real knack for photographing the shiny, new, and outrageous. Be it car, radio, or woman, Meyer made it all look like a million bucks. Eschewing flashy effects like zooms or tracking shots, he opted for endless angled setups, intricately intercut into dizzying musical montages that are just intoxicating, and Teas is no exception. Meyer’s films are sturdy, functional, and efficient, just like an old Rambler, and the only thing he ever did to soup ’em up was to make them run faster and faster by way of the cutting room.