{"product_id":"big-bosoms-and-square-jaws-isbn-9780307338440","title":"Big Bosoms and Square Jaws","description":"Russ Meyer, cult hero, creator of the sexploitation film, and the man the \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e called the King Leer of Hollywood, made movies that filled the big screen with “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis former WWII combat photographer immortalized his personal sexual obsession upon the silver screen, creating box-office gold with \u003ci\u003eThe Immoral Mr. Teas\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBringing his anecdote- and action-packed biographical style to another renegade of popular culture, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eShakey\u003c\/i\u003e Jimmy McDonough offers a wild, warts-and-all portrait of Russ Meyer, the director, writer, producer, and commando moviemaking force behind the sexploitation classics \u003ci\u003eVixen\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBeyond the Valley of the Dolls\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFaster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!\u003c\/i\u003e and many others. \u003ci\u003eBig Bosoms and Square Jaws\u003c\/i\u003e blows the lid off the story of Russ Meyer, from the beginning to his recent tragic demise, creating in the process a vivid portrait of a past America.“Ladies and gentleman, welcome to violence, the word and the act . . . While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex . . .” —from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A fun, twisted romp through the life of one of America's most celebrated, sordid filmmakers.\" —Leggs McNeil, author of \u003ci\u003ePlease Kill Me\u003c\/i\u003eJimmy McDonough is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eShakey: Neil Young’s Biography\u003c\/i\u003e. Visit him at jimmymcdonough.net.Mother Meyer and the Poor Dear\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe question always arises: did your mother have a big bust? Yes\u003c\/i\u003e. —Russ Meyer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eManny 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 \u003ci\u003eBeyond the Valley of the Dolls\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e$$$\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMeyer 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTight-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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMeyer 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLikewise, 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e$$$\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRussell 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.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLydia 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCertainly 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).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver 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 \u003ci\u003eA Clean Breast\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eA Clean Breast\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt 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 vegetables,” said Kitten  Natividad. “Russ can’t stand onion or celery soup because he had to eat  it all the time.” RM had to peddle the produce and other items  door-to-door. “Lydia was a hustler—I’m not saying that in a derogatory  way,” said Pete Filipovitch. “She’d get us into selling perfume, then  subscription magazines.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e$$$\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Filipovitch family lived near the Haywood family when they lived on  Birch Street in East Oakland, and Russ was friendly with the children,  Lou, Pete, and Martha—or at least as friendly as Lydia would permit. “I don’t think his mother allowed Russ to have too many friends when he was a kid,” said Tura Satana. “She kept  him at home a lot, kept him on a tight leash. But he loved that she was  a very strict disciplinarian, kept him on the straight and narrow.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLydia was working as a cashier at the McMar grocery in Oakland and  needed someone to babysit her two children. “My mother was a widow and  immigrant and Lydia treated her outwardly nicely, probably because she  didn’t have anybody else,” said Lou Filipovitch. “She was aloof and  above the neighborhood.” A devoutly religious woman, Pete Filipovitch  recalled her carting him off to church. “Oh, she’d drive me crazy. She  took me to the Protestants, she took me to the Baptists . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo say the least, times were tough in this Oakland neighborhood—as Pete  noted, “unless you were with the civil service or the railroad, you  didn’t have a steady job.” The Haywoods were poor, but the  Filipovitchs, who couldn’t even afford a phone, thought Russ and  Lucinda “were the rich kids” according to Lou, especially due to the  way Lydia doted on her son. “Lydia gave him everything that he wanted  or needed,” Pete agreed. “She pampered him; he was never without.” Lou  remembered Russ as being very generous with his pocket change. Lou and  his sister Martha once walked a mile and a half to the local movie  theater to see \u003ci\u003eA Midsummer’s Night Dream\u003c\/i\u003e, the excursion funded by Russ.  “It was his treat,” said Lou. “He had spending money, he bought us  candy and popcorn. Russ was one of the nicest guys I ever knew. He was  kind and gentle. I don’t think there was a mean bone in his body.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLydia, however, was another story. She was a racist, missing no  opportunity to slight blacks, Jews, or Irish. “Lydia didn’t like  anybody!” said RM’s pal Jim Ryan. Pete’s brother Lou felt her behavior  was rather less than Christian at times. “It seemed she was visiting  kindnesses upon people, but she had a malice in her. Lydia claimed to  be many things, including a registered nurse. One time I had a severe  case of poison oak and she proclaimed her expertise as an expert nurse.  She told me to rub bacon on it, and I almost died with pain. It was a  mad, crazy thing to do to a little kid. Lydia was just nasty and mean  and a little bit cuckoo.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd she was a very independent woman who took no guff. “Lydia was born  at the wrong time—she should’ve been a rank-and-file 1930 union  representative and union organizer, like John L. Lewis,” said Pete  Filipovitch. “You talk about believing in women’s rights! That’s what  was wrong with her—and that’s why her husband left her.”","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304586694885,"sku":"NP9780307338440","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307338440.jpg?v=1767722580","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/big-bosoms-and-square-jaws-isbn-9780307338440","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}