10
The Look of Love
The Great American Dream is to run into a woman that has no principles whatsoever—and a greedy pussy.
—RUSS MEYER on Vixen
Her tangle of long brown hair barely held at bay by a loud seventies brown scarf, Erica Gavin is Vixen, and she’s seducing a new victim. This time it’s Janet, the tipsy, unsatisfied wife of a friend. Vixen is one scary but entirely irresistible creature, the siren on the rocks, and she’s cheerfully bedded everyone in sight, including a Mountie and her own brother. “Basically this is a woman that is a racist, a sex fiend, an incest partner, a lesbian,” said Gavin. “[And] an all-American girl that saves a plane from being hijacked by the communists.” In other words, your typical Meyer heroine.
The first female whom Meyer would allow to drip sweat on-screen, Erica Gavin remains the most natural of his superwomen, and what she may lack in heavy appendages she certainly makes up for in heat. Vixen-era Gavin is fleshy in the most delectable way, lust personified, sporting a pair of thick, antennaelike eyebrows more appropriate for one of those disquieting translucent masks hanging by an elastic band on the joke shop wall. Her inviting lips alternate between bratty smirk and sullen pout, those bottomless brown eyes radiating “Danger Ahead.” Hardheaded, none too consistent, and utterly magnetic, Gavin’s most important asset is passion: whatever the complications, when Erica decides to give all, look out. Gavin, like Meyer, doesn’t kid around.
Gavin’s partner for Vixen’s thespian lesbian tango is one Vincene Wallace, who plays Janet, a clueless redhead with all the depth of a puddle of rain. RM has swathed her in vivid red lingerie and parked her atop an equally blood-colored bedspread. There could never be enough red in a Meyer picture—it was his favorite color—and with her pale skin, insouciant lips, and moronic, sexy little topknot, Vincene’s the dumb cherry atop a maroon cake.
The ever-sensitive Meyer has taken to calling Wallace “baby” when directing her on the Vixen set. “My name’s Vincene,” mutters the redhead. RM has already torn Wallace a new one for wanting to whip up steak curry for the cast in her downtime. Meyer sentenced her to slate takes instead. “You’re being paid to make a movie,” barks the maestro. Decades later Meyer would claim that Wallace was the first actress to defeat his no-casting-couch policy, staining the Vixen laser disc commentary with a rare tale of post-shoot hanky-panky.
Wallace looks a bit dazed, but who wouldn’t be when faced by Meyer as well as with the human tornado that is Erica Gavin? This girl-on-girl scene is Vixen’s deal-closer, and it is far from running smoothly. RM has provoked Gavin to the point of hysteria. For weeks she’s been trapped with an all-male crew in a cramped red farmhouse on six acres straddling the California/Oregon border. A million miles from nowhere, the joint is owned by Meyer childhood crony Wilfred “Bud” Kues, a man who is said to get a big kick out of eyeballing the smutty proceedings. As usual, RM is utilizing natural light, but silver reflectors brighten the small room to a painful degree. It’s a scorcher of a day, over a hundred on the thermometer, and even the walls seem to be perspiring. A reporter and photographer from the very manly True magazine huddle in the corner. The atmosphere is tense. Will Gavin deliver the goods, or flake once more?
Thus far Meyer’s terse instructions have been high-concept: “Turn on the sex. Be voluptuous, evil, sinful. Look satanic. Conceive of yourself as a female animal.” Gavin is nervous about the lesbian scene and, clueless as to the inner workings of actual Sapphic love, Meyer regales Gavin with a tale told to him by some AC/DC jailbird. Both her and her cellblock paramour achieved climax by “banging pussies,” legs locked like “two scissors.”
But thoughts of human shears only serve to send Erica into an inner freakout, and she grows more passive with each take. “You’re ruining the most important scene in the movie!” screams Meyer. She runs for the shelter of her room, where, between crying jags, Gavin is comforted by George Costello, ever the good cop to RM’s bad.
The sympathetic Costello goes so far as to slip Erica a can of Treesweet grapefruit juice purloined from Meyer’s private booty, unleashing a juggernaut that eventually dooms Costello to a thirty-year exile. George commits the unpardonable sin of fraternizing with the enemy, and with one of Meyer’s prized fillies yet. As Gavin saw it, “Once you become a Russ Meyer girl, in his mind you almost become like the Virgin Mary—no one can fool around with you.” But Meyer would have no one but himself to blame for the Gavin-Costello affair. “He pushed her right into George’s arms,” said Haji.
Sick of waiting for his erratic starlet to get it together, Meyer’s fuse is burning shorter by the second. But some dumb little bit of wisdom Costello imparts to Erica clicks. It’s a simple idea: just treat little Miss Vincene like she’s the woman and you’re a man. We have lift-off. Vixen pounces on the woozy redhead like a vulture, barely pausing to spit out the bones, the room silent save for the two dames kissing and pawing each other. Big belly to the floor, Meyer’s in a trance, his Arriflex camera gently swaying to the crotch opera unfolding before him. It’s what Meyer referred to as “umbilical cord” moviemaking—just the actors, the camera, and Russell Albion, humming together like a thousand beehives. Yeah, he’s definitely feeling it in the old grinch, and after the scene oozes to a halt he yells, “Cut! I’ve gotta change my shorts.” RM has broken the bank on this one.
One of Meyer’s most amusing creations, Vixen is a calculating bitch, but she pulls the strings with such gusto you want to surrender. And in a direct reversal of fates befalling Meyer’s past heroines, she is not punished for her sinful ways, but celebrated—Vixen is sixties sunshine to Varla’s black night. “She’s a healer,” proclaimed RM. “She makes everybody well again through sex.” Meyer, once again cannily adapting to changing times, created a heroine who not only played upon men’s fears but offered female viewers a vengeful chuckle or two, and RM maintained that women in particular readily responded to Vixen’s calling-all-the-shots attitude, turning the movie into a racy but acceptable couples date. “This was the basis for Vixen’s huge success. Once you have that happen, your gross doubles, even triples. It’s not just the raincoat brigade.”
Ground out in six weeks, the picture cost a paltry $72,000 and earned $7 million in its first year alone, $1 million of that from a record-breaking forty-three-week run at Chicago’s Loop Theater, a 606-seat grindhouse with a $2 admission. A fifty-four-week stand at the Starlite Drive-in in the tiny town of Elgin, Illinois, made the Guiness Book of World Records. “The film that put Meyer on easy street,” is how RM described Vixen. “It was a barn-burner.”
By Meyer math, Vixen eventually returned a whopping $15 million plus. That’s a lot of clams, and the attention of a sleeping giant known as 20th Century Fox was definitely aroused. No matter how much he wanted to strangle her, Meyer would always credit Erica Gavin for achieving his improbable entrée into the Big Time. While at Fox a few years later making Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a puzzled tech noticed Erica wandering the set and asked RM who was the spaced-out ingenue in the doorway. “She,” replied the man who never forgot a favor, “is the reason I’m here.”
Russ Meyer and Erica Gavin: a clash of wills the likes of which had not been seen since Meyer and Tura Satana locked horns. Unconquerable women brought out the best in Meyer, and Vixen in particular was a bloodless boxing match between director and star. By her kooky nature alone, Gavin pressed every button RM had; he in turn went out of his way to torment, belittle, and bedevil his latest nude ingenue. So much so, in fact, that some witnesses went as far as to declare it love.
Vixen was birthed in a West Hollywood Laundromat located at Santa Monica and Robertson. Inside, Meyer and Jim Ryan were shooting the shit while tending to RM’s soiled boxers. Meyer had been addled—maybe even panicked—by the big guns muscling in on his territory.
An ill wind was blowing out of the world’s ass, and its name was hard-core pornography. A fascinating 1969 profile on Meyer in True magazine*1 found him wringing his hands over whether the explicit Swedish “art” film I Am Curious (Yellow) would make it through customs. All of a sudden people were having sex, Doing It, right on screen. “The whole business will be ruined,” RM moaned. Pass it did, and it would rip the panties right off Meyer’s world. Meyer had promised everything and shown nothing—that was an essential part of his con. Now they were passing the stuff out on street corners like a Port Authority hooker. By 1970’s Mona, hard-core features would be shot in America.
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: RM was not against the showing of hard-core—he was no hypocrite—but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He detested it for aesthetic reasons. For Chrissakes, it was all pimply asses and motel lighting, nothing more than “roping sperm” meeting “an open-faced oyster.” No sirree Bob, not RM’s style at all. Meyer is not interested in What Lurks Below the Waist. No mystery there. Besides, said RM, if he did make hard-core, “I don’t think my mother would like it.”
It had been Meyer who’d invented the game, Meyer who’d upped the ante, and now any talentless hack capable of zooming in on some garishly lit gash splayed open in a no-tell motel could trump his hand. From now on, Meyer would be continually lumped in with such charlatans, and it stung. Did these imbeciles care about machine-gun editing, razor-sharp focus, the beauty of the female form? You wouldn’t find a Meyer girl spreading her legs in some no-budget porno.*2 (Although John Lamb’s successful court battles over his 1965 nudist documentary smasheroo The Raw Ones made full frontal nudity legally A-OK for the exploitation crowd, and furtive glimpses of pubic hair would soon start showing up in Meyer films.)
Threat number two was Tinseltown itself. “It is hard today to stay one step ahead of the majors,” he complained. “Why should the man on the street shell out to see a Russ Meyer movie when he can see nudity in Blow Up, lesbianism and masturbation in The Fox, and blood ’n’ guts in Bonnie and Clyde?” The upscale Canadian R-rated Keir Dullea–Sandy Dennis lesbodrama The Fox in particular wound Meyer’s clock.
All this meant that the competition was closing in. But Russell Albion Meyer was at his best with his back against the wall. It was strike-first-lest-ye-be-struck time. “Jim, we got to make the sexiest film ever made,” he announced to Ryan, his ever-present consigliere, and as the big coin-driven dryers hummed, Vixen’s story was plotted. A script was quickly fleshed out from the Meyer-Ryan treatment by another one of RM’s improbable scribes, this time actor Robert Rudelson, one of the Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers thugs. This would be no hard-core film, but it would have wall-to-wall sex, including lesbianism, incest, and interracial couplings. Not to mention the fish fondling.
Meyer ran off to scout locations, leaving the impossible task of finding the lead in the hands of George Costello. “I wanted a girl to come on like the Superchief,” said Meyer, and George would deliver the goods. On May 16, 1968, Daily Variety ran Costello’s tiny casting call ad for “Vixen, the Female Fox.” Erica Gavin, yet another dancer at the Losers, saw the ad while sitting in a dentist’s office and decided to audition for the role of a “technically interesting young Caucasian woman.” Why not, she thought—“the seed of Russ Meyer’s name had already been planted” by Haji and Tura. Erica showed up for the cattle call, where a sheepish Costello—who’d already seen over three hundred women—snapped a topless Polaroid, and soon she was summoned back to meet the boss.
“George and Russ were both there,” she remembers. “I think George knew he had a good one—he was sorta proud to present me to Russ. Russ wanted to see my tits. I felt that he was harmless. When he asked me to take my shirt off, it was like a doctor . . . very clinical. There was nothing sleazy about it.” Dismissing her supposedly lacking rack (Erica: “Here I’m thinking, ‘These are small??’ ”), Russ explained his big idea, which had been imparted to him by Costello: women would relate to Gavin because of her “normal” (by Meyer standards) body. RM had a hunch George was right. As simply as that, Erica was hired. She was now a leading lady, albeit a $350-a-week one.
Gavin was a true Hollywood starchild, the kind RM would soon poke fun at in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Born Donna Graff on July 22, 1947 (the name change occurred at age nineteen when she needed a fake ID to dance topless at the Losers), Erica’s parents were both actors—before being blacklisted, Fred Graff starred opposite William Holden in the 1950 noir Union Station. Following a traumatic split between her parents, teenage Erica was hell on wheels, smoking pot and dropping LSD “almost every day.” She fled home at seventeen, running off with an artist she met at Hollywood High. When drug dealing landed him in the joint, Gavin began dancing for the Models A-Go-Go agency to pay the rent.
Erica wound up in an Oxnard bar and, starting at ten in the morning, shook her ass fifty minutes on, ten minutes off, for seven hours a day. This wasn’t a world she knew. “I was in so much pain—you had to wear three-inch heels. I walked into my apartment, took off my shoes, and the tears started to flow.”
Like many a Meyer dame, Erica looks back with mixed feelings about what she was doing and why. “Sex has always been a really weird thing for me because I was molested for a long period of time when I was a kid,” remembered Gavin, who says a neighbor abused her for nearly a year when she was ten. Relationships with the opposite sex were problematic at best, and taking off her clothes for money didn’t simplify matters.
“I always felt that men were looking at my body, and I didn’t like that. But what a weird thing for me to go into—topless dancing. You don’t want people to like you for your body, yet you’re out there saying, ‘This is what I am, I’m all about my body.’ ” More to the point, she told writer Steve Sullivan, “Down deep inside, there’s a part of Erica who always felt that the only reason any man was with her was to fuck her.”
At age nineteen, Gavin showed up at the Losers for a Sunday amateur night, and owner Pete Rooney hired her on the spot. It wasn’t easy to break the ice with Losers luminaries like Tura Satana and Haji. “When you first join a crew like that, honey, they’re ready to massacre you,” Erica recalled. “I was kinda quiet. I was so involved with myself. They realized I wasn’t some kind of bimbo dumbass. I wasn’t there to steal their man or to be better than them. I was just trying to make a fucking living.” During her Losers stint Gavin did a bullfighter routine complete with cape and south-of-the-border eye makeup that would inspire the fabled Vixen brows. At times she was so zonked on drugs other dancers had to cover her ass. “I was stoned all my life,” said Gavin. “I mean really wasted.”
Now Erica was Vixen, and come the end of June 1968, she boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Miranda, California, where she was transported down a dirt road in the redwoods to the small farmhouse that would be her home for the next four weeks or so. Outside of some extra work and a one-afternoon no-budget bumblefuck called Erika’s Hot Summer that saw light of day only in the wake of Vixen’s success, she had no real experience in front of the camera: “I had never made a movie before. I had no clue.” And no preparation whatsoever for the man, the myth, and the madness that was Russell Albion Meyer.
The Bud Kues ranch was a typically grim Meyer outpost. RM, Gavin, and other cast members stayed in the farmhouse; the crew was relegated to tents on the lawn. Meals were cooked by the lethal Chef Meyer; according to sound man Richard Brummer, breakfast amounted to “one inch of bacon fat.” RM seemed particularly amused that the crew had not only to bathe with a cold-water hose, but defecate in full view of everyone by way of a makeshift open bathroom. “The girls could use the toilet in the house,” said Brummer. “The crew was supposed to use this throne that was on display.” Meyer would rise at 5:30, squeeze some fishing in, fry up some chow for the gang, then bore down on moviemaking until well into the evening.
Vixen’s plot is strictly no-frills. Tom is a workaholic “bush jockey”—pilot for hire—married to the beautiful Vixen. Tom flies Dave and Janet King, a handsome young couple, to his Canadian lodge where, unbeknownst to her husband, Vixen seduces them both. Vixen also beds her biker brother, Judd, and harasses his friend Niles Brook, a black draft dodger. When not scheming, seducing, or manipulating, Vixen coos utter devotion to her husband, who remains blissfully unaware of his wife’s endless philandering. Along comes O’Bannion, an evil redheaded Scottish commie intellectual complete with walking stick. He plans to hijack Tom’s plane to Cuba and coaxes Niles into coming along for the ride. During the flight, O’Bannion reveals himself to be a racist, and the men get into fisticuffs. Vixen pilots the plane while Tom knocks out O’Bannion with a monkey wrench. Niles picks up O’Bannion’s gun, wanting to turn the plane back to Canada, but Vixen talks him out of it and, after landing safely, the draft dodger runs off. A new couple appears, wanting Tom to fly them somewhere. Vixen studies the attractive pair while smiling in sharklike anticipation, and—shades of some fifties sci-fi shocker like The Blob—the movie freeze-frames on her face and on pops “THE END?”
Meyer shot a lot of the aerial footage for Vixen at a rather dramatic little location atop a mountain in the redwoods. “No buildings, just a landing strip,” said soundman Brummer. “At either end of the landing strips, you flew off the top of the mountain.” Brummer remembers seeing his Nagra tape deck “literally float in the air” while the pilot flew sideways and nearly upside down for the shots required for the film’s tumultuous, in-air climax, and at one point the pilot coolly told the soundman, “Y’know, I’m not supposed to do stunts in a Cessna. We may lose the wings any minute.” Dialogue sequences with the actors were shot on the ground with the crew hiding below and occasionally rocking the plane to simulate flying.
Vixen benefited from a great lineup. Garth Pillsbury plays one of Meyer’s most blissfully ignorant husbands, the pipe-puffing mannequin Tom; Harrison Page is the uppity but nice-guy African American draft dodger Niles (Michael Landon would later hire him for TV work based on seeing Vixen); red-bearded Michael Donovan O’Donnell essays the evil commie O’Bannion with just the right twinkle in his eye; and Vincene Wallace convinces as the sexily dumb Janet King. (Squished in for a brief cockney-accent cameo is Meyer stalwart John Furlong.) But the movie belongs to Erica Gavin, even though she felt like the odd one out during filming. When not embroiled in mind games with the filmmaker, she’d retreat to her quarters, consoling herself by spinning a vinyl copy of her theme song from the Losers, Sergio Mendes’ hit “The Look of Love.”
At least at first, Gavin saw Russ as a father figure, and when Big Daddy was pleased—as when Erica came up with the famous Vixen eye makeup—everything was groovy. “As soon as he said, ‘I love those eyebrows,’ that was it. Anything to make him happy. Because he was just looking for anything to be unhappy. He was just such a grump sometimes.”
The early part of the shoot was fun. Richard Brummer got to the production late, as he had just wrapped up work on Incubus, a curious, all-Esperanto horror picture starring William Shatner. Outfitted in his “traveling clothes”—a suit—Brummer arrived to find George Costello in a complete frenzy. No time to unpack or change, said George. They had to run to the town square and swipe some colored lights luckily left on a big tree since the holidays. “Next thing I know, I was climbing up a pine tree taking down Christmas lights and resetting them for the fish scene,” said Brummer.
Ah, yes—the infamous fish scene. During a barbecue, a yellow-dressed Vixen comes on to Dave in a novel fashion: by grabbing an about-to-be-fried trout, sticking it down her cleavage to shake her seafood-stuffed jugs, then slipping it into her mouth to suggestively suck on its head. Shot late one night with the crew bone-weary from a grueling day’s work, Gavin remembers the scene as a rare instance when she actually pleased RM. Although understandably apprehensive about sticking the slimy, odorous corpse (freshly caught by Meyer) between her lips, Erica got into the swing of it, and RM was ecstatic.
“I don’t know how he got me to be so free,” said Gavin. “The one thing about Russ is when you’re doing something right, he gets excited. He elicits it just by letting you know you’re doing good. It’s like patting a dog—‘Good girl!’ ” Costello recalled how Meyer just kept squeezing Gavin for more, more, more. “That was another Meyer fascination scene, blowing this fish. He’d shout out all this dialogue—‘Make love to that fish! Suck on that fish, suck on that head.’ He was getting off on that one. He’d give this little chuckle to himself. Like he’s got one here. Something special.”
Battle lines were drawn between Meyer and Gavin the day they shot Vixen abusing Niles, all the while coming on to her brother Judd by flashing her yellow bikini and snarling, “We’ll let the shine watch so he’ll have something to tell his grandchillun.” “It was so fucking hot,” Erica remembered. “It wasn’t one of Russ’s good days, everything was pissing him off. I was squinting because of the reflectors, and I was sweating. He didn’t like that—‘C’mon, it’s not that hot—stop sweating!’ I was, like, ‘How do I stop sweating??’ He said, ‘Just think of it being cold,’ and then put more reflectors on me.”
Gavin had problems hurling racial epithets at Harrison Page. In the course of Meyer’s alleged indictment of racism Vixen calls the actor “spook,” “spade,” “sambo,” “chocolate drop,” “Buckwheat,” and “black prince of the Congo.” Meyer wanted her to be “meaner and meaner, inflammatory and racist,” said Erica. “My parents taught me you never say the N-word, ever. I had never even heard those words before Russ, much less said them—I wanted to ask Russ, ‘What the fuck is a pickaninny?’ ”*3
Page had a mad crush on Gavin but also saw Meyer’s side in his battles with the female lead. “Truthfully? I thought Erica was extremely gifted but spoiled and difficult—this kind of dilettante,” he said. “She just behaved so irrationally, stormed off I don’t know how many times. And George would woo her back. Erica was a star with no experience whatsoever—and behaved like a star, believe me. She stomped around a lot. You always heard her coming.” Those with any acting experience found the casting of Erica Gavin a bit puzzling. “She was terribly amateurish in her line delivery,” recalled Garth Pillsbury. “Meyer was always going, ‘Erica, just say the lines.’ This was her first film, and she had the lead.”
Costello sensed that Meyer was doing a number on Gavin, and felt sympathy for her. “She was the wounded flower. During the shooting she was ready to quit several times and I had to talk her out of it. Because Meyer was browbeating her . . . it was just the wrong approach. It scared Erica, demoralized her. She just became totally afraid of him. She wouldn’t argue when he started yelling, she’d just go into this shell. That’s when he’d send me in to negotiate—‘George, go see what you can do with that girl.’ ” Costello followed orders, not knowing he was writing his own death sentence.
Oddest of all was the fact that when Harrison Page went out walking at night after the day’s shoot, he’d catch Meyer peeking into Erica’s room, obviously in an excited state. “He would look at me and I would pretend like I didn’t see him,” said a somewhat bewildered Page, who actually thought that Russ and Erica were a couple playing some kinky game and kept the incident to himself. “As far as I’m concerned they could’ve had that worked out together. . . . I felt the reason he was so hard on her is because they had a relationship.”
All these years later Gavin was stunned to hear that others felt Meyer was obsessed by her. “See, I never got that Russ was interested in me in any kind of way. Because Russ gave me no inclination. He made me cry a lot. He knew that I wanted to be perfect. And I wanted him to love me. I guess there were a lotta things that nobody knew about him, like his looking through my window! For some reason it doesn’t even offend me. God, Russ is such a clumsy teddy bear—one, I guess, who likes to look in windows and masturbate.
“What I really loved about Russ is underneath that harsh exterior I knew there was mush. Mush. I feel that inside him was just this tender loving person that thought he had it covered it up by being so fucking butch. Trying too hard. I always remember Russ scratchin’ his ass and pickin’ his nose. He would like to act gross as possible—I think Russ wouldn’t mind taking a shit in front of you. I mean, he never let anyone slide. The dirtier it was, the harder it was, the hotter it was—if he could’ve made the work any worse, he would’ve. Russ loved the fact that I had to run through the brush barefoot and it hurt like hell on my feet. He kept making me do it over and over and over. The more sensitive you were, the more Russ would go for the jugular.”
What a crazed triangle: Gavin thinking Meyer hates her, Meyer thinking Costello’s in love with Gavin, everybody else thinking Meyer’s in love with Erica, and George Costello oblivious to it all. It’s a wonder somebody didn’t die. They almost did.
One day during downtime a few of the cast members decided to mosey over to a stream not far from the house. When Meyer realized they were MIA, he became unglued, running out to a second-story balcony with a gun that he fired repeatedly in the air as he screamed, ‘You bastards, Come back!” Costello and the crew were frozen with fear in the nearby kitchen. “That was the worst. We thought he’d start turning the gun on us. Maybe he was going nuts.”
Pillsbury was among the infidels who had wandered away. “Suddenly I hear these gunshots go off, and we’re in the middle of nowhere. I thought, ‘Jesus, what the hell is that?’ I come back to the cabin and there’s Russ sitting there with a gun. Somebody told me that Russ took his fist and smashed it into the cabinet and got the gun out.” Garth felt the real source of Meyer’s anger was the bond developing between Gavin and Costello. “I really thought it was possible he was going to kill George,” he said.
Pillsbury’s wife Jacqueline recalled the intensity of the situation. “Russ said, ‘Nobody leaves tonight. You’re all gonna stay here. In the compound.’ That was the word, compound.” Garth had somehow talked Meyer into letting him and his wife stay at a nearby motel, and they got the hell out of Dodge before RM could restrain them. As they sped away, Jacqueline ducked down below the car window just in case Russ decided to open fire. They figured the one point in their favor was the fact that he had a movie to make and, as she reasoned, “It wouldn’t do him any good to kill the actors.”
As if the production itself wasn’t fraught with melodrama, once Meyer got to the cutting room a major technical snafu was discovered. “The camera had been running slow, less than twenty-four frames per second, so if you played the sound as it was supposed to sync up with picture, it would sound like Mickey Mouse—in sync, but high-pitched,” said Richard Brummer, who had to sync the picture syllable by syllable, a painstaking task. The unexpected benefit was that the faulty camera speed actually “made the action faster, which improved the movie,” said Brummer, chuckling. “Russ always wanted it to move faster anyway. Now he had a film that was innately faster.”
Unfortunately a sped-up picture left the film running short, and Brummer, cutting picture for Meyer for the first time, asked the boss if he should stretch scenes to pad it out. “Cut it as tight as you can, tighter than a drum, and I’ll fix it,” ordered Meyer, who flew off to the Northwest and shot some airport footage that brought the running time up to seventy-two minutes, a barely acceptable length for a feature. Next Meyer and Brummer labored over a rather novel teaser trailer, which “had no scenes at all, just the title changing colors,” said Richard. “We said in the narration that the picture was too hot to show you any part of it.” (Roger Ebert later reported that people were actually showing up at Chicago’s Loop Theater just to peek at the Vixen trailer.)
That August, Meyer ran out of scratch and, confident he had a winner, went begging to Eve to bail him out for an additional half of his take (according to Meyer, his ex had pulled funds out of the production at the last minute, angry RM had cut the crew in for distribution returns). They ceased bickering long enough to agree on terms for which proved to be a wise investment. Vixen would be the last offering under the banner of Eve Productions.
It would also be the last Russ Meyer picture for George Costello. While in the editing room Meyer somehow learned of the treasonous little can of Treesweet grapefruit juice that Costello had slipped Erica, and he just couldn’t let go of it. Brummer was adding a lot of wild lines to correct deficiencies in Gavin’s performance, and because of the camera problems he also had to spend time resyncing lines. An impatient Meyer had to find a culprit. “He blamed the performance problems on George!” said Brummer. “Not on anything he did or Erica did. George was persona non grata. In Russ’s mind it grew. This was now disloyalty.”
Costello’s marriage was kaput largely because he’d devoted every minute of his time to Meyer, and now his relationship with RM was heading south because of his involvement with Erica Gavin. He moved in with her, the brief affair tightening the vise a notch further. Jim Ryan had a good relationship with Gavin—she had Polish roots, and Ryan, speaking the language, called her by a Polish nickname, Slavka—but he made sure not to get too close, as he knew it had meant curtains for Costello. “George had moved in with her in the Valley somewhere,” he said. “I never said anything. I thought Meyer wouldn’t want to know.”
The fact that RM was up to his old habit of working everybody around the clock didn’t help matters. The editing crew ate only when and where Meyer wanted to eat. They broke only when Meyer said it was time to quit. “I think he had the need to control everybody associated with him,” said Costello. “And his feeling was he was paying us well, so we should be totally dedicated as he was. He verbalized that several times—that we should feel just as he does about these films. For the most part everybody was gung-ho—but when he became too possessive, to where you couldn’t leave or go down the street, then it became too much, against human nature. You couldn’t be out of Meyer’s sight. I was at that point where I’d had enough.”
Late one evening at the Meyer compound Costello let RM know that he was leaving for the night. “I told him I had to go and visit my child—I lied. Evidently he checked up on me.” When George showed up for work the next day, Meyer confronted him, and all of the anger building up came out like a cannon shot. Seething with rage, Meyer snarled, ‘You lied to me! You lied to me!” To which George calmly replied, “Well, Russ, if that’s the way you feel about it, okay. I’ll see ya later.” Costello walked out the door. “That was the end of it,” he said. “Excommunicated.”
Jim Ryan might’ve have been RM’s eternal right-hand man, but as far as the actual productions went, since the making of Mudhoney George had been indispensible. “Russ doesn’t give credit where credit’s due,” said Haji. “If he said, ‘Jump,’ Costello would say, ‘How high?’ But it wasn’t because he was a pushover, it was that he felt so part of Russ’s world. He must’ve wore five hats and he never had an ego trip about him. George never came on to anybody on the set—he had a lotta class and style. I have so much love and respect for him. George was the glue that kept everything together.”
Haji was one of the few brave souls who attempted to mend the fence between the two men, but the mere mention of the Costello name sent Meyer into a complete fury, roaring at Haji, “George betrayed me!” Haji shot back, “If it wasn’t for George, Erica would’ve left the movie,” which only made Meyer hotter. Haji felt Russ was being petty and not copping to the real reason behind the break. “Russ had a real crush on Erica Gavin,” she said. “I know it for a fact. Russ just fell in love with Erica.”
Gavin had truly become a femme fatale. “It was really bad,” she said. “Russ was just never ever going to talk to George again, and I felt horribly responsible. Now I think Russ was just absolutely floored that someone other than him was having an affair with me.”
A few years later when Meyer made it to 20th Century Fox, Costello couldn’t resist calling for a job. “I thought maybe he would let me back into the fold,” he said. Meyer took the call, said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, Costello,” and hung up. How dare that scoundrel call now?
George received a missive in his mailbox shortly thereafter, consisting of a curt “Costello, you’ve got a lot of gall.” Below that loomed that big Meyer signature, and inside the letter was a yellow feather—an arcane reference to The Three Feathers, a 1939 British film concerning a British officer who is given yellow feathers for fleeing service the night before battle.
Back at the Meyer manse, the inevitable plaque for Vixen was placed upon the wall of fame. Glued to the cheap wood was a single can of Treesweet grapefruit juice. Meyer would tell interviewers it represented the liquid needs required by a member of the Vixen cast that “nearly broke me,” but those close to the fray knew better. This cheapo, shiny can was now the symbol of George Costello’s betrayal. Meyer would not speak to Costello for another thirty years.
“A sexual steeplechase,” Vixen is one of Meyer’s plainest scripts, and stylewise the picture is equally low-key, giving off a TV-movie blandness that only serves to heighten Gavin’s rabid performance. This is a square’s fantasy all the way, and Meyer delivers exactly what the old codgers were a-hopin’ and a-wishin’ for while eyeballing those freewheeling hippie chicks skipping around town with no damn brassieres on. Although somewhat dated, the Gavin-Wallace lesbian escapade still packs a laughable sort of punch—Erica’s so keyed up one feels she just might explode on-screen. For once Meyer lets a sex scene build tension and play out instead of cutting away to some hyperactive montage. There are the usual amusing Meyer touches, such as the melody from The Volga Boatman bleating ominously on the soundtrack when the commie shows up. But the main attraction here is Erica. You just can’t take your eyes off of her.
Vixen inaugurated an image that would recur ad infinitum in RM’s films: a floor’s-eye view of sexual congress atop bare bedsprings (George Costello suggested the angle). The shot of a female ass grinding into the metallic coils was to be a much-noted Meyer trademark, not to mention the cause of many a bellyache from actresses who resented the reddened “spring-rings” left upon their stinging derrieres. Another relatively new visual obsession was the sight of some naked, barefoot broad running with abandon through the fields and streams of Mother Nature.
Vixen was the first American-made release rated X via the new MPAA ratings system. Meyer voluntarily slapped an X on the picture, and MPAA potentate Jack Valenti personally sought out RM during a post-Oscar bash to commend him for this noble deed. Meyer would soon grow to loathe both Valenti and the ratings board, declaring the all-too-broad rating a commercial “skull and crossbones,” but right now he loved being the first offender, and that ominous big black X on the one-sheet was guaranteed to stop Joe Six-Pack in his tracks. A loud, lurid campaign underscored the forbidden fruits to be seen on screen. “Is she woman or animal? TOO MUCH for one man.”
The picture opened nationally on October 15, 1968. By the end of January it had cracked Variety’s top ten grossers. In February, Meyer rounded up Erica Gavin and Harrison Page and flew to Chicago to attend some promotional ballyhoo for Vixen’s Windy City premiere at Oscar Brotman’s Loop Theater, a grindhouse that critic (and Meyer adversary) Gene Siskel declared “the movie cesspool of Chicago.” Vixen was one hot potato: a nervous Brotman pushed back the opening a week to allow city prosecutors a look-see. Meyer had bought Erica a dress for her one Vixen promotion, and suddenly Gavin had to face a gaggle of angry feminist protestors, then get eaten alive on a local TV talk show by Betty Friedan. The picture broke all records at the Loop, and in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert would declare Vixen “the best film to date in that uniquely American genre, the skin flick.”
Even the poison-pen reviewers had to chuckle over this “ludicrously topical” picture, and notices were far from bad. Playboy deigned to call Vixen “the most wholesome dirty movie of the year.” Kenneth Turan jumped off a cliff in praising Erica Gavin for the Washington Post: “The look of calculated lust with which she views every living thing is worth the price of admission, as striking in its own right as any of the more famous close-ups of Garbo or Dietrich.”
Most important, Vixen made fuck-you money, the kind of loot (Meyer claimed it eventually tallied $26 million) to which even the bigwigs couldn’t say no. MGM distributed the picture overseas, and in Los Angeles, Meyer managed to place Vixen with the Loews Theaters. Meyer gloated that this was the first time he had gotten one of his adult pictures “into first-class theaters in LA, before it was just the art house thing. The majors have pushed me into a position of respectability.”
Money, money, money. The coffers were so full even Eve was off his back. But all was not well in the temple of Meyer. One inevitable response to Vixen’s rampaging success was anger. Conservative, frequently pro-religious censorship advocates were beyond outraged over the picture’s unabashed carnality, and this ragtag but vocal group went on the attack.
January 22, 1969: The projectionist and manager of the Weis Drive-in, Macon, Georgia, are arrested by Bibb County sheriff’s officers and their print of Vixen confiscated. Bail is set at two grand apiece. A year of litigation ensues.
May 1, 1969: Accompanied by state police, a county prosecutor—besieged by anti-Vixen petitions from local clergymen—barges into the projection booth of the 31 Drive-in in Niles, Michigan, a scant four minutes from the film’s end. Once Vixen concludes, the officers allow the twenty patrons in attendance to flee, but duly note the presence of a minor in the audience. They arrest manager James Bowers and projectionist Electus M. Slater for exhibiting an obscene film and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Vixen is seized and Bowers and Slater are thrown in the hoosegow. The hysteria in Niles is such that when Vixen flickered on the drive-in screen Slater’s son Pete felt that it was as if “one big tit” had thrown its pear-shaped shadow over the town. “People was raisin’ hell,” he said. A month later in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the local DA threatens the manager of the Grand Theatre with arrest if he doesn’t excise the film’s sexual content. He complies, but Meyer himself pulls the film, proclaiming the ad hoc censorship a contract violation.
October 3, 1969: The vice squad charges into the Five Points Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida, where Vixen has been packing them in for five weeks straight. The picture is stopped and the print seized. “How come it took you so long to come and get it?” asks Mormon projectionist Carlos Starling as he hands the reels over to John Law. Theater owner Sheldon Mandell is charged with one of mankind’s great crimes: projecting “an obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and indecent picture depicting graphic visual and audio representation of a physically attractive female engaging in sexual intercourse with a Mountie.” “Why don’t you leave town, you dirty old man?” is but one message subsequently left on Mandell’s answering machine. The bust only increases business.
March 16, 1970: A nine-man, three-woman jury convicts Illiana Drive-in Theater owner Jack A. Butler on obscenity charges for exhibiting Vixen. He faces a thousand-dollar fine and a year at the Illinois State Penal Farm.
May 26, 1970: Monroe, North Carolina, Center Theater manager James Gregory is fined $250 for showing Vixen. Reverend Glenn Gaffney signs the warrant and is the prosecution’s expert witness. And who but the rev would know better?
On and on it went, from Texas to St. Louis to Pennsylvania. Meyer was now a smut-film King Kong, swatting one dive-bombing prosecutor after another. He would later claim he endured twenty-three prosecutions in one year, defending Vixen to the tune of $250 G’s. “Censorship is the wrong word,” he’d crow. “It’s persecution!”
For Russ Meyer, the showdown of showdowns over Vixen came in Cincinnati, Ohio, a town with “a history of making war against the bare breast” and whose infamous censorship campaigns have been fodder for books, documentaries, and the odd made-for-TV movie. There was just no way the good German Catholics on the Ohio River were going to open their arms to Vixen’s smutty charms. “Hamilton County,” RM muttered, “is a bastion unto its own. There is no hardcore. There is no softcore, even. It’s bust time.”
On September 22, 1969, the Guild Arts Theater at 782 East McMillan Street in Cincinnati was reopening with Vixen following a $25,000 renovation when the long arm of the law stopped everything. “The night of the first raid, there was a news photographer hanging around across the street,” said owner Pete Gall. “For the hell of it, I turned off the lights so they couldn’t get any pictures.” The reporter walked across to the Guild and let the cat out of the bag—the theater was about to be paid a visit by Officer O’Leary. The bust “was no last-minute deal,” said Gall. “It was planned.”
Meyer’s lawyer had another print shuttled in the very next day, and Gall ran it on the assurance that he wouldn’t have to pick up the legal tab. Vixen was seized again. This was just the beginning of a well-orchestrated attack. A politically connected lawyer claiming to be a “concerned” private citizen was at the center of it all, and he would prove to be a formidable adversary, one who would throw a very expensive wrench in Meyer’s smut machine. His was a name that could always elicit a curse from RM’s lips. “I was arrested so many times,” said Meyer. “Charles Keating did everything he could do to put me in the iron hotel.”
Born in Cincinnati on December 4, 1923, the rangy, six-foot-four, thin-lipped and bespectacled Charles Keating Jr. looks like a Madison Avenue Ichabod Crane as painted by Grant Wood. A product of poverty, he became a self-made dynamo in the legal world after a stint as a navy fighter pilot. Keating was not unlike Meyer: a risk taker, devout workaholic, and control freak who thrived on chaos, and whose whims could suddenly move valued employees to the persona non grata column in a process his staff likened to Amish shunning. Intimidating and inscrutable, Charlie was a skilled manipulator who loved big bands, had a profound distaste for commies and homosexuals, and “never saw a lawsuit he didn’t like.”
“Anyone who ever tells you he understands Charlie Keating is either lying to you or making a big mistake,” said a key aide. “He is the most complex, enigmatic human being you will ever come across.” Keating and Meyer would share one other extremely significant peccadillo, but RM wouldn’t learn of it for another twenty-five years.
Unfortunately for Meyer, whom Keating referred to as “that criminal,” Charlie’s pet hate was pornography, and in 1970 alone he traveled two hundred thousand miles to convert others to his anti-porno gospel. He was Richard Nixon’s only appointee to the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and when the committee’s report found attacking smut in the courts somewhat pointless, an angry Keating blocked its release until his and other commission members’ dissenting opinions were tacked on in a huge appendix.
Charlie had first been enlisted in the fight by a local Catholic Church leader in 1956, and took to it with the Bible-thumping brimstone of a backwoods preacher, the kind Meyer had lampooned in Lorna. “I’m only one guy,” intoned a solemn Keating. “It is not possible for me to do this alone. If the majority wants it, we’ll have public decency.” Charlie’s first big victory: the conviction of an elderly woman for selling sex aids out of her schoolyard-vicinity candy store. Lady Justice fined the old biddy a hundred bucks.
On November 1, 1958, Keating founded Citizens for Decent Literature, a somewhat loony but powerful watchdog group (sporting four senators and seventy House members on its honorary committee) that would have Meyer reaching for the antacids more than a few times. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who would take his battle with Keating to the Supreme Court and win, writes in his autobiography that the CDL “provided a vehicle for its staff members to pursue their own obsession with smut in a socially sanctioned way and condemn it at the same time. Freud would have a field day: several guys sitting around watching porno flicks, saying, “ ‘God, that was disgusting—would you rewind the film and play it again?’ ” Keating was completely and wholly obsessed with wiping out smut, so much so that it made even potential allies uncomfortable. Appearing before a House subcommittee, Charlie had to be restrained from reading aloud from an ode to sadism entitled Love’s Lash. He seemed to delight in shocking reporters by whipping out filth, and further unnerved one scribe when he uttered “a scatological term which somehow reaches the apex of revulsion.”
In 1965, Keating entered the motion picture biz, producing a threadbare Citizens for Decent Literature “exposé” just this side of exploitationville called Perversion for Profit. This laughable little gem exhibits almost as much flesh as a Meyer opus, specifically notes the smut world’s “preoccupation with the female breast to a point where it has become a fetish,” and puts forth the ludicrous claim that “75 to 90 percent of pornography ends up in the hands of small children.”
On September 19, 1969, Vixen unspooled in Cincinnati. One week later, Keating went on the attack, writing a letter to Safety Commisioner Henry Sandman complaining that the picture was obscene, and by way of an Ohio nuisance law demanding an injunction to prevent the picture from being shown. “It is my preference that action be taken by police,” wrote Keating, who filed suit in Common Pleas Court the day of the first print seizure. Sandman and members of the vice squad had already slipped into the Guild, seen Vixen, and decided to prosecute, and after a final Monday night showing it was seized at 11:30 p.m. “Keating orchestrated the whole thing,” said Pete Gall. “He was pushing to get rid of these theaters.”
Meyer’s lawyer for obscenity charges was Elmer Gertz, a colorful Chicago attorney who’d defend Jack Ruby, Nathan Leopold, and Henry Miller during his six-decade career. In the rest of the country, Gertz was able to get nearly all of the charges against Vixen dismissed via a First Amendment defense. In the press, Meyer utilized Vixen’s crazy “political” banter as relevant commentary. “I’m violently anti-communist, which gives my films social significance,” he’d boast to one reporter, while commenting to another, “Strangely enough most of the litigation has been associated with or near the Mason-Dixon line, which convinces me the frank racial exposition of the film is the primary reason the picture is being harassed.”
The tune being whistled by Meyer fell on deaf ears within the Ohio legal system, however. The cards were stacked against Vixen in Hamilton County, and Pete Gall recalled an incensed Keating denouncing Meyer’s name in particular when snooping around his theater one night. “The difficulty was that Keating’s family ran Cincinnati—the newspaper, the courts, the state attorney’s office,” said Elmer Gertz. Vixen was facing a judge with a long history of anti-pornography actions, Simon L. Leis Sr. (“Simon Leis,” moaned Meyer at the mention of his name decades later. “It sounds like the name of someone who stabbed Christ. The name bespeaks evil!”)
The assistant city solicitor attacking the picture in court was a devout Catholic ex-Marine known for mounting aggressive frontal assaults—and who, amazingly enough, also went by the name of Simon Leis. “We were up against a judge whose son was the prosecutor!” complained Meyer. Charles Keating and Simon Leis Jr. were sort of the Lennon and McCartney of anti-porn, later making life miserable for Larry Flynt. Clearly Keating and his Citizens for Decent Literature group aided other Vixen attacks outside of Ohio. The September-October 1969 issue of the CDL’s National Decency Reporter newsletter announced that their in-house legal counsel would be “happy to assist with prosection in any area of the country.”
Meyer and company fought back. “Mr. Keating intimidates people,” Gertz charged in court, accusing Keating and his cronies of engaging in a “conspiracy” to deprive Meyer and the general public of their civil rights, arguing that Vixen was already being shown in forty states, not to mention nineteen theaters in ten Ohio cities. During the trial, Gertz trotted out nine witnesses for the defense, among them psychologists, professors, and one local citizen and Knights of Columbus member who testified that Vixen had “Billy Budd–Christlike” themes that gave it relevance. A California physician was the prosecution’s only witness. He maintainted that the “unrealistic hoax” of Vixen’s “male lust” was “one of the major causes of marital discord.”
On November 17, Leis granted Keating a permanent injunction against Vixen in five Ohio counties on the grounds it was obscene. In a twenty-two-page opinion in which he quoted the prosecution’s sole witness extensively, Leis branded Meyer a “cancer on society,” one of those “unscrupulous men who have taken advantage of lack of censorship and capitalized on it” and who, if not stopped, “will infest society with a disease which will kill it.” The only thing Leis did not grant was Keating’s request that all box office receipts be turned over to the state. Charlie was now the victorious white knight of anti-smut, boasting that Judge Leis had “set a precedent whereby a private citizen could himself take measures to stop the pornographers from polluting the hearts, minds and souls of Americans.”
In Columbus, Ohio, on July 21, 1971, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the ban, ruling in a 5–2 decision that “purported acts of sexual intercourse solely for the profit of the producer and exhibitors cannot constitute the communication of an idea or thought protected by the First and 14th Ammendments.” Gertz would claim he heard the judges laughing aloud while screening Vixen behind closed doors. Of course, Vixen could be shown if Meyer cut the sex out—which would leave little more than some footage of a plane flying and a cockamamie argument or two. Although the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Meyer, a man not used to losing, had lost big time.*4Vixen has not played in Cincinnati since those two days in 1969, and legally, it still can’t—when a screening was attempted on a local university campus in 1984, authorities threatened seizure and arrest.
Ironically, the court battle didn’t vanquish the Guild Theater, as national publicity from the case only jacked up post-Vixen business. “My God, did we pack that house,” said Pete Gall. “It was a blessing in disguise.” But paranoia remained high. Before entering the theater, Gall had patrons sign a statement admitting they were knowingly seeing pictures containing nudity (even the vice cops had to add their John Hancock, much to their dismay). In addition, Gall had to put up with the Cincinnati papers changing David F. Friedman’s Trader Hornee to Trader Horn and refusing to run the title Love Is a Four-Letter Word. While legally unsuccessful beyond the Vixen brouhaha, the attacks by Keating and Leis had a chilling effect on adult entertainment in southern Ohio. The harassment just wasn’t worth it.
In the late seventies, Keating and Leis zeroed in on their new target, Larry Flynt. The battle got extremely personal. In their 1993 Keating biography Trust Me, Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden report that Keating held Flynt accountable for the rape of a daughter, and when the porno potentate was shot in an anonymous attack that left him paralyzed from the waist down, there were those (including, unbelievably, Keating’s own son) who suggested Keating might’ve been involved. To this day, Flynt’s attempt to sell Hustler’s wares in Hamilton County is being thwarted in the courts by Leis.*5
According to David F. Friedman, the majors didn’t lift a finger to help in the censorship battles, although they’d certainly benefit from the freedoms that ensued. It was the exploitation mavericks like Meyer who smashed the locks for everybody. “He fought the big, big fight to ensue the First Amendment rights of every American citizen,” said Friedman. But for Russ, it was just another game. He’d win the next round, and the fifteen after that. Let somebody try to stop Meyer. RM was at his best when the chips were down. “In the final analysis, you have to be a man,” he told authors Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito. “You ain’t worth a shit if you don’t finally stand up to something.”
There is a sublime epilogue to the Keating-Meyer saga. Charles Keating would go on to become a very rich, powerful, and arrogant figure in the banking industry, but it all went to hell in the end. In 1993, Keating was convicted of fraud in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal and sentenced to 151 months in jail (the conviction was later overturned, although in 1999, Keating, now seventy-five, pled guilty to four counts of fraud to avoid a retrial). Countless retirees—some of them perhaps members of CDL’s “tennis shoe brigade”—had lost their life’s savings due to the swindle.
A gleeful Meyer laid out a hundred bucks for Charlie’s mug shot, which he then printed in his autobiography. But the best was yet to come. When Meyer perused an article on Keating’s downfall in the Los Angeles Times, certain passages screamed out. Keating liked to “peer down the blouses of secretaries he has hired,” wrote Binstein and Bowden, who stated that a dozen women on Charlie’s staff had had augmentation done. First came an “unexpected” bonus, quickly followed by “huge new breasts.” Opposite a page showing a passbook from a canceled Meyer bank account at Keating’s notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan, RM reprinted the most salacious excerpts from the article in A Clean Breast, and directly below the text lurked a picture of Meyer, his grinning mug between the mammoth knockers of some frail. “Et Tu, Charlie?” asked Russ.
There was no such punch line for Vixen herself, Erica Gavin, and no rest for the wicked. After another bumpy ride with Meyer in 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Gavin drifted through miserable low-budget affairs like the never-released, shot-in-Tunisia Larry Buchanan epic The Rebel Jesus (in casting that would have Charlie Keating frothing at the mouth, she played Mary Magdalene, although illness forced her to bow out). Jonathan Demme’s 1974 women-in-prison Caged Heat was her last film of any note.
On the commentary track for the Vixen laser disc, Meyer callously suggests that succumbing to the Hollywood casting couch would’ve been best for Erica. Truth be known, Gavin had plenty to endure due to the Vixen legacy. She recalled a trip to the Beverly Hills Hotel to see a “producer” for what she thought was a part. She was greeted by a gross middle-aged troglodyte swathed only in a robe.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I basically let him fuck me,” said Erica. “I was afraid my agent would fire me. On his dresser he had all these bottles of perfume. They were all the same and they weren’t even in wrapping paper, they were wrapped with a bow. Afterwards, he gives me a bottle of the perfume and two dollars for my parking. Do you know what a piece of shit I felt like? I felt like I didn’t even deserve to be living. This guy was never making a movie. When I tried to do other things after Vixen, nobody was like Russ. They were all out to fuck you—period. Whereas Russ was into putting you into a movie. And not fucking you.”
But Gavin was a cat with nine lives. She floated around the fringes of the rock scene, running with such luminaries as Love’s Arthur Lee, the Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye, and Aerosmith. She did too much of everything, including heroin and speed. Erica quit acting, and for nearly twenty years she worked at the posh Melrose Avenue clothes store Fred Segal’s, then became a buyer for Barney’s, whereupon she and John Waters became friends.
“I knew her from wealthy show business dinner parties,” said Waters, who was stunned by the svelte, “chic” post-Vixen Gavin. “She looked like a model.” According to John, few knew of her previous notoriety. “I don’t think when they were buying designer outfits from Erica in Barney’s they were thinking, ‘Is she woman or is she animal?’ ” said an amused Waters.
The Meyer-Gavin relationship remained ever contentious through the years. RM stayed angry at her for losing weight after Vixen, not to mention the treachery involving George Costello. In 1976 Erica gave a rare, candid interview and took a few swipes at Meyer, marking her as one of few in the inner circle brave enough to offer any kind of criticism of the Great One.
RM was infuriated, responding decades later with a chapter in his autobiography entitled “The Other Side of the Coin,” in which he prints a cheerful handwritten note from Erica sent just after Vixen, a polite (if chilly) response from Meyer, and then the interview where she trashes him. Accompanying the text is a Vixen shot of Gavin holding up a small compact mirror, mesmerized by her own image. It’s a wonder she didn’t get a yellow feather in the mail.
At Gavin’s lowest ebb in the eighties, she got a Christmas card from Meyer out of the blue. He knew of her troubles and wanted to wish her the best. Inside the card was three hundred bucks. A small gesture from the man who’d made a mint off her naked body, but it got to her. Erica called him, and they had a few laughs. How did Russ know she’d end up a gay designer, exactly the character she played in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? In that comically gruff voice of his Meyer uttered a crass remark about how she liked “all that pussy.” Somehow it warmed the cockles of Erica’s knocked-around heart, and she actually braved the many phobias she had at the time to attend a Meyer birthday party, even if she soon fled. They now enjoyed an affectionate truce.
The eighties were Gavin’s nadir. She quit working and spent long periods alone, afraid to leave her abode. Anorexia nearly stopped Erica’s clock forever, and she traced the obsession with weight back to the first time she saw Vixen on the big screen. “I was shocked. Shocked. Everything was so big, just huge, including me. I could see my pores, a little zit that was on my chest . . . And knowing everyone else sees it, too! It was traumatic.”
After Vixen, said Erica, “people started to look at me. Scary. That’s why I became anorexic. It’s all how men see women—it was me wanting to become invisible by shrinking myself so that no one would look at me anymore. I almost killed myself by starving. I was one hundred and forty when I made Vixen. I went down to seventy-six pounds. My lowest weight. I was hospitalized three times.
“I’d just turn sideways and you wouldn’t see me. I didn’t want anybody to see me. I just wanted to be a nonsexual entity, androgynous. No tits, no ass, nothing feminine, nothing soft. And it kinda worked. No one came around me, y’know?
“I can see why Marilyn Monroe, anybody who has any fragile part of them, there’s no fuckin’ way they’re gonna make it through. I’ve seen people end up tossed on the lawn after they OD’d. They’d been in L.A. for nine months and that’s what became of them. They come here with all these dreams—‘I’m gonna be a star,’ all that. Y’know what? It’s so, so not that way. It’ll eat you up. It’ll fuckin’ eat you up.”
Tracking down Gavin these days is a daunting task. She’s the rock star of the Meyer women, the Elvis figure whispered about but rarely seen. Yes, she’ll meet me. No, she won’t. Yes, no, maybe so. More phone calls, then the waiting. Filmmaker and friend “Colonel” Rob Schaffner gives fifty-fifty odds on her waltzing through the door. Hours go by. Another phone call. She’s on her way. The odds go up to eighty-twenty. More waiting. “Erica only comes out at night,” says Schaffner. “She really is Vixen, dude.”
Finally, after one aborted meeting and even more phone calls, Erica consents to meet at an all-night L.A. coffee shop aptly named Swingers. It is three a.m. when she arrives. Wiry, angular, painfully alive, Gavin resembles an improbable collaboration between Gustav Klimt and Walter Keane. Life has thrown a few well-placed punches, to say the least. The voluptuous Vixen body is long gone, chipped to the nub as purposefully as one would strip a car, and she’s down to the sinewy fighting weight of say, Iggy Pop.
Infamous for clocking an ex-manager in broad daylight whilst attending a fan convention a few years back, Gavin’s no slouch in the tough-cookie department, yet one feels that the slightest of slights could send her scurrying back into that starless Hollywood fog to hide for another year or ten. All the hoop-jumping is worth getting to Erica, though. Plug into her socket and the juice is enough to fry you for good. Gavin’s a born provocateur. After a few minutes you either want to kiss her or kill her—there’s no middle ground. Even during a simple trip to the mini-mart, Erica drives like she’s auditioning for the remake of Bullitt.
Meyer’s cinematic image of Erica Gavin and her subsequent time on earth have dovetailed in eerie ways. She feels that RM had an almost supernatural—albeit unconscious—power when it came to the roles he cast people in. “Russ sees your subconscious, and then he has you become it. He has this vision of you that’s very real and very natural, before you even see it. That’s his gift.”
Erica shakes her head, smiling, and addresses the one who isn’t there. “Russ, you motherfucker! How did you know I was going into clothing? How did you know I would become a sex fiend and actually start masturbating while driving down the street, looking at guys and girls? How did you know I was going to end up liking women? How did you know all the things I was gonna be? Who predestined what?”
Gavin laughs. “It’s the Twilight Zone. Russ saw beyond without even knowing. It’s weirder than you even know.”