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

by Jimmy McDonough

  In later years Cresse, perusing the product in some adult bookstore, noticed two hooligans roughing up a woman outside in the street. Cresse gallantly charged out, pistol in hand, shouting that he was calling the cops. “We are the cops,” announced one of the two undercover officers in the process of arresting a prostitute. Then they not only shot Cresse in the stomach, but put a bullet in his dog, too. “He was never the same, never worked again,” said Friedman.

  The L.A. mob was a crazy, fun-loving bunch. Although cutthroat competitors, they somehow managed to booze, gamble, and carouse as pals. Russ Meyer was the one exception. “He was never out on the town like I was,” said Friedman. “We were at all the ‘in’ places, but Russ was never a part of it.” Aligning himself neither with the exploitationers and certainly not with the mainstream, RM was, as he was fond of saying, truly a genre unto himself.

  Outside of Teas, Meyer’s first period—consisting of the five nudie-cuties Meyer made from 1960 to 1963—is the least interesting to discuss. Part of the problem is that three of these pictures—Erotica, Europe in the Raw, and Heavenly Bodies—have not been seen since their original distribution as Meyer withdrew them from circulation, adamant that they aren’t his best work. All five films are Teas-like to varying degrees: 16 mm/35 mm blow-ups shot silent except for narration, with an average length just over sixty minutes, and featuring a simple, cutesy story that allowed for some no-contact female nudity.

  The first Teas follow-up made in 1960, Eve and the Handyman, is the only Meyer picture to star wife Eve. Decades (and many films later) RM bitched that filmmaking was just hard work, but he’d admit to David K. Frasier that this was the one picture he’d actually had fun making. Meyer shot his second feature in and around San Francisco. Costarring with Eve was his 166th buddy Jim Ryan.

  “Eve typed the script,” said Ryan, which amounted to “just loose-leaf paper—it wasn’t even a script, just a list of ideas. That’s all we had to work with. I improvised some of the stuff.” While the picture shared the same whimsical humor of The Immoral Mr. Teas, “it didn’t have all the nudity in it,” said Meyer. “Some.” None of which featured Eve, as it turned out. Rightly concerned that RM was reluctant to show the goods when it came to his own wife, partner Pete DeCenzie bailed out right before production started. The Meyers continued alone.

  “For a month I worked harder than I ever have in my life,” said Eve, who rose before dawn to make breakfast for cast and crew, then packed lunches for everyone before driving fifty miles so she could essay her starring role. Then she’d schlep back home and feed everybody dinner.

  There isn’t much to the picture. Eve skulks around in a trench coat, beret, and red scarf spying on everyman plumber the Handyman. The Handyman bumbles around from job to job in his 1936 Nash pickup, blissfully ignorant of the beautiful blonde following him. An occasional naked lady appears. The big finale consists of Eve cornering the Handyman, seemingly flashing him by opening her coat. But no, we see that she’s just wearing a display sign that reads, “Buy Strump brushes.” But brushes alone don’t get our plumber off. Eve then runs her brush through the Handyman’s hair, which apparently does the trick, intercut as it is with trains coupling, a kettle boiling, and a rocket blasting off.

  Visually, Meyer makes the most of this cornpone. Eve and the Handyman is a quaint little concoction, with one hoary sight gag after another—Eve serving up a two-scoop sundae adorned with maraschino cherries, Meyer cutting to her knockers, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. At one point the Handyman rolls a paintbrush across an empty canvas, and as the word “Mother” magically appears in big red letters on the blank white space, the sound effect of a bomb detonating is heard on the soundtrack. Nobody captures the flashy ephemera of modern life with RM’s flair—in this case jukeboxes, pinball machines, and close-ups of Eve’s beautiful kisser. Meyer makes capitalism look sexy, shiny, and new in that narcotic Playboy way.

  Eve and the Handyman premiered May 5, 1961, at the Paris Theater in Los Angeles. The first ten thousand customers were promised free bathroom plungers, and members of the plumbers’ union got in free. “Eve All Smirk, No Smoke,” declared the Los Angeles Examiner, but the film was a certified smash and the dough continued to roll in. No one-hit wonder was Meyer.

  Meyer missed his partner, though, and managed to bring Pete DeCenzie back into the fold for the next two pictures, beginning with 1961’s Erotica. Ground out for a mere four grand, Erotica was a compilation of six vignettes, including “city girl who likes to swim in country stream” and “the legend and lore of bathing suits.” Judging from the stills, it appears that there were two main attractions to the movie. The first, Miss Glendale, was an impossibly built credit manager for that city’s Chevrolet dealership, and RM had hounded Miss G relentlessly to work with him until she capitulated (afraid of being recognized, she let con man Meyer convince her that a mere pair of sunglasses would shield her identity from the world). Attraction number two was the truly astounding Sherri Knight and her fifty-five-inch bust. Two years before Erotica, RM had shot stills of Knight for the skin rags, and Meyer was wise enough to capture the dame on motion picture film at the same time. In RM’s words, “Meeting Sherry [sic] for the first time might be compared to witnessing the launching of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga.” A mink stole her only piece of wardrobe, Knight rolled around in the Malibu sand as Meyer snapped over a hundred stills with his Rollei, after which a hundred feet of Kodachrome 16 mm film chattered away in his Arriflex, and all this before any of the local boys in blue appeared on the scene. Shooting wrapped for the day and RM never saw Knight again. DeCenzie was knocked out by the footage and begged Meyer to stick it in Erotica.

  Next came 1962’s Wild Gals of the Naked West, a strange little crudity that’s basically a plotless excuse for Meyer and his army buddies to play cowboys and Indians alongside a few scantily clad women, most notably men’s magazine model Julie Williams and another RM personal favorite, Donna X, aka Trena Lamar. This is Meyer’s first real collaboration with the fabulous Jack Moran (who’d provided some narration for Erotica), perhaps his greatest scriptwriter. Moran penned Wild Gals and plays the old coot cowboy narrator. Meyer loved to people his films with crazy characters, and this film marks the first appearance of one of the oddest creatures RM ever exalted to celluloid stardom, the toothless, “banjo-bodied” Princess Livingston. One can only guess in what dark corner of the world RM found this broad. A horny old grandma and nuttier than a loon, Princess had a cackle like a stuttering foghorn and a gleeful, glassy stare. She also told the filthiest jokes imaginable. “She was funny as hell,” said actor John Furlong, who’d work with her in 1965’s Mudhoney. “I don’t know if she had any acting experience. I think she was running a motel in Hollywood.” Furlong recalled a memorable moment during a break on the set of Mudhoney. “She was sitting on the porch and her skirt was kind of up. Sitting there with no underpants on!” Russ took one look at her undercarriage and muttered, “It’s hairier than a blacksmith’s apron!”

  Meyer’s fourth time at bat, Wild Gals, has its charms. The colorful cartoon sets and montages of rubber monster masks, gun barrels, and waggling breasts convey a jittery weirdness, a pre-Devo evocation of modern man absurdity. Meyer has a way of building tension with shot repetitions, hypnotizing the viewer in a very peculiar manner. Like the proverbial kid in the candy store, he’s lost in the rhythm, overwhelmed with excitement to be showing us such crazy stuff—“Look at this and look at this and look at this! Now let’s look at it all again, shall we?” RM’s lust for life infects every frame. As does a borderline insanity, if you ask me. By the end of his career, repetition would take over everything, like a flip book on endless repeat.

  If you’re at all familiar with Meyer mythology, Jack Moran’s closing monologue in Wild Gals becomes rather touching, RM’s version of “Buckets of Rain” at the end of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Addressing the camera in his ridiculous fake moustache and Deputy Dawg hat, Moran’s Old-Timer bemoans the fact that the “worst si
n town in the West” has gone straight. “This town plumb died from good.” Then comes a bit of philosophical musing, straight from the heart of Russ: “I ain’t one to be sayin’ evil’s good, but a person needs a twinge of meanness in ’em—y’know. Somethin’ for the good to work against. It keeps your blood movin’.” There’s a dreamlike montage of the film’s characters fading into each other, a bit of D-cup Proust. “Seems like all I can see is yesterday.” He’s not even there yet and already Meyer is yearning for the past. But as the Old-Timer pontificates how “ol’ Adam, he was a pretty straight-laced fella until Eve come along,” an inevitable bit of evil—half-naked Trena Lamar—sashays in to end his big thoughts. Old-Timer ogles her as he picks up a bottle of booze and says, “What a combination: an eighty-year-old man, ninety-proof straight whiskey, and 100 percent pure woman!” Off into the desert the pair wander, the end.

  Wild Gals would be the last joint effort with Pete DeCenzie, who complained that RM was holding back on the money shots by keeping the females in pasties. Both Pete and his wife, Yvonne, left in midproduction to return home to their dogs, and Meyer didn’t appreciate being left holding the mop. When Eve fired one of DeCenzie’s buddies over a distribution squabble, Pete tore into her, reducing Eve to tears. RM took his wife’s side in the argument, and Meyer and DeCenzie would not meet again until decades later at an anti-censorship affair at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. RM suggested they meet for dinner to reminisce, but when Meyer arrived at Pete’s Gaiety Theater, DeCenzie was a no-show. Meyer never saw him again, but paid for a DeCenzie tribute in Variety when he learned of his demise. “After Pete died, Russ almost got maudlin over him,” said Dave Friedman.

  In 1962, the newsreel-inspired Italian import Mondo Cane became a smash international hit (its theme song “More” was nominated for an Oscar), and it birthed a new exploitation film subgenre that some consider the precursor of reality TV. In the guise of educational travelogues, the mondo picture promised to sicken and disgust with the worst the world had to offer, while (initially in the series, anyway) balancing it out with more whimsical sights. Sometimes real, sometimes faked for the camera, it was yet another cinematic equivalent of the carnival freak show: do you dare look behind the curtain? See hell on earth, from a safe distance and for the cost of a movie ticket.

  Meyer was outraged by what he felt was anti-American sentiment in Mondo Cane’s round-the-world freakfest—odd in itself since the few USA-inspired vignettes are no more cynical than those from the rest of the globe. He struck back by making his own sex shockumentary of European depravity using both actual travel footage and faked sex scenes, 1963’s Europe in the Raw. Boarding the S.S. France with Eve, Meyer deliberately limited himself to short reels of film and cheap equipment in order to pass as a tourist and not the smut peddler he was. In Brussels he shot some fantastic footage of a dancer named Veronique Gabriel (he later recycled it in Mondo Topless) but ran out of luck in the red-light districts of Berlin and Amsterdam, where he realized that flashing a camera around might get him killed. In Amsterdam, RM tried to make up the difference by faking a Dutch nudist camp complete with windmills, adding the hot stuff back home.

  Meyer then came up with a wild idea that would salvage the tenuous project. Noticing that Europeans were fond of carrying valises, he had a suitcase modified for a secret camera while in Copenhagen. “With a very obvious window built into the bag and the loud whir of the camera motor it would hardly take an Ian Fleming or an Allen Dulles to spot the thin subterfuge,” wrote Modern Man magazine. Back into the fleshy fray went RM and his 16 mm eye-spy. Hamburg hookers chased Russ and Eve out of a bordello when one of the women smelled a rat. In Paris he shot footage of prostitutes trolling the notorious Les Halles district, tracking one hooker right up the stairs of some cheap flophouse and into her room. Foolishly believing that honesty was the best policy, Meyer revealed his camera and asked, “Photo?” The girl responded by running to an open window and shouting for a gendarme. RM hightailed it out of there, concocting a suitable staged ending for the cinema verité French footage back in the States, using a double for himself and a stacked Las Vegas showgirl named Veronica Erickson.

  “Tits and War” was Meyer’s summation of the picture after he’d intercut the European beauties with some of his old combat footage. The most intriguing of the three pictures withheld by Meyer, Europe in the Raw! did only OK box office, according to RM.

  The year 1963 sent Meyer to the hospital twice, first for a hemorrhoid operation, then for an appendectomy. In order to have a money-generating project to work on while convalescing, RM spent five grand to hastily shoot his last pretty-naked-girls-plus-narration nudie-cutie—a purported exposé of the glamour photography biz called Heavenly Bodies—over a long weekend in Los Angeles. Eve, claiming an aversion to hospitals, didn’t visit the ailing Russ during this time. “Eve was really pretty tough,” recalled Jim Ryan, who said that her brand of TLC amounted to “Give him a drink and have him shut up.” “Russ seeking downright pity did a real number on Mrs. Meyer,” wrote RM.

  Apparently Eve’s indifference did a number on Russ as well. After eleven proud years of monogamous bliss, Meyer committed “joyful adultery” at the Hollywood Players Motel on Vine Street. His partner was the mysterious Janet Buxton. At least that’s the alias she gets in Meyer’s autobiography. Most likely, this is the same woman he nicknamed Miss Mattress, a married-with-children, baby-oil-loving wildcat who’d appeared in some of his films (she also shared Eve’s December 13 birthday). “It is not a love affair,” he told Adam magazine in the eighties. “It is strictly carnal.” As he’d meet with her periodically over the years until he could no longer function, this was probably the most consistent relationship of Meyer’s life. “We never spent more than three hours together at any one time,” he’d boast to one reporter. “We go to a motel.”

  The Hollywood Vine Motel, the Disneyland Howard Johnson’s Motel, the Le Baron Hotel in Anaheim, the Hyatt off Interstate 5 . . . Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Meyer would even occasionally pimp Buxton to his friends, including a group of 166th buddies who chickened out at the last moment. There are reams of pages in RM’s book documenting what seems to be his every sexual encounter with Miss Mattress in onomatopoeic detail, with every grunt, groan, and gush immortalized to a punishing degree. There are also scores of photographs of Buxton in the raw, although in each and every shot Meyer helps keep the Mrs.’s identity a secret by thoughtfully placing a paper bag over her head.

  There was one more perverse wrinkle to his relationships with both his wife and Miss Mattress. “Eve truly wanted children,” said friend Floyce Sumners. “She was desperate for children and she was just really unhappy that she didn’t have any.” Meyer was adamant that a family would only interfere with his many plans. Friend Dolores Fox felt that Russ resented anything that took Eve’s attention away from him, even if it was merely a piano lesson. In spite of this, 166th buddy Charlie Sumners maintained that deep down Russ wanted children. “He always resented the fact that I had kids and he didn’t. But he never really liked kids.” Meyer seemed uncomfortable and impatient around children, unsure of how to act around them.

  But while Eve wouldn’t get the one thing she wanted most, his motel fuck-buddy would. According to Meyer, Miss Mattress bore him an illegitimate son. “The boy doesn’t know and the father doesn’t know,” he said in 1979, adding that his son was now fifteen, meaning that he’d been born around 1964, while RM was still married to Eve. To most people, Russ would proudly express his indifference over the affair, but Rob Schaffner, a friend of Meyer’s in later years, said that RM described more than once traveling to where mother and son lived in order to hide in a car and spy on his offspring. “He would sit there five, six hours just to get a look at him.”

  Charlie Sumners thought the whole thing was a fabrication on Meyer’s part, just another tall tale. Meyer himself would deny the child’s existence in Rolf Thissen’s 1987 biography, yet he’d share the scandal with reporter after re
porter. During a visit to Chicago in 1995, he’d jest to a roomful of fans that he’d named his son Mr. Mattress. At least one close friend doesn’t doubt there’s an heir. “I’ve seen a photograph of the kid,” said biographer David K. Frasier. “It’s obvious—this kid couldn’t be anybody but Russ’s son.”

  By 1963, the nudie-cutie fad was finito, and Heavenly Bodies stiffed at the box office. “The public just grew tired of seeing the same old thing,” said RM. Had The Immoral Mr. Teas been his only credit, Meyer might’ve remained a curious footnote in sex film history. As it turned out, he’d just been revving his engines. “I realized nudies had had it. Women had been presented in every conceivable way. Now there was required—in addition to the exposure of flesh—some sort of story.” Noting that foreign “art” films seemed to be making a comeback, RM started to concoct a new recipe for the sex film. And then a neon idea blinked on in his mind.

  “I said, now I must do something like the foreign films, only it will be Erskine Caldwell and it will be a morality play and we’ll borrow heavily from the Bible and I’ll find a girl with giant breasts.”

  Exactly.

  Top Lust, Top Hate, Top Heavy

  No woman ever did anything after they worked for Meyer, by and large. None of them. They’ve been to the top, where else is there to go? They’re through.

  —RUSS MEYER

  He cast a corpse. The broad doesn’t have it. Tits aren’t big enough. She just doesn’t do it, and if Meyer ain’t feeling it in the grinch, it’s a no-go. Not one frame shot, and already RM is in a tailspin. Deep inside he knows the picture’s fucked. His co-screenwriter and star James Griffith pushed him to cast Maria Andre, a redhead he’d used in Heavenly Bodies, and he’d done so—reluctantly. RM just couldn’t come up with anybody else. “The worst part of making films is trying to find the women,” he’d say later. “There was only one Lorna, there was only one Uschi, there was only one Kitten.”