Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film - Hardcover

Jimmy McDonough

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400050448 ISBN 13: 9781400050444

Publisher: Crown, 2005

Synopsis

What do you need to make money making movies? The answer, according to cult hero, creator of the sexploitation film, and the man the Wall Street Journal once dubbed the King Leer of Hollywood, Russ Meyer, is: “big bosoms and square jaws.” In the first candid and fiendishly researched account of the late cinematic instigator’s life, Jimmy McDonough shows us how Russ Meyer used that formula to turn his own crazed fantasies into movies that made him a millionaire and changed the face of American film forever.

Bringing his anecdote—and action—packed biographical style to another renegade of popular culture, New York Times bestselling author of Shakey Jimmy McDonough offers a wild, warts-and-all portrait of Russ Meyer, the director, writer, producer, and commando moviemaking force behind such sexploitation classics as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen, and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. This former WWII combat photographer immortalized his personal sexual obsession (women with enormous breasts, of course) upon the silver screen, turning his favorite hobby into box-office gold when this one-man movie machine wrote, directed, and produced a no-budget wonder called The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959. The modest little film pushed all preexisting limits of on-screen nudity, and with its success, the floodgates of what was permitted to be shown on film were thrust open, never to be closed again. Russ Meyer ignited a true revolution in filmmaking, breaking all sex, nudity, and violence taboos. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Meyer created a body of work that has influenced a legion of filmmakers, fashionistas, comic book artists, rock bands, and even the occasional feminist.

Rich with wicked and sometimes shocking observations and recollections from Meyer’s friends (such as colleague Roger Ebert and fellow filmmaker John Waters), lovers and leading ladies (some of whom played both roles with equal vigor), a cadre of his grizzled combat buddies, moviemakers inspired by him, and critics and fans alike, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws tells the voluptuous story of Meyer’s very singular life and career: his troubled youth, his war years, his volatile marriages, his victories against censorship, and his clashes with the Hollywood establishment. In his new biography of a true maverick, Jimmy McDonough blows the lid off the story of Russ Meyer, from beginning to his recent tragic demise, creating in the process a vivid portrait of a past America.
The picture is midnight black. An imperious, testosterone-heavy voice intones: “Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the world of violence . . . While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex . . . Let’s examine closely then, the dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained within the supple skin of woman—the softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female . . . But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs . . . Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist . . . or a dancer in a go-go bar!”

Cut to an eye-popping triad of outrageous, impossibly built women shimmying with frenzied abandon. A swaggering, bargain-basement Tom Jones–style voice belts out a number on the soundtrack. Cut! Close-ups of gyrating, disembodied breasts and hips. Cut! A shiny, alluring jukebox. Cut! Leering, predatory faces of cigar-chomping manimals impotently cheering the women on. Cut! Cut! Cut! Each new shot seems to add another crazy angle, another fabulous detail.

Cut to raven-haired, black-gloved Varla—one of the dancers—head thrown back and cackling maniacally as she hammers the gas pedal of a gleaming Porsche. Vrrrrooom! The Porsche screams down a Mojave desert highway at the head of a menacing trio of bisexual go-go superwomen, itching to annihilate any man who gets in their way. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! screams the title. And this is just the first two minutes of the picture.

—From the Introduction of Big Bosoms and Square Jaws

About this title

About the Author:

Jimmy McDonough is the author of The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan and Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Mother Meyer and the Poor Dear

The question always arises: did your mother have a big bust? Yes. —Russ Meyer

Manny Diez saw Russ Meyer show fear. A very unique event, and it only happened once. Meyer had just finished his big X-rated outrage for 20th Century Fox, 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and he was riding high. Diez worked as his round-the-clock assistant. “Russ said, ‘Manny, I would like you to come with me today.’ We got in his car, just started driving, I guess it was about a forty-minute drive. I had no clue where we were going.” There was no conversation. RM seemed to be in a melancholy mood.

They pulled into a large psychiatric hospital. “Russ said, ‘My mother has been in residence here for quite some time. If you wouldn’t mind, would you please wait out here in the car for me?’ I guess he was gone forty-five minutes. He came back, his mood even more somber. We got in the car, left again, pretty much a dead silence. Eventually he said, ‘My mom has been here X number of years and my sister’s in a similar facility. Manny, I’m really scared that I’m gonna wind up in a place just like this.’ He just felt that was his destiny. I just listened. It was never mentioned again.”

$$$

Meyer could be a paranoid fellow—one crew member from his films told me RM outlawed whispering on the set because he was sure his minions were talking about him—and he sure wasn’t forthcoming on matters he felt were negative in any way. Even those who knew him well don’t know much about RM’s early life. “He mostly talked about his war years,” said Meyer star Tura Satana. “I think his childhood was very lonely for him.” Very rarely would RM volunteer any facts regarding his formative years and nobody felt permitted to pry. “There were certain places you didn’t go with Russ,” said longtime secretary Paula Parker. “Russ was a very close-mouthed guy,” maintained Meyer’s film distributor Fred Beiersdorf. “He was not gonna share. But the entire family wasn’t happy.”

Tight-lipped as he was, Meyer certainly purported to idolize his mother Lydia. He’d mention her constantly during interviews but spew forth nothing more than one-dimensional platitudes. “Mother influence is extremely important and I had a great one. She defended me to the teeth, and everything her son did was right. . . . She was a very God-fearing woman who instilled a desire for success in me. . . . Anything I achieved was because of her.” Wherever Meyer went he carried a color portrait of his mother in his wallet (usually side by side with a nude shot of his current heartthrob). Combat buddy Warren Harding recalled that whenever RM came to visit, the photograph of Lydia was front and center on the nightstand. On one trip Meyer lost the picture and he flipped until it could be located.

Meyer was no slouch when it came to looking after Mom. “Russ was a wonderful son,” said family friend Dolores Fox. “You couldn’t ask for anyone to take better care of his mother. He was so devoted. He paid for her every need.” There was no joking with Meyer about his mother. Editor Richard Brummer came into the cutting room one day absently singing the “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” song made famous by the Marx Brothers. A stone-faced Russ tersely muttered, “My mother’s name is Lydia.”

Likewise, in Lydia’s eyes, Russ could do no wrong. “She used to adore him, adore him so,” said RM’s first wife Betty. “If I ever did anything to Russ, she would kill me. He was her idol.” Dig a little beneath the surface of the mother-son relationship, though, and things were naturally more complex. “She was a manipulator, his mother,” said close friend Charlie Sumners. “She pretty much ran Meyer,” maintained RM’s right-hand man, Jim Ryan. “He just said, ‘Yes, Ma, yes, Ma’ to whatever she said.”

“We used to call her Mother Meyer—not to Russ’s face, of course,” said actor Charles Napier, who felt that RM’s relationship with his mother “was sad and funny at the same time. Funny in the sense she was about as eccentric as he was. Sad in the sense that he worshiped her, the only human being he probably ever loved. He would say, ‘She got me my first camera and she made me learn how to use it and now it’s paying off.’ ”

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Russell Albion Meyer was born March 21, 1922. Even here we find conflict: biographer Rolf Thissen discovered two birth certificates filed twenty years apart for RM, and the first lists his name as Russell Elvan Meyer. Early photos show a dazed, chubby baby with a messy mop of hair sitting in the lap of mother Lydia, a rather solid and strong-looking brunette sporting an ornate feathered hat. Both mother and son share luminous, searching eyes. There is a shot of Russ a few years later looking rather delicate, wearing knee socks and holding an American flag. Although he’d never admit it, RM was something of a mama’s boy. “He said he breast-fed til he was three,” said Meyer star Tura Satana. “I told him, ‘Jeez, Russ, I only breast-fed til I was two.’ ”

Lydia Lucinda Hauck Howe was born March 30, 1897. In numerous articles it was reported that Lydia had been married six times, although it was nothing her son bragged about (in his autobiography, RM notes three marriage surnames for Lydia, but only in the index). Writer David K. Frasier worked on a 1990 Meyer bibliography with RM’s assistance, and Frasier wrote a biographical sketch in which he mentioned Lydia’s serial matrimony. A very upset Meyer claimed to have read the draft of the biography Frasier had given him while visiting his mother’s grave, at which point he promised the dead matriarch the offending information would be removed.

Certainly Lydia’s most significant betrothal was to William Arthur Meyer, a Missouri-born East Oakland cop of German heritage possessing a bad gambling habit. Little is known about the relationship other then the fact that Lydia was granted a divorce on April 9, 1923, a little over two weeks after the birth of their son. William was thirty-six, Lydia twenty-five, and RM’s birth certificate lists them as both living at 1255 Santa Rosa Street in San Leandro, California. RM claimed to know few details of the breakup, stating his mother always said positive things about his dad. Only when pressed—and only after any attempt for a relationship between father and son had failed—did she tell him that during the court battle over child support for the then-pregnant mother, William had shouted out, “I hope they both die!” In his autobiography, Meyer states that in May 1988, while leafing through a baby book in which Lydia had penned a few notes, learned that his father had pressed her to get an abortion (in an earlier draft of the manuscript RM says his mother told him directly).

Over the years Meyer related a few terse, varying tales concerning his father, none of them suggesting that William wanted anything to do with his son. In one he gets the door slammed in his face attempting to visit his father; in his autobiography A Clean Breast, RM describes a single visit from his dad. Dressed in a swanky camel-hair coat, refusing to come in, William stood at the screen door, inquiring as to how things were going with Lydia and Russ. The visit was so casual Meyer thought it might begin one of many, but William never returned. Lydia prodded her son into attempting a visit with his father at the police station. Told that William wasn’t there, Russ left an ashtray he’d made for his dad in shop class. William never bothered to respond.

“He was a bastard, he was no good, he wasn’t worth a damn,” said a seventy-seven-year-old RM of his dad in 1999. That’s as far as you could go on the subject with Meyer. Jean-Pierre Jackson, Meyer’s French distributor, first biographer, and friend, recalled RM going stonily silent when asked about his dad. “I asked him many times about his father—nothing. Not a word.” But the shadow of his absentee father looms large in dumb Nazis and stupid cops in Meyer’s films, as RM actress and longtime paramour Kitten Natividad explains, “because his father was a German policeman. I go, ‘You’re gonna put another Nazi in this movie?’ ‘Yeah, reminds me of the old man.’ He got off on that. He said it to me lots of times through the years.”

In A Clean Breast, Meyer does grant a few kind words for his stepdad, Howard Haywood, an ailing WWI vet whose bout with tuberculosis left him barely able to work as a furniture salesman. Howard and Lydia had one child together, the aforementioned Lucinda. RM’s childhood friend Lou Filipovitch said Lydia treated Howard with contempt, and others told me she’d forced her sickly husband to live in the garage. “Howard was a quiet, gentle, pleasant man,” said Lou. “She ridiculed Howard Haywood constantly, called him ‘whistle britches,’ ‘eagle beak.’ She was brutal, absolutely brutal. She just humiliated and insulted Howard.”

It was the Depression, and the Meyers barely got by. Lydia got $50 a month in child support from William Meyer for Russ, which was later knocked down to $35. “When I was young I was poorer than Job’s turkey,” said RM, who said that his family would frequently have to “shoot the moon”—skip out on unpaid rent. “His mother always had a garden because they didn’t have enough money to buy the vegetable...

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400050448
• ISBN 13: 9781400050444
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480