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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Tura’s led one hell of a life. Carrying her trademark props—hara-kiri knife, a Buddha, dazzling beaded costumes that weighed up to forty pounds apiece—she wowed the nation as a burlesque-headlining stripper. Her long, jet black hair, piercing stare, and lethally stacked figure added up to a cruel sort of beauty, one that commanded your absolute attention as she prowled the stage doing acrobatics, juggling fire torches, and twirling tassels. Nobody twirled a tassel better than Tura Satana. Lying on her back, she could make ’em go in opposite directions like “little propellers.” Among her paramours she can count Hugh O’Brian, Rod Taylor, Billy Wilder, Elvis, a six-foot redhead named Tiger Lil, and at least one midget. Politically, I don’t think she’d mind if you called her a hawk—Satana’s pro-Bush, wants prayer in public schools, and loved The Passion of the Christ.

  It is Tura’s portrait of Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! that stopped the clock forever. With her trademark Germaine Monteil eyeliner and Max Factor pancake, a Frederick’s of Hollywood bra with specially made cups that ensured even cleavage with no unexpected pop-outs, and leather gloves—one of which inevitably holds a slim Nat Sherman cigarette—Varla’s a gender-bending femme fatale who still packs a wallop nearly forty years later. Tura didn’t have to do any research for the part. The tragic events of her childhood gave her a grim insight into the role that couldn’t be begged, borrowed, or stolen. “Varla is the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the Meyer canon,” writes critic Richard Corliss. “Certainly the scariest.”

  Born Suvaki (“Suvaki means ‘white chameleon’ or ‘white flower,’ but in Cheyenne Indian it’s Tura”) Yamaguchi in Hokkaido, Japan, on July 10, 1938, “my dad was a silent movie actor and my mom was a circus performer, a contortionist. He went to a circus, saw her there, and fell in love.” Of Japanese, Filipino, Scotch-Irish, and American Indian blood, Tura spent part of WWII in one of California’s infamous Japanese internment camps before relocating to Chicago. “This is where Varla was created in me,” Tura writes in her as-yet-unpublished autobiography, The Kick-Ass Life of Tura Satana. “She was born in Chicago, on the Westside.”

  Tura was an excellent student and athlete, as well as leader of a scrappy little girl gang. In the early postwar years, she was constantly harassed for her oriental heritage and “fought my way going to school and coming back. I was constantly taunted about being a Tojo, a monkey-person.” Further tormented by an extreme case of early developement—she was a 34C at age nine—Tura took to hiding her body in baggy clothes. The worst was yet to come.

  On the walk home from an errand to a neighborhood bakery for her mother, the nine-year-old was cornered, thrown in a Chevy sedan and raped by five men, then tossed into an alley and left to bleed to death. Her assailants were never prosecuted, and Satana learned much later that it was rumored the judge had been paid off. “One thousand dollars for a little girl’s virginity,” she said. “I’m just lucky it didn’t turn me into a man-hater. The only persons that were allowed to touch me were my father and brother. It was slow work until they could finally put their arms around me and give me a hug without me tensing.”

  Tura’s father Juntaro taught her to defend herself. Satana went on to become a martial arts expert, achieving a green belt in aikido and a black belt in karate. “If I could help every woman this has happened to, I would,” she writes in her autobiography. “It is in your spirit to conquer this degradation.” Over the next fifteen years, Tura maintained she tracked down and exacted physical revenge on each of her attackers. “I made a vow to myself that I would someday, somehow get even with all of them. They never knew who I was until I told them.”

  After the attack, Tura was sent to reform school. “Everyone blames you for being raped, not the rapist,” she writes. At thirteen she entered into a brief arranged marriage, then headed out to Los Angeles, where, with a fake ID, she worked as a B-girl and blues singer. She also did nude modeling for silent film star and 3D photographer Harold Lloyd, whom she credits with giving her the confidence to pursue a career. “I saw myself as a very ugly child. Mr. Lloyd said, ‘You have such a symmetrical face, the camera loves your face. You should be seen, you should get into the entertainment industry.’ ”

  Tura wound up in gritty Calumet City, Illinois, for the first time appearing nude onstage in an act called Galatea, the Statue That Came to Life. She was fifteen years old. Satana saw burlesque as a challenge she could easily master. “You have a thousand eyes looking at you. And you’re trying to please all those eyes.”

  Tragedy continued to find Tura’s home address. Her second marriage, to a jockey, ended when he was fatally trampled during a race. She went on a two-year bender, crediting friends in the burlesque world for saving her life. “Stripping wasn’t the last step on the way down for me, it was the first step on the way up,” she wrote in a 1957 article for Cabaret magazine entitled ‘How a G-String Saved Me from Gin.” Tura’s downed nothing stronger than Diet Coke ever since.

  Satana was a sensation onstage, and those lucky enough to have witnessed her dueling tassles haven’t forgotten it decades later. “She had a number where she did acrobatics in high heels,” said her hairdresser Peter Young. “It was something else. Even the waitresses would stop serving to look. She was so glamorous, a star.” Director Ted V. Mikels first saw Tura dance in 1957 at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas. He was instantly smitten. “Tura was just stunningly gorgeous. She had long hair goin’ down to her buns, and she had it in a knot. She not only twirled fire tassels on her boobies, she flung her hair around like a watusi—a wild, crazy dance. She was just a real exciting person.”

  “Men were always after her—big, big names,” said Peter Young. “She had boyfriends. A lotta them. Tall, good-looking men.” Needless to say, she attracted a lot of uninvited suitors as well. In Danville, Illinois, one patron attended each and every one of Satana’s performances. The last night, he asked if he could buy Tura a drink, confessed he was in love with her, then asked for her hand in marriage. Tura politely declined his request and left for the dressing room to pack her things.

  “Next thing I know the sheriff is banging on my dressing room door,” she remembered. “He takes me outside and there’s this guy sitting behind the wheel of his car with a shotgun in his mouth—and his brains in the backseat.” The same man who had proposed minutes earlier had restated his love in a suicide note. The story turns even more unbelievable with the arrival of Elvis Presley, whom Tura had been dating. “Elvis comes up in his Cadillac and away we drive,” she said.

  Tura was extremely devoted and kind to her friends and family, but she was also something of a loner. “She didn’t have a lot of female friends,” said Peter Young. “The other dancers would be extremely jealous of her. I never saw anything like it.” And woe to the knucklehead who tried to put the make on Tura Satana. “She would let you know right off the bat, ‘Don’t even come near me, ’cause you’re not gonna fuck me,’ ” said Young. “Tura was like a guitar: she wouldn’t make noise unless you touched her. If you did, you were asking for it.” Tura pulverized a six-foot Bourbon Street dancer named Honey and broke the jaw of another boyfriend who unwisely assaulted her. “When I was younger, I had a very short fuse,” she said. “I’d lose my temper like that. I’d explode. And people would clear out of the way.”

  “A lot of girls were afraid of her,” insisted Haji. “Nobody would dare use her makeup or hairbrush.” But Haji wasn’t afraid. The pair had danced on and off together since 1962, often at a swanky strip joint supper club on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles called the Losers. The strange name came from its gimmick: a big lit-up billboard in front of the club that announced the latest unpopular figure in current events, from Richard Nixon to Fidel Castro. “Everybody always came by to see who the loser of the week was,” said Haji. Owner Pete Rooney ran a tight ship, giving his dancers a sense of security by way of the baseball bat he kept behind the bar. Many a Meyer star was a Losers alumna, among them Tura, Haji, Erica Gavin, Kitten Nat
ividad, Bebe Louie, and Shawn “Baby Doll” Devereaux, to name but a few. The club even had its own costume designer. “It was like a Las Vegas review show,” Haji boasted. “Pete had a good eye for the ladies. Whatever a man’s type was, he could find it at the Losers. We had Asians, black girls, blondes, brunettes, and redheads . . . it was like the United Nations.”

  The Losers was a world unto itself. There was a long mirror that ran the length of the dressing room, and there was definitely a pecking order as to the seating arrangement. “We’d be putting on our makeup and you’d talk to each other in the mirror—we all had our seats,” said Erica Gavin. “Tura was at the very end—she had senority—then Haji.” Gavin recalled being the new kid on the block, desperate to befriend the two dancers, who she thought were beyond cool. “Haji and Tura I loved,” said Erica. “I wanted to fit in. They ignored me like I was nothing. Tura was the last one to talk to me. The first time she acknowledged me I immediately had this sense of ‘Oh my God—finally.’ ” In all the time Gavin worked at the Losers, she never once saw Tura smile.

  “I had men kicking the shit out of the women, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we do one where the women kick the shit out of the men?’ ” That, in a nutshell, was the concept for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

  Meyer had two ace screenwriters during his filmmaking career. Roger Ebert was one, and John E. “Jack” Moran was definitely the other. Ebert concocted witty, knowing, high-concept screenplays featuring some of Meyer’s most outrageous characters and events, beginning with 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Jack Moran ground out three rude, bitter scripts for Meyer that are far more human in a sweaty kind of way: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Common Law Cabin (in which he also starred), and Good Morning . . . and Goodbye. Moran had an ear for the way men and women verbally demolish one another, crafting a brand of bad vibes dialogue so sharp it could sever an artery. “That’s the way Jack talked,” said George Costello. “One-liners.”

  Jack Moran possessed one of those grizzled, haunted mugs routinely found at the track or an all-night check-cashing joint. Handsome, but with a flaw in the canvas, and sad, squinting eyes doggedly trying to see beyond a thousand regrets. An alcoholic, he lived and worked as a booze-store clerk in Hemet, a dusty outpost in the desert southeast of Riverside known as a cheap retirement sanctuary for those down on their luck. He was also a maniacal smoker. “One lung and he refused to stop,” said RM.

  Moran was a child actor who’d been in Gone With the Wind and played a space cadet in Buck Rogers, only to have a relative squander his show-biz fortune. He encountered one of Meyer’s combat buddies during an unfortunate overnight stay in jail over writing bad checks, which led to his meeting Meyer. Aside from the threadbare Wild Gals of the Naked West, Pussycat was his first real piece of screenwriting.

  Jack told Meyer his three requirements upfront: Writers Guild minimum paid in cash, a cheap motel, and a bottle of hooch.*1 With that, Moran slipped into some flophouse on Santa Monica and came out four days later. When he emerged, he had in his hands a finished copy of The Leather Girls, creating a diabolical world he obviously knew from the gutter up.

  The plot concerns a day in the life of the Pussycats, three hard-driving, amoral strippers of amorphous sexuality. Varla is the leader, a psychopathic bully who controls through intimidation and sex. According to her pal Billie, Varla’s “like the gas chamber . . . a real fun gal.” Rosie is her hot-headed, masochistic lover, and Billie the party girl along for the ride. At a salt flats race course they encounter a squeaky-clean young couple, Tommy (“a safety-first Clyde,” says a mocking Varla) and his half-pint girlfriend Linda. “Would you like to look under my hood?” Billie coos to Tommy. The Pussycats toy with Linda, pushing her around. “Honey, we don’t like nuthin’ soft,” says Rosie. “Everything we like is hard!” Varla rips a stopwatch from around the terrified teenager’s neck, shouting, “You overdress!” She runs Tommy off the track to keep him from winning the fast-car battles of the sexes that ensues (“I don’t beat clocks, just people!”), then casually kills him with her bare hands. The trio jump into their bombs and flee, taking Linda as their hostage.

  At a gas station the Pussycats spy The Vegetable, a muscle-bound hunk, carrying his crippled father, The Dirty Old Man. They discover that the Old Man’s loaded. Billie wants to seduce The Vegetable (“Two of everything and some left over,” she coos), but Varla’s more interested in the Old Man’s cash. They follow the pair to a remote and downtrodden ranch, where they wrangle an invitation to lunch. “That young’un . . . tender as a cottontail,” says the lip-smacking Old Man upon eyeing the captive Linda. He’s a pervert who depends on his half-wit son to drag girls back to the ranch so they can both have their way. Both are sexually dysfunctional, suffering fits when the local freight trains make their daily run. Kirk, the “normal” son, feigns ignorance of his family’s secrets, and when a hysterical Linda escapes the ranch, the hapless Kirk brings her right back.

  Everybody begins to unravel. During lunch, Billie gets soused, and Varla slaps her. Billie needles Rosie over her sexuality, and Rosie is devastated when she runs out of the house to find Varla in the arms of Kirk. “You’re beautiful and I’m weak,” says Kirk. “I want you.” But Varla is too corrupt for the do-gooder Kirk. “What’s he trying to prove?” she asks the Old Man. “Maybe that not everybody in the world is as twisted-up as we are,” he responds. Varla plants a knife in Billie. Varla runs down the Old Man, and as he falls out of his wheelchair, his fortune falls out of his mobile honey pot. The Vegetable stabs Rosie. Varla crushes The Vegetable with her Porsche. The film ends near the railroad tracks when Varla is bested by little Linda, who smashes into her with a Jeep. She dies in the middle of a failed karate chop, Kirk and Linda walking off to an uncertain sunset. “I killed her like she was an animal, like she was nothing,” sobs the corrupted innocent.

  Armed with a crazy screenplay—a script Meyer says Eve wasn’t fond of and had to be talked into co-financing—RM assembled one of his most exquisite casts. Playing Kirk was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s Paul Trinka, a health food nut whose bad breath would have Satana complaining for the next thirty-five years. “I tried offering him breath mints, gum, everything,” she said. Dennis Busch would play the muscle-bound, brain-dead “piece of mutton” The Vegetable (Busch also has the honor of being the only Meyer man whom John Waters “personally found sexy”). Ray Barlow played Tommy, Linda’s straight-arrow boyfriend (apparently enunciation was none too easy for Barlow, as Lori Williams notes that “Ray had those big ol’ caps on his teeth . . . he couldn’t navigate those puppies for the life of him”), and bug-eyed Mickey Foxx popped in for a cameo as a gas station attendant.

  Last but not least was Meyer stalwart Stuart Lancaster in a bravura performance as The Dirty Old Man, an unshaven, wheelchair-bound, female-hating lech who’d been crippled while trying to pull a woman from the path of an oncoming train. One memorable Lancaster moment occurs when The Dirty Old Man swigs some hooch to lessen the torture of the daily train whistle and, teeth grinding, lashes out at the distant locomotive: “Sound your warning . . . send your message . . . huff and puff and belch your smoke . . . and kill and maim and run off unpunished!”

  Susan Bernard, later to appear as Playboy’s first Jewish Playmate in December 1966, played Linda, and was only sixteen at the time. “I was very ambitious—I read Variety daily and there was an ad and it said, ‘All-American girl who looks good in a bikini.’ I showed up.” Susan’s father, Bruno—aka Bernard of Hollywood—had worked with Meyer in Berlin shooting a layout on the production of Fanny Hill. Much to everyone’s displeasure, Ruth “Brandy” Bernard accompanied her underage daughter to the set. “There was a choice between Susan and another girl, and Meyer really regretted it,” said George Costello. “Because the mother was constantly nagging the whole way through. We would kind of laugh at her.”

  But the real casting came with the three devastating and fabulously odd Pussycats themselves. Lori Williams, an eightee
n-year-old from Pittsburgh who’d already appeared in beach-party and Elvis movies, played Billie, the malevolently hedonistic nonbrunette who’d rather frug than fight. “There was a ‘big blonde’ interview. Russ wasn’t gonna hire me because he didn’t think my boobs were big enough. He said, ‘Well, maybe we’ll pad you up,’ and that’s how I got it.” Williams would contribute her costume: a skimpy bare-midriff sweater, go-go boots, and two pairs of white jeans that she wore on alternate days before cutting one pair down to make an outrageous pair of hot pants featured prominently in the movie. Meyer’s only instruction to Williams was to swing her hips as hard as possible every time she walked.*2

  Haji was perfectly cast as the fireball Rosie, Varla’s tortured lover. Meyer didn’t let on about the lesbian relationship between the two until well into the shoot. In the scene where Rosie catches Varla making out with a man, Haji “didn’t understand why I should be crying.” For her, Varla was just a “big sister.” Tura Satana was equally kept in the dark. “That was something Russ sprung on me,” she said. “Back then that was a big no-no,” but Tura understood the turf. “Believe me, in reform school, it was definitely there. I’m not gonna be anybody’s bitch!” Satana recognized Varla’s real mission: “Her gig was control.”

  Satana’s agent Murray Weintraub sent her out for the part. Tura had already had cameos in major Hollywood pictures, most notably Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce, and was reluctant to audition knowing Meyer’s rep. “There’s no nudity in this thing at all,” the agent assured her. Meyer would con both Tura and Lori Williams into ditching their duds for outdoor shower scene, but he’d show nothing (although one could argue by watching Tura’s astounding just-above-the-nipples close-up that it was as close to the edge of nothing as it gets). Tura thumbed through the script and told Meyer, “I think she has to have a little more balls.” She did a reading, and RM announced, “You are definitely Varla.” (According to Satana, Meyer had been considering Haji for the role.) Tura Satana was a name Russ Meyer could love, and in the years following, he’d greet her by uttering it in a menacing growl, dragging out the syllables.