Quotes of the Day

Russ Meyer is a tit man. He sings the female form divine. For 56 years and counting, he has photographed it, parodied it, made love to it, made fun of it. The man who directed such deathless sexploitation sagas as "The Immoral Mr. Teas," "Lorna," "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!", "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens" is a willing slave to the majesty of mammoth mammaries. In his self-published autobiography "A clean BREAST!" Meyer never tires of proclaiming the beauty of woman's "top-heavy balcony," "gravity-defying giganzos," "extravagant breastworks," "shadow-casters" that are "most improbably pontooned." He nuzzles up to "her huge majungas," "her cruelly crowded chest-cage," "her big dreadnoughts in tumultuous concert," "her mind-rupturing credentials (in) a bra of serious amplitude." Meyer at his most poetic echoes the pulp fiction of his steamy, virginal youth: "Her majestic melons barbarously savaged a 48 double-E cup bra."

Those offended by such odes to udders should stop reading right now, because there will be a lot more of it. Meyer is an unregenerate sexist. Sexist the way another person is a Buddhist or foodist or nudist — for this is Meyer's profane religion, and he worships at the female breast as Paleolithic man venerated the Venus of Willendorf. And as he aged (but never, ever, matured), the breasts of his models and actresses enlarged, expanded until now, with the likes of Pandora Peaks and Eva "Tunde" Howath, they look ready to explode. The chest measurements of Meyer's chosen women, which began in the high 30s with Tempest Storm and his wife-muse Eve Meyer, are now nearing three figures. To these two eyes, long appreciative of the traditional female form, the Meyer bosom is now grotesque. And growing tesker.

Which won't stop America's most honored dirty old man. At 80, Meyer is enjoying a trifecta festschrift. A New York gallery has mounted his girlie photographs on its pristine walls, the better for academic reconsideration of a grimy genre. Meyer's RM Films International has just issued three of his old films — "Mondo Topless," "Cherry, Harry & Raquel!" and "Up!" — as DVDs. And for true scholars of sexploitation, "A clean BREAST! The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer: The rural Fellini . . his films, fantasies and frauleins" is an exhilarating, exhausting must-read. Also, with 2500 photos, a must-ogle.

This "Tunde"-size opus — 1213 8-1/2x11" pages, weighing 16lbs.13oz. and costing a giganzo $217, including shipping (you can save about $12, if that matters, by ordering it from Amazon) — is purportedly authored by Adolph Albion Schwartz. But that's just the latest in a series of mock monickers the auteur has concocted over the decades. The nom de Kraut also fits Meyer's sometimes breezy, sometimes exaggerantly urgent writing style — a voice that aficionados will recognize from the narration for his movies. Meyer writes (or, more likely, dictates) as he speaks, in spurts and sputters, grenades of clauses punctuated by two dots (..)— not three, the man's in a hurry — or backslashes. Referring to himself in the seemingly objective third person, he races through paragraphs of raunchy recollection and, often ends them with a vigorous "Yes!" a la Molly Bloom or Marv Albert. Or sometimes a sassy Southern "Yeassss."

Twenty years in the compiling, "A clean BREAST!" is as much a scrap book from the all-inclusive RM Archives as it is a self-proclaimed "mammary book." Its chapters on Meyer's World War II service contain the full texts of rah-rah memos Eisenhower and Patton memos wrote to their troops, as well as Signal Corps ratings sheets of RM's work. Meyer also reprints virtually every word of virtually every article written about his films (including most of what I wrote about him in the Village Voice 30-some years ago). And though Russ can usually match his photo-pornographic memory with a writing style so lively it keeps you turning the pages even when you can't lift the book, he does include more than is absolutely mandatory about certain personal issues. "The year of 1963 held more than uncommon interest for Russ. Of number one concern was the irritating conditions of his hemorrhoids..."

If you don't want to read, just look. There is ample, I may say clinical, evidence of Meyer's preoccupations. Women. Everywhere. Women shot from above, underneath, up-close, on a mountaintop and, frequently, with a paper bag over their heads. If Russ thinks the reader may be dozing during some tale of the Great War, he drops in some cheesecake. Across one spread (pp. 46-47), photographs of "three Sherman laying siege to the Wehrmacht" and "Baby Doll Shawn Devereaux" protrude at each other — the phallus of war nuzzling the bosom of sex. On pp. 84-88, photos of the buddies' 1984 return to "St. Hubert's piney woods" are scrunched up against pix of Ms. Howath and her gargantuan front-pack of bazooka bazooms — H-(cup) bombs that Slim Pickens would've happily ridden to Doomsday.

Total immersion in Meyer's biographical fluids should convince even the skeptic that the man is no Stone Age machis-man, no Conan the Boobarian. As critic Roger Ebert, who co-perped the screenplays of "Beyond the Valley" and "Beneath the Valley," wrote in a 1973 Film Comment essay, "he is not the primitive or untutored artist he sometimes likes to appear to be; his method of work on a picture is all business, he is a consummate technical craftsman, he is obsessed by budgets and schedules, and his actors do not remember how 'turned on' a scene was, but how many times it was re-shot. In a genre overrun by sleazo cheapies, he is the best technician and the only artist."

YOUNG RUSS MEYER

His mam fixation may have had its root in mom devotion. Russ's mother Lydia had been urged by her husband William, an East Oakland, Cal., cop, to have an abortion. Lydia refused, the couple separated and, on March 21, 1922, Russell Albion Meyer was born. Throughout his three-volume tome, the author expresses the most innocent tenderness toward Lydia. She indeed seems a woman who loved her son and encouraged all his career adventures, however offensive to contemporary community standards they might be. When he was nearly 25, Meyer showed Lydia photos he'd taken of stripper Evelyn West — his first cheesecake work. Her response: "What a lovely girl, Russell . . and such big beautiful breasts!"

Russell had been aware of breasts at least since junior high, when he encountered — in his dreams — a demoiselle named Polly. "Needless to say, the bra-busting (if she ever wore one) Polly was the feature and chief distracter of the class and she always played to a full / appreciative audience. Store-bought dresses were out of the question, in light of the stacked lass' outstanding topography: her couturier skilled, if hardly celebrated . . the style strictly 'East Oakland dirndl' with heavy emphasis on the commodious bodice purposefully décolletté by design . . a scoop neck / vast of scoop / strikingly accommodating to her voyeurs whilst bending over to retrieve an often dropped pencil . . jumbo bodice agape / twin pornocopias aplenty to the delight of Polly's horny fellow classmates' adulation; my fantasizing, at the time, that if Polly had been nothing loathe to let me nuzzle into the cavernous space between her big knockers, I would have settled for a swamper's berth at Elmhurst's Exide battery factory. Forever. With Polly at my bosomy behest. Yes."

But his true passion was photography. He begins both the prologue and Chapter One of his opus with the description of cameras; one might say his first love was the Universal Movie Camera's 8mm Univex. Bitten by the shutter bug, Russ would fiddle through his teens with all manner of photographic apparatus. Presumably he did the same with his own equipment — since, he confesses, "At age 20, RM was still a rock-bibbed / brass-bound / bona fide virgin."

WAR IS SWELL

Adolf Hitler saved Meyer from lethargy. The California kid joined the Army and got into the Signal Corps, nirvana for a snap-happy lad with an itch for action. The Army also got Meyer inside a movie studio; he was trained in part at the MGM School of Motion Picture Photography, where his instructor was Joseph Ruttenberg, who'd been shooting stars from Evelyn Nesbitt in the teens to Garbo, Garson and Bergman in the 1940s. Finally ready for the European Theater, Meyer got stuck with an idiot Captain who busted all Jewish Staff Sergeants (including the young Stanley Kramer) to Private. Russ would have been shit-canned too, until it was explained to the Capt. that this Meyer was a German-American Christian.

As RM recalls in his mock-heroic third-person: "The 8mm Univex period and Kitten Natividad notwithstanding, his army tenure must remain the most important / formative plus fulfilling period in Meyer's life." In the Army Meyer met guys he would work and play with throughout his movie career: Bill Abrams, Fred "Fritz" Mandl (cinematographer on Meyer's 20th Century Fox opus "The Seven Minutes"), William Ellis "Bill" Teas (of "The Immoral..." fame) and Anthony James "Jim" Ryan (star of "Eve and the Handyman" and a co-producer on later epics in Meyer's fervid oeuvre). For Russ, moviemaking would be a continuation of war, and war camaraderie, by other means.

A WWII cameraman's job, they say, was "being in the wrong place at the right time." He was a soldier, a propagandist and a recording avenging angel all in one. When Gen. George S. Patton told his troops of a mission that, he hoped, would result in the capture and assassination of Hitler and Goebbels, he turned Russ' way to growl: "And you, Sergeant, be damned sure of your job with that camera." Meyer was, apparently, sure of foot and finger. He escaped alive with some nifty war stories; one exploit, related to writer pal Eric "Mick" Nathanson, blossomed into the novel (then film) "The Dirty Dozen."

Here's another, set in Belgium's snowy Ardennes Forest outside St. Hubert. With his "own photo howitzer," an Eyemo camera with a Long Dong Silverish 20-inch lens, Russ is snapping away at "an innocent church steeple housing a gang of irreligious Nazis." His pal Charles "Slick" Sumners is in a Jeep somewhere out of frame. The shelling begins and, as Meyer tells it:

"five 105mm HEs smashing into The Lord's house . . one smack on target. Bingo! A direct hit on the pointy steeple / exploding within its ancient belfry / doing the job . . rendering anything / anybody yonder sieve-like!! Meyer exultant, but his demonstration short-lived . . incoming Kraut mail shearing off tops of St. Hubert's piney woods! The GI peepers spotted . . tables overturned / the defilers now on the receiving end . . the expiring Jerry soldier doing his job forthwith . . only seconds before, Kingdom Come! The return fire increasing with intensity . . the immediate air black with cordite . . shrapnel-humming / death-dealing . . Russell Meyer roughly forsaking his valuable gear . . tripod still attached / legs splayed out crazily . . face pressed into the cold numbing snow . . whilst, separate from the thunderous explosions, the unmistakable brouhaha of a Jeep's raucous klaxon . . the dedicated Slick just yards away / hunkering down over the steering wheel. Shouting: 'Over here . . and don't take all day!' Russ streaking for the savior Jeep / dragging the clumsy 20-inch lens dominating the Eyemo . . crazy-quilt tripod legs trailing behind / hurling himself head-first into the back of the vehicle . . still hanging onto his accoutrement with Sumners pouring the coals to his four-wheeler / miraculously escaping from that Ardennes hell!"

War bestowed on Russ another consummation: his deflowering, courtesy of a hooker in a Rambouillet bordello — a "lush-bodied lady avec le plus grand balcon de monde . . with a contiguous/protuberant bazoom ... with a massive brass-bound rack." And was the encounter worth waiting for? "Well, RM's gotta' tell ya, Adolf . . it was the Scheherezade / Götterdämmerung and The Charge of the Light Brigade all wrapped up in one neat package. Yesss! And you know, bouncy Babette had me up and at it again within thirty seconds. Maybe less. Ah, sweet bird!"

TITTYBOOM

By 1945, "the wondrous war (was) grinding down for Meyer, regrettably." Back in the U.S., Russ found it hard to bust into movies. The cinematographers who'd been at war, and the ones left behind, filled up all the slots; there was no G.I. Bill for cameramen. And the union made it tough for newcomers.

Back in Oakland, Russ married a woman named Betty and, when she got pregnant, he promptly insisted she get an abortion — just like dear old dad. The couple's only dependent was old Army buddy Teas, who bivouacked on the living-room couch for months and stifled any marital congress in the nearby bedroom. Russ and Betty divorced a year later.

By now Russ was into "tittyboom," shooting semi-revealing sessions with some of the era's reigning burlesque divas: Tempest Storm (née Annie Locke); Miss Lilly LaMont, the Alaskan Heat Wave ("a socko twin pair of casabas with corralling-cleavage capable of hiding Johnny Bench's catcher's mitt"); and a certain Miss St. Louis, in whose memory Meyer stirs himself to frenzies of violet verbiage. "Nearly indescribable voluptuousness . . top-lined by a lush balcony deeply cleaved ... her huge hooters projecting thirty degrees both left and right / high-perched and pointing straight-forward from the lady's sleek shoulders." Said RM to self: "God! I must have that woman . . first on film / then a platter!" Soon enough, they did torque torsos, though it was Miss St. Loo in charge: "brashly bawling out orders. Not unlike a boot camp top kick."

He had other dalliances: with the cashier at Peter DeCenzie's El Rey Burlesque, with the chili-pepper-blooded Ysobel Assunscion Marti. But when he met Eve Turner Flores, it was love-lust at first sight, and for a good while thereafter. Russ writes that from the start he wanted Eve's "large / creamy / rose-tipped breasts to knead and nurture." Well, he got them. On August 2, 1952, they were married — the beginning of a long, fruitful-fractious personal-professional relationship.

In photos, Eve looks not the most fabulous of Meyer's ?50s camera subjects. That, of course, would be Diane Webber, the hazel-eyed brunette who blended Jeanne Crain's fine, soft, American-girl features with Lana Wood's delicate voluptuousness. A two-time Playmate of the Month (as Marguerite Empey, May '55 and February '56), Webber was a cover girl for magazines as varied as Esquire, Classic Photography and Nudist Yearbook; she appeared on LP covers for Nelson Riddle, Les Baxter and Xavier Cugat; she did a few movies and TV shows; a proselytizing nudist, she published a book of family photos; she also taught belly dancing at Every Woman's Village in Van Nuys. Meyer did some shoots with her and appended a short film of Webber poses ("This Is My Body") to "The Immoral Mr. Teas." But he's a bit curt to her in the book, complaining that her body was never the same after she had kids. Guess her husband didn't demand she have an abortion.

In life, Russ gave himself to his blond Eve — she of the harsh mouth, the large pores, the aura of a lamp-post lady. (In a bio-pic of their lives, she'd be played by Uma Thurman.) He was sufficiently smitten with her to remain faithful, amid many temptations, for more than six years. But by then, they had become a Playboy pair: Eve (now Eve Meyer) as the Playmate of June '55, Russ as the photog. Meyer was now getting good gigs. In Europe, he photographed "large-breasted Anita Ekberg / pregnant-breasted Diane Webber / melon-breasted Ingrid Goude / cantilevered-breasted Greta Thiessen / conically-breasted Cleo Moore / while hardly to ignore beehive-breasted June Wilkinson."

CALENDAR ART

Some of these early photos, and other later ones, have been on exhibition this summer in a small (21 images) but choice show at the Manhattan gallery Feigen Contemporary. It gives anyone long-familiar with Meyer's work an odd feeling. Pictures taken for girlie magazines naturally have a different meaning and impact when seen in an art gallery in 2002 — as they do when seen, not by the teen me of the '50s, but the geezer me of today. (That is the shock, and the joke, of context.) The models have inevitably become artifacts of their time, they are upstaged by other objects in the shot: a pink bed and bedspread, a red sports car, the grillwork on a door. And when we shift our gaze to the women's faces and bodies, at the light and shadow rendered on paper 25-50 years ago, we see the skewed vision that men, especially Meyer, had of the women they watched.

Here is Eve, times seven. Her garish red lipstick, freckled skin and scornful pout make her a slimmer blond retread of the surly young Jane Russell in "Outlaw." In a 1955 photo titled "Eve in front of fireplace," she wears a sheer negligee, the fabric a soft wind caressing and artfully concealing, her right nipple; before her stand two glasses of red wine — one for you. Over here is Barbara Joy (better known as Lorna Maitland from Meyer's 1964 "Lorna"), baring aureoles the size of an ordinary woman's breast. Joy is more attractively rendered in "Lorna Holding Towel" (1964), the shadow of a piece of toast suggesting the nipple that can't be seen, and in "Lorna and gold lamp," where her pubis is covered by a striped blanket. (The '50s had to play peek-a-boo with men's libidos.) And here is the luscious Raven DeLaCroix — an actual woman!, her dark hair lightly streaked with gray — in a black gown cut nearly to the navel.

What you're about to hear could be the sapped voice of a middle-age man abashedly revisited the flaming follies of his youth. Anyway, to me, the women, except for Raven and perhaps Lorna, have an allure more zoological than priapic. Outfitted in, say, a pink fur and green toreador pants (yow! also ugh!); or casually displaying thigh bruises; or sporting a string of pearls that compliments the veins in her breasts; or with gravity creping the skin on her huge chest; or with another string of beads lost in the Carlsbad Caverns of her cleavage . . the Meyer goddess acquires a carnival tinge, and not from the girlie tent but from the freak-show. By highlighting the imperfections of these women — which is to say, their humanity — Meyer reveals himself as an inadvertent realist, closer to Weegee than to Vargas.

TEAS

Back in the '50s, Meyer couldn't imagine that his photos would be exhibited in an art gallery a half-century later. Meyer's obsession — mammography — was now his profession. What more could he ask? Plenty. He rankled at his status as "a crass 'tittyboom' girlie magazine photographer" and yearned to break out.

Peter DeCenzie, entrepreneur of the old El Rey Burlesque, had an idea for a movie. In the mid-'50s, the grind houses had been making money with nudist films ("Garden of Eden" and its ilk), whose documentary snapshots of unclothed ladies has been deemed non-pornographic by the courts. No wonder: it was an aseptic genre — a National Geographic photo essay, but with white women — that had no drama or danger to give narrative shape to the female forms. (As Ebert wrote in his long Meyer essay: "One of the most distracting enemies of film eroticism is a lack of context.") Why not add some humor and a wee story line? Meyer had recently shot a Playboy spread of a man imagining women naked. A brisk feature-length movie version would give RM a chance to do "what he does best . . satire and tits / like big ones."

He did it well enough, and marketed it smartly enough, to turn a $24,000, four-day shoot into a movie phenomenon that grossed $1 million (or more, or less — in the sexploitation biz, books were occasionally cooked). It replaced the nudist trend with the "nudie" trend, spawned dozens of pallid imitations (some of them Russ's) and created a nationwide chain of "art" theaters that made U.S. and imported soft-core sex films a thriving genre. All because an ordinary fellow — Meyer's deadpan Army buddy Bill Teas — was surrounded by topless femmes in an American movie. A movie with no dialogue, just a man wandering around, bemused by the strange things he sees. "Teas" is basically a Pete Smith Sexual Specialty. Or a "M. Hulot's Horny Holiday" — Tati with titties.

Today, "Teas" is of mainly archaeological interest. It's full of '50s artifacts and attitudes, from hula hoops to a psychiatrist reading Jules Feiffer's "Sick Sick Sick." The models wear tight blond coiffs that are not so much teased as taunted. There's also a nonstop music score that tells you This Is A COMEDY; the reed section ("wah-wah") does the viewers' smirking for them. The magniloquent narration, delivered in a starched mid-Atlantic accent by Irving Blum, is a salad of encyclopedia browsings ("The density of water is 64.4 lbs. per cubic ft.") and long-fused gags ("The guitar is a very sensitive instrument, with G being the third string, and it is played over a system of frets ... sensitive men have been fretting over G strings for years").

Meyer's cinematography in "Teas," like his glamour photography in Playboy, is also very '50s. Cartoon-like in its bright colors and clean surfaces, it has the blinding, Death-Valley-at-noon clarity of an industrial film or a Kodachrome mug shot. In his later films, Meyer did acknowledge the need for shadows, if only under his stars' bosoms. But he never realized (as the films directed or imported by Radley Metzger were suave enough to) that chiaroscuro is a sensitive sculptor of a woman's curves. Russ was no artful deceiver; his motto was Truth in Advertising. Big boobs — see 'em up close, close enough to get a vicarious mouthful, like baby from mama. His erotic dream was of the bimbo as wet nurse. He was a sucker for suckling.

Yet the prototype Meyer film, "Teas." is a tease. It languishes for 28 mins. before a single breast (all right, a double breast) is shown — and that as if exhibited on a wall, Magritte-style. It's 32 mins. before the first fully topless woman appears. Finally (the film is only 62 mins. long), a trio of lovelies take a sunbath, as in every nudist film that had preceded it. The shock of "Teas" was how unshocking the content was. But in context, the movie delivered more than had been seen in an American movie, and without moralizing. The film ends with a philosophical shrug, as Teas visits a shrink and finds her naked too. "On the other hand," the narrator intones, "some men just like being sick."

Next time: Russ Meyer, Beyond and Beneath

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on Russ Meyer, the grand old man of "bosomania"