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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Pussycat capped Meyer’s great black-and-white melodrama period. It is one of RM’s masterpieces—the other being 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. But while the arctic nothingness of Dolls may be its main virtue, Pussycat wears a black heart on its sleeve. The freaks come out at night, and this is the one time our man from the 166th truly embraces and stands up for them. Meyer may have been a twisted, bizarre fellow, but he let his women go-go-go freely, and with abandon—in fact, no man present in his films can ever stop the dance. To the world he may have looked like (and even presented himself as) a leering Frankenstein, but deep inside that misfit heart Meyer recognized that even a monster picks a flower or two before, say, tossing a child into a lake. Aside from its ending, which, like many a RM picture, slightly deflates into a by-the-numbers action picture, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! hits like a punch in the face, yet feels like a kiss. Its “message” can be summed up in two lines of its dialogue. “What do you want?” Kirk asks Varla. “Everything—or as much as I can get,” she responds. It’s eat or be eaten, and Varla is nobody’s hamburger.

  “For the first time on screen we will see a woman kill a man with her bare hands,” Russ Meyer boasted, but when Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was unleashed on the public in early 1966, it was a complete loser commercially. “It just died, laid an egg,” said RM. “No one cared.” Pussycat was just too extreme. Exhibitors were uncomfortable with the lesbian overtones, and black-and-white pictures, even low-budget ones, were on their way out. “People complained when I didn’t show Tura Satana’s big tits naked,” noted RM. After heading in his most interesting direction as a filmmaker, he would immediately abandon it. Pussycat had failed the Meyer test: no asses in the seats. End of story.

  But Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! managed to find friends in funny places. Riding through the dirty streets of Baltimore in his vehicle of choice—a somewhat used Buick sedan of an indiscriminate (but plain) color, a teenage John Waters had been transfixed by lurid ads from the local black station blasting out of his car radio. He motored on over to Carlin’s Drive-in to check this Pussycat thing out. “I was completely blown away. A redneck lesbian killer drama, and because it was black-and-white, somehow arty. They were homicidal oversexed lesbians, which was right up my alley. Talk about strong women, my God. They were feminists, but in a Las Vegas kind of way. I went to see it the next night and the next night. I kept taking people to see it. I took Divine, who loved it because of the exaggerated women. It was just so amazing.”

  For a brief moment Waters was film critic for the Baltimore Free Press, and in his initial May 3, 1968, column suggested Pussycat be shown as part of a five day “Shock-a-Thon” film festival he wanted to put on in celebration of the recent collapse of the Maryland Censor Board. Pussycat, Waters wrote, contained “enough first rate shock scenes to open the most jaded film-goer’s eyes.” John also wrote a gushing fan letter to Meyer, which would eventually lead to a rather unique friendship. In his 1981 book Shock Value, Waters dubbed Russ Meyer “the Eisenstein of sex films,” and famously declared Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to be “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”*5

  Pussycat refused to die. “My films are like a reptile you beat with a club,” RM boasted. “You think you’ve killed it, but then it turns around and gets you on the ankle.” This was never truer than with Pussycat. It just seemed to keep building momentum over the years. In 1983 came the majestic recording of the Pussycat theme song by the Cramps, bringing a legion of new fans Meyer’s way; RM himself admitted in the nineties that Pussycat’s newfound success was “largely because a punk-rock group called the Cramps make references to it.”

  The film became a major seller for Meyer with the advent of the home video market in the eighties. “Lesbians and fags are crazy about it,” was Meyer’s crass boast. In 1995, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! had a major theatrical rerelease and played to packed houses nationwide. It would also reunite the three Pussycats, who had more or less lounged in obscurity in the years since. Their appearance at screenings and conventions now brings out rabid fans who are often covered in tattoos of their favorite Pussycat. Although Satana, Haji, and Williams don’t see a dime from any of the film revenue—though for a while Tura received overseas royalties on video sales—the trio seem a little nonplussed by the picture’s second life. “Russ was a little ahead of his time,” said Haji. “You just didn’t see women taking over and beating up men in those days.”

  In September 2002 the Pussycats went on a triumphant two-month tour of Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Holland, and Switzerland. “I felt like a rock star,” said Lori Williams. “They had people standing in the auditorium, lined up outside around the building. They’d play the movie and we’d do scenes from it. There were people with candles, somebody had a tattoo of me on their arm.” The other Pussycats found that time had brought on a mellower, gentler Tura Satana. Lori went as far as to call her “spiritual.” “She’s very generous,” said Haji. “No matter what you need she’ll open her magic little bag and she’ll have it for you. She’s like Mary Poppins!”

  The fact that Tura Satana’s talents haven’t been utilized in more films is criminal, and even Meyer realized an opportunity had been missed. “I really made a mistake,” he said. “I should’ve used her in another film.” RM readily admitted that Tura was the heart of the movie—and that maybe the friction between them had pumped blood into it. “He said, ‘I couldn’t have done it with anybody else,’ ” Tura recalled. “The way he said it made me feel very, very special.” “She and I made the movie,” said Meyer. “We had this confrontation that was constantly, ‘Who was the strongest?’ Not physically strongest, mentally strongest. I could never put one over on her, and nor could she really with me.”

  In hindsight, Satana recognized that a lot of the fuel for Varla came from the terrible childhood assault all those years before and “the anger that never left me. I was never able to really put a closure to it. I eventually got even with those guys—it took years—but the anger stayed. Because I could never erase the fact of what they did.” It’s not necessarily easy to move Tura Satana, but she’s genuinely touched by the response she continues to receive from this one scrappy little film.

  “Y’know something? It makes me very humble. I get e-mail from women all over the world—Italy, Spain, Japan, Brazil, China. I’d hate to tell you how many women say, ‘Thank you for showing us we can be feminine and still be independent. We don’t have to rely on men.’ I’m happy I’ve had an influence on females this way.” Tura let out an evil little chuckle. “Can you imagine being a Susan Bernard all your life? If I get a flat, I change my own tire.

  “You don’t have to be a namby-pamby. You can still be feminine and have balls.”

  Shit Floats

  I’m proud of my life / But don’t ask me why.

  —“PRIMITIVE,” THE GROUPIES

  “You couldn’t kill that broad with an axe,” says psychopathic cop Barney Rucker in Common Law Cabin. The broad in question? The lovely Babette Bardot, of course.

  Tanned, blond, and gigantic, with a harsh, cubist kisser that sends some wags in search of an Adam’s apple, Babette Bardot is one of Russ Meyer’s scariest superstars. It’s definitely attack-of-the-fifty-foot-woman time with ol’ Babette. “I’m the fourth cousin of Brigitte Bardot,” yaps our BB, who also modeled for Picasso at age fourteen before becoming a two-grand-a-week stripper. Everything about Babette is too much—that slightly deranged, hysterical femininity, an incomprehensible Swedish-French accent, a body so overripe that flies might be interested, and let’s not forget the tongue-waggling/thumb-sucking monster red lips that look like they could swallow a Hummer. With flesh quivering in all directions, there is something abstract about Babette, something a little Paul Klee . . . RM claimed to have enjoyed a dalliance with BB. A daunting task, if you ask me, like attempting to mount a float from the Macy’s parade. But then Russell A. Meyer is not ju
st any man.

  And only Meyer could dream up Babette’s raunchy unveiling, the simply maniacal Mondo Topless. This is the film that convinced me Russ Meyer was mad. Shot in five days in 1966 for the princely sum of twelve grand, Mondo Topless is a plotless stripper “documentary” made to cash in on the then-raging topless dancing craze and is Meyer at both his most threadbare and pure.*1 Hard to endure straight through its sixty-one-minute totality, Mondo Topless is best savored in short, concentrated blasts that allow you to linger on the chrome-plated, neon-lit nuttiness of it all—a line of cinematic coke, but much better for you (right). “My films have a lot of vignettes,” said Meyer in 1990. “You can just look at one vignette every now and then. Or another. And that may be the reason why people buy them—you don’t have to look at the whole damned movie again.” Absolutely.

  Mondo Topless began with Meyer filming Babette Bardot running amok back at Ollie Pesche’s ranch, one of the main locations for Pussycat. Meyer unearthed Babette at the Pink Pussycat on Santa Monica Boulevard, and she rounded up the other “buxotics” he’d shoot undulating in the desert—Sin Linee, Darla Paris, Diane Young, and the exquisite Pat Barringer. He brought back an old favorite from his early sixties film work, Trena Lamar (now dubbed Donna X), grabbing some truly frenzied stuff of her bouncing around in a cramped motel room, her only props being some beads, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a dress with no ass.

  Meyer augmented this new material with footage purloined from his past films, mainly staged footage of strippers—Denise Duvall, Gigi La Touche, Veronique Gabriel—doing their nightclub routines from Europe in the Raw. One of the more fetishistic soufflés Meyer has ever concocted, the scene featuring Veronique Gabriel is especially mesmerizing. With the precision of a surgeon, Meyer’s quick cutting between close-ups chops Gabriel into op-art chunks, mutating her performance into a meditation on shiny black patent leather belts, fishnets, high heels, diamond earrings, snapping fingers, and blood red lips. The sequence wouldn’t look out of place in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.

  Last to arrive to the Mondo Topless scene was Darlene Gray, aka Candy Morrison, aka Vivienne Cornoyer of—I shit you not—Maidenhead, England. A pigtailed pipsqueak with breasts the size of Yul Brynner’s shiny head, Gray was discovered by RM’s favorite Melrose Avenue flesh wrangler, Andy Anderson. Anderson took one look at her impossible physique and got Russ on the horn, telling him to haul ass and bring plenty of film. Meyer gave her the once-over and, characteristically nervous his latest filly might vanish, treated Cornoyer to dinner, then imprisoned her in a hotel overnight. When Darlene inquired as to what she should wear for the next day’s shoot, Meyer responded, “Max Factor’s ‘Light Egyptian.’ ” And nothing else. That morning at 3 a.m. Meyer whisked little Darlene off to the Chocolate Mountains, where he shot footage of her frugging through the wilderness, in her tiny hand a compact and streamlined symbol of all things US of A for Meyer, the transistor radio. Darlene stops vibrating only long enough to relax in a luxurious mud puddle. “I got her at her absolute prime,” said RM. “I only photographed her one day and then she disappeared. Never saw her again.” Meyer bosom buddy Roger Ebert panted that Darlene was “undoubtedly the most voluptuous actress Meyer has ever used in a film.”

  Ostensibly an exposé of the ecdysiast lifestyle, the Mondo Topless soundtrack originally featured Meyer doing the Q&A with the dancers on display. When Richard Brummer cut the track, he suggested dropping RM’s questions, resulting in absurd monologues that lull the viewer’s brain into sexy negative space as Meyer’s bombastic images assault the eyes. “Color makes me feel sex.” “All you’re doing is a dance, it has no meaning whatsoever.” “Even if it does excite them, this is good.” “There seems to be something subtly sadistic going on here,” deduced Ebert. Bingo, Roger.

  Mondo Topless leaps out of the gate at a dizzying gallop. We see a street sign that reads “Twin Peaks.” A telegraph stutters on the soundtrack. “San Francisco is calling!” Cut to Babette Bardot buck naked and squished behind the wheel of a snazzy auto, careening around the crazy-quilt Frisco streets like a pinball. A bent travelogue of the city unfolds, complete with untoward remarks about the Coit Tower and obtuse ruminations on cablecars. Cheapo rock music by the-never-heard-from-again supergroup the Aladdins blares endlessly on the soundtrack, all thin, brittle guitars and leering sax. There’s no plot, no logic, and no men, outside of a narrator (barking in an insistent, grave tone previously reserved for cattle auctions or reporting the Hindenburg crash) who implores, “You’ve only dreamed there were women like these, but they’re REAL, unbelievably REAL in Mondo Topless”—only minutes into the picture and it’s referencing itself already!?!*2

  But relief is in sight because, as Ernie K. Doe once sang, “Here come the girls, girls, girls.” It’s as if RM perused his one-armed viewers and thought, “OK, you want tits? You’re gonna drown in ’em! Suffocation by way of the bosom!” Blammo! Denise Duvall and “her tempting, teasing dance of the muff!” Gigi La Touche, the Girl with the Throbbing Guitar! Bleached blond Pat Barringer, looking like a Sunset Boulevard Cleopatra as she swings precariously from a telephone tower (wonder how RM sweet-talked her into that one). It is a world reduced to hamburgers, hot pants, and hood ornaments. The movie never stops moving. Ass shaking! Cut! Chrome fender! Cut! Breasts quivering! Cut! Car radio! Cut! Tape recorder! Cut! Cut! CUT!

  There is a shot here of Babette Bardot that once seen will remain tattooed on your eyeballs forever. Certainly Babette’s big blond head, tanned carcass, and non-outfit of white bra, black panties, and tiny high heels would in and of itself be enough to raise the dead, but Meyer has positioned her out in the desert right alongside a railroad line. As she’s frantically frugging away, a huge locomotive barrels down the tracks toward the camera. Bardot, in broken English, informs us, “I try to project a childlike-to-woman quality.” Whatever you say, Babette. Big trains, big women, big dreams . . . bad intentions drenched in testosterone. Meyer visually invades these women with the same sort of I’m-gonna-eat-you-alive gusto he displayed tearing into a blood-red steak. This is manly-man filmmaking at its most erect, spurting forth with a macho attitude not dissimilar to, say, a cock-swaggering Howlin’ Wolf bellowing “You’ll Be Mine” to some overcome front-row female at Theresa’s Lounge on the Southside of Chicago late one sweltering summer night in 1961.

  After a while, though, RM’s enforced euphoria becomes unbearable—you just want to scream, “Uncle!” It’s like cheese doodles. You have one, it’s pretty good. But then the bag’s gone, you feel sick, that crappy orange dust is stuck to your fingers, and you’re wondering why. Mondo Topless is a tune with one note, a Metal Machine Music with hooters. It’s ever so giddy and upbeat on the surface, and so completely depraved underneath. When aliens excavate the ruins of planet Earth in 2525, would you rather they found a copy of some anemic, technically inept, politically-correct-to-the-point-of-screaming-boredom John Sayles film? They’d learn a lot more about us humans watching a top-heavy Lorna Maitland pulling a burro up a hill!

  RM dismissed Mondo Topless as “a quickie,” but—unlike Faster, Pussycat—it was drive-in gold, and in later years became a hot seller on the home video/DVD market. There’s certainly nothing else quite like it. “Russ was a great filmmaker,” said John Waters. “He really knew how to edit films and he really knew how to shoot them. Like nobody else. You could immediately tell it was a Russ Meyer movie. He had his own style—he made industrials about tits.

  “Russ was a fetishist. He did the whole macho thing, certainly, but he was so obsessed by tits. It was a wonderful perversion to me, like somebody who likes big dicks. It was a big, big part of his personality. He could barely talk about anything but tits. But not many people turn that into a film genre!”

  Waters related a tale about Meyer visiting his Baltimore apartment and perusing John’s vast collection of books. “I see him lunge at a volume and pull it out,” said Waters. “It was The Mellons. It was about the family. But he thought it was
about tits! I’m not makin’ that up. I saw him lunge. Russ said, ‘Oh,’ and put it back. It really made me laugh.”

  Where does one begin to sing the praises of Alaina Capri? Is it the staccato, far-from-cuddly personality, or maybe the imposing jet black coiffure, with nary a hair out of place? The blasé but armed-with-razors tone that could render any male within 150 yards impotent? Perhaps it’s the iceberg gaze that seemed to imply, “You’re the run in my stocking, you little ant”? The full lips that whisper, “No dice, Casanova”? At the end of the day it may be the breathtaking narcissism on display that impresses the most. You just get the feeling that nobody in the world matters to this chick but her gold-plated-bitch self. Elizabeth Taylor in a Pez wrapper, a sweet, sweet nutcracker indifferent to cries of lust or pain. Something about Capri’s beautifully arrogant mouth says, “I can’t count to ten and it doesn’t matter.” Regrettably, Capri only made a pair of pictures for RM, but after all these years the mere utterance of her name still lights a fire in the loins of those in the know. Absinthe in a bad bikini, that Capri, and good to the last drop.

  One of eight kids, Aelina Tuccinardi grew up in Inglewood, California. “I won Miss Muscle Beach,” she recalled. “Russ Meyer saw my picture in the paper.” He then shot some photographs of the sixteen-year-old on the beach in Malibu. Their paths would cross again. Aelina studied acting at UCLA—“I was a natural.” She then got under the wing of music impresario Oliver Berliner, who renamed her Alaina Capri and stuck her in a femme pop trio called the Loved Ones. “We looked like three sisters. None of us really sang before they put us together. We got jobs on our looks.”