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YOU'LL NEVER WRITE A BOOK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN
July 26, 2005
By D.K. Holm
The Breast Generation
In 1959, Russ Meyer, a war vet and California-based industrial film director with a sideline in glamour photos for the burgeoning field of men's magazines, collaborated with Pete DeCenzie, a down-on-his-luck former operator of a San Francisco burlesque house, to create a cheap, short color film starring Meyer's wartime pal Bill Teas (rhymes with "tease"). The resultant film, THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, changed, as they say, the world, in league with PLAYBOY magazine, a post war male sensibility that was both impatient with middleclass morality and wised up by its war experience, the rise in disposable income and "singlehood," the collapse of Christianity, the rise of the pill, and the importation of sexy foreign films that revealed what stay-at-home Americans had been missing.
Meyer, then 36, went on to make some 25 more high profile girlie films: cartoonish extravaganzas of vulgarity that appealed both to men and women thanks to their humor and their hard-headed femme stars. Among his trailer park progeny are that elaborate prank played on Hollywood called BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS; VIXEN!, with the amazing Erica Gavin; THE SEVEN MINUTES, widely viewed as one of the most boring "sex" films ever made; the oddly compelling SUPERVIXEN; that pinnacle of tastelessness, BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRAVIXENS; and that apogee of S&M vitality, FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!
Hawking his output town to town like a carnival barker (in the long time tradition of exploitation filmmakers such as Dave Friedman), while at the same time coveting critical accolades, Meyer built his empire tit by tit. His current handlers announced his death in the fall of 2004, the once mighty king of skin reduced to rubble, his mind gone from Alzheimer's, his once lucrative movie empire run by interlopers who evinced no respect or even interest in either Meyer's work or — especially — his friends and former stars.
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In BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF RUSS MEYER, KING OF THE SEX FILM (Crown, 463 pages, $26.95, ISBN 1 40005 044 8), Jimmy McDonough, previously the Boswell to Times Square filmmaker Andy Milligan (whose career, McDonough points out, has parallels with Meyer's) and the biographer of low slung guitarist Neil Young, recounts this long tale with both shameless prurient interest and a cad's finger-snapping lingo. He recounts everything, from production histories of Meyer's films to the life stories of all his starlets, to the auteur's fascination with his (and other people's) daily stool. In his tenacity McDonough uncovers long lost Meyer concubines, starlets, and collaborators, gives a feel for the decrepit and gaudy interior of Meyer's various abodes, and charts everything from Meyer's tantrums to his favorite dining places. He recounts nearly everything, in fact, about Meyer's life but the three encounters I myself had with Russ Meyer. Since McDonough is eagle-eyed about everything else, I am baffled as to how he could have missed them.
In fact, my three dinners with Meyer more or less chart and support the career trajectory that McDonough sets out in his book. I will recount these exposures to the Meyer whirlwind, briefly, for the edification of future generations.
The first time I met Russ Meyer was in the lobby of the Benson Hotel (where Nixon wrote the Checkers speech) in Portland, Oregon sometime in 1979. He was touring on behalf of BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRAVIXENS and me and a couple of other guys had his attention for about 45 minutes, the interview eventually published later that year in a magazine I worked on called CINEMONKEY. He was with Kitten Natividad
and a publicist breathed significantly in my ear that "Russ and Kitten are sharing a room!" Russ dressed like my dad. Loafers. Ghastly patterned slacks. He seemed to delight in embedding a double entendre in every sentence. And he seemed both to relish the attention of serious fans and find mockworthy our comparisons of him to Richard Lester and other comic masters of montage.
My second encounter was a party thrown in his honor in 1988 at a friend's house when Meyer was in town to chat during a short retrospective of his films at the local rep house, the Cinema 21. I have recounted the sordid details of this event elsewhere. One mystery McDonough clears up from that experience is the name of the person in the picture in his wallet that Meyer advertised as his new girlfriend. She turns out to be a Hungarian bombshell named Tundi.
My third and last encounter with Meyer occurred some time in the early 1990s. It was a slow news-day in the offices of the once-alternative newspaper where I worked at the time. I was standing in the airy, brightly lit production department. I heard my name paged, picked up the 'phone, and heard a voice say, "Hello, this is Russ Meyer."
I didn't believe the caller. I thought it was a prank (by this time in my "career" I'd attracted a couple of stalkers).
I asked if this was a trick, if this was really Russ Meyer. The voice on the other end of the line sounded ticked off at my expression of doubt. It turned out that it was Russ Meyer, and that he was seeking the right to reprint that earlier CINEMONKEY interview in his forthcoming autobiography. I said sure. He sent the forms. I signed them, and then never heard anything about him again: his career was essentially over.
McDonough does allude mysteriously to one aspect of Meyer's visit promoting ULTRAVIXENS. Before a showing of the movie at a private screening room called the Little Roxy and housed in the offices of the then-existent Larry Moyer theater chain, Meyer gave a small, double-entendre laden introduction, and then unleashed Kitten onto the critics. Kitten worked her way up the aisle of the 35-seat auditorium and sat in the lap of the movie reviewer sitting in front of me, a rather typical specimen of the genus — single, probably virgin, living at home with the 'rents, eccentric, angry, jealous of his colleagues and of handsome movie stars such as Brad Pitt. The diminutive Kitten (diminutive in all but chest size) wiggled into his lap, clutched the square block of his Charlie Brown-like head in her paws, and jammed his skull into her gargantuan bosom.
This reviewer dined out on the tale for years. "Kitten," he liked to drawl, even 20 years later, "once cleaned my glasses with her tits. " "You mean Kitten Natividad, the stripper who once cleaned my glasses with her tits?" And so on. If this person is still alive, he may still be telling this pointless tale (but given that the homely pug was already in such ill health with kidney stones, high blood pressure and god knows what other maladies, this seems unlikely).
In the book, McDonough makes it sound like some incomprehensible Masonic rites were practiced in the room about which the reviewers were sworn to secrecy. But in reality it was about five minutes of a bust-shaking aisle dance with a momentary lap dance (and glasses cleaning) thrown in at the end. A side note: I took my mammary-fancying friend Tim to a public screening of the film later that week and positioned him on an aisle seat the equivalent number of rows away from the stage, believing that Meyer would pull the same stunt. He did. But my computations were off. Kitten plopped herself instead into the lap of the gay guy sitting right in front of my friend. To this day Tim's glasses remain sadly dirty.
These three encounters coincide with the second half of Meyer's movie career. First the adulation of budding young film buffs, critics, filmmakers, musicians, and artists, seeking out his sage wisdom or celebrating his distinct style. This is followed by public acceptance of Meyer by Cocktail Nation, at a time, however, when he would no longer make any films (whether or not he knew it). And finally the isolated angry man living Kane-like in his compound, quick to denounce and excommunicate before engulfed by "handlers."
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Curiously, the best biography writing these days, like most of the best cultural writing, seems to come out of the world of rock criticism. The trend probably started with Albert Goldman, whom everyone seems to despise, and includes other former purely-rock writers such as Nick Tosches, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and for general rock writing Richard Meltzer. McDonough appears to come out of this tradition, although he is also as much a film buff. McDonough's book is infectiously readable. He adopts a persona and sticks with it for 400 pages. If he uses the transitional locution "Russell Albion Meyer was … " or the phrase "gave up the ghost" a bit too much that is simply the fallout of writing word jazz, spritzing with the white hot tip of an easily exhausted mental instrument. It's hard enough to sustain over the course of 3000 words, much less 100, 000. Occasionally Homer nods. McDonough introduces the WALL STREET JOURNAL's designation of Meyer as King Leer a second time as if he hadn't done it once already; on page 200 he has someone making "google eyes," which is not meant to be a yearning search for information in the other person's face (I think he means "goo goo eyes"). And Verdi composed the Anvil Chorus (for IL TROVATORE), not Handel (page 203). On the other hand, McDonough has a knack for the striking unforgettable Nabokovian image: "[Hal] Hopper had a lipless, reptilian mug with skin like a thrift-store wallet" (page 137).
Because I've met Meyer a couple of times, I can state this as the lesson I took away from McDonough's book: celebrities really are not like their image. This doubtlessly makes me sound naïve and amateurish. But bare in mind that Meyer's rep was as the rebel, the true independent, the man with the anti-Hollywood bias who beat the industry at its own game, the guy who took on the censors and (mostly) won. McDonough's book makes it clear that Meyer was a typical American male of his generation, the so-called greatest generation: casually racist and homophobic, unthinkingly anti-commie, pro-American, a skinflint vulgarian. Releasing him onto the art of filmmaking was like giving a Neanderthal a flute. He could be very charming when selling you something, but despite his international fame and his getting the best nookie in the world, he remained terribly insecure, a grudge collector who lashed out at loyal friends for the most minor infractions or for imagined betrayals. Yet one continues to like Meyer as the book goes on, just as his pals and starlets did in real life and just as one continues to admire, say, James Joyce no matter what outrageous acts of begging and selfish skullduggery his biographer, Richard Ellmann, throws at you. Joyce so believes in his own talent that you do, too. The same with Meyer.
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It is to be expected that a book about a sex film director would have a high quotient of gossip, and BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS doesn't disappoint:
- Meyer became a favorite of James Dean when the budding ribald master was court photographer on GIANT.
- Meyer did a rock video for the band Faster Pussycat, and asked the band's producer, Dave Ewing, "You're a pretty healthy guy, but you eat all this junk. What's your stool like?"
- One of his last lovers, Jane Hower, of Seattle, described Meyer in the sack thus: "Very straightforward — hug, kiss, touch, and put it in."
- Meyer's sister Lucinda was insane and spent most of her life in an institution.
- Meyer had a near life long affair with a certain woman whose identity he kept fanatically secret. She goes unnamed both here and in Meyer's own autobiography. When he came to print pix of her in his memoir, Meyer showed her with a paper sack over her head.
- Meyer's philosophy was, "Every film is exploitation. We're all in the same game."
- In his dotage Meyer peed on the dining room floor of his favorite restaurant.
- Meyer was what I like to call a location masochist. The hotter, more barren, ungiving, isolated, and deprived the spot the better he liked it. Partially this was because Meyer could better control his actors, with whom he invariably had love-hate relations. He learned early that the best way to make sure the actors show up for a shoot is to trap them on location.
- Meyer hated blinking in his movies. His rapid fire editing technique was meant partly to eradicate his actors' blinks.
- Meyer was not a feminist. "I don't care to comment about what might be inside a lady's head. Hopefully it's my dick."
- Meyer was a control freak, even down to the sex lives of his stars. He was also extremely jealous if any male around him got more pussy. Scratch that: any pussy. Kitten asked him about this mania and Meyer replied, "I'm the director. I'm Russ Meyer. "
- Erica Gavin, arguably Meyer's most beautiful star, is now a reclusive disciple of Sappho.
- Meyer's collaboration with the Sex Pistols, WHO KILLED BAMBI?, was finally killed off by a Fox studio board member by the name of Grace Kelly.
- The voluminous June Mack of BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRAVIXENS was shot to death trying to protect her boyfriend from getting killed by a drug dealer.
- The man who was once fascinated by his bowel movements and their correlative methane explosions ended up soiling himself and any room he was in daily with his diarrhea.
- McDonough's book is very good on the state of RM Films, explaining in an appendix why there are still no good transfers on DVD.
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Meyer also figures, if only evanescently, in STRIPTEASE: THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE GIRLIE SHOW (Oxford University Press, 438 pages, $28 dollars, ISBN 0 19 512750 1). Meyer merits two mentions only, but then this is the girls' story, a recounting of a secret history, one that is written down only in easily disposed of ephemera such as sex newspapers, flyers, posters. Rachel Shteir's book is a remarkable achievement: a history of an aspect of American culture where no history could be written.
There is a ton of fascinating trivia in her book.
- H. L. Mencken came up with the term "ecdysiast" as a synonym for stripping (McDonough uses it a couple of times).
- Shteir has an excellent short passage on Lenny Bruce, who got his start as an emcee at strip clubs (pages 262 - 263). She notes how burlesque forged and influenced his later "dirty" but political comedy.
- Her summary of Blaze Starr's romance with Earl Long, the governor of Louisiana, is better than the movie. Probably certifiably mad, Long once peed on live television.
- Seattle's gay community flocked to the Garden of Allah, to see female stripers in cowboy get-ups and other exotic costumery.
Virtually every page of this book is dense with stories, anecdotes, memoirs, and analysis. Shteir may be too tad too PC (surprisingly) for some readers but there is so much information to impart that the rush of fact doesn't allow her much time to pause and dwell on the politics too much. She is demonstrably on the side of the dames, however, and is not overly judgmental of the men who made burlesque and stripping an underground national mania.
NEXT TIME:Tales of two Natalies!
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