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

by Jimmy McDonough

  A film, especially a silent one, needs music, and Meyer found a kid hungry enough to come up with it. Edward J. Lakso—later to bless us with TV themes for the likes of Charlie’s Angels—was an aspiring musician and writer fresh out of UCLA and desperate to get into the business. He first met the Meyers on the set of Operation Dames, a threadbare 1959 war drama directed by a war buddy of RM’s that Lakso had scripted for a few grand and which Eve had starred in.

  Lakso’s initial encounter with Russ was a memorable one. RM had to do a location shoot with his wife and asked Edward to lend a hand. Off into nature they went, Lakso unaware of precisely what a shoot with Russ entailed. “Meyer goes, ‘All right, Eve, do your thing’—and she strips to the buff! I wasn’t expecting it and started dropping things.” A nonplussed Meyer asked Lakso if there was something wrong. “It never occurred to Russ that you gotta prepare the average man for something like that.”

  Meyer offered Lakso two hundred bucks to score Teas. Anxious to stick a foot in the door, Lakso took the gig, inquiring as to how many musicians he could hire. “You can hire all you want—you’re still only getting two hundred,” was RM’s response. Lakso joined two friends in some cheap Hollywood studio, and this meager trio, with Lakso manning that annoyingly unforgettable accordion, created the music for Teas off the top of their heads as a print of the film flickered before them. Whenever Teas appeared on screen, Lasko broke into a jaunty little march-of-the-tiny-man theme he’d come up with, instructing flute player William St. Pierre to improvise a solo “every time a girl with a breast shows up.” When the first naked woman wafted by, St. Pierre—“a very straight guy”—“almost swallowed his flute.”*1

  Although also credited with the narration of the film, Ed Lakso has no memory of writing the monologue. Nor did Meyer ever take full ownership, though it’s certainly an embryonic version of his special brand of absurd wordplay (which would grow hilariously extreme in such later pictures as Good Morning . . . and Goodbye and Cherry, Harry and Racquel). When the professional hired to recite the narration pulled out due to pneumonia, RM offered the job to his friend Irving Blum, whose pompous, awash-in-reverb intonation added another strange layer of humor to Teas. Due to Blum’s eventual standing in the hoity-toity world of fine art, his contribution remained largely a secret throughout the decades, although Meyer slipped him a print of the film, from which Blum got a lot of mileage at private parties.

  Meyer and DeCenzie had laid out very few clams for the first shoot—$1,500 by one report. By the time additional inserts, editing, and distribution costs (including the 35 mm blow-up) were added in, the price tag came to everything they had: twenty-four grand. Although Playboy initially passed on a layout, finally running one in November 1961, Adam wrote a very welcome and “in those days unheard of” thousand-dollar check for a Ken Parker–shot photo spread of the production. This exorbitant fee would amount to peanuts when Teas was finally unleashed. Appreciative of Blum’s help, Meyer offered him a percentage of the film’s profits or a $1,500 buyout. “I took the buyout and ran,” said Blum, who “could hardly believe it” when the picture proved to be a monster hit. “Russ was elated at the success, and, oddly, not too surprised. He kind of expected it. I never did.”

  But Blum certainly remembered how jazzed RM was when the film was completed. “I think this is art,” he proudly told Blum, who chuckled at the memory. In the end Meyer would have the last laugh.

  When the movie was finally in the can, “we couldn’t find anybody with the courage to screen it,” said Meyer. “No one had ever seen as bare a film as Teas.” The picture had its world premiere in San Diego at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27, 1959, at The Balboa Theater, where it was improbably billed with a Gary Cooper western, The Hanging Man. Classic exploitation teaser ads had ballyhooed its arrival: “For the first time—a combo of comedy and girls in a picture! Look! For Mr. Teas and his trusty bicycle on city streets tomorrow after noon! If your last name begins with ‘T’ stop Mr. Teas and get a free ticket! Extra! Bikini-clad Hollywood models hourly on mezzanine posing for amateur photogs!”

  But Teas was a goner just as soon as it started to flicker. Twenty minutes into the picture the San Diego flatfoots rushed in, shutting the film down. The exact details of the bust were kept hush-hush. All mention of the film disappeared from the next day’s newspaper, and the Balboa now had Rio Bravo filling the Teas slot. Word on the street was that DeCenzie hadn’t paid local authorities “the patch,” carny lingo for a bribe. It would take Meyer and DeCenzie a year just to get the print back.

  In January 1960, Teas reopened at the Monica Theater in Los Angeles, breaking the house record on its opening night. Variety enthusiastically dubbed it “a perverted Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” praising its “amazingly good” photography. Due to the San Diego bust, though, nobody wanted to chance the picture in the rest of the country. Teas was too hot to handle. As RM put it, “A statement had been made: this is a film you shouldn’t book because the police are going to get involved.” It appeared that Meyer had been too adventurous for his own good.

  But Pete DeCenzie would save their asses. Up in Seattle and still peddling his Pictures in Poses, Pete ran into a “fellow paisan” who just happened to be on the Seattle censor board. DeCenzie explained the little problem he was having with his new picture, and his friend arranged for Teas to be screened by the board. “They convened in a hotel room, which is unheard of,” said Meyer. No way was DeCenzie going to forget the patch this time: he sprang for some Italian takeout, a few bottles of vino, and everybody sat back and enjoyed the show. Unbelievably, they passed the nudity-packed picture with one cut, an innocuous shot of Ken Parker’s fully clothed wife Eleanor nibbling on his ear.*2 A censor board seal of approval went a long way in erasing the taint of the San Diego bust. The Immoral Mr. Teas opened in midsummer 1960 at Seattle’s Guild 45th Theater and stayed for nine months. “Passing a censor board like that is like a license to steal,” said Meyer. “A week after it opened Pete DeCenzie and I bought Cadillacs.”

  Teas broke records everywhere—Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. It played for three years straight in Los Angeles alone. The film would gross an unheard-of million dollars, making over eighty times what the sixty-three-minute picture cost. In October 1961, highbrow critic Leslie Fiedler wrote a long, enthusiastic review entitled “A Night with Mr. Teas,” declaring the picture “a kind of imperturbable comedy, with overtones of real pathos.” Of Meyer, Fiedler said, “I hope he makes a million.” Much to Meyer’s amusement, the critic also maintained that the filmmaker was indulging in pointed social commentary by placing Bill Teas in front of a bus-stop bench featuring a mortuary ad. Fiedler “read in all kinds of stuff,” said Meyer. “I’m glad he did, but I had no message except big bosoms and greed . . . my cant is towards entertainment, not in creating some opus that has subliminal reasons for its existence.”

  When it came to analysis of his pictures, Meyer had a schizophrenic response, much like he did about everything. He’d laugh off any complex interpretations, yet a bad review would wig him out enough to fire off a handwritten attack to the critic responsible. RM claimed he was in it for the money, yet nothing pleased him more than serious interest in his films. In later years he’d bristle when lumped in with the hard-core industry. “I’m a class pornographer,” said Meyer in 1979. “There’s a difference. I spend fourteen months making a film. Not thirty minutes in a motel room.”

  Pete DeCenzie handled the distribution of Teas aided by an unexpected partner—Eve Meyer. Moving away from modeling, Eve had dabbled in an acting career but, according to RM, grew disgusted by casting-couch politics. But Eve proved to be a financial whiz, her astute investments making Meyer a fortune. Unfortunately, Eve and Pete butted heads over Teas. DeCenzie would entrust the picture to the same burlesque-world lowlifes who had robbed the partners on French Peep Show. “They’d fight strenuously over people Eve didn’t trust, and with good reason,” said Meyer, who felt the real damage to his friendship wit
h DeCenzie was due to the simple fact that Pete “didn’t like the idea of a woman having anything to do with business.” Meyer would soon go it alone with his wife.

  As Teas raked in the loot, its namesake grew tired of waiting for his 2 percent of the take to materialize. Meyer felt that “Teas would listen to the bartenders and they’d say, ‘You have a piece of that show? You didn’t get any money yet? The picture’s making millions. You’d better check into it. These guys are cheating you, Bill.’ It got to him. He was steaming, seething.”*3

  Things came to a head one day when Teas charged up to Meyer’s house in a rage. RM was developing prints in the basement when Teas “accused me of cheating him—‘I want the money.’ I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ I literally chased him out of the darkroom. I was so angry that I was just ready to beat the shit out of him. He insulted my character. He just offended me.”

  Meyer went to Eve—who didn’t care for Teas and hadn’t been happy with Russ cutting him in—and instructed that she and Pete get rid of him. “So they bought him off for $750,” said Meyer. Bill further angered RM by starring in a rarely seen early sixties non-Meyer nudie-cutie “sequel,” Steam Heat.

  The relationship between Russ Meyer and Bill Teas was a curious one. Never one to forgive a grudge, Meyer remained angry over the incident in perpetuity, wasting no opportunity to tell the world how “heavy into the sauce” Teas was. He blew a gasket when reporter Burr Snider did a look back on Teas and his involvement in RM’s film in a 1981 San Francisco Examiner article. So enraged was Meyer that he dashed off a remarkable thirty-one-page handwritten memo in which he angrily corrects every factual error (ignoring his own misspellings), then goes on to accuse Teas of being soused throughout his stay in the service and drunk throughout the making of the film, being a weakling, and, perhaps worst of all, being too cheap to buy RM’s first wife Betty a meal. Meyer ends the diatribe by suggesting that Teas and Snider go on a date to see that season’s reporter-makes-fatal-mistake drama Absence of Malice.

  Meyer seemed obsessed with what Teas thought of him. When biographer David K. Frasier was researching a never-finished article on Teas in the nineties, RM suggested that Dave tape-record an interview with Bill—then play it for Meyer so he could eavesdrop on what Teas really thought. Frasier declined to participate in that Nixonian melodrama.

  “By the early 1960s sexual desire, especially male sexual desire, was economically legitimate,” writes historian Eric Schaefer, and Teas definitely furthered that legitimacy, spawning well over a hundred imitators. Even Time took note of the film, maintaining that The Immoral Mr. Teas had “opened up the floodgates of permissiveness as we know it in these United States.” Meyer would be uncharacteristically modest when held responsible for the decline of Western civilization. “The real driving force behind the increasing permissiveness of our society is Hugh Hefner,” he said. “I simply put his illustrations to movement.”

  But Meyer had indeed done a very provocative thing. He’d made a technically polished, nudity-packed film completely unapologetic in its leering, and one that dared to poke fun at sex. “I don’t know why people take love-making so seriously,” he said. “It’s pretty funny when you look at it.”

  And while Teas may seem “so innocent it is almost wistful,” there lurks something diabolical under all that skin. Who exactly was Meyer’s joke on? As usual with RM, the intention is not altogether clear.

  Noted by Roger Ebert as “one of the canniest psychologists” of those who made sex films, Meyer “understood, instinctively or not, why men go to skin flicks.” If you believe that many of these men might just attend such movies out of an inability to connect sexually with women in other, more direct ways, you have to conclude Meyer is exploiting a certain masochism in his male audience. Let’s face it, looking ain’t always living. For Mr. Teas mirrors all those poor saps—David K. Frasier writes, “who can never hope to meet, let alone attain, the fantasy women who excite their senses. The women in the film are all pinups come to life. They lack the emotional substance to make them real and are thereby immune to any form of relationship other than visual.”

  Meyer was an odd choice to be the one pushing any sexual boundaries. Here was a man with one foot in the commie-hating Norman Rockwell fifties and the other in some garish live-action Looney Tunes universe where Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae got naked and got down. This outrageousness would help carry him into the psychedelic sixties, although smoking his one and only joint merely put him to sleep. Strictly Black & White scotch for this gent, and straight up if you please. RM was squarer than your grandpa, but for some unknown reason he possessed a knack for latching on to the latest fad faster than Andy Warhol could silkscreen a soup can.

  Meyer made clear he put sex on the screen the way he preferred it in bed, so it’s a subject worth investigating. According to the women I talked to, RM’s view of sex was Neanderthal at best. He didn’t even care to get the vocabulary right. With a straight face he’d tell one writer how he might shoot a scene where a cop stops a woman and “she performs cunnilingus [sic] on him while he’s writing out her ticket.”

  Romance and foreplay, that was for sissies. Nope, no kittens and flowers for Russell Albion. He liked his sex just the way he liked his food: meat and potatoes, skip the fancy sauces. RM just wanted to fuck, to get in there and “wail away at it.” His terms for the act were more apropros of a boxing match: low body blows, stunts and grunts, hunkering down, doing the horizontal mambo.

  No blow jobs, vibrators, whips, or chains for Meyer in his films or in his life. None of that kinky stuff.*4 He attended one wife-swapping party in his life, and only to watch. Perversion, RM declared, was simply “un-American.” If a woman didn’t get off just being in the presence of the man the Wall Street Journal dubbed “King Leer,” well, that was her problem. A female servicing herself annoyed him—there was no RUSS in that equation. “What does a woman know about sexuality, anyway?” pondered Meyer as late as 1990. “They are the receivers, they’re the catchers. You’ve got to be able to pitch.”

  America bought what Russ Meyer was pitching and it would make him a millionaire. If you put it under the simplest microscope, RM’s universe was weirder than hell, but coming out of the sexual dark ages of the fifties it provided both release and relief. For a while his work hummed with a youthful exuberance that hid the dark shadows, a thar’s-gold-in-them-thar-hills frothing at the mouth, more irresistable than the fanciest pack of lies from your favorite used-car salesman. RM had his big fat finger on the pulse of something. What was it? Who knows. Meyer saw the absurdity in sex at a time when it angered, bewildered, and frightened most everybody else. Despite the wacky visuals, it would soon become apparent that underneath it all RM was selling a rather wholesome and old-fashioned message, one that would quell Joe Six-Pack’s anxieties: “normal” sex between man and wife maintains our moral universe. Meyer dragged the hairy sex monster into the noon sun and turned it into a seemingly innocent cartoon. Where Americans had shuddered, they now laughed. Of course, everything was funny to Meyer—underneath it all he believed in nothing. And in the end he’d become much like his own colossal, colorless everyman, a mean Mr. Teas. But that was a lifetime away. For now he was set to ride the sixties chaos rocket like Slim Pickens straddling Strangelove’s H-bomb, a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ all the way down.

  “He’s still the first Sergeant in the Signal Corps,” said Eve of her then–ex husband in a 1969 interview. “He never got over it.” RM was just one of those guys who went barreling through life on a mission and let the chips fall where they may. He was Meyer, and Meyer did whatever he wanted.

  He’d paid scant attention to Eve while making The Immoral Mr. Teas. She seemed annoyed with the whole enterprise, feeling that their happy home had suffered from the invasion. One day she came in to find Russ shooting the ridiculous dream sequence in which Teas hallucinates having a huge, bloody molar removed as dental assistant Marilyn Wesley cheerfully stands by, holding a giant hypo and n
aked save for a nurse’s cap. Eve took one look at this grotesque tableau and broke down, running from the house. Meyer chased after her, only to find his wife curled up in her T-bird, sobbing. It finally penetrated his thick skull: Eve felt left out. They might’ve fought like cats and dogs during her glamour photo shoots, but they’d done it as a team.

  RM knew a way to rectify the situation in a hurry. His next movie would be called Eve and the Handyman, and you didn’t need to tap the tarot deck to guess the female lead. Meyer would succeed in holding his fabulous marriage together, if only temporarily.

  The Handyman

  I made movie after movie . . . nothing else really mattered.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Modern Photo looks anything but modern. The place is a dusty, chaotic mess. Old family portraits hang on the walls; junk is scattered everywhere. Window displays have been bleached nearly colorless by the Los Angeles sun. You figure maybe you’re in the wrong joint, but then start noticing Meyer regulars in some fading photos on the wall. A head shot of Cherry, Harry and Raquel’s Charles Napier lurks not far from a photo of Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens’ Kitten Natividad appearing in a neighborhood parade. Traces of Meyer linger everywhere in this Figueroa Street shop. Bits of his movies were shot in this building, and I’d later learn that one of RM’s last forays in public was warbling a karaoke “My Way” one boozy night in the bar next door.