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

by Jimmy McDonough

  In Columbus, Ohio, on July 21, 1971, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the ban, ruling in a 5–2 decision that “purported acts of sexual intercourse solely for the profit of the producer and exhibitors cannot constitute the communication of an idea or thought protected by the First and 14th Ammendments.” Gertz would claim he heard the judges laughing aloud while screening Vixen behind closed doors. Of course, Vixen could be shown if Meyer cut the sex out—which would leave little more than some footage of a plane flying and a cockamamie argument or two. Although the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Meyer, a man not used to losing, had lost big time.*4 Vixen has not played in Cincinnati since those two days in 1969, and legally, it still can’t—when a screening was attempted on a local university campus in 1984, authorities threatened seizure and arrest.

  Ironically, the court battle didn’t vanquish the Guild Theater, as national publicity from the case only jacked up post-Vixen business. “My God, did we pack that house,” said Pete Gall. “It was a blessing in disguise.” But paranoia remained high. Before entering the theater, Gall had patrons sign a statement admitting they were knowingly seeing pictures containing nudity (even the vice cops had to add their John Hancock, much to their dismay). In addition, Gall had to put up with the Cincinnati papers changing David F. Friedman’s Trader Hornee to Trader Horn and refusing to run the title Love Is a Four-Letter Word. While legally unsuccessful beyond the Vixen brouhaha, the attacks by Keating and Leis had a chilling effect on adult entertainment in southern Ohio. The harassment just wasn’t worth it.

  In the late seventies, Keating and Leis zeroed in on their new target, Larry Flynt. The battle got extremely personal. In their 1993 Keating biography Trust Me, Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden report that Keating held Flynt accountable for the rape of a daughter, and when the porno potentate was shot in an anonymous attack that left him paralyzed from the waist down, there were those (including, unbelievably, Keating’s own son) who suggested Keating might’ve been involved. To this day, Flynt’s attempt to sell Hustler’s wares in Hamilton County is being thwarted in the courts by Leis.*5

  According to David F. Friedman, the majors didn’t lift a finger to help in the censorship battles, although they’d certainly benefit from the freedoms that ensued. It was the exploitation mavericks like Meyer who smashed the locks for everybody. “He fought the big, big fight to ensue the First Amendment rights of every American citizen,” said Friedman. But for Russ, it was just another game. He’d win the next round, and the fifteen after that. Let somebody try to stop Meyer. RM was at his best when the chips were down. “In the final analysis, you have to be a man,” he told authors Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito. “You ain’t worth a shit if you don’t finally stand up to something.”

  There is a sublime epilogue to the Keating-Meyer saga. Charles Keating would go on to become a very rich, powerful, and arrogant figure in the banking industry, but it all went to hell in the end. In 1993, Keating was convicted of fraud in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal and sentenced to 151 months in jail (the conviction was later overturned, although in 1999, Keating, now seventy-five, pled guilty to four counts of fraud to avoid a retrial). Countless retirees—some of them perhaps members of CDL’s “tennis shoe brigade”—had lost their life’s savings due to the swindle.

  A gleeful Meyer laid out a hundred bucks for Charlie’s mug shot, which he then printed in his autobiography. But the best was yet to come. When Meyer perused an article on Keating’s downfall in the Los Angeles Times, certain passages screamed out. Keating liked to “peer down the blouses of secretaries he has hired,” wrote Binstein and Bowden, who stated that a dozen women on Charlie’s staff had had augmentation done. First came an “unexpected” bonus, quickly followed by “huge new breasts.” Opposite a page showing a passbook from a canceled Meyer bank account at Keating’s notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan, RM reprinted the most salacious excerpts from the article in A Clean Breast, and directly below the text lurked a picture of Meyer, his grinning mug between the mammoth knockers of some frail. “Et Tu, Charlie?” asked Russ.

  There was no such punch line for Vixen herself, Erica Gavin, and no rest for the wicked. After another bumpy ride with Meyer in 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Gavin drifted through miserable low-budget affairs like the never-released, shot-in-Tunisia Larry Buchanan epic The Rebel Jesus (in casting that would have Charlie Keating frothing at the mouth, she played Mary Magdalene, although illness forced her to bow out). Jonathan Demme’s 1974 women-in-prison Caged Heat was her last film of any note.

  On the commentary track for the Vixen laser disc, Meyer callously suggests that succumbing to the Hollywood casting couch would’ve been best for Erica. Truth be known, Gavin had plenty to endure due to the Vixen legacy. She recalled a trip to the Beverly Hills Hotel to see a “producer” for what she thought was a part. She was greeted by a gross middle-aged troglodyte swathed only in a robe.

  “I didn’t know what to do, so I basically let him fuck me,” said Erica. “I was afraid my agent would fire me. On his dresser he had all these bottles of perfume. They were all the same and they weren’t even in wrapping paper, they were wrapped with a bow. Afterwards, he gives me a bottle of the perfume and two dollars for my parking. Do you know what a piece of shit I felt like? I felt like I didn’t even deserve to be living. This guy was never making a movie. When I tried to do other things after Vixen, nobody was like Russ. They were all out to fuck you—period. Whereas Russ was into putting you into a movie. And not fucking you.”

  But Gavin was a cat with nine lives. She floated around the fringes of the rock scene, running with such luminaries as Love’s Arthur Lee, the Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye, and Aerosmith. She did too much of everything, including heroin and speed. Erica quit acting, and for nearly twenty years she worked at the posh Melrose Avenue clothes store Fred Segal’s, then became a buyer for Barney’s, whereupon she and John Waters became friends.

  “I knew her from wealthy show business dinner parties,” said Waters, who was stunned by the svelte, “chic” post-Vixen Gavin. “She looked like a model.” According to John, few knew of her previous notoriety. “I don’t think when they were buying designer outfits from Erica in Barney’s they were thinking, ‘Is she woman or is she animal?’ ” said an amused Waters.

  The Meyer-Gavin relationship remained ever contentious through the years. RM stayed angry at her for losing weight after Vixen, not to mention the treachery involving George Costello. In 1976 Erica gave a rare, candid interview and took a few swipes at Meyer, marking her as one of few in the inner circle brave enough to offer any kind of criticism of the Great One.

  RM was infuriated, responding decades later with a chapter in his autobiography entitled “The Other Side of the Coin,” in which he prints a cheerful handwritten note from Erica sent just after Vixen, a polite (if chilly) response from Meyer, and then the interview where she trashes him. Accompanying the text is a Vixen shot of Gavin holding up a small compact mirror, mesmerized by her own image. It’s a wonder she didn’t get a yellow feather in the mail.

  At Gavin’s lowest ebb in the eighties, she got a Christmas card from Meyer out of the blue. He knew of her troubles and wanted to wish her the best. Inside the card was three hundred bucks. A small gesture from the man who’d made a mint off her naked body, but it got to her. Erica called him, and they had a few laughs. How did Russ know she’d end up a gay designer, exactly the character she played in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? In that comically gruff voice of his Meyer uttered a crass remark about how she liked “all that pussy.” Somehow it warmed the cockles of Erica’s knocked-around heart, and she actually braved the many phobias she had at the time to attend a Meyer birthday party, even if she soon fled. They now enjoyed an affectionate truce.

  The eighties were Gavin’s nadir. She quit working and spent long periods alone, afraid to leave her abode. Anorexia nearly stopped Erica’s clock forever, and she traced the obsession with weight back to the first time
she saw Vixen on the big screen. “I was shocked. Shocked. Everything was so big, just huge, including me. I could see my pores, a little zit that was on my chest . . . And knowing everyone else sees it, too! It was traumatic.”

  After Vixen, said Erica, “people started to look at me. Scary. That’s why I became anorexic. It’s all how men see women—it was me wanting to become invisible by shrinking myself so that no one would look at me anymore. I almost killed myself by starving. I was one hundred and forty when I made Vixen. I went down to seventy-six pounds. My lowest weight. I was hospitalized three times.

  “I’d just turn sideways and you wouldn’t see me. I didn’t want anybody to see me. I just wanted to be a nonsexual entity, androgynous. No tits, no ass, nothing feminine, nothing soft. And it kinda worked. No one came around me, y’know?

  “I can see why Marilyn Monroe, anybody who has any fragile part of them, there’s no fuckin’ way they’re gonna make it through. I’ve seen people end up tossed on the lawn after they OD’d. They’d been in L.A. for nine months and that’s what became of them. They come here with all these dreams—‘I’m gonna be a star,’ all that. Y’know what? It’s so, so not that way. It’ll eat you up. It’ll fuckin’ eat you up.”

  Tracking down Gavin these days is a daunting task. She’s the rock star of the Meyer women, the Elvis figure whispered about but rarely seen. Yes, she’ll meet me. No, she won’t. Yes, no, maybe so. More phone calls, then the waiting. Filmmaker and friend “Colonel” Rob Schaffner gives fifty-fifty odds on her waltzing through the door. Hours go by. Another phone call. She’s on her way. The odds go up to eighty-twenty. More waiting. “Erica only comes out at night,” says Schaffner. “She really is Vixen, dude.”

  Finally, after one aborted meeting and even more phone calls, Erica consents to meet at an all-night L.A. coffee shop aptly named Swingers. It is three a.m. when she arrives. Wiry, angular, painfully alive, Gavin resembles an improbable collaboration between Gustav Klimt and Walter Keane. Life has thrown a few well-placed punches, to say the least. The voluptuous Vixen body is long gone, chipped to the nub as purposefully as one would strip a car, and she’s down to the sinewy fighting weight of say, Iggy Pop.

  Infamous for clocking an ex-manager in broad daylight whilst attending a fan convention a few years back, Gavin’s no slouch in the tough-cookie department, yet one feels that the slightest of slights could send her scurrying back into that starless Hollywood fog to hide for another year or ten. All the hoop-jumping is worth getting to Erica, though. Plug into her socket and the juice is enough to fry you for good. Gavin’s a born provocateur. After a few minutes you either want to kiss her or kill her—there’s no middle ground. Even during a simple trip to the mini-mart, Erica drives like she’s auditioning for the remake of Bullitt.

  Meyer’s cinematic image of Erica Gavin and her subsequent time on earth have dovetailed in eerie ways. She feels that RM had an almost supernatural—albeit unconscious—power when it came to the roles he cast people in. “Russ sees your subconscious, and then he has you become it. He has this vision of you that’s very real and very natural, before you even see it. That’s his gift.”

  Erica shakes her head, smiling, and addresses the one who isn’t there. “Russ, you motherfucker! How did you know I was going into clothing? How did you know I would become a sex fiend and actually start masturbating while driving down the street, looking at guys and girls? How did you know I was going to end up liking women? How did you know all the things I was gonna be? Who predestined what?”

  Gavin laughs. “It’s the Twilight Zone. Russ saw beyond without even knowing. It’s weirder than you even know.”

  The Watusi Gun-Bearer

  All that counts is to get the film done, no matter what you have to do. Lie, cheat, steal, bunco, co n— get it out.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Uschi. Two syllables that evoke sweet dreams. There, beneath a ravenous grin that somehow managed to be more pornographic than old 42nd Street in all its glory, lurked a fleshy, sun-baked carcass with more curves than the Coast Highway—the sort of filthy figure that could even make a macramé dress look inviting. To a pimply adolescent, encountering an image of Uschi Digard for the first time was akin to the thrill of seeing Godzilla: taller than the tallest skyscraper and breathing fire. “Who cares about acting ability and character development when you were presented with nipples that would show up in satellite photos?” wrote Uschi fan Mike Accomando in his treatise “I Love Uschi: Thanks for the Mammaries.” “You could tell it was more than a paycheck with her. . . . She shows an exuberance for sex that bordered on berserk.”

  Uschi Digard, aka Digart (and a zillion other aliases—for Meyer’s Cherry, Harry and Raquel she’s Astrid Lillimor) was a seventies soft-core queen. Her credits are infinite, as she appeared in a ton of magazine layouts and cheap sexploitation movies (“Who else can say they appeared in films about the sex lives of Robin Hood, Casanova, Pinocchio and Bigfoot?” writes Accomando). But it is her work with Meyer that exalts her to some sort of immoral immortality, particularly her performance as the maniacal milkmaid in 1975’s Supervixens.

  Other than a handful of endearingly bland, contemporaneous interviews—“I’m living for right now. . . . We live behind clothes, and why?”—little is known about the real Uschi. She was born August 15, 1948 (some say a few years earlier; unfortunately, some also say Uschi isn’t her real name), in Bismarck, North Dakota (!) and raised in Scandinavia. Speaking some nine languages, Digard worked as a translator before falling into nude modeling. According to Uschi, Meyer saw her first magazine layout sometime late in the sixties and went gaga. “We’ve been together ever since that day,” she said in 1976.

  When it came to taking Meyer production punishment, Uschi was not unlike Haji: one of the guys. “The dedication of a Watusi gun-bearer,” said Meyer, who gave Uschi associate producer credit on two of his pictures. “She’d do anything. She’d run over bare coals and cut glass. I mean literally! She was that kind of chick.” Like most Meyer women, Digard never ventured into hard-core. “I made my reputation by the tease,” she said. “Everything was simulated.”

  Meyer, however, has suggested otherwise in both his autobiography and interviews, maintaining that there were times Uschi wanted real stimulation in order to make the fake look real. RM told writer Dan Scapperotti that the two “had a great love affair” off and on for years. “One of the most aggressive sex partners anyone could hope to find,” added Meyer, who confessed to having spent a weekend in Vegas with both Uschi and Babette Bardot, a mind-melting concept akin to having a couple of the heads of Mount Rushmore parked in your living room (but sexier, of course).

  Digard’s initial foray into the world of Russ Meyer was 1969’s Cherry, Harry and Raquel, but the movie would have to fall apart first, creating a black hole only a supernova like Uschi could fill.

  Meyer’s sixteenth production cost $90,000, some of the cash coming from co-producers Jim Ryan and Thomas J. McGowan. McGowan, who had first encountered Meyer at Camp Crowder, was an old crony of Ryan’s—he’d made a 1956 short in the Amazon starring Jim—who’d gone on to work at major studios, directing the 1966 all-feral kiddie extravaganza Born Free. McGowan sank $38,000 into Cherry, Harry and Raquel and wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Tom Wolfe. By the end of the affair, RM would complain that McGowan had done nothing but sit under an umbrella and watch Meyer sweat, while McGowan bitched that he never saw a penny from the hit film after getting his initial investment back. The ten-week shoot took place in the rugged desert canyons of Panamint Valley—“a terrible fucking place,” according to McGowan, and undoubtedly a location Russ Meyer could love.

  The concept for Cherry, Harry and Raquel came during a visit to Charlie Sumners during which RM and Sumners saw the latest Clint Eastwood picture, Coogan’s Bluff. Meyer grabbed a pad and started scribbling, the result being a nearly incomprehensible action picture involving drugs, lesbianism, and a mysterious Native American assassin named Apache. The movie
starred Meyer stalwart Franklin J. Bolger, along with a few new faces, including (most ruefully for RM, as we shall see) an English woman named Linda Ashton, a Miami Beach showgirl with an ICM agent boyfriend. The male lead was another Meyer discovery, sort of a knockabout yang to Uschi’s sparkler-bright yin.

  There is something frightening about the head of Charles Napier. I say that with full admiration. As RM was fond of saying, he’s got six more teeth than Burt Lancaster and is perhaps the only man who can simultaneously smile out of one side of his mouth while sneering out the other. Napier is the archetypal Meyer manly man—testosterone made flesh, square-jaw determination in the shadow of a Stetson hat, and headed straight for your daughter. No doubt you’ve seen Napier’s mug on either TV or the big screen, playing the paranoid CIA operative, the psychotic redneck sheriff, or the sadistic coach, but it was RM who made him a star.

  Perhaps to show his appreciation, Napier became the first actor to grace a Meyer picture with full frontal male nudity. Cherry, Harry and Raquel contains one shot where, accompanied by an equally unclothed Larissa Ely, Napier runs toward the camera wearing nothing more than boots and Stetson. “Next thing I know it gets picked up by United Artists, and there I am galloping across the screen naked as hell,” said Napier. “AP gets a hold of it, calls my mother. I weathered the storm.”