Right before the Loved Ones were leaving for a gig in Japan, Berliner saw an ad “looking for buxom girls to put in a movie. He sent my picture to RM.” Meyer wanted her for his next picture. Her only professional acting experience thus far had been a small walk-on next to Jerry Lewis in The Delicate Delinquent. In contrast to her conniving, Meyer-induced screen persona, Capri was really just a nice lady who’d eventually wind up teaching grade school. Being dropped into the Meyer world was like a trip to another, more squalid dimension. When asked about her co-star Babette, Alaina laughed. “She was kind of wild. She said she kept milk in her boobs so they’d always be big.” Exactly what that means I don’t know, but it’s certainly not hard imagining big ol’ Babette muttering it.
There are those who say that RM really had the hots for Capri. He did seem to take particular care in composing her shots, which often look dreamlike. “Russ kind of protected me,” said Capri. “He didn’t put me in the same category as the other women. I was Miss Innocent.”
In his seminal 1973 Film Comment article on Meyer, Roger Ebert more or less dismisses the two films RM made with Capri, Common Law Cabin and Good Morning and Goodbye, as lesser works, “essentially soap operas whipped up to display voluptuous actresses.” Let me get this straight—you’re saying that’s a minus for Meyer, Roger? These two unrelenting hatefests are silver bullets of badness oh-so-tightly packed with RM’s soiled, despairing view of humanity, the sort of sad bile usually found in the dime-store novels of Jim Thompson. Both made in 1967, these are among Meyer’s most entertaining pictures, and benefit greatly from more acidic wordplay from the mighty John Moran.
First up was Common Law Cabin, a film permeated with a very specific sort of flop-sweat desperation, the kind, let’s say, that drips off a one-hit wonder awaiting the reception of an ill-fated second album.
The plot, such as it is: alcohol-damaged skipper Cracker (John Moran) cons Martin (John Furlong) and Sheila Ross (Alaina Capri) into taking a trip to Hoople’s Haven, vacation spot from hell. Martin is a pathetic shell of a man with a fatal heart defect, resigned to being a kick-ball for his venomous, deeply unsatisfied wife, Sheila. Along for the ride is Barney Rickert (Ken Swofford), a psychopathic cop on the lam with a million in hot rocks. Getting a whiff of the testosterone her husband sorely lacks, Sheila eyes him like a hungry cat. “Must you pant?” asks hubby wearily. “It’s an animal trait.” “It’s the bitch in me, dear—or don’t you remember?” sneers Sheila, still taking Rickert in. “It has been such a long time.”
Hoople’s Haven turns out to be a miserable dump, its downtrodden boozehound host Dewey Hoople tortured by incestuous thoughts about his daughter Coral (yet another slightly pregnant Meyer beauty, a German export by the name of Adele Rein). Dewey’s bitter girlfriend Babette attempts to entertain the unfortunate visitors with a screaming, torch-wielding dance, the finale of which has her jumping off an imposing precipice into the river below.*3
Things quickly unravel at Hoople’s Haven as the participants reveal themselves as human scabs unable to refrain from picking each other to death. “I only say what you think so you’ll hear how lousy it sounds,” Babette tells Dewey. Rickert schemes to take over the place, striking evil alliances with just about everybody but Dewey. He also seduces Sheila, rapes Babette, and paws Coral. “Wake up, old fool,” Sheila tells Dewey. “I’m not your daughter. I’m not even your friend.” Martin slaps his wife; she spits in his face. Sheila and Babette sneer at each other. “I really feel for that broad,” says Babette of her rival. “That’s the problem—everybody feels.” Their hatred for each other culminates in the river, where, balanced precariously on the shoulders of the menfolk, they get into a vicious catfight, somehow inducing a fatal heart attack in Martin. When Sheila is asked if she knew about her husband’s heart condition, Babette hisses, “She knew his bank balance—why worry about his heart?” Coral romps with late arrival Lawrence Talbot III (Andrew Hagara), a young heir on the run for reasons never explained. Rickert knocks Babette out with a punch in the face, then shoots both Cracker and Sheila. After a big tussle in Cracker’s boat leaves Rickert adrift in the river, the unmanned vessel plows into Rickert’s skull, killing him. Dewey walks off into the sunset with Babette, pleased that his daughter’s boyfriend is worth $40 million. That’s all, folks.
From its pompous opening narration—“Where does a river begin?”—Common Law Cabin is one long wallow in a blasé sort of disgust for the human race, in this case exemplified by a bunch of losers in brightly colored bathing suits trapped on a weedy moonscape, awaiting a ship they know will never come in. Everybody’s corrupt and life’s a con game. Somehow Meyer gets a lot of belly laughs out of this brutal conceit.
This was one of RM’s kookier casts. A lipless, red-faced dark cloud of the Burt Lancaster variety, Ken Swofford is a worthy addition to Meyer’s malevolent manimals. John Furlong is perfecto as the sad clown of a husband, Franklin Bolger is a suitably pathetic pie-eyed popeye, and newcomer Andrew Hagara contributes one of the worst performances ever in what I believe is his only appearance on the silver screen. And the women? Yet another collection of gaudy billboards advertising Meyer’s crackpot notions of femininity—what’s not to like? Just watching Babette Bardot attempt to chop wood with a machete is worth the price of a DVD.
There are about ten thousand good Common Law Cabin stories, so let’s go through all of them, okay?
The picture was set to be shot in Hawaii, but problems with film unions put the kibosh on the deal, as Meyer just couldn’t justify the expense. “Russ was furious,” said Richard Brummer. “We didn’t do a rewrite—he literally tore all those pages out of the script that referred to Hawaii.” Meyer relocated the production to a remote nowheresville on the Colorado River near Yuma, Arizona. The principal location was a small shack on an ugly, sunbeaten hunk of land accessible only by boat. Of all the crazy places that RM chose for celluloid immortality, this was perhaps the most despairing. In place of the lush tropical island that had slipped away was a landscape as bleak as a ghost town with no ghosts, and shot in color to maximize the dread. Hollywood it wasn’t.
Jack Lucas accompanied Meyer to scout for locations, and remembered the moment RM found what he was looking for. “We had to hack our way through the reeds to get onshore. Here’s this beat-up ol’ torn-down, fallen-apart place—a sheepherder’s cabin.” Lucas dressed up this shabby lean-to as Hoople’s Haven, a vacation “resort” more suitable for a POW camp. Grass skirts, Hawaiian shirts, and leis—all holdovers from the pre-torn script—only underscore the cruel irony.
Cast and crew were imprisoned downriver in a bunch of tattered bungalows run by an old river rat who bettered herself by selling the entourage marked-up six-packs of beer. RM’s headquarters consisted of a rustbucket trailer augmented by a tent annex with a frequently willing Babette Bardot ensconsed inside. The camp was phoneless, forcing Meyer to communicate with his minions via walkie-talkie. Power was supplied by generators, and an unemployed steamboat hash slinger doled out the production cuisine—chicken-fried steak, day in, day out.
Every morning at four the group rose, scarfed down a greasy breakfast, then hiked to a tiny dock where they boarded a pair of motorboats that putt-putted through the predawn chill to Hoople’s Haven. Sandbars would rise in the river during the night as flow was cut from the dam upstream, and Meyer would jump into the water to physically dislodge the vessels. “I can still see Russ in that river pullin’ that boat,” said a disbelieving Ken Swofford. “Like Humphrey Bogart in African Queen.”
So there they all were. A Swedish-French stripper, a pregnant fraulein, a schoolteacher, a bewildered pretty boy, and a few actual but somewhat desperate thespians. A band of outsiders in the middle of nowhere, all at the mercy of Russell Albion Meyer, the sun frying their minds as they shot a feature film in a decrepit hut that shivering pygmies would hesitate to enter. Something was bound to go wrong. Indeed, just about everything did.
Andrew Hagara—the picture’s male “l
ove interest”—was a mere babe in the woods, and the delicate, refined actor didn’t exactly fit in with the he-man Meyer posse. “First of all, he showed up with a full-length mirror and under his arm,” said John Furlong. “And a little stuffed green frog.” Hargara took one look around at the cramped, dirty quarters where the actors were staying and meekly inquired as to where he was to sleep. A hulking, barely clothed Ken Swofford threw back the threadbare sheets on his cot and bellowed, “Get in, kid!” A terrified Hagara fled for the leading ladies’ bungalow.
Meyer rode the poor guy the rest of the shoot. One afternoon as he stumbled over his lines for the nth attempt, RM just lay facedown in the Arizona dirt and moaned—within earshot of Hagara—“Shit, I was the one who hired him.” At the end of the day Meyer would reward each actor with a little nip of booze from his private stash. “Whoever Russ was mad at that day didn’t get a shot,” said Swofford. “Andrew would be standing there with his cup hanging out. I don’t remember him ever getting a drink.
“When Hagara started the picture, he looked like Tab Hunter,” Swofford continued. “After two weeks of Russ he looked like Franchot Tone. He had aged thirty years.”
Meyer’s boozy old pal Franklin Bolger spent most of the time in an alcoholic stupor. Frank nearly totaled a boat, not to mention crew and camera, during a shot in which RM wanted the Cracker character to beach the vessel right next to the camera for dramatic effect. “Bolger drives the boat up on the shore,” reported Richard Brummer. “He was very timid, coming up very slow. Russ said, ‘C’mon, now! This has got to be an exciting scene—I want you to bash that boat right up on the beach! Just bash it right in there!’ Here comes Bolger with that boat full speed and hits the mudflats. The boat keeps coming. The cameraman dives, pulls the camera away, and the boat comes almost all the way up to Russ. The shot was ruined, of course. And Russ said—very calmly—‘OK, Frank. This time give me a medium bash.’ ”
Franklin was always good for a chuckle or two. Apparently Bolger had an unnatural fear of pumas. “If a forest ranger would come up, he’d go, ‘Have you heard any new reports of . . . pumas?’ The guy would look at him kind of funny and go, ‘No.’ He was always worried about pumas.” Enlisted as a crew man when not acting, Bolger would squat behind a cactus to defecate into a sack in between takes. “We’d hear this cry of ‘Food for the pumas!’ and he would fling this paper bag of his crap across the desert,” said Richard Brummer.
In order to record the dialogue for the boat scenes, soundman Brummer had to hide in the bow with all the equipment. “The boat starts to leak. And the water starts to rise. And I have open 110-volt wires that I’m sitting in the water with. I’m watching the water rise as I’m continuing to record, because Russ had not said cut yet. We got the shot—just before I might’ve been electrocuted!”
The fact that French-Swedish Babette was playing mama to Deutschland’s Adele Rein and that neither navigated the English language too gracefully only added spice to the casserole. “Adele had a Kraut accent and Babette had a French accent,” said Ken Swofford, who recalled the scene where Dewey Hoople bemoans the fact that he’s made his family suffer in poverty and Babette is supposed to console him by saying, “Oh, Dewey, you make me rich.” “And Babette goes, ‘Aaah, Dewey, you make me retch.’ Furlong and I are standing there just looking at each other. Russ goes, ‘Cut! Beautiful!’ Furlong goes, ‘Russ, she said, “You make me retch.” ’ He goes, ‘What?!?’ and turns on the tape recorder, and there it was—‘Dewey, you make me retch.’ Russ goes, ‘Ah, fuck it, it’s a comedy.’ ” On to the next fabulous scene.
Meyer had his own rather unusual technique to inspire great performances from his leading ladies—one to rival Strasberg, Adler, Stanislavski, and all the rest of the greats, but with none of the fuss. He’d just have George Costello go up to an actress right before a scene and shake her as hard as he could. Shake her! “Meyer would say, ‘Go shake the girls now, George. Go shake Alaina, get her ready, shake her up.’ He’d have me shake them before the take to get them in some sort of physical mood or emotional state, get them more involved. This was ongoing. He had me shake them all. I’d grab ’em by the shoulders and give ’em a big shake. This was Meyer’s version of the Method. It sounds ludicrous now, but this really happened.” (Which female was Costello too apprehensive to shake? Tura Satana, of course.)
Although she’ll remain nameless, one actress induced much unintentional mirth when she announced to her fellow thespians, “Russ says if we do real good we might make the Canus Film Festival.” John Furlong chuckled when I asked him about Meyer’s disdainful attitude toward the theatrical arts. “I don’t think he knew a goddamn thing about acting. I remember Alaina Capri wasn’t moving her face enough, so he said, ‘Give me some Ben Turpin!’ She didn’t know who the hell Ben Turpin was! A lotta times he’d mention these older actors and nobody knew who the hell they were.” Ken Swofford concurs. “Russ’d be doing a scene and he’d go, ‘Babette! On this one give me an Edgar Kennedy! And she’d go, ‘An Eeeeedgor Keeeeenedy???’ She had no idea what Russ was talking about.” Swofford maintains that Babette also had a wandering eye, which only added to the particular challenge of acting alongside her.
At one point in the film Swofford was supposed to hit Babette with his satchel of stolen goods. “Babette turns around and hits me in the face with a boob. It just flew out and hit me in the face. Russ goes, ‘Cut!’ I go, ‘Leave it in! For God’s sake, that’s a movie first.’ ”
Meyer didn’t exactly handle the endless mishaps of making Common Law Cabin calmly. “Russ would have seventeen tantrums a day,” said Ken Swofford. “One of the things he did was try to discombobulate everyone.” If it was a fight scene, he’d whisper offending things that one actor supposedly said about the other, “so the guy would be mad and maybe actually punch someone.” If it was a love scene, he’d tell an actor that the leading lady said he wasn’t delivering the goods. “If Russ had upset enough people, he had achieved his objective,” Swofford continued. “I think he thrived on that. You know that term ‘drama queen’? Russ was a drama king. He liked turmoil and he liked to see people go against each other.”
Swofford enjoyed Meyer as a character but saw him as a bully. “I think he had a lot of contempt for women and he enjoyed making them uncomfortable, making them cry.*4 I saw it.” Get the king to chuckle, though, and he backed off. “You figured out very early on if you could make Russ laugh, you were free from abuse. . . . He could actually smell fear on someone and boy, that was the end of it. There was a lot of latent sadism there.”
More often than not, it was George Costello who drew the short straw. Not only did he tend to all the minutiae on set—each night after the shoot he had to round up that day’s footage and, pilled up to keep his eyes open, speed through the dry river beds, making the hour-and-a-half drive to Yuma to ship the footage to the lab.
“Russ would humiliate George in front of people,” Swofford admitted. At one point Swofford and John Furlong showed up on set out of costume. Meyer barked at them to put on their suits. Furlong told Meyer they didn’t have to bring their outfits, as Costello had informed them they were working as grips that day. Meyer went berserk, rounding up cast and crew. It was lecture time.
As Swofford recalled, “Russ goes, ‘Now listen to me: George has the mind of a two-year-old!’ ” Meyer started jumping up and down, spittle flying from his lips as he shouted, “George has the mind of a two-year-old! Don’t listen to George!” Growing more agitated, he demanded that those present join in. “We’re all yelling, ‘George has the mind of a two-year-old! And he’s stamping his feet in rhythm—‘George has the mind of a two-year-old!’ ” Meyer repeated it to the point of insanity. It was these moments when many felt RM had truly gone off his rocker. A momentary snafu would trip some diabolical inner switch, and in a matter of mere seconds Meyer would accelerate from zero to a murderous sixty. “I don’t know how George didn’t have a complete physical collapse,” said Swofford.
&
nbsp; The scripted Babette-Alaina catfight in the ice-cold river provided another opportunity for Meyer to torment George. “Russ thought our legs were too thin,” said Swofford. “So he has Costello take his pants off and run through the water while he shoots close-ups of George’s legs. We’re just standing there, George is running through the water, punch drunk and no sleep for a week, running through this freezing water while Russ is shooting his legs.”
At the end of another grueling day, Meyer was frantic to finish a scene before the light faded, and instructed Swofford and Furlong to haul equipment pronto. “Russ points a mile down this muddy beach and says, ‘Take these reflectors down there,’ ” recalled Swofford. “So Furlong and I change into our coveralls and we’re sloggin’ down the beach with all these reflectors.” John got his foot stuck in the mud as wind blew the reflectors out of his hands. An exhausted and fed-up Furlong bolted upright and muttered, “Goddamn it, Swofford, as soon as I get back to Hollywood, I’m gonna suck a dick! How long could it take? A few minutes and you’re a star!”
At one point in the movie Swofford fires off a round from his gun. Furious that the shots weren’t visible on camera—the blanks didn’t physically eject like actual bullets—Meyer loaded the weapon with actual lead and started screaming at Ken to fire directly over the camera. “I was so pissed off,” said Swofford. “I came running through the sand dunes and I fired these real bullets right over Russ’s head while he was standin’ by the side of the camera. He goes, ‘Good. They all ejected.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, by God, that’s pretty good—the bullets whizzed by and he didn’t even blink.”
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 21