Back on the 1960s Braintree’s South Shore Drive-In was located off 128 outside of Boston over the Blue Hills from my suburban development of split-level houses. No one went to the twin screens in the daytime, but on summer nights my father drove my mother and their six children to the open-air theater, where we watched THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies from the back seat of our station wagon. We loved the popcorn from the concession, however neither my older brother nor I left the car, since my mother insisted on our wearing pajamas. “I want you ready for bed when we get home and what’s the problem with wearing pajamas?” She thought of us as her babies, even though we were 12 and 11. “They can’t go to the concession stand dressed like that. They’re almost teenagers.” My father interceded for us. “Other teenagers say things.” “They shouldn’t care what those hooligans say.” My mother had heard about the wickedness of ‘submarine races’ from the parish priest. “The drive-in is for movies. Not sin.” My mother was never more right than when the Holy Roman Church backed her up, but the South Shore Drive-In was more like a Midnight Mass in comparison to the Neponset Drive-In off Route 3. The single-screen regularly featured adult fare. Biker films were screened as the first show and the second movie offered bare skin. Whenever we passed the silver screen off Route 3 on the way into Boston at night, my mother ordered us to shut our eyes. “These films are filth born from the loins of Satan.” Our pastor, a seventy year-old Irishman condemned this torrid combo in his Sunday’s sermon. His brogue rang with his devotion to a decades-old celibacy and he sought to enlist altar boys into the ranks of black cloth. None of the boys on the cusp of teenagerism sought to suffer the curse of lifelong virginity, especially not in 1965, which was a good year for go-go girls and outlaw bikers. My older brother was in 8th Grade. He had kissed a girl at the matinee of the Mattapan Oriental, The upper balcony. She had let his hands roam to second base in the pitch-black balcony. My next-door neighbor, Chuckie Manzi, and I had found stroke books in the woods below Chickatawbut Hill. Our hands belonged to the Devil and our souls were lost to God, especially since I had been an atheist since age 8. In the August of 1965 we wanted wickedness and no Hollywood film preached sin more fervently than FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. Ads from the Neponsset Drive-in for Russ Meyer’s movie were splashed across the local newspaper entertainment sections and lurid posters promoted the no-holds barred cinematic experience were plastered on brick walls throughout the South Shore. The star of the movie was Tura Santana. The buxom lead actress was mix of Japanese/Sioux/Irish blood. My hometown was a white suburb, mostly Italians, Irish, and a few Jews. No one in our white suburb was as exotic as Russ Meyer’s star. The first night showing was scheduled for the upcoming Friday. Our parish priest pleaded with Sunday worshipers to tear down these offensive placards and our parents obeyed his edict. Their devout fingers bled from the effort. One evening my older brother and I salvaged two tattered black and white posters of three buxom Amazons proudly standing before a foreign sports car. A Porsche 383. James Dean had died in the same Porsche. our next-door neighbor Chuckie guessed that the sports car’s color was red. I kept my poster under my bed. My brother stashed his in the attic. My mother would have killed us, if she found one, but we worshipped them as unholy relics of our increasingly rebellious youth. On Monday morning the boys from 7th and 8th Grades discussed the upcoming Russ Meyer film on the bus en route to Our Lady of the Foothills. “What do you think they do in the film?” I whispered to our friends. “No sex, but a lot of flesh and big breasts.” Chuckie’s answer was a good guess. We had seen more in the dirty books we have found in the woods. “There’s only one way to find out for sure.” My brother looked at us and we instinctively knew what we had to do and that week we plotted an expedition to the Neponset Drive-In to broaden our adult awareness. Our plan was simple. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO was playing at the local movie house by the Expressway. The film starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif had won almost every Oscar at the previous month’s Academy Award. On Friday evening I asked my father for permission to see it with Chuckie and my older brother. My mother objected to my request. “It’s a love story about communists.” She remained a McCarthyite a decade after Tailgunner Joe’s death. “Pasternak was a great poet, but this is only a love story.” My father had attended college in Maine. He spoke French and overruled her politics. She stormed upstairs and slammed shut the bedroom door. “Boys, remember when you’re teenagers that your father stood up for your rights.” “Yes, sir.” On the cusp of forty he belonged to another generation, but he was a good father and drove us in the station wagon to the local theater. The early show coincided with the sunset. He would pick us up later. Where he went, we never asked. FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL screened twenty minutes later. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO ran three hours. The theater was a mile from the drive-in, A twenty-minute walking distance or a ten-minute trot. Our scheme was planned to the last detail. Chuckie had even hide his father’s binoculars under his coat, because we would watch the FAST PUSSYCAT KILL KILL for free from the other side of the river. Upon arriving at our town theaters, we were surprised by the line of young boys snaking around the corner. We waved good-bye to my father. He was heading someplace. We never asked where. “Certainly a long line for a love story,” commented my father. “Julie Christie is beautiful.” My brother had her magazine photos under his mattress far from the posters of FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. He was a die-hard romantic and dreamed one day that he would end up with Julie, but it wouldn’t be tonight. “Yes, she is.” My father liked her too. “I’ll pick you up in three hours.” We bought tickets and waited out front for several minutes. Several clusters of other pre-teen boys also lingered on the sidewalk. None of us had any intention on seeing DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Darkness drenched the eastern sky and stars clustered across the overhead sky. Chuckie nudged my ribs. “Let’s go.” The three of us walked down the side street and around the corner we broke into an easy lop. Within minutes we were running over the hilly golf course overlooking the Neponset River. “There it is,” Chuckie declared from the summit. The drive-in was packed with cars. The big screen showed ‘Coming Attractions’. Inbound traffic on the Expressway was snarled for the free show. The other boys behind us whooped upon seeing our goal within reach. As we pelted downhill to the river, I recounted the plot of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO to my brother and Chuckie, in case our fathers and mothers quizzed us later. They weren’t fools. We reached the river’s edge to discover that the drive-in was not visible from this vantage point. “We could swim to the other side.” Chuckie suggested and unbuttoned his shirt. “And how are we going to explain our wet clothes?” My older brother was determined to attend law school and his concern for his permanent record deterred his detours from the straight and narrow. “We’re not.” I pointed to the highway to where boys filed across the expressway’s bridge. It was a good way to get killed and cars beeped their horns, yet we joined their procession to the opposite bank. Our next obstacle was a dump rank from the stench of trash burning in the glowing incinerator. We spotted the top of the screen and ran like hounds hunting a fox to the twenty-foot chain-link fence preventing any unpaid entrance to the drive-in. None of us needed to go any farther and we sat on the ash heaps of the garbage dump. Forty-feet high big-breasted women in skimpy clothes filled the screen. “Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams,” Chuckie spoke the actresses’ names, which he had memorized the poster.
Nothing had prepared us for the female mayhem and violence. No man was safe from the Pussycats’ terror and for the first time in my life I realized that women were not the weaker sex.
Ninety minutes later we walked away from THE END in a state of exhaustion.
“Why did they treat men like that?” asked Chuckie.
“Because men treat women worst. Remember last winter when those boys took the girls under the Mattapan Bridge. They slapped them around and made them take off their shirts. Worse things happened to girls and women too.”
“The men in the movie got what they deserved,” said my older brother. We had two sisters and would kill anyone who messed with them.
Back at the theater showing DOCTOR ZHIVAGO we gave the usher our tickers and sat with the audience. The film had another hour to go. We exited after THE END. My father asked about the movie. We said it was good. As we approached our neighborhood, Chuckie whispered in my ear, “I’m in love with Tura Santana.”
“Me too.” She looked a little like his raven-haired sister, Addy had been my babysitter. Her breast-size was a 36-B. Chuckie had once shown me her bra. It smelled of baby powder.
Chuckie never met Tura Santana, although years later I interviewed the director Russ Meyer at the 1984 Deauville film festival. We had a couple of drinks at the Hotel Atlantique. I paid for them. My expenses were backed by a French magazine. The big man spoke about his serving in the Army’s 166th Signal Photo Company.
“I was 15 and somehow was assigned to a combat film crew. I shot a camera across France, but when I got back to LA I couldn’t find any work, although I did some of the camera work on GIANT.” That George Stevens film was being honored by the Deauville Film Festival.
“Can you remember which scenes?”
“I’m lucky to remember my name, but enough of my blowing wind. You’re here as a journalist. You have to have some questions for me?”
“Only one. What ever happened to Tura Santana?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I explained about Chuckie, my older brother, and countless other boys going to see FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL.
“Ha, you’re not the first kid to tell me a story like that. 1965 was twenty-one years ago. I was in my forties. Up until I shot MOTORPSYCHO I was a nobody, but I sold the producers that I’d make a film like MOTORPSYCHO with three women. The audience didn’t get three women with three women. Now you can find porno everywhere. I still don’t know why they let me make that movie.”
“Me neither, but we were glad they did. Why was Tura so angry?”
“It wasn’t any act. She told me that when she was ten years old some men raped her. They got away with it. Tura trained in martial arts and over the next fifteen years got them all.”
“How?”
“How do you think? She was no act.”
“What happened to her?”
“I saw her a couple of years ago and you know what the worse thing about my movies. Not that feminists think that I was sexist, because they’re wrong. All my women beat up on men. They even kill them, so I can live with that label. The worst thing about my films is seeing all those beautiful women lose their beauty. It makes me feel like crying. Same with Tura, but she hung onto it longer than most and if I close my eyes I can still see her on the set in the Mojave. What a woman.”
And she still is.
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