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

by Jimmy McDonough

  A bald, middle-aged everyman with an insurance salesman’s self-satisfied smile, his sonorous, self-important voice spewing forth Meyerspeak is somehow comforting no matter how many times I hear it. He functions as the cosmic guide for RM’s sex-industrial universe, often delivering obtuse monologues that have one chuckling long after the movie ends. During interviews Meyer loved to paint Lancaster as the ultimate old pervert, going on at great lengths about the sick white coating of his tongue or how he’d fluster actresses by getting a hard-on in the middle of a scene. “I want willing hands hovering around,” was Meyer’s most frequent direction to Lancaster.

  Lancaster was “a fun guy to be around, certainly not the typical actor,” said Dave Friedman, who also used him in a few films. “He was a regular guy.” A member of the Ringling circus family, Lancaster had blown his inheritance founding an acting theater in Sarasota, Florida, before seeking fame out west. Married six times, Lancaster was a severe manic-depressive who, according to his last wife, Ivy Bethune, “studied every religion and had a million books on self-help. He was opposite of Russ. They were so different they didn’t compete with each other. He made Russ laugh a lot.” In concert with Furlong and Costello, very funny guys as well, Lancaster contributed a lot of mirth to RM’s production day, much to the annoyance of the director himself, who was known to stomp around bellowing, “I want no levity on this set!”

  Highly regarded by Meyerites, Mudhoney develops Lorna’s fever dream into a deranged Wal-Mart family portrait. “My homage to Grapes of Wrath,” as RM put it. Although the convoluted script contains enough characters and plot twists to fuel an opera, it’s basically the story of Sidney Brenshaw (again Hal Hopper), a mean old bastard who runs his tiny town through fear, intimidation, and rape. He sides with manipulative preacher Brother Hansen (Franklin Bolger), hoping to increase his stranglehold, but in the end Sidney can’t control his all-consuming rage, and an angry mob (played by Meyer and his crew) hangs him in the town square.

  Visually the picture is quite spiffy, with Meyer working to refine his tightly wound cross-cut collage style (there are enough cutaways of feet in this picture to satisfy any fetishist), but the script is unexceptional, and the jazzy dialogue so central to RM’s wild style hasn’t quite crystallized.

  It’s Mudhoney’s detailed ambiance that impresses most. The party scenes ooze a weird, wild energy teaming with real backwoods mental illness. What a memorably creepy bunch—as one scribe put it, “unforgettable grotesques ripped from the pages of some abysmal southern novel”—and all of them dancing spastically to some sweaty sax number on the stand-up Victrola. Appearing for her second and last Meyer film, barefoot Lorna Maitland shakes her stuff in a skintight dress as pantherlike Hal Hopper looks on, drinking from a flask and ready to pounce. Bearded Sam Hannah, shoeless in bib overalls, jumps around with a jug of moonshine in his hand while that ebullient harpie Princess Livingston, in sack dress and worn sneakers, eggs everybody on. Rena Horten, “the perfect female—can’t hear, can’t talk,” watches happily in silence. There’s something truly mad about these scenes, heightened by eruptions of evil, crazed laughter throughout the movie. In fact, Mudhoney’s total effect could be summed up in a single closeup of Livingston’s cackling, toothless face. What’s interesting is that you never get the idea that Meyer sides with the good in these pictures. Virtue, that’s for chumps. The meek shall not inherit RM’s scorched earth, and once again the yardstick is virility. “She’s my woman, boy, my woman, and you know why?” Hopper snarls at the picture’s wimpy good guy, Calif McKinney (John Furlong). “Because she needs a man, a real man, not some gutless boy!”

  “My films can be taken on two levels: as parodies or as being completely straight. I guess they’re both.” Those who knew and worked with RM disagree over exactly when he realized how funny he was being, but Mudhoney seems to have been a turning point. Lancaster described a screening where one patron was “laughing so hard I thought he was gonna have a heart attack.” This apocryphal event registered big on the Meyer Richter scale, as did reports of college students and other members of the “intelligentsia” yukking it up over the RM worldview. Once Meyer realized that there was an audience out there beyond the raincoat brigade, he went for it in a very peculiar way, making live-action cartoons that were to be “played seriously and straightforwardly, with no obvious tongue-in-cheek, but with situations and circumstances overblown and overdone. Do more, make it bigger than life, bigger, bigger, best.”

  Mudhoney was first released in 1965 as Rope of Flesh, with an awful ad featuring a silhouette of Sidney Brenshaw being hanged. Lynching did not prove to be a box office draw, so Meyer withdrew the picture, tightened the editing, and came up with a snappy new title by way of an odd word he’d plucked from, of all sources, Oscar Wilde—Mudhoney. Unfortunately, it was still a financial flop and thus no favorite of its maker. “I made a gamble with Mudhoney and failed. . . . The only reason I made Mudhoney was I was in love with a girl named Rena. . . . I should have not made the film.” Meyer also held Maitland’s postpregnancy cleavage responsible. “Her tits had kinda gone south.”

  According to Maitland’s husband, Ben Rocco, Lorna should’ve gone on to much bigger things. “Angie Dickinson got the contract she was offered—two movies a year for seven years.” When the call came in, Lorna was “sitting on the couch, half gone. In 1965, LSD was the happening thing, and she was one of the people who had trauma from it. In the seventeen years I spent with her, she spent a fourth of that time in mental institutions.” Oddly enough, before Lorna would surrender to a vagabond life of cheap apartments and motels, she’d use go-go money to bankroll Lorna Records, whose sole release was one of the very first singles by Neil Young’s intrepid band Crazy Horse, then known as the Psyrcle.

  Meyer never saw Maitland again and didn’t exactly break into “Auld Lang Syne” when her name came up. “It’s not like we could meet in the Hotel Pierre twenty years later and have a tearful reunion. God, her tits must be down to her knees now.”

  Despite the telephonic screaming matches with ex-wife Eve and the occasional motel tryst with Miss Mattress, RM somehow kept it together with Rena Horten for a year or so, even living with her briefly in the Hollywood Hills. But the union was not meant to last. According to Meyer, Rena put him on the spot during the making of Mudhoney by trying to back out of the nude scene, after happily baring it all in front of a crewful of Krauts during Fanny Hill. “It represented a down deep solid lack of trust,” said Meyer, who apparently never forgot the incident.

  “They used to get in horrible arguments,” said Jim Ryan, noting that Rena could be just as stubborn as Russ. “She’d say, ‘I want to go downtown at 5 o’clock and he’d say, ‘No, I can’t go until 7.’ Some trivial thing, and it would turn into a major argument.” RM’s buddies were fond of Horten. “Rena was pretty handy, she couldn’t have been a nicer chick,” said Fred Beiersdorf. “But Russ ran her off. Anybody who really tried to get close to him, he didn’t want anything to do with.”

  Horten and Meyer remained good friends, although they were still bickering decades later. Meyer friend and scriptwriter John McCormick witnessed RM once again exhibiting his frightful and defiant lack of knowledge on female sexuality at an eighties dinner reunion between Russ and Rena during which RM crowed about some sex partner “lubing up her pussy.” As McCormick recalled, “Rena called him on it and said, “Russ, if it’s really happening, she doesn’t need to “lube up”! You just don’t know anything about a woman!”

  You can’t get more exotic than Haji. She’s a creature from a far-off land but who knows where to set her compass. “I came visiting here with my family from another galaxy, and we landed in Quebec,” she’ll calmly inform you, adding, “You earthlings are very strange people.” With her English-mangling accent, moon-sized eyes, and jet black hair, not to mention makeup lovingly applied with a trowel, Haji had supporting roles in five RM pictures and is hugely memorable in every one of ’em.

  Nearly eve
ry word from her extraterrestrial lips is quotable. “These people that talk about exploiting—you know who makes comments like that? Lesbians. I love being a woman. I love all those sexy negligees and the nylons and the high heels.” Nature is Haji’s bag, and she’s been known to start the day at six a.m., body-surfing in her birthday suit. “I think a lot about all the little creatures in the ocean.”*5

  Haji suggested many a leading lady to RM—Tura Satana, Erica Gavin, and Shari Eubank, to name a few—as well as working makeup and crew. Never an item, Meyer and Haji were close friends, one reason being that Haji was one of the guys. When Meyer had a reunion of combat buddies, it was Haji who brought the fellas beer. Although most definitely all woman, nothing about Haji is soft. Woe to the Mr. Hollywood who tries to talk his way into her pants in exchange for a part. “One guy asked me if I wanted to give him a little head. I said, ‘What I’d like to do is bust your head!’ ”

  Born on January 24 of an unknown year in Quebec as Baby Girl Downes, she is mum on how she acquired the Haji moniker (“a long story” is all she’d reveal). She started dancing at age fourteen; a daughter Cerlette arrived soon after. A superb dancer, Haji was famous for undulating to “The Girl from Ipanema.” She was shaking her stuff at some club in the Valley when Meyer first saw her in action and made his pitch: he was making a new picture called Motorpsycho, would she like to give it a shot? Initially she auditioned for a small part in the opening scene that later went to Arshalouis Aivazian, but on her way out to the car, RM called her back in. Haji was shocked to learn that Meyer now wanted her for the lead.

  Meyer took his cast and crew deep into the barren scrub near Blythe, California. “Meyer loved the desert,” said actor Charles Napier. “Asked him why one time and he said, ‘Because you can die there.’ ” Conditions during the Motorpsycho shoot would’ve made an Eagle Scout blanch. Snakes and scorpions lurked underfoot; Meyer had the only trailer, which he shared with Rena Horten. Everyone else camped out, sleeping in “fart sacks”—Meyerspeak for sleeping bags. Cast and crew shared a tiny outhouse and showered beneath a water barrel perched atop wooden planks. “It was so cold that you would have to stop and pray before you went in,” said Haji.

  Meyer and Haji became fast friends following her forcible extrication from a fart-sack tryst with a co-star. Unhappily interrupted, Haji “clawed the shit out of me,” said RM, who then installed her and the rest of the women cast members within the safety of his trailer. “I slept by the door with an axe handle,” said Meyer, who from now on would go to absurd lengths to segregate men from women on his shoots. There would be no fooling around on his set, no hanky-panky. Meyer wanted all “vital juices” retained for the camera.

  Echoes of RM’s glory days as a soldier began to seep into the daily grind. He wouldn’t simply tell an assistant to move the camera; he’d tell him to “hurl” the camera down a ravine, or “smash” the Arriflex into a corner. George Costello described the production style as “take the next hill.” The battleground mentality invaded every aspect of the task at hand. “Two actors ended up in the hospital, one with a hole in his stomach two inches wide,” reported one of the Motorpsycho leads, Steve Oliver. In the editing room, Meyer worked the crew until they were ready to drop. One evening Andre Brummer (who was scoring the picture under an alias) tried to head home for some shuteye after cutting music until well after midnight; instead, RM imprisoned him in one of his guest bedrooms, ordering George Costello to stand guard while Andre snoozed. Unfortunately, Costello was just as exhausted, fell asleep on his watch, and had to be dispatched to Brummer’s home the next day by an apoplectic Meyer to haul Andre back in. During the mix Brummer’s wife gave birth. “Andre couldn’t appear because he was at the hospital,” said his brother Richard, who filled in. “Russ was fit to be tied. That’s not something that should intervene with the finishing of a Russ Meyer movie.”

  Although his brother withstood the making of only one picture, Richard Brummer would remain with Meyer off and on for the rest of RM’s career. Brummer had military cachet—he’d also taken basic training at Camp Crowder—but the rest of his background was quite different from that of the usual Meyer associate, coming out of the New York City experimental film world of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas, where he cut an influential 1954 short, Jazz Dance. A gentle, soft-spoken soul, Brummer recorded location sound and cut film for Uncle Russ, bringing a host of new ideas with him, not to mention a few of RM’s best titles—Motorpsycho and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Despite this, Meyer “wasn’t particularly nice to Brummer,” as actor John Furlong saw it. “He’d yell at him a lot.”

  “Meyer respected Brummer, because he was such a technician and such a stickler for detail,” said actor Charles Napier, who described Brummer as “kind of like Harpo Marx out in the middle of the desert. We’d start to shoot and Brummer would go, ‘Hold it!’ and it would just infuriate Meyer—‘What is it now???’ ‘I hear a cup moving. A Styrofoam cup.’ ‘There can’t be a fucking Styrofoam cup, we’re in the middle of Death Valley!’ And sure as shit Brummer would come up with a cup. That would piss Meyer off even more.” RM later boasted to one of his Hollywood film festival audiences, “There’d never be an extraneous noise with Brummer around!”

  Weary of minor legal hassles over censorship that Lorna and Mudhoney had provoked, Meyer downplayed the nudity in Motorpsycho and emphasized a much more drive-in-friendly component: violence. No real story, just three young biker toughs terrorizing Anytown USA in a somewhat more salacious update of The Wild One. RM tapped into Middle America’s growing youth-culture invasion anxieties with these sunglassed, amoral savages, their hepcat lingo and faithful transistor radio blaring one guitar-heavy doom tune.

  Motorpsycho opens with a short boy-girl scene, its tension created by cross-cutting a handful of shots against a soundtrack that is silent but for three lines of dialogue, the squeak of a beach chair, and the splunk of a fishing line into the water. Meyer sucks you right into his skewed look at a pipe-smoking fisherman who blissfully ignores his buxom young wife to concentrate on rod and reel. Intent on having her needs addressed, she jumps into the water in front of him. “Now you’ve screwed up the fishing!” squawks hubby. “You’ve got the best there is on your line right now!” she shrieks, smiling demonically now that she’s got his full attention. Wifey will be the first victim of the motorpsychos, but the rest of the women they attack will all suffer the same lack of primal attention from their mates. Once again it is Meyer’s particular brand of sexual dysfunction that leads to doom and destruction.

  Motorpsycho benefits from ever-greater camera work, and RM’s pacing is beginning to speed up, but this is another dud script with unremarkable dialogue (courtesy of Adam magazine contributor Bill Sprague, who also co-wrote Mudhoney). There’s just not enough flesh on display, and RM without dames means tedium. Haji is by far the best thing in the picture. An Anna Magnani in pasties, she’s riveting, giving her all to such ridiculous moments as the one where Alex Rocco is bitten on the leg by a rattler. “Suck it! Suck on the poison, suck it out, suck it some more,” implores Rocco as he grinds Haji’s face into his bloody wound.

  RM’s cameo as a paunchy, dumb cop sums up Motorpsycho. After gleefully peeking under the sheet at the battered body of one of the bike gang’s victims being loaded into an ambulance, he mutters to the woman’s husband, “Nothing happened to her a woman ain’t built for.” “Talk about politically incorrect!” enthused John Waters.

  “A film that lacks any kind of good taste,” was Hollywood Reporter’s verdict. “Meyer seems at times to be saying that the assault perpetrated on these women is no more than they deserve. But it is hard to tell just what his point is.” Released in 1965, Motorpsycho packed the drive-ins, doing “a hell of a lot of business in the passion pits.” While it might not be one of the greater Meyer efforts, its success would inspire RM to rebuild Motorpsycho as a muscle car with cleavage. “I told my wife, ‘I’ve got a great idea, we’ll do it with three bad girls. She said, ‘A
re you sure it’s gonna work?’ I said, Absolutely.’ ”

  No shit. Although Eve would loathe the script and the picture, not to mention the mediocre box office returns, Russ Meyer was about to bang out a bona fide masterpiece: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

  Klieg Eyes on a Dry Lake Bed

  I personally prefer the aggressive female . . . the superwoman.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Tura’s a lady. Many who encounter her expect a fire-breathing dragon capable of executing a karate chop to the aorta. But she’s just an old-fashioned gal. “I love being female and being catered to,” said Miss Satana. “I enjoy men opening doors for me.” Tura has the sort of pulse-racing effect on the id that few other women do, outside of, say, Ava Gardner, Tina Turner, and Tammy Wynette—sexy, proud, and heartbreaking all at the same time. “With all the beautiful women that exist in the world, she’s one of the more fascinating,” said director Ted V. Mikels, who not only put her in his no-budget epics Astro-Zombies and Ten Violent Women but romanced her as well. “Tura totally understands men,” he said knowingly.

  Spend any time around Tura Satana and you can’t help but fall under her spell. One whiff of that perfume—Luna Mystique, if you must know—and you’re a goner, my friend. She’s got a smoky, mischievous chuckle that says life’s a game and the deck’s been marked, so we might as well laugh. Satana still gets a kick out of life and enjoys kicking it back. There’s something noble about Tura. She slugged her way through years of gin mills and flesh pits with nary a dent to her dignity.