Christiani felt that one force driving all the chaos was Meyer’s mortality. “As I worked on it over the years, I wondered if he didn’t want it to end. The book’s done, his life’s over. He never said that to me directly, but I just got that feeling. He did not want it to end.”
Pandora Peaks arrived during one of the frequent disappearances of Melissa Mounds. Peaks came to RM through the efforts of Morgan “Tex” Hagen, editor of Hustler’s Busty Beauties magazine and a huge Meyer fan. Another scientific marvel of boob engineering, Pandora at least had some of the spunk of Meyer’s classic old-school dames. She had started stripping in September 1990 and by April of the following year Meyer was shooting a layout of her for German Playboy.
A smart cookie with ambition, Peaks knew how to keep RM happy without getting too deep in the Meyer mire. The two weren’t involved, although Pandora was savvy enough to let the world think so. “I didn’t have a problem being on Russ’s arm and letting him have his glory. I wasn’t gonna be a romantic figure in his life—he might’ve presented me that way. Russ was very kind to me. I was his girl of the nineties. It would’ve been Melissa, but she just wasn’t there. She could’ve been very jealous of me.” Meyer filmed Peaks for a feature that wouldn’t see light of day until 2000. “For years he’d say to me, ‘Six months, it’s gonna come out in six months,’ ” said Peaks, who was kept on a $9,000 weekly retainer during filming.
Meyer’s next project was another Busty Beauties sensation, Letha Weapons. Assuring Letha that “there wouldn’t be any sex, or whatever,” Meyer talked her into coming out to his home in Palm Desert for some pictures. “I was sleeping in his bed and everything, but he never tried to make a move on me. The whole time we hung out, he’s goin’ on and on about my hair. I didn’t want to disappoint him by taking my wig off—a blond bob with bangs. So I left it on for, like, two days.” RM accidentally barged into the bathroom to find Weapons wigless. There were no further compliments concerning her coiffure.
A few days later Letha left for a dancing gig in Corpus Christi. To her shock, Meyer showed up at the club. “He had come there with an engagement ring to propose to me. I never had even had sex with the dude. He was like, ‘I have an engagement ring for you, I wanna marry you, blah blah blah. I was like, ‘Huh?’ ” To sweeten the deal, RM told her he wanted to shoot her for German Playboy, promising her $7,000 for one week’s work. When Letha, who already had a commitment to appear in Howard Stern’s Butt Bongo Fiesta video, told Meyer she’d do it if he’d limit the shoot to a few days, RM got angry.
“He was raising his voice, pissed off. Up until that time he’d been totally nice to me, a gentleman, and then the second he hears I’m not gonna do exactly what the hell he wants me to, he just turned to like an obnoxious jerk-off. Howard Stern was only paying me fifty dollars, but it was the principle of the matter. I knew this photo shoot didn’t take more than a day, so I was being very generous giving him three or four. He’s trying to take all my time and be possessive—‘Well, you have to choose! You either do this photo shoot with me or do Howard Stern! You’re not gonna do both.’ I said, ‘Y’know what? You can kiss my ass. Just forget it.’ ”
Meyer still wanted to spend the night in her hotel room, but Letha refused. When she got back to the hotel there was a missive from Meyer awaiting her. “And in the card it says I owe him three hundred for his round-trip ticket and fifty dollars for his hotel stay! I was like, ‘Oh, I do not even think so.’ I got on the phone and talked to his secretary, just let her have it. I said, ‘Look, you tell this motherfucker that he invited himself here—he’s trying to propose to me, I don’t even know this fool, and he shows up sayin’ I owe him his airline ticket?’ I was irate. I never talked to him again after that.”
Right to the bitter end, Russ kept a close watch on all his 166th buddies, organizing their reunions. When Bill Teas died, Meyer took his ashes to the next 166th get-together in Joplin, Missouri. As Charlie Sumners recalled, “We were all sittin’ around, and Russ said, ‘I have Teas’ ashes.’ Teas loved to drink and he loved vodka, so I said, ‘Well, I have a suggestion—why don’t we just get a fifth of vodka, stir Teas’s ashes up in it, and all have a cocktail.’ That didn’t go over too well. Russ still has Teas’s ashes.” Meyer took the deaths of his comrades hard, calling up friends to weep openly over the latest loss. And by this time they were dying with some regularity. Roger Ebert noted that when actor Henry Rowland—RM’s beloved “Martin Bormann”—passed, Meyer took out a full-page tribute in Variety.
For Meyer, the hardest death of all was that of wolf-dog Harry in 1993. Although Harry’s hips had given out and he was falling apart in general, “Russ wouldn’t put him down,” said secretary Paula Parker. “The dog was shitting all over the room.” For Harry’s frequent trips to the vet, Meyer summoned an ambulance. And when Harry finally gave up the ghost, RM called the man who had brought the dog into his life. “When Harry died, man, I answered the phone and he was sobbing unbearably,” said Charles Napier. “Russ goes, ‘He’s gone,’ and I knew who ‘he’ was. I talked to Meyer like the dog was a member of the family—‘You want me to come down, you want to have a service?’ He had to treat Harry like he was a human. You could never refer to Harry in front of Meyer as an animal.” Harry was buried beneath Meyer’s deck, then RM had the requisite plaque made in his honor.
One night, returning to his Palm Desert home from dinner with Charlie Sumners, RM suddenly slammed on the brakes in front of a small church. Meyer went in, leaving Sumners in the car. “It shocked me!” said Charlie, a Baptist who’d never discussed religion with his best friend. “Russ got back in the car and said, ‘You didn’t expect me to do that, did you? I was praying for Lucinda.’ ” Others remember RM visiting the church to communicate with his mother. “I turn to God,” Meyer confessed in 1995. “I find myself going to a little wayside chapel. I’ll say a prayer for people who need help.”
And yet no one knew how Meyer felt about his own mortality. Said Kitten Natividad, “He never discussed death—even though it was all around him.”
In 1995, Mike Thomas at Strand Releasing suggested to RM that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! be rereleased theatrically. Thomas was a great friend and fan of Meyer’s; he booked his films on the revival circuit and even helped Meyer shoot a scene or two for Breast. According to Thomas, RM had taken “a fatherly attitude” toward him.
Meyer was excited by the prospect of resuscitating Pussycat, consulting with Thomas on every detail. Everything went swimmingly until they got to the one-sheet. RM wanted the original poster re-created, down to the paper stock. Of surpassing importance to Meyer was that the red—the only bit of color in the otherwise black-and-white poster—be matched exactly. The printer went to great trouble, painstakingly mixing the color to get it just right.
Although RM wanted to inspect the posters as they came off the press, the printer provided short notice, so Thomas took his vintage original down there and compared the two himself. To Thomas’s eyes the new one-sheet seemed perfect, but Meyer took one look and hit the roof. Unfortunately, Thomas’s original poster had faded, and thus they’d matched a slightly different red. “Hardly anybody could’ve ever told the difference—but Russ noticed. Strike number one.” Meyer wanted them to run the poster again, threatening to sue. “Already the paper it was printed on was expensive,” said Thomas. “We didn’t have the resources to go out and print more posters for a crazy man over a shade of red.”
The movie became a smash hit on the revival circuit, playing to packed houses. Thomas said it grossed a half million dollars—not bad for a nearly thirty-year-old picture that had flopped the first time around. Pussycat then went into the secondary stage of release, playing smaller cities for two or three days at a time. “Meyer started bein’ offended when we wouldn’t do well in some town where we probably never had a chance of doing well. He started taking those failures seriously, became kind of like the wounded bear, and lashed out.”
Meyer suddenly demanded a
$350 daily guarantee—“an arbitrary figure which would go up depending on his mood,” said Thomas. The shit really hit the fan in Miami. RM didn’t like the advance publicity done there, and he tried to pull the print at the very last minute, after it had already been advertised. Meyer relented, but that was the last straw. Thomas was exhausted by dealing with his hero, even though he’d originally planned on re-releasing the rest of RM’s catalogue theatrically.
“I knew how Russ could be, and I just wanted to get out before we turned into archenemies. Before he sued us, or who knows what. I just didn’t wanna find out.”
And yet RM could be incredibly kind when you least expected it. He bailed out numerous combat buddies and ex-girlfriends financially. Screenwriter John McCormick was also among the fortunate after a deal to do a Meyer picture at Carolco collapsed. “I couldn’t get arrested in terms of writing gigs, couldn’t get anything going, and one day Meyer just pulled up in front of my house in the Suburban, came in, and said, ‘I need you to write a screenplay for me,’ and wrote me out a five-thousand-dollar check. It was like manna from heaven, and it saved my ass. Russ discerned my trouble—I certainly didn’t tell him.”
Throughout this time, the Meyer/Mounds doom train continued its intermittent ride to hell. In Febuary 1994, Mounds filed a lawsuit against Meyer over a bite to the face she’d received a year earlier from Harry. Melissa settled out of court, some say to the tune of a hundred grand. Mounds gave up stripping that same year, leaving her with no income, and when she discovered she had throat cancer, RM picked up the tab for treatment. “She was a real mess,” said Haji. “I liked her, but she had no goals in life. She’d get up in the morning and she had nothing to live for or do.”
Except report to Sgt. Meyer, that is. “He was a very controlling, moronic idiot,” said Melissa’s agent Eleanor Bucci, who was literally spat on by RM at a video convention in Las Vegas after Meyer decided she was partly to blame for his troubled relationship with Mounds. “She couldn’t call me on the phone—he would go through the phone records. He was a possessive person, really quite nasty. He promised all kinds of things, then he showed his colors. She was almost a prisoner. He didn’t want her to go anyplace. It was like putting a teacup over a butterfly. He just smothered her. She was very unhappy; she’d call me up and cry.”
Copious amounts of alcohol didn’t help matters on either side. “Russ was not a drunk,” said Roger Ebert. “He drank in a social way. Russ worked too hard to have time to get drunk.” Without any real projects to drive him—and with Melissa by his side—that changed. “Melissa was just an alcoholic and they both got drunk together,” said Charlie Sumners, recalling a comical visit the two lovebirds made to his home in Alabama. Although Sumners lived in a dry county, Mounds borrowed a car and somehow managed to find beer, which she hid outside. “She didn’t want Russ to know she was drinkin’, and Russ didn’t want her to know he was drinkin’. I would fix his drink in a can of 7-Up and she’d slip outside to drink hers—and take her a swallow of cough medicine so we couldn’t smell it on her.” Meyer later paid for Mounds to attend rehab at the Betty Ford Center, but she checked out early. “She won’t listen to them,” said RM.
Friends started to suspect that something was wrong with Meyer. The word Alzheimer’s was whispered. The fear that RM had expressed to Manny Diez some twenty-five years previous was now becoming a reality: he was losing his mind. That magnificent brain, so all-powerful and detail-cognizant, was beginning to get hung up on repetition, not unlike a Meyer editing sequence. Charlie Sumners first noticed it in the mid-nineties on a trip overseas. “He would irritate the tar out of me, because every time we stopped he would go through every damn thing in his bags. He had money from all different sources—he had French francs, German marks, Portugese money. He had about five billfolds, and every time we’d stop he’d count his money. When I came home, I told my wife, ‘Russ is losin’ it.’ ”
For years, Meyer tinkered endlessly with the Pandora Peaks movie and then, whenever he was on good terms with Melissa Mounds, abandon it to work on her film. It seemed like he’d never finish either one (the Mounds film remains unfinished). “Russ finally entered into a phase of his life where he just was always perfecting things and never finishing them,” said Roger Ebert. “I think it was part of his disintegration.”
Richard Brummer lived in Meyer’s Palm Desert house, editing the Pandora Peaks film in RM’s garage cutting room. “We were working on it in fits and starts. He was already not in good shape, already forgetting.” When RM asked for a section of the work print, Brummer would make Meyer “write a note that he had received it, because later in the day he would say, ‘Where is it?’ I’d say, ‘I gave it to you.’ He said, ‘No, you didn’t.’ And I would have to say, ‘Well, here’s a note that says you did.’ ”
Getting ever stranger, Meyer had a urinal installed in the middle of the editing room. “Up until that time, he would open the back garage door and piss on the piece of lawn between us and the next house,” said Brummer. “The neighbors began to complain, because not only did the grass die, but it also began to be odorous. So he put in the urinal, which he wanted me to use as well.”*4 Alas, Brummer preferred the privacy of the bathroom inside the house, which irritated Meyer, along with Richard’s habit of getting up early in the morning hours and using a hairdryer and electric toothbrush. “He didn’t like the noise of it. I had to close all the doors. He says, ‘You think I still don’t hear it?!?’ It upset him beyond reason.”
After one of their many breaks, Meyer summoned Brummer back to Palm Desert to resume work on Pandora Peaks, this time with a catch: RM was working with a scriptwriter, and he didn’t want Richard disturbing him with that thunderous hairdryer/electric tootbrush racket. Meyer wanted Brummer to come to work just the way he woke up—no blowing of hair, no brushing of teeth. “I’d rather stay in a motel,” was Brummer’s response. Meyer was furious. He made Brummer stay in Hollywood to cut the film, communicating with the editor only via written notes. They eventually made up, but not before RM trashed Brummer in an interview with a German magazine, accusing Richard—who’d now worked with him off and on for over thirty years—of being disloyal.
In 1996, Pandora Peaks appeared in the Demi Moore feature Striptease, and RM got it in his head that he was going to shoot stills for the Moore movie. “That just didn’t happen,” said Peaks. “I felt really bad. He got cantankerous; he wanted it to be on his rules. Russ was just too difficult to deal with.” The following year, Peaks appeared in Playboy’s Voluptuous Vixens II, a home video hosted by Russ. At one point a haggard, wild-eyed Meyer ruminates on the merits of the term glamour. “I don’t care for it myself. I’d much rather say, ‘This girl’s built like a brick shithouse.’ ” Meyer’s brief clips seem heavily edited, with the vixens surrounding him looking genuinely uncomfortable. It saddened Pandora to see RM obviously deteriorating.
Kitten Natividad, working for RM at the time, realized things were out of whack “the day Russ stacked up the desks. One day we came in and he had desks on top of desks, all very neat and organized. And he said, ‘See, now we have lots of room. Your desk is up there.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but how am I gonna sit up there?’ He goes, ‘I didn’t think about that.’ He started getting kinda weird.”
Natividad joined Meyer and Ebert for a night out at the Academy Awards. At dinner, Russ kept asking if he had ordered. Then Meyer announced he had to call Melissa. “He didn’t know how to dial the phone . . . that night was a bad night,” said Kitten. “The next day he was okay. He’d say, ‘From now on I’m gonna remember things, I’m really gonna remember things.’ ”
Supervixens star Raven De La Croix came by with her boyfriend Michael Ziton to visit Meyer. They realized RM was heading south when he asked for Michael’s help setting up magazine racks—on the exterior of his house. “These interviewers came and he started talking about children and sex,” said Raven. “I almost fell on the ground.” RM continued to give interviews right up into 1999,
and they got progressively weirder and filthier.
Charles Napier came by to see Meyer. “It’s eleven o’clock at night, we’re drinking, all of a sudden he looks up and he goes, ‘Who in the hell are you?’ When Meyer was getting really bad, he called and said, ‘Y’know, I can act—I want you to direct me.’ I said, ‘I know you can, Russ. Pick a script. I’ll direct you.’ Of course, he’d forget about it the next day. He’d call up in the middle of the night, just out of his head. It’s a terrible disease. He was bizarre when he was himself—when it was Alzheimer’s, you never really knew. I said to Ryan, ‘Did you guys take his guns away?’ ”
Napier took Meyer to the set of a movie he was appearing in. “During the day he sat around watching. I could see he was getting upset. ‘These fuckin’ people don’t know what they’re doing.’ And he started trying to take over. I hadda hustle him off—he was getting ready to fuck it all up. Once I got him out, he goes, ‘I want to go home.’ It became a thing where it was a very unpleasant situation to be anywhere with him.”
Even taking RM to his favorite restaurants became impossible. He’d yell at the help, then pull his member out and whiz on the floor. His behavior bordered on the poetically surreal at times. Rob Schaffner recalled Meyer scurrying out to his GMC Suburban and, a can of spray paint in his hand, writing “RYAN SITS HERE” on the passenger-side door. Combat buddies from the 166th were also becoming alarmed by Meyer’s condition. “At our last reunion up in Joplin, he was in bad shape,” said Charlie Sumners. “He had on a pair of shorts, old scuffy shoes, and his old World War II hike jacket. Shocked everybody.”
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 39