Who Killed Bambi? collapsed in a tangle of lawsuits from both sides. Even director Julien Temple was dragged into the fray in 1980, during a promotional tour for Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, the film that finally resulted in the aftermath of the Meyer debacle. He told reporter Todd McCarthy that Meyer had “personally shot a deer with a pistol” while filming Bambi. RM, furious that someone would accuse him of such a stunt, took Temple to court for libel, extracting a printed public apology from him in the pages of Screen International. “He loved to sue people,” said Kitten Natividad.
Meyer was devastated by the sudden demise of Bambi. He’d thought this would be his ticket back into the big leagues, and at age fifty-five, Meyer no doubt realized the opportunity wasn’t going to present itself again. “That experience drove me to not make more films for quite a time. It’s depressing to have a project collapse like that. I traveled to New Zealand and Switzerland just to get away from it.”
Meyer went into a tailspin. “He would go into deep depressions and get diarrhea,” said Kitten. “I knew when Russ had diarrhea he was depressed. He’d get up, his pants would be all soiled. I’d go, ‘Russ, God! Go take a shower!’ He wouldn’t sleep all night. He’d be in a dark room, sitting and staring. ‘Russ, are you coming to bed?’ Nothing. ‘Russ, are you coming to bed?’ ‘Leave me alone!’ ” Natividad said these down periods could last weeks. “I think he was sort of manic when he was depressed. He’d be really, really low, and then when Russ was working, he was working, working, feverishly working. Y’know, we could never stay home and watch TV. Never. Because he had to work. And if he wasn’t working, he was screwing—or asleep.”
Eventually Meyer finished and released the film he’d shot before the Bambi fiasco, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Not only were the critics harsh, but the outlets for a Russ Meyer picture were drying up.
Meyer encountered increasing resistance from theaters due to his constant X ratings. While RM had jumped on X in its infancy, he now considered it a liability. Meyer criticized the MPAA every chance he got. He particularly loathed the MPAA’s all-powerful potentate Jack Valenti, whom he saw as a glad-handing shill for big-studio interests. “The rating board is our censor board, plain and simple,” charged Meyer. “If you get an X rating, there are a lot of newspapers and television and radio stations that won’t take advertising.” In the late seventies theaters were proliferating inside shopping malls, and mall owners forbade X material—it clashed with a wholesome family atmosphere.
X was the one rating Valenti had failed to copyright, a prime reason being, notes author Jon Lewis, “to keep the studios out of the dirty picture business.” The message seemed to be: Make a picture that goes too far for Hollywood and we’ll trap you in the gutter. Thus Robert Aldrich’s lesbian psychodrama The Killing of Sister George, the hard-core Behind the Green Door, and the soft-core Supervixens were all slapped with (and many filmmakers say marginalized by) the same rating, whether MPAA-designated or self-imposed. Could Joe Six-Pack discern the difference between triple-X porno and a Meyer X? They were a galaxy apart, yet all that registered with the public was the one scarlet letter. “It had a bad connotation because of the hard-core people,” said Meyer. Yet when RM had some of his older pictures rerated R, business fell. The X was Meyer’s albatross.*8
As previously stated, big studios and major directors were routinely exploring subjects that were formerly taboo. One only had to catalogue some of the major’s pictures in the decade preceeding Beneath. Male hustlers in Midnight Cowboy. Wife-swapping in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The ultraviolence of The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange. The Exorcist’s obscenity-spewing devil-child masturbating with a cross. Box office superstar Marlon Brando’s shenanigans in Last Tango in Paris. The sexual politics of Shampoo. Teen prostitution in Pretty Baby. An Oscar-winning director—Roman Polanski—appearing in drag in The Tenant. The pressbook for the 1974 Columbia Pictures–distributed soft-X import Emmanuelle spoke volumes: “X has never been known for its elegance. Or for its beautiful people. Or for its intelligent story line. X has been known for other things. At Columbia Pictures we’re proud to bring you a movie that will change the meaning of X.” This was bullshit, of course, as what was being peddled was no loftier than anything Russ Meyer had to offer, but since a Hollywood studio was doing the selling, hell, it must be art.
Guys like Meyer had busted down the doors, enabling the studios to waltz in after him, throwing big bucks around in the process. “The exhibiting game is now based on the advertising dollar,” he noted. “The majors pump all that money in. They get one hundred and forty theaters, and put up an advertising budget of half a million dollars.” A small fry like RM could no longer compete.
Meyer saw the handwriting on the mall. “The days of Vixen are gone.” Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens would be Russ Meyer’s swan song, the last theatrical release of his career.
Which makes the ending of Beneath all the more poignant. Meyer stands on a desert mountainside, surrounded by his equipment. The crew has left and he’s packing up his movie camera alone. He addresses the audience, his voice dubbed by John Furlong doing a passable Bogie impression. He yells for Kitten—who’s gyrating wildly in the vicinity—telling her it’s time to go home. It was a retirement from which Meyer would not return.
“We fight all the time,” Kitten told a reporter in 1979. “We can’t stand each other. But it seems to work.” By this time, Meyer had queered the relationship by trying to control Natividad like he did everything else. For Kitten, the reality in the bedroom was a long way from what they’d created on the silver screen. “I’m glad to make a movie where I’m the superior one . . . but then when I try to live it out in real life, Russ wants to cut my head off.”
Stuart Lancaster’s wife Ivy Bethune saw Kitten trapped in “a masochistic relationship. She was very good to Russ, she would do anything to please him. He showed her off a lot, but you felt it was as if you took a dog on a leash—they’d better do certain things, or else. My own feeling about Russ was that though he was sexually attracted to women, he thought very little of them and never really related to them as people. Kitten always suffered because he treated her as he had the others.”
According to some, the passion between Meyer and Natividad sometimes turned violent. “Kitten gave him a couple of vicious cuts,” said Jim Ryan. “Busted his head right open. Chair, I think.” Meyer distributor Fred Beiersdorf, who put Russ and Kitten up on a trip to Texas, spoke of “fistfights in the house.”
Natividad emphatically denied all of this. “We never hit each other. Never! I don’t even think I broke a dish—I like my things.” However, she admits that Meyer “liked women to be violent, he got off on it. He wouldn’t hurt me, but he would yell and scream about my family or my friends or how dare I do that stupid movie. He’d wind me up. After he got me all upset, Russ didn’t want to stay there and argue. I knew that once he split, I wouldn’t see him for six months. He’d hide out somewhere. Vegas.”
When Meyer walked out after one particular screaming match, Kitten “ran out naked after him—stark naked, not a stitch of clothing. I said, ‘No, you’re not gonna go, you’re not gonna go, you’ll have to run over me!’ Then he started the car. I just jumped on the hood, everybody in the neighborhood watching me. I hung on by the windshield wipers.
“Everything was just about RM. Period. You really couldn’t talk about anything except RM. He had me all brainwashed—‘I am the best! In my movies there are no stars, because I am The Star! I am!’ That’s why I think our relationship went south. One time Russ had to work late, so I had a girlfriend come over. We were listening to that song ‘I Will Survive’ and we were dancing. Russ opens the door and goes, ‘I guess I’m not needed here.’ And he slams the door and leaves. He couldn’t stand for me to have fun.”
Nor did RM have any use for Kitten’s close family ties. When her sister would join them for dinner, her Meyer-induced uneasiness would render her silent. “He’
d go, ‘That sister of yours. She doesn’t say a word! And I fed her that steak!’ ”
Despite the many battles, marriage was discussed while the couple was in Europe for the Bambi ordeal. “He goes, ‘Let’s go to Amsterdam and get your diamond there.’ That scared me. To tell you the truth, Russ just didn’t seem normal. I thought, ‘Something’s not right here.’ He said, ‘Look, I want your tits bigger. Will you double your birth control?’ Screw up my health? No!”
While in London with RM, Kitten started going to the gym, cutting back on the chocolates and booze. It enraged Meyer, who liked company while feasting on both. Natividad even returned to her husband, but RM lured her back with the promise of children. Then Kitten fell for a younger guy, with Meyer still refusing to admit defeat. “We’d go to lunch and Russ was just hoping to get lucky. He’d carry a briefcase. I said, ‘What’s in the briefcase?’ He’d open it and it was a bottle of champagne with two glasses. And he said, ‘I got a room, too,’ then point upstairs. I’d say, ‘All right, let’s go.’ ”
Although Kitten would come and go in RM’s life until very late in the game, she had to make her escape. “By the time I was forty, I was worn out.”
Mother Meyer remained cantankerous to the very end. Lydia spent her final days wheelchair-bound in a rest home, and RM would express his eternal gratitude to both Uschi and Kitten for visiting and caring for her. Meyer even paid for Uschi to take Lydia to visit relatives in Germany, but after one day abroad she wanted to return to the States. Jim Ryan then had his sister take Lydia to Hawaii. Once again, it was one day, then home.
“Lydia was not really with it most of the time,” said Ryan, recalling vicious fights she had with staff at the Sepulveda Convalescent Hospital, where she spent her final years. According to Jim, discourse from Lydia often boiled down to ‘fucking Jews,’ ‘goddamn niggers.’ And right in front of the people—‘You dirty nigger, you ain’t gonna touch me. Get outta here.’ That’s not the thing to say to those people, because they have ways of retaliating.” Lydia would find her false teeth missing or her glasses stepped on, then put in an angry call to her son.
Charles Napier remembers tagging along with Jim Ryan and Meyer for one Lydia outing. “We would pick her up and we’d go through the Hollywood Hills looking at the Christmas lights. Meyer would talk to her. She was senile, incoherent. She thought he was a doctor. We’d go to a bar and he’d order her a cocktail. He’s wiping her mouth, making sure she isn’t spilling anything on herself, expounding on tits and ass, and I’m trying to keep a straight face.” The rest of the visit consisted of “running her over curbs in this wheelchair—bangin’ her around, bam crash, back to the rest home. It was that kind of bizarre funny-but-not-funny, y’know what I mean?” Roger Ebert recalled Meyer pushing Lydia across four lanes of traffic just to take her out for a meal. “We wound up in a topless restaurant that was attached to a motel across the street from the rest home.”
Lydia succumbed to cancer on March 21, 1979, her son’s fifty-eighth birthday, and just days short of turning eighty-two. Meyer was out on the road with Kitten promoting Beneath when the call came in. “We were in Houston. Russ went on doing interviews and the opening of the film. He got diarrhea because he stayed up thinking of his mother and he didn’t sleep and he cried. He got kinda sick.” Once back in Los Angeles, Meyer was consoled by Roger Ebert. “I went and talked to him, sat with him for a while in the evening. He was crushed.” Meyer was deeply touched by Ebert’s kindness, and when Roger’s mother passed away RM flew to Illinois for her funeral.
Meyer packed Lydia’s body into his GMC Suburban for the trip to her final resting spot in Stockton. Kitten stayed behind. “I said, ‘Do you want me to go with you?’ And he goes, ‘No, I wanna be alone with her.’ ” From then on he’d spend every Christmas at her gravesite. He’d tell friends he was going to dedicate all the proceeds of his autobiography to cancer research.
Meyer, a mama’s boy to the end. He had never really been able to commit to any other woman. His first marriage to Betty was over in a flash. Eve lasted longer then most, but eventually that, too, went to hell in a handbasket. And then came the parade of cows, as his mother was so fond of calling them. Meyer kept Lydia at a distance, but her shadow hovers over everything in his life, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that RM’s film career basically ends with her death.
“I think Russ was a very lonely person,” said Meyer production associate and editor Les Barnum. “He really wanted to be close to other people, and I think he was envious of those who had solid family relationships. Russ really tried—he was very gracious and magnanimous at times—but his films always won out. There was just that look in Russ’s eye that meant the fiends of hell were risin’ up. There was always a demon lingering in the background. It’s terrible, but there’s that line in Arsenic and Old Lace—‘Insanity runs in my family, it practically gallops.’ ”
Lydia, the only one who had truly believed in him, was gone. But there was that omnipresent living ghost, The Poor Dear. Lucinda still called Meyer’s office incessantly, often in hysterics, insisting she’d been assaulted or raped, desperate for her brother to set her free.
Mondo Meyer
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind.
—JAGGER-RICHARDS, “Ruby Tuesday”
Throughout the eighties and much of the nineties, reporters hungry to spill some ink on a slow news day made the trek out to Hollywood to RM’s Arrowhead Drive home, aka the Russ Meyer Museum, paying their respects to King Leer. Dressed in Ralph Lauren chino shorts, a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls T-shirt, and some old-school bling consisting of a diamond-encrusted Rolex alongside a gold ring and bracelet both bearing his name, a crusty, well-oiled Meyer held court, often holding in his huge mitt a piece of celluloid from a film he’d never finish. He had become a caricature of himself, a walking, talking hooter-hungry legend of lech, and his palaver was always the same. “They must be cantilevered. They must be defying gravity. You’ve got to have huge breasts, casting long shadows. Just so the women don’t buckle at the knees.” The walls of his home echoed his words, as they were plastered with photos showing “dozens and dozens of women with large and sometime very, very large breasts,” wrote journalist Louis Black. “It is overwhelming . . . too much flesh. It is nice to go outside and find the California sun.”
Meyer would live in the Arrowhead Drive house until the end of his life. Even when RM was mentally intact, he didn’t exactly keep it according to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. All of its five rooms functioned as offices to some extent, while plaques, pictures, and Meyer memorabilia crowded every inch of the walls and even the ceilings. Overnight visitors of lesser status stayed in the guest house by the pool, while for the A-list, Russ rolled out a cot and you “slept amongst boxes,” according to friend Paul Fishbein. “There were no clean towels, no soap, no shampoo. Russ had no idea how uncomfortable it was staying there.”
Meyer’s 166th buddy Fred Owens came to visit RM in the late seventies shortly after he moved into the Arrowhead home. “Fred worried about Russ like a brood hen,” said Roger Ebert. “He didn’t feel that Russ understood the pleasures of life. He worked too hard. Fred said, ‘Well, look at this place—there’s nuthin’ here but office furniture! Every chair in the house has wheels on it! There’s no place to sit down in this house, unless you’re working! My wife and I, we have a couple of easy chairs, one on either side of the fireplace. We sit down, stretch out our legs, read the paper, have a drink, do whatever you feel like doin’.’ ” Every time Ebert saw RM he “would quote that and just roar with laughter.” For Meyer, “it was all work. There was no easy chair.”
When Garth Pillsbury and his wife Jacqueline Mayo attended a party on Arrowhead in the late eighties, both were struck by the lack of atmosphere. “I don’t know what Stalag 17 looked like, but a stalag is where I was,” said Mayo. “Aluminum chairs, steel-topped sinks, paper plates, cheap stuff from Sears—it looked like a commandant’s office. It just di
dn’t look like a place in the Hollywood Hills. More like the outskirts of Kansas City, or near a penitentiary.” When neighbors complained that sets Meyer had discarded in his yard were an eyesore, he retaliated by painting his house the garish orange and green that adorned his home video boxes.
The eighties, a crap decade. Ronald Reagan, Huey Lewis and the News, Top Gun—need I say more? If you were unfortunate enough to be around, it seemed like ten years that didn’t happen at all. In the wake of 1977’s Star Wars, Hollywood turned more and more to high-priced, often indistinguishable blockbusters seemingly designed to sell sequels, action figures, and lunch boxes. Such assembly-line corporate crap only reinforced the idea of Meyer as a renegade cobbler whose down-home product had only been influenced by his crotch, and even though he didn’t release a single film during the decade, the eighties were very good to him indeed. RM had stuck around long enough to become a bona fide icon. “Like an old hot rod, he has aged gracefully from Public Enemy to American Classic,” declared the Soho Weekly News.
Projects came and went. The Jaws of Lorna; The Jaws of Vixen; Blitzen, Vixen and Harry; Mondo Topless, Too; Up the Valley of the Beyond; an ill-conceived color remake of his 1966 masterpiece entitled Kill, Kill, Pussycat! Faster!—all were announced, all faded away. “I don’t care about making another movie,” said Meyer in 1988. “I got all the money I’ll ever need. You gotta be hungry to make a movie. I don’t have the desire, the urge.” What other filmmaker would have the guts to admit the fire was gone? Meyer’s three-volume autobiography stopped abruptly once it got past 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. No more films, no more life.
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 36