Erica wound up in an Oxnard bar and, starting at ten in the morning, shook her ass fifty minutes on, ten minutes off, for seven hours a day. This wasn’t a world she knew. “I was in so much pain—you had to wear three-inch heels. I walked into my apartment, took off my shoes, and the tears started to flow.”
Like many a Meyer dame, Erica looks back with mixed feelings about what she was doing and why. “Sex has always been a really weird thing for me because I was molested for a long period of time when I was a kid,” remembered Gavin, who says a neighbor abused her for nearly a year when she was ten. Relationships with the opposite sex were problematic at best, and taking off her clothes for money didn’t simplify matters.
“I always felt that men were looking at my body, and I didn’t like that. But what a weird thing for me to go into—topless dancing. You don’t want people to like you for your body, yet you’re out there saying, ‘This is what I am, I’m all about my body.’ ” More to the point, she told writer Steve Sullivan, “Down deep inside, there’s a part of Erica who always felt that the only reason any man was with her was to fuck her.”
At age nineteen, Gavin showed up at the Losers for a Sunday amateur night, and owner Pete Rooney hired her on the spot. It wasn’t easy to break the ice with Losers luminaries like Tura Satana and Haji. “When you first join a crew like that, honey, they’re ready to massacre you,” Erica recalled. “I was kinda quiet. I was so involved with myself. They realized I wasn’t some kind of bimbo dumbass. I wasn’t there to steal their man or to be better than them. I was just trying to make a fucking living.” During her Losers stint Gavin did a bullfighter routine complete with cape and south-of-the-border eye makeup that would inspire the fabled Vixen brows. At times she was so zonked on drugs other dancers had to cover her ass. “I was stoned all my life,” said Gavin. “I mean really wasted.”
Now Erica was Vixen, and come the end of June 1968, she boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Miranda, California, where she was transported down a dirt road in the redwoods to the small farmhouse that would be her home for the next four weeks or so. Outside of some extra work and a one-afternoon no-budget bumblefuck called Erika’s Hot Summer that saw light of day only in the wake of Vixen’s success, she had no real experience in front of the camera: “I had never made a movie before. I had no clue.” And no preparation whatsoever for the man, the myth, and the madness that was Russell Albion Meyer.
The Bud Kues ranch was a typically grim Meyer outpost. RM, Gavin, and other cast members stayed in the farmhouse; the crew was relegated to tents on the lawn. Meals were cooked by the lethal Chef Meyer; according to sound man Richard Brummer, breakfast amounted to “one inch of bacon fat.” RM seemed particularly amused that the crew had not only to bathe with a cold-water hose, but defecate in full view of everyone by way of a makeshift open bathroom. “The girls could use the toilet in the house,” said Brummer. “The crew was supposed to use this throne that was on display.” Meyer would rise at 5:30, squeeze some fishing in, fry up some chow for the gang, then bore down on moviemaking until well into the evening.
Vixen’s plot is strictly no-frills. Tom is a workaholic “bush jockey”—pilot for hire—married to the beautiful Vixen. Tom flies Dave and Janet King, a handsome young couple, to his Canadian lodge where, unbeknownst to her husband, Vixen seduces them both. Vixen also beds her biker brother, Judd, and harasses his friend Niles Brook, a black draft dodger. When not scheming, seducing, or manipulating, Vixen coos utter devotion to her husband, who remains blissfully unaware of his wife’s endless philandering. Along comes O’Bannion, an evil redheaded Scottish commie intellectual complete with walking stick. He plans to hijack Tom’s plane to Cuba and coaxes Niles into coming along for the ride. During the flight, O’Bannion reveals himself to be a racist, and the men get into fisticuffs. Vixen pilots the plane while Tom knocks out O’Bannion with a monkey wrench. Niles picks up O’Bannion’s gun, wanting to turn the plane back to Canada, but Vixen talks him out of it and, after landing safely, the draft dodger runs off. A new couple appears, wanting Tom to fly them somewhere. Vixen studies the attractive pair while smiling in sharklike anticipation, and—shades of some fifties sci-fi shocker like The Blob—the movie freeze-frames on her face and on pops “THE END?”
Meyer shot a lot of the aerial footage for Vixen at a rather dramatic little location atop a mountain in the redwoods. “No buildings, just a landing strip,” said soundman Brummer. “At either end of the landing strips, you flew off the top of the mountain.” Brummer remembers seeing his Nagra tape deck “literally float in the air” while the pilot flew sideways and nearly upside down for the shots required for the film’s tumultuous, in-air climax, and at one point the pilot coolly told the soundman, “Y’know, I’m not supposed to do stunts in a Cessna. We may lose the wings any minute.” Dialogue sequences with the actors were shot on the ground with the crew hiding below and occasionally rocking the plane to simulate flying.
Vixen benefited from a great lineup. Garth Pillsbury plays one of Meyer’s most blissfully ignorant husbands, the pipe-puffing mannequin Tom; Harrison Page is the uppity but nice-guy African American draft dodger Niles (Michael Landon would later hire him for TV work based on seeing Vixen); red-bearded Michael Donovan O’Donnell essays the evil commie O’Bannion with just the right twinkle in his eye; and Vincene Wallace convinces as the sexily dumb Janet King. (Squished in for a brief cockney-accent cameo is Meyer stalwart John Furlong.) But the movie belongs to Erica Gavin, even though she felt like the odd one out during filming. When not embroiled in mind games with the filmmaker, she’d retreat to her quarters, consoling herself by spinning a vinyl copy of her theme song from the Losers, Sergio Mendes’ hit “The Look of Love.”
At least at first, Gavin saw Russ as a father figure, and when Big Daddy was pleased—as when Erica came up with the famous Vixen eye makeup—everything was groovy. “As soon as he said, ‘I love those eyebrows,’ that was it. Anything to make him happy. Because he was just looking for anything to be unhappy. He was just such a grump sometimes.”
The early part of the shoot was fun. Richard Brummer got to the production late, as he had just wrapped up work on Incubus, a curious, all-Esperanto horror picture starring William Shatner. Outfitted in his “traveling clothes”—a suit—Brummer arrived to find George Costello in a complete frenzy. No time to unpack or change, said George. They had to run to the town square and swipe some colored lights luckily left on a big tree since the holidays. “Next thing I know, I was climbing up a pine tree taking down Christmas lights and resetting them for the fish scene,” said Brummer.
Ah, yes—the infamous fish scene. During a barbecue, a yellow-dressed Vixen comes on to Dave in a novel fashion: by grabbing an about-to-be-fried trout, sticking it down her cleavage to shake her seafood-stuffed jugs, then slipping it into her mouth to suggestively suck on its head. Shot late one night with the crew bone-weary from a grueling day’s work, Gavin remembers the scene as a rare instance when she actually pleased RM. Although understandably apprehensive about sticking the slimy, odorous corpse (freshly caught by Meyer) between her lips, Erica got into the swing of it, and RM was ecstatic.
“I don’t know how he got me to be so free,” said Gavin. “The one thing about Russ is when you’re doing something right, he gets excited. He elicits it just by letting you know you’re doing good. It’s like patting a dog—‘Good girl!’ ” Costello recalled how Meyer just kept squeezing Gavin for more, more, more. “That was another Meyer fascination scene, blowing this fish. He’d shout out all this dialogue—‘Make love to that fish! Suck on that fish, suck on that head.’ He was getting off on that one. He’d give this little chuckle to himself. Like he’s got one here. Something special.”
Battle lines were drawn between Meyer and Gavin the day they shot Vixen abusing Niles, all the while coming on to her brother Judd by flashing her yellow bikini and snarling, “We’ll let the shine watch so he’ll have something to tell his grandchillun.” “It was so fucking hot,”
Erica remembered. “It wasn’t one of Russ’s good days, everything was pissing him off. I was squinting because of the reflectors, and I was sweating. He didn’t like that—‘C’mon, it’s not that hot—stop sweating!’ I was, like, ‘How do I stop sweating??’ He said, ‘Just think of it being cold,’ and then put more reflectors on me.”
Gavin had problems hurling racial epithets at Harrison Page. In the course of Meyer’s alleged indictment of racism Vixen calls the actor “spook,” “spade,” “sambo,” “chocolate drop,” “Buckwheat,” and “black prince of the Congo.” Meyer wanted her to be “meaner and meaner, inflammatory and racist,” said Erica. “My parents taught me you never say the N-word, ever. I had never even heard those words before Russ, much less said them—I wanted to ask Russ, ‘What the fuck is a pickaninny?’ ”*3
Page had a mad crush on Gavin but also saw Meyer’s side in his battles with the female lead. “Truthfully? I thought Erica was extremely gifted but spoiled and difficult—this kind of dilettante,” he said. “She just behaved so irrationally, stormed off I don’t know how many times. And George would woo her back. Erica was a star with no experience whatsoever—and behaved like a star, believe me. She stomped around a lot. You always heard her coming.” Those with any acting experience found the casting of Erica Gavin a bit puzzling. “She was terribly amateurish in her line delivery,” recalled Garth Pillsbury. “Meyer was always going, ‘Erica, just say the lines.’ This was her first film, and she had the lead.”
Costello sensed that Meyer was doing a number on Gavin, and felt sympathy for her. “She was the wounded flower. During the shooting she was ready to quit several times and I had to talk her out of it. Because Meyer was browbeating her . . . it was just the wrong approach. It scared Erica, demoralized her. She just became totally afraid of him. She wouldn’t argue when he started yelling, she’d just go into this shell. That’s when he’d send me in to negotiate—‘George, go see what you can do with that girl.’ ” Costello followed orders, not knowing he was writing his own death sentence.
Oddest of all was the fact that when Harrison Page went out walking at night after the day’s shoot, he’d catch Meyer peeking into Erica’s room, obviously in an excited state. “He would look at me and I would pretend like I didn’t see him,” said a somewhat bewildered Page, who actually thought that Russ and Erica were a couple playing some kinky game and kept the incident to himself. “As far as I’m concerned they could’ve had that worked out together. . . . I felt the reason he was so hard on her is because they had a relationship.”
All these years later Gavin was stunned to hear that others felt Meyer was obsessed by her. “See, I never got that Russ was interested in me in any kind of way. Because Russ gave me no inclination. He made me cry a lot. He knew that I wanted to be perfect. And I wanted him to love me. I guess there were a lotta things that nobody knew about him, like his looking through my window! For some reason it doesn’t even offend me. God, Russ is such a clumsy teddy bear—one, I guess, who likes to look in windows and masturbate.
“What I really loved about Russ is underneath that harsh exterior I knew there was mush. Mush. I feel that inside him was just this tender loving person that thought he had it covered it up by being so fucking butch. Trying too hard. I always remember Russ scratchin’ his ass and pickin’ his nose. He would like to act gross as possible—I think Russ wouldn’t mind taking a shit in front of you. I mean, he never let anyone slide. The dirtier it was, the harder it was, the hotter it was—if he could’ve made the work any worse, he would’ve. Russ loved the fact that I had to run through the brush barefoot and it hurt like hell on my feet. He kept making me do it over and over and over. The more sensitive you were, the more Russ would go for the jugular.”
What a crazed triangle: Gavin thinking Meyer hates her, Meyer thinking Costello’s in love with Gavin, everybody else thinking Meyer’s in love with Erica, and George Costello oblivious to it all. It’s a wonder somebody didn’t die. They almost did.
One day during downtime a few of the cast members decided to mosey over to a stream not far from the house. When Meyer realized they were MIA, he became unglued, running out to a second-story balcony with a gun that he fired repeatedly in the air as he screamed, ‘You bastards, Come back!” Costello and the crew were frozen with fear in the nearby kitchen. “That was the worst. We thought he’d start turning the gun on us. Maybe he was going nuts.”
Pillsbury was among the infidels who had wandered away. “Suddenly I hear these gunshots go off, and we’re in the middle of nowhere. I thought, ‘Jesus, what the hell is that?’ I come back to the cabin and there’s Russ sitting there with a gun. Somebody told me that Russ took his fist and smashed it into the cabinet and got the gun out.” Garth felt the real source of Meyer’s anger was the bond developing between Gavin and Costello. “I really thought it was possible he was going to kill George,” he said.
Pillsbury’s wife Jacqueline recalled the intensity of the situation. “Russ said, ‘Nobody leaves tonight. You’re all gonna stay here. In the compound.’ That was the word, compound.” Garth had somehow talked Meyer into letting him and his wife stay at a nearby motel, and they got the hell out of Dodge before RM could restrain them. As they sped away, Jacqueline ducked down below the car window just in case Russ decided to open fire. They figured the one point in their favor was the fact that he had a movie to make and, as she reasoned, “It wouldn’t do him any good to kill the actors.”
As if the production itself wasn’t fraught with melodrama, once Meyer got to the cutting room a major technical snafu was discovered. “The camera had been running slow, less than twenty-four frames per second, so if you played the sound as it was supposed to sync up with picture, it would sound like Mickey Mouse—in sync, but high-pitched,” said Richard Brummer, who had to sync the picture syllable by syllable, a painstaking task. The unexpected benefit was that the faulty camera speed actually “made the action faster, which improved the movie,” said Brummer, chuckling. “Russ always wanted it to move faster anyway. Now he had a film that was innately faster.”
Unfortunately a sped-up picture left the film running short, and Brummer, cutting picture for Meyer for the first time, asked the boss if he should stretch scenes to pad it out. “Cut it as tight as you can, tighter than a drum, and I’ll fix it,” ordered Meyer, who flew off to the Northwest and shot some airport footage that brought the running time up to seventy-two minutes, a barely acceptable length for a feature. Next Meyer and Brummer labored over a rather novel teaser trailer, which “had no scenes at all, just the title changing colors,” said Richard. “We said in the narration that the picture was too hot to show you any part of it.” (Roger Ebert later reported that people were actually showing up at Chicago’s Loop Theater just to peek at the Vixen trailer.)
That August, Meyer ran out of scratch and, confident he had a winner, went begging to Eve to bail him out for an additional half of his take (according to Meyer, his ex had pulled funds out of the production at the last minute, angry RM had cut the crew in for distribution returns). They ceased bickering long enough to agree on terms for which proved to be a wise investment. Vixen would be the last offering under the banner of Eve Productions.
It would also be the last Russ Meyer picture for George Costello. While in the editing room Meyer somehow learned of the treasonous little can of Treesweet grapefruit juice that Costello had slipped Erica, and he just couldn’t let go of it. Brummer was adding a lot of wild lines to correct deficiencies in Gavin’s performance, and because of the camera problems he also had to spend time resyncing lines. An impatient Meyer had to find a culprit. “He blamed the performance problems on George!” said Brummer. “Not on anything he did or Erica did. George was persona non grata. In Russ’s mind it grew. This was now disloyalty.”
Costello’s marriage was kaput largely because he’d devoted every minute of his time to Meyer, and now his relationship with RM was heading south because of his involvement with Erica Gavin. He moved i
n with her, the brief affair tightening the vise a notch further. Jim Ryan had a good relationship with Gavin—she had Polish roots, and Ryan, speaking the language, called her by a Polish nickname, Slavka—but he made sure not to get too close, as he knew it had meant curtains for Costello. “George had moved in with her in the Valley somewhere,” he said. “I never said anything. I thought Meyer wouldn’t want to know.”
The fact that RM was up to his old habit of working everybody around the clock didn’t help matters. The editing crew ate only when and where Meyer wanted to eat. They broke only when Meyer said it was time to quit. “I think he had the need to control everybody associated with him,” said Costello. “And his feeling was he was paying us well, so we should be totally dedicated as he was. He verbalized that several times—that we should feel just as he does about these films. For the most part everybody was gung-ho—but when he became too possessive, to where you couldn’t leave or go down the street, then it became too much, against human nature. You couldn’t be out of Meyer’s sight. I was at that point where I’d had enough.”
Late one evening at the Meyer compound Costello let RM know that he was leaving for the night. “I told him I had to go and visit my child—I lied. Evidently he checked up on me.” When George showed up for work the next day, Meyer confronted him, and all of the anger building up came out like a cannon shot. Seething with rage, Meyer snarled, ‘You lied to me! You lied to me!” To which George calmly replied, “Well, Russ, if that’s the way you feel about it, okay. I’ll see ya later.” Costello walked out the door. “That was the end of it,” he said. “Excommunicated.”
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 24