The old warriors refuse to die. Deep inside that hermetically sealed Tinseltown fantasy factory known to aficionados simply as “the mansion,” a curiously square jaw that has been sans trademark pipe for over seven years now and his brittle bones comforted by the finest silken pajamas, Hugh Hefner holds court with his seven cookie-cutter blond girlfriends, plus a newly remade/remodeled Pamela Anderson. Perhaps the gang is discussing the finer points of saline implants, or the joys of Viagra. A few miles away Edy Williams stares at the bare walls of her abode and wonders just what happened to all those flashy dreams. Two and a half hours outside of Los Angeles, smack dab in the middle of a broiling, unkind desert of the sort that only Russ Meyer could love, a seventy-six-year-old Tempest Storm shakes her somehow still-intact stuff, the closing act of a shambolic, affectionately retro annual burlesque shindig known as Miss Exotic World.
Used, abused, and still a bit nutty after all these years, Meyer’s women fight to scratch out some sort of a living, waiting for the break that never came post-RM.*12 They were too far ahead of their time, too big for this planet, and financially they have benefited the least from the work they helped to create. But somewhere out there a fourteen-year-old scowling bad seed of a girl is seeing Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill! for the first time and thinking to herself that the world can’t be all bad if Tura Satana’s in it.
As a filmmaker, Meyer stands alone. His untamed visions have inspired countless filmmakers, rockers, and artistes of all stripes—as recently as November 2003, Quentin Tarantino—whose Kill Bill films certainly qualify as Meyeresque to some degree—talked reverentially of Faster, Pussycat in the New York Times and told another interviewer he’d “give up five years of my life” to have worked with a circa-Pussycat Satana.
Movies, TV, rock videos, reality TV hellcats like Anna Nicole Smith . . . if you squint, it’s not hard to discern the ghost of Russ Meyer flitting about. Much of the stuff is sexless and grim, though—Girls Gone Wild, anyone?—and completely devoid of the vulgar exuberance of Russ Meyer at his best. Big-budget remakes of his films seem inevitable—Courtney Love starring in a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is excruciatingly easy to imagine. But RM’s world can’t be replicated in these jaded, numb times. It’s funny—who would’ve thought one would long for the days of Meyer’s wholesome depravity? Who could’ve predicted that RM would come to represent class, however crass? One way or another, Meyer’s films will prevail, despite their many imperfections. They are just too rambunctious, too original, and too evocative of an America now gone. As long as men and women continue to connive ways into each other’s pants or wallets, Meyer’s big bosoms and square jaws will captivate.
For a while there RM succeeded in getting the world to chuckle over sex, a subject that still short-circuits this country. A single tit can stop a nation—witness the night in 2004 when Janet Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunction” disturbed the sanctity that is American football. If only Meyer had been able to provide some play-by-play commentary for that debacle. It was such a plastic and strange event, as was the hysteria that ensued. These days it sometimes feels like we are all trapped in a Russ Meyer film, and not one of the good ones.
And what was to become of Russ Meyer, the man? “Russ was so vibrant, so, so alive,” said Tura Satana. “To see him now, it’s just—you wanna cry, you really do. He’s like a Popsicle.” Tura last saw Meyer in 2000, as did Kitten. “So RM’s only pleasure would probably be eating, huh?” she mused in 2002. “I’m supposing a drink is out of the question. God, he loved his cocktail hour.”
Outside of his handlers, few saw Meyer in his end days, except for the occasional brief visit from Jim Ryan and, whenever he was in town, Roger Ebert. “Russ dug his own grave, in a sense,” said Raven De La Croix. “He brought it all on himself. Russ became the character in his films, abused by women, taken advantage of. He made his fear come true.”
“It’s almost biblical, isn’t it?” said David K. Frasier. “No love in RM’s life, so he dies alone sitting on a Costco folding chair.” Nineteen ninety-nine was the last year Frasier saw Meyer in the flesh, and the great man had already turned into a drooling shadow of his former self. One bright California day during his stay, Frasier took RM out for a little jaunt in the immediate neighborhood. On the scrubby hillside behind them the infamous Hollywood sign shone big and white in the sunlight. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to Russ than during those walks,” said Frasier. Meyer, almost like a child, would gather up leaves from the street—“only the very reddish orange ones,” said Frasier—and stick the stems into the buttonholes of his shirt. “June Wilkinson is coming over for a photo shoot and I’m going to place these leaves all over her body,” announced a beaming RM. “Nice memory,” Frasier told me.
Of course, there was no photo shoot. And no pending visit from June Wilkinson. But that was reality, after all, and Russell Albion Meyer never gave a damn about that.
Postscript
In early September 2004, an ailing Meyer, suffering from pneumonia, was taken to the Glendale Adventist Medical Center. It wasn’t his first bout. After a couple of weeks he was sent home on September 18, and that day, in bed and surrounded by his caretakers, Meyer suddenly began gasping for breath. An ambulance was called, but he was pronounced DOA at the hospital. He was eighty-two years old. The news wasn’t made public to friends until three days later, outraging many of those close to him.
Janice Cowart had micromanaged Meyer’s life until the last minute and beyond. Rob Schaffner, a friend of RM’s for twenty years, had discovered what hospital Meyer was in during his last bout of pneumonia, and only wanted to slip in for brief moment and say a final goodbye to his friend. Cowart found out he’d called the hospital, and she went ballistic, telling Schaffner’s wife Chris she’d have guards escort Rob off the property if he dared to show up there.
Meyer’s service took place at the Old North Church in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in the Hollywood Hills. Both the viewing the day before and the service were private, with a strict guest list compiled by Cowart. This seemed highly inappropriate for a man who not only loved the company of his friends and fans but also loved mixing them all together. (Schaffner, who was not on the list, still managed to sneak in and give his old friend a final salute. To the mirth of many, another crony of his absconded with Janice’s guest list. It should be noted that the estate did offer to pay travel expenses so at least two of RM’s old friends could attend the service, Tempest Storm and Floyce Sumners.)
I counted fifty-five heads at RM’s service, a paltry send-off for a king like Meyer, but that’s what you get when you lock out the world. Still, many of the fabulous women he made famous managed to show, all of them dressed to the nines: June Wilkinson, Tura Satana, Haji, Kitten Natividad, Alaina Capri, Erica Gavin, Raven De La Croix, and a few others. Dressed in the requisite black, Janice Cowart sat in a front pew “like the grieving widow,” as Rob Schaffner cruelly observed. By her side was the ubiquitous Julio Dottavio.
For anyone the least bit familiar with Meyer’s life the service was an outrage. The man who’d made such fun of organized religion in his movies was given a cookie-cutter ceremony, with canned songs interrupting a bland sermon. The Presbyterian minister mispronounced RM’s name as “Mayer” and, as if apologizing for Meyer’s existence, babbled such dubious statements as “Russ was not a voyeur.” One only hoped RM, lying there in his coffin back behind the minister, would suddenly rise from his casket and end all this punishing monotony by way of a loud fart.
The only moment of actual emotion came courtesy of Roger Ebert, who stood up and, graciously thanking Janice and Julio for taking care of RM, shared a heartfelt and funny remembrance of his deceased compadre. Glancing at the back of the church, spying a crony of Raven De La Croix’s up in the rafters surreptitiously videotaping the event for a documentary Raven’s putting together on Meyer, I had to laugh. Cowart would find out about the clandestine recording, and the next day De La Croix played me a recording of an angry phon
e call full of veiled legal threats she’d received from her. Janice also complained that Haji tried to photograph RM in his coffin. “How tacky is that?” said Cowart.
At the end of the service, everybody shuffled out of the church, pausing in front of RM’s open casket to pay their respects. He was dressed in a cheap suit and sported nary a speck of his trademark gaudy gold jewelry, nor—sins of sins—the slightest physical evidence of his combat career. So much larger than life while alive, Meyer now looked very small, tragically mundane. Life had been never-ending hand-to-hand combat for Meyer. Had he won the battle? Had he lost? That I can’t tell you, but as I stood there silently staring at the man, a line Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci had written of John Gotti came to mind: “For a while, he was what he wanted to be, which is only what we all want.”
Yes, one mustn’t feel too sorry for Russell Albion Meyer, despite his long, sad journey to the end of the Hollywood night. Russ wouldn’t want it that way. RM wasn’t interested in anybody’s help. He was too good for that. After all, he was Meyer, and Meyer needed no one. Mother Lydia had made certain of that. No, there had been no repenting or regretting. Meyer had given the world the finger and lived to tell the tale. As Roger Ebert maintained, when it came to his life, “Russ never apologized.”
A few days later, Meyer was to be interred up north in the Stockton Rural Cemetery, buried between mother Lydia and half-sister Lucinda. Janice Cowart reportedly has a fear of flying, so that Sunday she, Dottavio, and Ryan were taking the body by train (“not unlike the burial of President Lincoln,” quipped one RM associate). There was a meager turnout at the gravesite: Cowart, Dottavio, Ryan, a few close friends. According to one witness, Cowart choked up recalling how Meyer had complimented her at the end of each and every day she worked for him. Julio Dottavio also reminisced, although, according to one spy, “he didn’t have the kind of memories that would bring a tear to your eye.” As of February, 2005, it looks like Meyer’s tombstone will indeed carry the Keating quote previously mentioned as well as RM’s wicked retort.
And what about the fabled Meyer will? It had been the subject of endless discussion among both his friends and enemies. RM—as a tribute to his mother, who died from the disease—left the bulk of his fortune to both the Kenneth J. Norris, Jr. Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. A few of his stars, girlfriends, and associates are to receive the sum of approximately $5,000 each (a 1999 amendment to the will states that Melissa Mounds was specifically disinherited), and some closer associates (including a few army buddies) are to get $15,000 apiece. Meyer left instructions that his house and its endless memorabilia remain intact, a monument to himself.*13 RM also left a final stinger attached to his last wishes: should anyone contest the will, that person is to be immediately disinherited. Apparently most of the many recent codices Meyer had added to the will in fits of anger or joy have been discounted due to his dementia, although there are those who are already questioning whether the 1998 document that’s been chosen by his estate could be declared invalid for the very same reason.
The will states that Meyer’s trust be run by three consecutively appointed candidates from the following list of six people: Janice Cowart, Phil Cooperman, Jim Ryan, David K. Frasier, the late Charles Sumners, and a friend (unknown to this author) by the name of James Gaspar. According to one source, for quite a while the Meyer trust was (and may still be currently) run by only two trustees, Cowart and Ryan, with Cooperman having dropped out some time ago. If this is true, it would appear RM’s instructions are being ignored. It seems that Julio Dottavio has a great deal of input concerning anything to do with Meyer’s archives, despite no apparent mention of his name in the will in regards to the matter.*14
Additionally, the will calls for the creation of a three-person committee overseeing any and all decisions relating to Meyer’s work in all its mediums. The committee members are to be picked consecutively from the following list of Meyer’s associates: Janice Cowart, Jim Ryan, Charles Sumners, a filmmaker friend named Mike Carroll, David K. Frasier, Warren G. Harding, Fred Owens, Bill Newhouse, and George Carll (Sumners, Owens, and Newhouse are all deceased). To my knowledge, no such committee has been set in motion thus far, and at least some of those listed had no idea that they have been so chosen by Meyer.
No doubt the will of Russ Meyer is destined to cause as much controversy as everything else in his life. “I just hope this is what Russ wished for,” said his old secretary Paula Parker. “That’s the only thing I’d like to know. Would Russ be glad? Maybe he would find all this very exciting. He used to kid about how he had his will all tangled, just so everybody would be all screwed up—so he was controlling people, even from the grave.”
At the end of the Los Angeles service, I had watched as Janice Cowart, Julio Dottavio, and RM’s caretakers climbed aboard a large stretch limo that whisked them away, ostensibly to Meyer’s home, which was only a ten-minute drive. By contrast, a frail-looking Jim Ryan got into a beat-up ’87 Oldsmobile, which failed to start on the first two tries, although it eventually puttered off. Who should be blamed for this injustice? I wondered. “The Handyman,” Ryan had pretty much given sixty years of life to Meyer, and as far as many were concerned, RM should’ve left him a huge chunk of dough. But then I recalled something Meyer had said to a friend about his good buddy Jim Ryan: “The day after I die, Ryan’ll go out and buy a Cadillac.” Although Anthony James Ryan remains on the board of Meyer’s trust, it looks like he won’t be tooling around in a shiny new Caddy after all.
The morning of Meyer’s Los Angeles service, Dave Frasier, staying at an old haunt of RM’s in Burbank, the Safari Inn, walked a few blocks to the nearby Talleyrand restaurant, an old-school coffee shop. Meyer loved its horseshoe booths and on numerous occasions had taken Frasier there to chow down. Dave wanted to pay tribute to his old friend with a final breakfast in RM’s honor. When Frasier arrived, the place was packed. A waitress hustled him off to a booth, which, eerily enough, was the very same one Frasier had sat in with Meyer the last time they were there.
Looking down at the tabletop, Dave noticed a pile of ones, obviously a tip the waitress hadn’t pocketed yet. As he studied the top dollar bill, the hair on Frasier’s neck stood up: somebody had inked a large, loud set of initials near the center of the dollar that simply read “R.M.,” and within those bold letters the same hand had scribbled a big smiley face. Perhaps, just perhaps, Russ Meyer was off somewhere in the afterlife, looking down (or up, as the case may be) to have one last laugh after all.
Epilogue: Smell of Female
The point is of no retur n— and you’ve reached it!
—VARLA, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
The Friend drove the long, winding road up to the Meyer manse. He tried to see RM every time he was in town. He wasn’t aware that he was one of the few allowed in. Meyer and The Friend went way, way back. Let’s just say they’d fought a war together.
He pulled up to the house, which had long since been painted normal colors—as opposed to the neighbor-provoking orange and green. Parked under an awning was a familiar GMC Suburban, the one Meyer called the Kampfwagen, the one with “Patton’s Photographers—166 Signal Corps” on the tailgate. The Kampfwagen had a flat and looked like it hadn’t been driven in a long, long time.
They’d had a lot of fun in this place. Movies. Food. Women. Laughs. In addition to everything else, RM was the only guy he’d known who’d built an entire museum to himself and his love of the female breast. But now all the walls were bare. Muzak played, and a closed-circuit TV system made sure that Meyer took his pills. Apparently he didn’t always want to take his medicine.
A nurse ushered Meyer into the room. He looked great—better than ever, in fact. Strong as an ox, and tan as hell, too. Somebody had even cut his hair. Yes, RM looked fit as a fiddle. The only problem was, he didn’t recognize his visitor. Or himself.
The Friend sat for a few minutes to reassure himself he’d made the effort. Truth
was, he didn’t know if he’d be making the journey again. He held his emotions in check, knowing it would do no good to express them.
The nurse came in to give Russ his bottle of water. He had to have his bottle. Three times a day. Meyer slurped it down like a child, then the nurse retrieved the empty container and left.
As The Friend got up to go, he noticed RM gazing in the direction of the nurse’s exit. Russ paused a moment, then, looking The Friend directly in the eye, slowly patted his chest, quietly mouthing two unmistakable words.
“No tits.”
Endnotes
Introduction: Bigger than Life
*1 Definitively deciphering exactly which Meyer titles end in an exclamation point is a bit of a challenge. See my note in the filmography for further explanation.
*2 An effete, obscure idea, to be certain, but Meyer’s still photographs sure do look majestic when accompanied by male “deep” soul duos. The author also recommends blasting the Sims Twins’ “I Gopher You” or Lonnie and Floyd’s “I Pledge” while perusing RM’s work.
1 Mother Meyer and the Poor Dear
*1 For the record, it should be noted that most of the time RM did state his mother was generously endowed, but there were others when he maintained he said yes only because the question irritated him and he’d learned to tell reporters whatever they wanted to hear. It is hard to gauge measurements just by looking at the few photos of Meyer’s beloved mother Lydia floating around and as far as I know, although RM saved everything, none of her brassieres were archived.
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 43