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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Poor Raven De La Croix—I always felt that she deserved a better Meyer picture than Up! One of Meyer’s superior actresses, she has a real flair for comedy. Aside from the usual sprinkling of Meyer’s combat cohorts, Up!’s cast consists of new and generally unimpressive faces. Raven is the standout, although Ed Schaaf—a former part-time golf caddy who had answered a Daily Variety ad—is an uncanny Hitler (RM’s standby Nazi, Henry Rowland, somehow decided to pass on playing a nude, violated Führer, although he does dub the voice). Meyer returned to the Miranda, California, cabin where he had shot Vixen for most of Up! The day Raven arrived, Meyer was riding the actors in usual hard-nosed fashion, directing a scene where a nude girl in an Indian headdress is in bed, riding local cop Homer Johnson (the square-jawed Monte Bane). De La Croix quickly adapted to Meyer’s boot camp ways and took to calling the director “Chief.”

  RM put Raven through the wringer. When Meyer had her swing nude through the air over the camera, Raven came flying down and knocked the cameraman over. She hung off a cliff with no safety net below. In another scene, as she’s being violently dunked in a river, De La Croix, who’d almost drowned as a child, was stricken with panic. RM kept yelling, “Put her under again!” Raven noted the sadism in Meyer’s approach. “If you pissed him off in any way, he would rewrite the script for the other character to degrade you.”

  And Meyer made Raven run. And run. And run. Through the woods, down winding roads, across raging rivers—delivering some mightily verbose dialogue (recorded live) all the while. “Run like a gazelle, dear,” he’d instruct her. If Raven made even the slightest stumble, he’d scream, “Cut!” and have her start from the top. “She has great feet,” informed Meyer. “You can run Raven through a bed of hot coals.” No matter that her soles looked like hamburger at the end of the day. No human frailties were allowed for RM’s amazons.

  For some unknown reason Meyer also drafted Raven as his Inspector Clouseau. One morning before it was even light out, Uschi Digard, working as an associate producer/crew member on Up!, came in to tell Raven that Russ wanted to see her. When she reported to a dour Meyer, he immediately starting grilling her: “De La Croix, who ate my salami?” “I knew I had to take this seriously,” Raven recalled. “Food was his thing.”

  “Who took my salami?” Meyer demanded.

  “He didn’t want it to be the crew, because then he was gonna have to lock up his food,” Raven recalled.

  “Can you tell me anything?” asked Sgt. Meyer.

  “Give me some information,” replied Cpl. De La Croix.

  Meyer took her to where the salami had last been seen, hanging outside on the back porch. Raven told Meyer to give her a few minutes, and RM stormed off into the house.

  De La Croix sat there, bleary-eyed in the predawn chill, asking herself, Who ate the salami? “All of a sudden I see this little face with little hands peep out. Raccoons.”

  Uschi came out to summon her for a progress report on the investigation. She addressed a grave-looking RM. “It’s the raccoons, Chief. I saw the raccoon that took your salami. And they were coming back for more, sir.” Case closed.

  “Okay, you got twenty minutes before the bell rings.”

  Raven went back to her room to grab a few minutes more shuteye before Meyer had her back before the camera, once again running naked in the woods.

  Up! was hardly the barn-burner that was Supervixens. Fred Beiersdorf, one of Meyer’s distributors, said the picture merely did “OK.” Meyer and De La Croix hit the road for a thirty-five-city promotional tour.*5 Although RM dismissed Raven’s pursuit of the spiritual as a bunch of malarkey, he found himself unable to curb a certain fascination.

  One night as they were heading out for their evening meal, RM stood before Raven, “sort of like Clark Gable. All dressed up, charming, his heart attached to his pants. He had that look on his face, and I knew that this was the offer, this was the moment, and I said, ‘You look really great, Russ. Really handsome. I’m really glad we’re friends. Let’s go to dinner.’ ”

  Raven saw Meyer as a kind of eccentric grandpa. But she had great affection for the old coot—and pity for King Leer: “He doesn’t know how to make love to a woman, from any woman I’ve ever talked to that’s ever been with him. He has no clue of what to do with these breasts he’s so fascinated with. None at all.”

  When Meyer was in the editing room busy with Up!, he dreamt up a final touch that would render the film even more incomprehensible. Shari Eubank had suggested that RM might want to use a dancer she knew, and Shari turned out to be on the money. Meyer decided to create a new character for this female, The Greek Chorus, to narrate the movie nude on-screen and further confuse the already convoluted story. He asked Roger Ebert to whip up something in a hurry. “Russ said, ‘You’ve got to write some dialogue for the Greek Chorus. It doesn’t matter what she says, she just has to say something. And it should sound kinda poetic.’ ” So I just pulled down the first book of poetry I had, and paraphrased poetry by H. D. Hilda Doolittle always wrote under the name ‘H.D.’ She was an imagist poet, a contemporary of Pound. Nobody has ever noticed that. Maybe RM fans and H.D. scholars aren’t the same people.”

  Armed with Ebert’s lofty gobbledygook, Meyer took The New Girl out in the woods, stripped her down, and made her recite all this complex, arcane narration while she hung from trees and hid in bushes, although he’d later dub in another girl’s voice to obliterate his new paramour’s Spanish accent. He scared The New Girl and made her cry. But Meyer would fall hard for her, and as far as the women in his life went, he’d place her second only to Eve. They’d fuck, fight, and film off and on for the next four years.

  Meyer was in a fever over the broad, and he was gonna use his movie camera to cut her up like a steak—RM’s next film would be a loony jigsaw puzzle assembled out of endless disembodied close-ups showing her every naked inch. Her name was Kitten, and she was one hot tamale.

  The Ultra-Vixen

  I don’t need any of that connubial bliss stuff. I imagine I’ll probably end up a lonely old man.

  —RUSS MEYER

  Everybody loves Kitten. She’s got a big heart, a big temper, and of course, mythic mammaries. Natividad’s battled booze and drugs and, during a low point in the eighties, even slid into that crass wango tango known as hard-core. She’s survived a double mastectomy (Russ contributed $11,000 to her operation costs—“one tit,” joked an anonymous friend), and is determined to rebuild her fantastic physique. No doubt some people would find that desperate. I find it inspiring in a cuckoo sort of way. Like Meyer, Kitten wants to one-up reality at any cost. “I have a metal cast of my fanny,” Natividad once informed reporter Jessica Berens. “I just sold one to a doctor in Madrid. I only have two left . . . I must reorder. Some guy in the Valley made it.”

  Kitten Natividad is one of Meyer’s wackiest dames. The living embodiment of funky delirium à la James Brown’s “Hot Pants,” everything about Kitten was too much—outrageous body, “Is it a wig?” hair, industrial-strength makeup, and the most overheated line delivery this side of Edy Williams. In some ways, Kitten was also along the lines of Uschi—a dedicated soldier ready for anything—only Kitten kept going long after the cameras had run out of film. Critic Ted Mahar recalled Natividad making an unforgettable Meyer-orchestrated entrance at a Portland, Oregon, reviewers’ screening of Up! “Kitten comes out in a jumpsuit zipped up to her neck—‘Hello, I hope you like me!’—and she zips it all the way down. She’s got nothing under the jumpsuit. None of the people present reported what she did. Everybody enjoyed the show and kept it to themselves.”

  Later that same evening Meyer took Mahar and Natividad out for a steak dinner, during which “he pulled open her shirt and said, ‘Aren’t those the most beautiful things you ever saw?’ Kitten looked down, smiled, and blushed mildly—not because her breasts were exposed, but she was receiving a compliment. It was like Russ had said Kitten had gotten straight A’s on her report card.” Much to Meyer’s great glee, wherev
er Kitten went, craziness—and much publicity—ensued. When she returned to the City of Roses three years after Up! to promote Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, she was thrown off the campus of Portland State University. “Offering no resistance, the pneumatic Natividad went quietly with officers,” according to the campus paper.

  In Shock Value, John Waters wrote about a memorable evening spent with RM and Natividad at Meyer’s favorite Hollywood eatery, Musso and Frank’s. “Kitten gave out nude photos to the waiters, and the maître d’ treated Russ as if he were Cecil B. DeMille.” Natividad’s pants were too tight for her to step up into Meyer’s GMC. So RM wrapped his meaty paws around the back of her legs and lifted her in, writes Waters, “as she squealed, ‘Ohhhhhhh, Russ!’ ”

  Movie critic Kevin Thomas recalled a trip to the cinema with the crazy couple. “Being the English major that I was, I ventured into conversation with Kitten,” said Thomas, who started discussing Meyer’s films, describing Russ as “essentially a puritan.” Kitten said, ‘Boy, you aren’t kidding—I can’t get him to go down on me!’ Well, it was the one and only time I have ever seen Russ blush. Beet red.” According to a highly amused Waters, “She told me that she taught Russ how to eat pussy. I thought, ‘Well! I just met you.’ ”

  Natividad was a raunchier kind of Meyer girl, and some of his other superstars needed time to adjust. Haji, in attendance when RM later proposed to Kitten, was shocked when Natividad nonchalantly popped a boob out of her dress in a local eatery. “I looked at Russ like he was a gentleman. I was totally embarrassed. I was very private and shy. I said, ‘I’m not going out with this girl anymore.’ It took me a long time to make friends with Kitten—then I learned how kind and wonderful she is.” Roger Ebert maintained that Natividad was, “loyal to Russ right to the end. They loved each other, and it was sexual at various times, but it was always a friendship.”

  Even Meyer’s combat buddies warmed to her. “Kitten I liked,” said Charlie Sumners. “She was so frank and aboveboard. No pretense.” Charlie’s wife Floyce recalled a reunion of the 166th that included a tour of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Kitten picked up many knickknacks in the gift shop, and among all the fine, upstanding military folks present, the stripper “was the only one who bought something religious out of our whole group,” said Floyce. “We thought that was so funny.”

  Francesca “Kitten” Natividad was born on February 13, 1948, in Juarez, Mexico. The first of nine children, Kitten was born when her mother was just sixteen. By age fourteen, Natividad was housecleaning for actress Stella Stevens. Exposure to the world of movie stars hooked her on show business, and she became determined “to grow up and be gorgeous and loved and coveted by all!”

  Kitten started dancing in 1969 and eventually held not one but two prestigious titles, Miss Nude Universe and Miss Nude Cosmopolitan. Hipped to Natividad by Shari Eubank, Meyer ventured into the Classic Cat to see what Kitten had to offer. Determined to make an immediate impression, she introduced herself by sneaking up behind RM and resting her big knockers on his back. Ironically, it was Natividad’s second husband, wig importer George DeMoss, who encouraged her to pester Meyer for a part. “The first time I went to read for him, he asked me to dinner. I said, ‘I’m married.’ He said, ‘Oh. Well, I was just asking for dinner.’ When Russ wanted something, he went for it. He didn’t care if you were married,” Natividad laughed. “He didn’t care if he was married.”

  Kitten was soon smitten. “I saw different little things that impressed me. How Russ, with his big, huge hands, would tenderly handle that camera like it was a lover. He was so good to it. He had these big fat fingers, yet he could gently open the lens and click it—it was just marvelous. Then when he wrote a check out, oooh—what perfect, beautiful handwriting for such a massive hand.” As for Russ’s craggy visage, Natividad instructed the press that RM had “a sexy face, sort of perverted.” To one reporter in 1979 she helpfully explained, “I have a father complex thing.” And why was Russ gaga over Kitten? “Because I mother him,” she revealed.

  Eventually Meyer invited Kitten to lunch at a Hollywood watering hole called Michael’s. “I was thirty years old and never drank,” said Natividad, who nervously downed a martini after RM ordered one. “I drank one martini and it was okay. By the second, I started throwing up at the bar. Then I went to the bathroom, threw up, and passed out.” RM got a hat check girl to revive her by sticking amyl nitrate under Kitten’s nose, while Russ struggled with her bushy pubic hair as he zipped up her pants.*1

  Somehow Meyer managed to drag Kitten back to his lair. “I woke up naked. And Russ said he took my clothes off so I wouldn’t throw up on them. But then I said, ‘Why are you naked?’ ” Meyer actually admits in his autobiography that he had his first roll in the hay with Natividad while she was still unconscious.*2 And thus began their grand and tempestuous affair.

  Russ went right to work on his new project, concentrating first on redoing Kitten’s bargain-basement Tijuana boob job. According to both Roger Ebert and Haji, RM had previously been against augmentation, but Meyer set about rebuilding Kitten like he was souping up a T-Bird. RM took Natividad to a Dr. Tippit in Las Vegas, who properly augmented her breasts for $3,500. “You can get them for $1,200, but they are not nearly so good—those kind droop,” Kitten instructed the press. (RM also set her up with a $100-an-hour voice coach to demolish her thick Spanish accent.) From here on in Meyer starlets became so massive Meyer boasted they could only be measured in “hat sizes.”

  As for the sexual rewards that followed, “Kitten Natividad was the champion, without a doubt.” In interview after interview, Meyer would describe Natividad as an insatiable sex maniac who would eat you alive if she wasn’t satisfied nightly. Funnily enough, Kitten complained the same about Russ, who, she felt compelled to point out, “had a beautiful, huge cock with a big head. After a while, you don’t like him banging you that hard all the time! It had to be twice a day, morning and night. Four o’clock in the morning—whether I got up or not. You can never have a head-ache with him, y’know?”

  The fame bestowed upon her by Meyer alleviated any migranes, however. “I really enjoyed just looking at my name up there,” said Natividad of seeing Up! on a theater screen. “So huge. The biggest I’ve ever seen it.” Kitten would star in RM’s next film, playing two confusing roles à la Shari Eubank in Supervixens.

  Meyer filmed the $233,000 Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens in eight weeks during 1977, shooting most of it (outside of a few days spent along the Colorado River) in a new Hollywood Hills house on Arrowhead Drive he’d bought specifically for the production, as its A-frame construction allowed him to stick the camera anywhere.*3 RM’s home became a very personal smorgasbord of strange, colorful sets: one space filled with piñatas, sombreros, and Mexican flea-market junk; another completely neon-blue down to the bed frame and springs. The sadistic violence that had proved so unpopular in Meyer’s last two pictures was now abandoned, although he’d have characters bleed in different colors (black junkyard man Mr. Zebulon bleeds white; the gay dentist bleeds pink; etc.) Apparently this was RM’s retort to critics of his past cinematic bloodshed, although cowriter Roger Ebert thought it an obtuse gambit at best. “I don’t think anybody can understand it,” said Ebert, who, despite being an outspoken critic of exploitation gore in such pictures as I Spit on Your Grave, maintained he never took Meyer violence “very seriously. It was a cartoon, but sometimes I thought [Russ] lost control of the tone.”

  Believe it or not, Beneath’s ludicrous plot had been somewhat inspired by Kitten having introduced Meyer to anal sex, a sport he found absurdly repellent. With Roger Ebert manning the typewriter under the pseudonym R. Hyde, director and scribe spent a week dreaming up the story of Lamar Shed (played by Ken Kerr), who “can’t look a good fuck in the eye”—that is, he can only function sexually with wife Lavonia (Kitten Natividad) á la rear entry. In the course of salvaging his marriage, Lamar not only gets saved by radio preacher Eufaula Roop (the big blo
nde Ann Marie, Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny made flesh), but endures coitus with the immense Junkyard Sal (June Mack) as well as aggressive Spanish stripper Lola Langusta (Kitten again).

  Perhaps only a county away from Supervixens, this world of “beautiful people, driving terrible cars and living in squalor . . . all oversexed” (and all sporting intricate names RM had nicked off a Georgia map) benefited from one of Meyer’s stronger casts. Much beefier than in his Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! days, Pat Wright plays macho sex machine Mr. Peterbuilt with one-stroke-away-from-a-heart-attack intensity, giving new meaning to the term grudge-fuck.

  Providing the obtuse Our Town on-screen narration is The Man from Small Town, U.S.A., the cosmically bland Stuart Lancaster, in overalls and a plaid red hat, gazing into the camera with the earnestness of a Home Shopping Network rep conning you into calling in your credit card number to buy a Christmas elf figurine. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve seen Lancaster barge into a tiny mountaintop shed to interrupt some young buck humping Soul (Uschi Digard) with the immortal admonishment, “Now son, if you plan to be around to see your fifteenth birthday, you’d better pull out that thing you call a dick and let your father show you how it’s done.”

  A huge African American woman with a mug not unlike a sexy Jabba the Hut, June Mack was a dominatrix and madam who tooled around in a Rolls when not polishing off tubs of ice cream. As Roger Ebert put it, “She had so much silicone goin’ on that you didn’t know where it stopped and the body began.” RM had seen an ad advertising her services in the L.A. Free Press and sent it to an interested Ebert. Before long her massive body was parked in front of Meyer’s lens essaying the role of Junkyard Sal. According to Ebert, Meyer’s favorite June Mack tale involved the scene where she entertains Mr. Peterbuilt in a pile of leaves in the back of a garbage truck. “Shout like you love it!” barked Meyer. Mack shot back, “What do I know about love?” The image of this ebony mountain of flesh in a hot pink nightie, clapping Lamar’s feet together while they go at it—well, it’s a vision you can’t erase (upon gazing upon the big-breasted behemoth that was June Mack, Charles Napier muttered to the critic, “You got your night cut out for you, Ebert”).*4