No breast too large

Russ Meyer is as American as Grandma Moses, but he probably wouldn't have been interested in her, since she wasn't a D-cup.

By David Bowman

Jul 4, 2002 | Titian had a thing for redheads. Rubens fancied fat girls. For Russ Meyer, it's tits. He's a jugs guy. A melon man. Meyer's women have aureoles that are bigger than Calista Flockhart's headlights.

After half a century of nursing this obsession, Meyer has developed his own lexicon concerning hooters -- chicks with big boobs are "melon breasted" or "pregnant breasted" or "cantilever breasted." Actress June Wilkinson has a pair of "beehives." Meyer loves women whose knockers have "globosity." He loves women with "orbicularity." He won't even look at a female unless she is a D-cup.

"Anything smaller than that is just too small for me," his press release says. "I've seen breasts as big as a triple F. There is no such thing as a breast that's too large." Indeed many of the women who appeared topless in recent Russ Meyer films have breasts bigger than grocery sacks.

Although the bulk of Meyer's artistic accomplishments consists of campy films where big-busted women make fools out of men ("Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"; "Mondo Topless"; "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens" ) Meyer began his Hollywood career as a simple man, sprouting a Tennessee Ernie Ford mustache, who had both a camera and a wife with good-sized maracas. The wife's name was Eve, and she is the model for many of the photos now on display at Feigen Contemporary gallery in New York City (through July 27). The best picture that Meyer took of her is titled "Eve and the Red Car." Meyer's wife stands on a Pacific beach wearing a discreet 1950s bikini with a red 1954 Dodge Royal parked in the sand behind her. This is such an essential vision from the 1950s -- a decade when a man loved his car as much as his wife -- and both are beauties in Meyer's color photograph.

In "Eve With Seal," Meyer's wife rests her hands on top of a large dopey stuffed toy, looking self-consciously arch -- predating Cindy Sherman's similar self-portrait facial expressions by more than 30 years. "Eve in Lingerie" shows the wife kneeling on a beach in a kind of triumphant, naughty poor girl's Marilyn Monroe pose. "Eve With Legs Up" shows the wife sprawled upside down on a discreetly mussed-up bed, the cups of her brassiere pointing true north. There is a sweet innocence in these pictures -- yesterday's kitsch transformed into a wholehearted testimonial of how beautiful a woman can be.

On the other hand, in some shots Meyer's Eve looks seedy and deranged like a Mike Hammer bimboesque killer. "Model Playing Ping Pong" depicts a Nordic woman with long braids and appendicitis scar looking like a psychopathic Heidi. The nylons of "Model With Garters" cut into her flesh as she gives a grotesque exhalation. These Meyer women are capable of great violence. No wonder Meyer claims that "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (1966) was the first movie that ever showed a woman killing a man with her bare hands.

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