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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Jim Ryan might’ve have been RM’s eternal right-hand man, but as far as the actual productions went, since the making of Mudhoney George had been indispensible. “Russ doesn’t give credit where credit’s due,” said Haji. “If he said, ‘Jump,’ Costello would say, ‘How high?’ But it wasn’t because he was a pushover, it was that he felt so part of Russ’s world. He must’ve wore five hats and he never had an ego trip about him. George never came on to anybody on the set—he had a lotta class and style. I have so much love and respect for him. George was the glue that kept everything together.”

  Haji was one of the few brave souls who attempted to mend the fence between the two men, but the mere mention of the Costello name sent Meyer into a complete fury, roaring at Haji, “George betrayed me!” Haji shot back, “If it wasn’t for George, Erica would’ve left the movie,” which only made Meyer hotter. Haji felt Russ was being petty and not copping to the real reason behind the break. “Russ had a real crush on Erica Gavin,” she said. “I know it for a fact. Russ just fell in love with Erica.”

  Gavin had truly become a femme fatale. “It was really bad,” she said. “Russ was just never ever going to talk to George again, and I felt horribly responsible. Now I think Russ was just absolutely floored that someone other than him was having an affair with me.”

  A few years later when Meyer made it to 20th Century Fox, Costello couldn’t resist calling for a job. “I thought maybe he would let me back into the fold,” he said. Meyer took the call, said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, Costello,” and hung up. How dare that scoundrel call now?

  George received a missive in his mailbox shortly thereafter, consisting of a curt “Costello, you’ve got a lot of gall.” Below that loomed that big Meyer signature, and inside the letter was a yellow feather—an arcane reference to The Three Feathers, a 1939 British film concerning a British officer who is given yellow feathers for fleeing service the night before battle.

  Back at the Meyer manse, the inevitable plaque for Vixen was placed upon the wall of fame. Glued to the cheap wood was a single can of Treesweet grapefruit juice. Meyer would tell interviewers it represented the liquid needs required by a member of the Vixen cast that “nearly broke me,” but those close to the fray knew better. This cheapo, shiny can was now the symbol of George Costello’s betrayal. Meyer would not speak to Costello for another thirty years.

  “A sexual steeplechase,” Vixen is one of Meyer’s plainest scripts, and stylewise the picture is equally low-key, giving off a TV-movie blandness that only serves to heighten Gavin’s rabid performance. This is a square’s fantasy all the way, and Meyer delivers exactly what the old codgers were a-hopin’ and a-wishin’ for while eyeballing those freewheeling hippie chicks skipping around town with no damn brassieres on. Although somewhat dated, the Gavin-Wallace lesbian escapade still packs a laughable sort of punch—Erica’s so keyed up one feels she just might explode on-screen. For once Meyer lets a sex scene build tension and play out instead of cutting away to some hyperactive montage. There are the usual amusing Meyer touches, such as the melody from The Volga Boatman bleating ominously on the soundtrack when the commie shows up. But the main attraction here is Erica. You just can’t take your eyes off of her.

  Vixen inaugurated an image that would recur ad infinitum in RM’s films: a floor’s-eye view of sexual congress atop bare bedsprings (George Costello suggested the angle). The shot of a female ass grinding into the metallic coils was to be a much-noted Meyer trademark, not to mention the cause of many a bellyache from actresses who resented the reddened “spring-rings” left upon their stinging derrieres. Another relatively new visual obsession was the sight of some naked, barefoot broad running with abandon through the fields and streams of Mother Nature.

  Vixen was the first American-made release rated X via the new MPAA ratings system. Meyer voluntarily slapped an X on the picture, and MPAA potentate Jack Valenti personally sought out RM during a post-Oscar bash to commend him for this noble deed. Meyer would soon grow to loathe both Valenti and the ratings board, declaring the all-too-broad rating a commercial “skull and crossbones,” but right now he loved being the first offender, and that ominous big black X on the one-sheet was guaranteed to stop Joe Six-Pack in his tracks. A loud, lurid campaign underscored the forbidden fruits to be seen on screen. “Is she woman or animal? TOO MUCH for one man.”

  The picture opened nationally on October 15, 1968. By the end of January it had cracked Variety’s top ten grossers. In February, Meyer rounded up Erica Gavin and Harrison Page and flew to Chicago to attend some promotional ballyhoo for Vixen’s Windy City premiere at Oscar Brotman’s Loop Theater, a grindhouse that critic (and Meyer adversary) Gene Siskel declared “the movie cesspool of Chicago.” Vixen was one hot potato: a nervous Brotman pushed back the opening a week to allow city prosecutors a look-see. Meyer had bought Erica a dress for her one Vixen promotion, and suddenly Gavin had to face a gaggle of angry feminist protestors, then get eaten alive on a local TV talk show by Betty Friedan. The picture broke all records at the Loop, and in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert would declare Vixen “the best film to date in that uniquely American genre, the skin flick.”

  Even the poison-pen reviewers had to chuckle over this “ludicrously topical” picture, and notices were far from bad. Playboy deigned to call Vixen “the most wholesome dirty movie of the year.” Kenneth Turan jumped off a cliff in praising Erica Gavin for the Washington Post: “The look of calculated lust with which she views every living thing is worth the price of admission, as striking in its own right as any of the more famous close-ups of Garbo or Dietrich.”

  Most important, Vixen made fuck-you money, the kind of loot (Meyer claimed it eventually tallied $26 million) to which even the bigwigs couldn’t say no. MGM distributed the picture overseas, and in Los Angeles, Meyer managed to place Vixen with the Loews Theaters. Meyer gloated that this was the first time he had gotten one of his adult pictures “into first-class theaters in LA, before it was just the art house thing. The majors have pushed me into a position of respectability.”

  Money, money, money. The coffers were so full even Eve was off his back. But all was not well in the temple of Meyer. One inevitable response to Vixen’s rampaging success was anger. Conservative, frequently pro-religious censorship advocates were beyond outraged over the picture’s unabashed carnality, and this ragtag but vocal group went on the attack.

  January 22, 1969: The projectionist and manager of the Weis Drive-in, Macon, Georgia, are arrested by Bibb County sheriff’s officers and their print of Vixen confiscated. Bail is set at two grand apiece. A year of litigation ensues.

  May 1, 1969: Accompanied by state police, a county prosecutor—besieged by anti-Vixen petitions from local clergymen—barges into the projection booth of the 31 Drive-in in Niles, Michigan, a scant four minutes from the film’s end. Once Vixen concludes, the officers allow the twenty patrons in attendance to flee, but duly note the presence of a minor in the audience. They arrest manager James Bowers and projectionist Electus M. Slater for exhibiting an obscene film and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Vixen is seized and Bowers and Slater are thrown in the hoosegow. The hysteria in Niles is such that when Vixen flickered on the drive-in screen Slater’s son Pete felt that it was as if “one big tit” had thrown its pear-shaped shadow over the town. “People was raisin’ hell,” he said. A month later in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the local DA threatens the manager of the Grand Theatre with arrest if he doesn’t excise the film’s sexual content. He complies, but Meyer himself pulls the film, proclaiming the ad hoc censorship a contract violation.

  October 3, 1969: The vice squad charges into the Five Points Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida, where Vixen has been packing them in for five weeks straight. The picture is stopped and the print seized. “How come it took you so long to come and get it?” asks Mormon projectionist Carlos Starling as he hands the reels over to John Law. Theater owner Sheldon Mandell is charged with one of mankind’s great crime
s: projecting “an obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and indecent picture depicting graphic visual and audio representation of a physically attractive female engaging in sexual intercourse with a Mountie.” “Why don’t you leave town, you dirty old man?” is but one message subsequently left on Mandell’s answering machine. The bust only increases business.

  March 16, 1970: A nine-man, three-woman jury convicts Illiana Drive-in Theater owner Jack A. Butler on obscenity charges for exhibiting Vixen. He faces a thousand-dollar fine and a year at the Illinois State Penal Farm.

  May 26, 1970: Monroe, North Carolina, Center Theater manager James Gregory is fined $250 for showing Vixen. Reverend Glenn Gaffney signs the warrant and is the prosecution’s expert witness. And who but the rev would know better?

  On and on it went, from Texas to St. Louis to Pennsylvania. Meyer was now a smut-film King Kong, swatting one dive-bombing prosecutor after another. He would later claim he endured twenty-three prosecutions in one year, defending Vixen to the tune of $250 G’s. “Censorship is the wrong word,” he’d crow. “It’s persecution!”

  For Russ Meyer, the showdown of showdowns over Vixen came in Cincinnati, Ohio, a town with “a history of making war against the bare breast” and whose infamous censorship campaigns have been fodder for books, documentaries, and the odd made-for-TV movie. There was just no way the good German Catholics on the Ohio River were going to open their arms to Vixen’s smutty charms. “Hamilton County,” RM muttered, “is a bastion unto its own. There is no hardcore. There is no softcore, even. It’s bust time.”

  On September 22, 1969, the Guild Arts Theater at 782 East McMillan Street in Cincinnati was reopening with Vixen following a $25,000 renovation when the long arm of the law stopped everything. “The night of the first raid, there was a news photographer hanging around across the street,” said owner Pete Gall. “For the hell of it, I turned off the lights so they couldn’t get any pictures.” The reporter walked across to the Guild and let the cat out of the bag—the theater was about to be paid a visit by Officer O’Leary. The bust “was no last-minute deal,” said Gall. “It was planned.”

  Meyer’s lawyer had another print shuttled in the very next day, and Gall ran it on the assurance that he wouldn’t have to pick up the legal tab. Vixen was seized again. This was just the beginning of a well-orchestrated attack. A politically connected lawyer claiming to be a “concerned” private citizen was at the center of it all, and he would prove to be a formidable adversary, one who would throw a very expensive wrench in Meyer’s smut machine. His was a name that could always elicit a curse from RM’s lips. “I was arrested so many times,” said Meyer. “Charles Keating did everything he could do to put me in the iron hotel.”

  Born in Cincinnati on December 4, 1923, the rangy, six-foot-four, thin-lipped and bespectacled Charles Keating Jr. looks like a Madison Avenue Ichabod Crane as painted by Grant Wood. A product of poverty, he became a self-made dynamo in the legal world after a stint as a navy fighter pilot. Keating was not unlike Meyer: a risk taker, devout workaholic, and control freak who thrived on chaos, and whose whims could suddenly move valued employees to the persona non grata column in a process his staff likened to Amish shunning. Intimidating and inscrutable, Charlie was a skilled manipulator who loved big bands, had a profound distaste for commies and homosexuals, and “never saw a lawsuit he didn’t like.”

  “Anyone who ever tells you he understands Charlie Keating is either lying to you or making a big mistake,” said a key aide. “He is the most complex, enigmatic human being you will ever come across.” Keating and Meyer would share one other extremely significant peccadillo, but RM wouldn’t learn of it for another twenty-five years.

  Unfortunately for Meyer, whom Keating referred to as “that criminal,” Charlie’s pet hate was pornography, and in 1970 alone he traveled two hundred thousand miles to convert others to his anti-porno gospel. He was Richard Nixon’s only appointee to the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and when the committee’s report found attacking smut in the courts somewhat pointless, an angry Keating blocked its release until his and other commission members’ dissenting opinions were tacked on in a huge appendix.

  Charlie had first been enlisted in the fight by a local Catholic Church leader in 1956, and took to it with the Bible-thumping brimstone of a backwoods preacher, the kind Meyer had lampooned in Lorna. “I’m only one guy,” intoned a solemn Keating. “It is not possible for me to do this alone. If the majority wants it, we’ll have public decency.” Charlie’s first big victory: the conviction of an elderly woman for selling sex aids out of her schoolyard-vicinity candy store. Lady Justice fined the old biddy a hundred bucks.

  On November 1, 1958, Keating founded Citizens for Decent Literature, a somewhat loony but powerful watchdog group (sporting four senators and seventy House members on its honorary committee) that would have Meyer reaching for the antacids more than a few times. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who would take his battle with Keating to the Supreme Court and win, writes in his autobiography that the CDL “provided a vehicle for its staff members to pursue their own obsession with smut in a socially sanctioned way and condemn it at the same time. Freud would have a field day: several guys sitting around watching porno flicks, saying, “ ‘God, that was disgusting—would you rewind the film and play it again?’ ” Keating was completely and wholly obsessed with wiping out smut, so much so that it made even potential allies uncomfortable. Appearing before a House subcommittee, Charlie had to be restrained from reading aloud from an ode to sadism entitled Love’s Lash. He seemed to delight in shocking reporters by whipping out filth, and further unnerved one scribe when he uttered “a scatological term which somehow reaches the apex of revulsion.”

  In 1965, Keating entered the motion picture biz, producing a threadbare Citizens for Decent Literature “exposé” just this side of exploitationville called Perversion for Profit. This laughable little gem exhibits almost as much flesh as a Meyer opus, specifically notes the smut world’s “preoccupation with the female breast to a point where it has become a fetish,” and puts forth the ludicrous claim that “75 to 90 percent of pornography ends up in the hands of small children.”

  On September 19, 1969, Vixen unspooled in Cincinnati. One week later, Keating went on the attack, writing a letter to Safety Commisioner Henry Sandman complaining that the picture was obscene, and by way of an Ohio nuisance law demanding an injunction to prevent the picture from being shown. “It is my preference that action be taken by police,” wrote Keating, who filed suit in Common Pleas Court the day of the first print seizure. Sandman and members of the vice squad had already slipped into the Guild, seen Vixen, and decided to prosecute, and after a final Monday night showing it was seized at 11:30 p.m. “Keating orchestrated the whole thing,” said Pete Gall. “He was pushing to get rid of these theaters.”

  Meyer’s lawyer for obscenity charges was Elmer Gertz, a colorful Chicago attorney who’d defend Jack Ruby, Nathan Leopold, and Henry Miller during his six-decade career. In the rest of the country, Gertz was able to get nearly all of the charges against Vixen dismissed via a First Amendment defense. In the press, Meyer utilized Vixen’s crazy “political” banter as relevant commentary. “I’m violently anti-communist, which gives my films social significance,” he’d boast to one reporter, while commenting to another, “Strangely enough most of the litigation has been associated with or near the Mason-Dixon line, which convinces me the frank racial exposition of the film is the primary reason the picture is being harassed.”

  The tune being whistled by Meyer fell on deaf ears within the Ohio legal system, however. The cards were stacked against Vixen in Hamilton County, and Pete Gall recalled an incensed Keating denouncing Meyer’s name in particular when snooping around his theater one night. “The difficulty was that Keating’s family ran Cincinnati—the newspaper, the courts, the state attorney’s office,” said Elmer Gertz. Vixen was facing a judge with a long history of anti-pornography actions, Simon L. Le
is Sr. (“Simon Leis,” moaned Meyer at the mention of his name decades later. “It sounds like the name of someone who stabbed Christ. The name bespeaks evil!”)

  The assistant city solicitor attacking the picture in court was a devout Catholic ex-Marine known for mounting aggressive frontal assaults—and who, amazingly enough, also went by the name of Simon Leis. “We were up against a judge whose son was the prosecutor!” complained Meyer. Charles Keating and Simon Leis Jr. were sort of the Lennon and McCartney of anti-porn, later making life miserable for Larry Flynt. Clearly Keating and his Citizens for Decent Literature group aided other Vixen attacks outside of Ohio. The September-October 1969 issue of the CDL’s National Decency Reporter newsletter announced that their in-house legal counsel would be “happy to assist with prosection in any area of the country.”

  Meyer and company fought back. “Mr. Keating intimidates people,” Gertz charged in court, accusing Keating and his cronies of engaging in a “conspiracy” to deprive Meyer and the general public of their civil rights, arguing that Vixen was already being shown in forty states, not to mention nineteen theaters in ten Ohio cities. During the trial, Gertz trotted out nine witnesses for the defense, among them psychologists, professors, and one local citizen and Knights of Columbus member who testified that Vixen had “Billy Budd–Christlike” themes that gave it relevance. A California physician was the prosecution’s only witness. He maintainted that the “unrealistic hoax” of Vixen’s “male lust” was “one of the major causes of marital discord.”

  On November 17, Leis granted Keating a permanent injunction against Vixen in five Ohio counties on the grounds it was obscene. In a twenty-two-page opinion in which he quoted the prosecution’s sole witness extensively, Leis branded Meyer a “cancer on society,” one of those “unscrupulous men who have taken advantage of lack of censorship and capitalized on it” and who, if not stopped, “will infest society with a disease which will kill it.” The only thing Leis did not grant was Keating’s request that all box office receipts be turned over to the state. Charlie was now the victorious white knight of anti-smut, boasting that Judge Leis had “set a precedent whereby a private citizen could himself take measures to stop the pornographers from polluting the hearts, minds and souls of Americans.”