Meyer reveled in revealing Ebert’s sexual proclivities to the press, cheerfully recounting one night early into the writing of Dolls when there was a small get-together at his home including Uschi, Ebert, and some wanna-be starlet who had stripped before Meyer earlier that day at Fox in hopes of getting a part. “Roger got head right on the edge of the pool,” boasted RM. “Flapping like a seal. A great scene!” (After which Meyer declared there would be no more exchanges of wonderous body fluids until Dolls was completed.)
Ebert had some clarifications in regards to this tale. “I will leave it to Russ to tell his version of this story, since it is more action-packed than mine. The auditioning actress and the girl in the pool were two different women, nor did both events happen on the same day. Actually it’s surprising Russ would tell this story the way he does, since he was adamant about not connecting the ‘casting couch’ with his sex life.”
Meyer was particularly fond of relating his version of how Ebert had first encountered June Mack, an immense African-American dominatrix who’d go on to star in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. “They started to talk, and she described to him, y’know, her whole act. And Roger turned white . . . June finally said, ‘Okay, what do you want?’ And Roger told her, “Everything but the shit and the piss.’ ” (When asked to confirm this, Ebert had this to say: “I could tell you some stories about June Mack, but that one doesn’t ring a bell. It sounds more like a scripted line. I think that if I was talking to June Mack in answer to that question, I would’ve said, ‘Tits.’ ”)
Not unlike John Moran, when it came to remuneration for his work, Ebert “would have conditions,” said Meyer. “For example, he wanted to have screenwriter’s money, no salary, and he wanted to drink—he doesn’t drink now—and he liked to have a lot of good booze and good food . . . at the end of the week he would have to have a girl with outrageous proportions.” Countered Ebert, “I did not require a girl at the end of every week, nor, for that matter, did I get one.”
Whatever the details, it was a hell of a team. A paunchy war vet and a somewhat nerdy, bespectacled film critic—neither of these guys were exactly matinee-idol material, and the image of the two of them drowning in a readily available sea of cleavage is a rich one. According to Erica Gavin, Ebert was “awestruck” by Meyer’s world. “Russ took him under his wing. Roger was like the son that Russ never had, who’d just gone into puberty and Russ wanted to show him all the whorehouses. It was like, ‘Alright, kiddo, I’m gonna show you what tits ’n’ ass is all about.’ ” There are those who felt that RM used the promise of female flesh as a means to lull Ebert’s busy mind into submission and thus the critic was somewhat blinded by the Meyer myth. “Then again, I’d believe everything I was told if some outsized mammarific apparition (controlled by King Leer) was pressing her casabas against my distended member,” said one anonymous observer.
And so it was that when 20th Century Fox opened its pearly gates, Russ Meyer got on the horn to Chicago. “I called Ebert. I said, ‘You gotta get your keister out here. It’s the big time.’ ” Added Roger, “It was a military campaign, and I was a recruit.”
Ebert got a taste of what he was in for on that first night in Tinseltown, when Meyer took him to his favorite Hollywood Boulevard eatery, Musso and Franks. Roger had planned to lose some weight on his time off from the paper, and was about to order some fish when RM stopped him. “Russ forbid that. He said, ‘When you’re working for me you’re gonna eat well, because you have to have your energy.’ And he ordered me lamb chops and a baked potato.”
Meyer put Ebert up at the Sunset Marquis, at the time the somewhat dusty lodgings for such notables as blacklisted screenwriter Abe Polonsky, comic Jackie Gale, and actor Van Heflin, as well as freak-show crooner Tiny Tim and his fiancée Miss Vicki. “It was very cheap in those days, nineteen dollars a night,” said Ebert. “No room service, but you could cook in your room. Russ would pick me up every morning in his big Cadillac. We’d drive off to Fox.”
Where Ebert would write. And write. “When Russ didn’t hear the typewriter, he’d say, ‘What’s the matter?’ To him typing and writing were the same thing. If you weren’t typing, you weren’t writing.” Meyer and Ebert blasted through a 127-page treatment in ten days. Within three weeks they had their first draft, and in six weeks the script was done. (Given a typewriter and locked in a closet by Meyer, Manny Diez would contribute a few uncredited scenes after Ebert’s departure.) Turns out someone actually worked fast enough for RM.
As Roger Ebert notes, Meyer’s plots could be summed up in either a sentence or not at all, so for Dolls, let’s go with the sentence Ebert gave Time magazine: “It’s a camp sexploitation horror musical that ends in a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding.” Kelly McNamara, Casey Anderson, and Petronella Danforth (respectively, Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, and Marcia McBroom) are the Carrie Nations. They come to Hollywood intent on the big time, and there encounter sex film star Ashley St. Ives, lothario Lance Rock, lesbian fashion designer Roxanne, omnisexual teen music tycoon Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell, and a cast of a thousand crazies. Sex, drugs, and death result. Fullfilling Meyer’s bent desire for “the picture to end in a positive way,” the survivors indeed marry, including the group’s manager, Harrison Allsworth, who can miraculously walk again despite a live-on-TV suicide attempt that left him wheelchair bound.
Originally, Fox had asked Meyer to drum up a sequel to Valley of the Dolls; RM and Ebert screened the Mark Robson–directed tear-jerker, ignored Susann’s two attempts at a follow-up screenplay, then proceeded in their own frenzied direction. Valley star Barbara Parkins was under contract to reprise her Anne Welles role, but Meyer deemed her too expensive for his budget. (He’d actually asked his former leading lady Alaina Capri—a dead-ringer for Parkins—to take the role, but she’d just had a child.) Any ideas of an outright sequel were scotched after Susann, incensed upon hearing Fox was going forth with smut king Russ Meyer in her place, went to court to get an injunction, and when that failed, Susann sued Fox outright.*1 Early drafts of the Ebert screenplay feature returning characters from Valley as well as a sex-novel authoress named Ashley Famous, surely a playful jab at Susann herself. (The character became sex film star Ashley St. Ives in the end, the name change due to concerns over reprisal from the then-powerful Ted Ashley talent agency and the career switch undoubtedly made to avoid further trouble with Susann.)
In the hands of Meyer and Ebert, Dolls became its own animal, possessing a crazy anarchy not seen before in a studio film. With Fox’s cash, RM was going for broke. “He made it clear that the key word in the title was ‘beyond,’ ” wrote Ebert. “Dolls was supposed to be a satire of an exploitation movie in which the very genre itself would come under attack.” But there was no master plan at work. “We never talked about our purpose,” Ebert admitted. “We only talked about the plot.” Thus the character Z-Man was suddenly revealed to be a woman in the film only when Ebert happened to invent a scene where “he” reveals his breasts.*2 “I said, ‘Russ! You’re not gonna believe this! Z-Man’s a woman! He’s been a woman the whole time.’ ” RM’s response? “You can never have too many women in a picture.” Not that anything was changed in the previous 174 pages to foreshadow such an outrageous conceit; this was just another oddball explosion in a picture full of them. Wrote Ebert, “Meyer wanted everything in the movie except the kitchen sink.” From Roger he got it.
Russ Meyer had arrived at Fox at just the right moment. The studio was near collapse following a string of big-budget flops like Star! and Hello, Dolly! Fox publicist Jet Fore, who’d become a lifelong friend to both Meyer and Ebert, begged for their help. “He told us one night that our job was to save the studio, because everybody was going to Easy Rider and all they had were two war pictures and a Western. Of course, it was M*A*S*H, Patton, and Butch Cassidy, but they didn’t know they were gonna be hits.”
And with that Meyer and Ebert rode into Fox with their six-guns blazing. And while they didn’t exactly
wear white hats, in their own demented way they did help “save” the studio, with a picture that would outrage not only the studio that made it, but most of America.
Roger Ebert had arrived in Los Angeles the same week the gruesome Sharon Tate murders hit the papers. “This cast a pall over Hollywood—the notion that you live this lifestyle, but it could lead to your death. And that seemed to dovetail with the message of the original Valley of the Dolls. So I said, ‘Russ, that was about three actresses that found fame and fortune, but some of them were destroyed by booze, drugs, and sex. Let’s just make ’em an all-girl rock trio. Have them come to Hollywood, and have some of them be destroyed the same way.’ He went for it.” This cross-fertilization of Charles Manson and Jacqueline Susann birthed the Carrie Nations, a femme band that was a far cry from any group muddied by Woodstock. “A hippie in Hollywood was certainly very different than what a hippie anywhere else was,” noted John Waters. “The Carrie Nations hardly looked like hippies. They looked like showgirls on LSD.”
“Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable,” wrote Joan Didion of Los Angeles in 1968–69. “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far’ and that many people were doing it . . . black masses were imagined, and bad trips were blamed.” Not only was coverage of the Manson murders everywhere you looked, the mayhem at Altamont was another indication all was not groovy with the Woodstock Nation. Even Hollywood was going a little berserk: among the top twenty grossing films of 1969 were such shockers as I Am Curious (Yellow), Three in the Attic, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider. An X-rated United Artists film had won the Oscar, for chrissakes—John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy—and Dennis Hopper’s hippie freakout Easy Rider proved, at least for a moment, crazy longhairs could be boffo box office, and to the tune of $40 million. No wonder Meyer turned his X-ray vision on the youth culture, and what a strange set of peepers to be seeing it through.
“Russ was not affected by the love generation,” said John Waters. “The sixties never affected him. He certainly wasn’t into drugs or gay people or hipness—he didn’t pretend to be either. Russ was untouched by hipness, in a way.” But Meyer was also a permanent kid. He never grew up! He understood excitement, excess, youthful energy, thumbing your nose at everything. At the same time there’s that curmudgeonly Mother Meyer side of RM: everybody is shit, young or old. Put those two elements together, add Ebert’s Mad magazine zaniness, and you begin to get where Beyond is coming from.
Not to mention that Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert were two very unlikely prospects to chronicle the Los Angeles music scene. Although RM frequently utilized rock’s beat to propel his films, “he hated it,” said editor Richard Brummer. Meyer’s preferences leaned more toward big bands and Dixieland, with an occasional shot of Engelbert Humperdinck. “I like rock and roll,” Ebert insisted to this author, but withering comments from his work might suggest otherwise. For example, in his review of Dead Man, Ebert writes, “A mood might have developed here, had it not been for the unfortunate score by Neil Young, which for the film’s final thirty minutes sounds like nothing so much as a man repeatedly dropping his guitar.” Of Bob Dylan he’s written, “Since he cannot really sing, there is the assumption that he cannot be performing to entertain us, and that therefore there must be a deeper purpose.” Ebert on The Last Waltz: “The overall tenor of the documentary suggests survivors at the ends of their ropes. . . . These are not musicians at the top of their art, but laborers on the last day of the job.”
So how did these two outsiders research a satire on the current rock scene? They made it up. “We wanted the movie to seem like a fictionalized exposé of real people but we had no real information as inspiration for the characters,” wrote Ebert. So, although the spark behind Z-Man had been fiendish pop producer Phil Spector, Ebert happily admitted that neither he nor Meyer had ever met or even knew much of anything about the man. Likewise for Randy Black, a vague approximation of Muhammad Ali.
Meyer went to new extremes with the look of the film, lighting each scene as if “there were eighty-nine searchlights,” said Dolls composer Stu Philips. “Like a comic strip.” From the gibberish people talk to the hollow “now” sound of the score to the movie’s brash visuals, nothing registers as remotely real in this film, down to the big-mama voice raging out of pipsqueak Dolly Read. “That inauthenticity is perhaps the point of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” wrote critic Stuart Klawans. “Here is sixties youth culture as seen, and warped, by a World War II vet. . . . Mr. Meyer had by this time reduced other social milieus to burlesque. Now it was the hippies’ turn.”
Richard Zanuck (now president of Fox) and David Brown were in Cannes when they received the Meyer-Ebert treatment, and on September 8, 1969, they sent an enthusiastic three-foot cable giving the green light. Despite some reservations about all the debauchery and murderous mayhem present in the pages sent, everything would remain in the finished film save one scene, and curiously enough it involved a studio mogul character named Maurice Fruchtman attempting to get in the pants of Casey Anderson during a bogus script reading. It was cut (which had Cynthia Myers miffed, as this was her big scene—and the tenuous explanation why she becomes a man-hater who falls for lesbian fashion designer Roxanne).
Zanuck and Brown approved a million-dollar budget (nearly the same amount had already been blown on Susann’s treatments). Meyer vowed to come in under and did, shooting almost the entire film on existing sets and paying none of the actors (outside of Fox contract player Edy Williams) more than $500 a week. For his trouble, RM received $80,000 and was given 10 percent of the profits, his own suite of offices, and access to Darryl F. Zanuck’s private steam room. “Russ was on friendly turf—at least cash-friendly,” said Brown. Meyer had a few demands of his own—mainly the freedom to bring in members of his own cast and crew. “It was my shot at making a film for a major studio. I thought I might not get to make another, so I was damn well going to make the film I wanted to make.”
Incredibly, the studio let Meyer do exactly that, with little or no interference. “Russ did this as an independent movie under Fox’s banner,” said composer Stu Philips. “Russ made a certain kind of movie at a certain price, and we didn’t want to mix in,” explained David Brown. “We approved the script and the making of the movie, and he brought it in under budget, under schedule. That was good enough for us.” According to Ebert, one man whom Meyer butted heads with was his esteemed director of photography, Fred Koenekamp, who the next year won an Oscar for his work on Patton (which, ironically enough, utilized some of RM’s combat footage). Meyer had the cojones to question his DP’s focus (a picture could never be sharp enough for RM). According to Ebert, Koenekamp felt that “no other director—let alone some sleazeball from poverty gulch—had ever been so demanding. Russ was a perfectionist.”
The music for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was also created on Meyer’s terms. Over the objections of Fox music head Lionel Newman, RM insisted on bringing in Stu Philips, who’d produced and co-written the title song for Cherry, Harry and Raquel; Bill Loose, responsible for many Meyer soundtracks of the seventies; and old standby Igo Kantor (Dolls was his last for RM, as he’d enrage Meyer by not being available due to his own directorial work). Lynn Carey, a knockout blonde with a voice so huge that Philips had her stand across the studio from the mike, recorded the vocals Carrie Nation lead singer Kelly McNamara was to lip-sync. The daughter of actor Macdonald Carey, Lynn became infamous for her group Mama Lion’s shocking cover photo of Carey breast-feeding a lion cub. “They put pablum on my nipple and he actually was sucking. He had no teeth, thank God. I had visions of being destroyed.” Carey, who had appeared in Lord, Love a Duck, herself had a figure that could quell an angry mob, and Meyer in fact asked her to be in Dolls, but she declined, although somehow she’d muster the courage to pose for Penthouse in 1972. Carey co-wrote a couple of numbers for the picture, most notably “Find It,” the high-octane opening song, which sh
e wrote on the spot with Philips and which was somehow inspired by the opening scene in which Erica Gavin gets a mouthful of lead. “I pictured this woman getting married in a nuclear sunset after her head’s been chopped off,” said Carey. “It’s a bizarre song.” Much to Lynn’s dismay, political infighting resulted in her vocals being replaced on the actual soundtrack album by unknown Ami Rushes.
Like Ben-Hur, Dolls seemed to have a cast of thousands, among them some of the most alluring young creatures Tinseltown had to offer. RM found three new stunners to play the Carrie Nations. Marcia McBroom, drums, was a black former New York fashion model. Out front were two ex–Playboy centerfolds, English import Dolly Read and Cynthia Meyers, a wide-eyed Ohio innocent still known to use the word “gosh”—and whose 39DD-24-36 body earned her a legion of particularly rabid fans.
In loyalty to his veteran thespians, Meyer shoehorned as many as he could fit into Dolls: Erica Gavin, Harrison Page, Lavelle Roby, Duncan McLeod, Charles Napier, Garth Pillsbury, Bert Santos, Joe Cellini, Veronica Erickson, and Haji, wandering through the picture wearing nothing but black body paint. The film is also blessed by Henry Rowland playing exiled Nazi Martin Bormann, the first of three such appearances in RM’s films. Pam Grier, in her debut film role, is alleged to be present as well. Looking more toothless than ever, a bewigged Princess Livingston boogaloos through Dolls with a lizard-tongued Stan Ross, famous for his TV work on Milton Berle’s Texaco Theater. The party scenes in Dolls dazzle, capturing, as Ebert has pointed out, the lunatic energy of a Jack Davis cartoon. “I grew up in Hollywood,” said Erica Gavin. “Russ captured it. That party is so disgustingly, pukey Hollywood.” Hugh Hefner himself visited the Dolls set, devoting a Playboy layout to the film and its women in its July 1970 issue.*3
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 28