I am no expert. I’m not a bra-fitter, plastic surgeon or professional photographer of glamour models. I don’t work in a strip club or make blue films.
But now here I was. Standing in front of a woman whose breasts had helped her become among the first adult film industry Hall of Famers. She had many other talents too.
I had first seen the famous Francesca “Kitten” Natividad’s glory guns many years ago, on film, as an impressionable teenager, when I had managed to hire one of the movies in which she starred in the 1970s.
I was probably about 14 and had started to delve into the world of b-grade/exploitation films — Ted V Mikels, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, and the rest. It was the filmic dimension to my tentative foray into the world of punk and garage rock: bands like The Cramps went hand on tit with Russ Meyer films. The two were a natural fit.
For those who don’t know: Meyer was one of the great auteurs of Hollywood’s shadow film industry. A WW2 US Army veteran, he was a handy photographer fixated on cannons of the flesh, who moved into the business of movie-making in the 1950s and became, in the ’60s and ’70s, one of the premium smut peddlers of his time. He inhabited the LA fringe, the twilight world full of kooks and wannabes, freaks and geeks, the people who make Hollywood move in all sorts of mysterious ways.
He made sexploitation films, soft porn, and bowed out professionally just as the ice age of video began to suck the blood from the form’s throbbing vein, as pornography started its cock-first descent into the new hardcore digital age.
Compared to the depravity readily available online these days, Meyer’s films were Doris Day romps — but with far bigger tits.
In his biography of Meyer, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, Jimmy McDonough describes Kitten, one of Meyer’s biggest stars, like this: “Everybody loves Kitten. She’s got a big heart, a big temper, and of course, mythic mammaries.”
For a pimply teen, looking at Kitten’s breasts in a film like Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens was like a peephole into a magical fantasy land. Remember, this was a time before the internet, when department store catalog models wearing lacy bras was the only thing a suburban kid could get sometimes in the way of visual aid.
There was no PornHub, X-Videos or whatever other internet portal you may favour to get your fill of midget albino Brazilian housewives in camel toe pedal pushers — if that’s your thing. You would cling tenaciously to whatever smut you could beg, borrow or steal; your porn stash carefully cultivated, curated and hidden from prying hands and eyes.
Around the same time as hiring that Meyer film from my local video store, I had somehow come across an exploitation film magazine packed with photos of Meyer’s big bosom babes: Kitten, of course; the mesmerising Tura Satana; ultra-fraulein Uschi Digard; and the exotic Haji, who died only recently.
These women were more than just your run-of-the-mill Playmate of the Month material. They were women from another planet.
More than two decades on from my teenage dalliance with the wild women of Russ Meyer, I too was now on another planet. La-La Land. The City of Angels. Hollywood Babylon. Hollyweird.
I was here for five days, for pretty much the sole purpose of seeing the band Steely Dan on four of those five nights. But that’s another story.
We had stopped at Noah’s New York Bagel’s on the corner of Beverley and North Larchmont in North Central. We had criss-crossed our way across greater LA in our rental car, sticking to the gritty but picturesque boulevards rather than cruising the drab freeways — a mistake too many tourists make.
You always entertain the idea of running into a celebrity when you’re in LA. On this trip, the closest we had come was trading late night quips with the Asian guy from Mad TV in Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Boulevard. Nice guy. But I thought my funny impressed the cute waitress more. Cut-throat world, showbiz.
We didn’t expect to run into anyone famous in this unassuming bagel store. It seemed like a regular local hang: teenage girls drinking frappuccinos; older women drinking caw-fee and chowing down on donuts; schleps like us being schleppy.
A couple of women sat down at our communal table and, being friendly types, we struck up conversation. Before long, talk turned to what it was like to live in LA and what it was like to live in this neighbourhood.
The old Paramount Studios lot was just up the road, and a lot of the houses in the area had been built in the ’50s to house the army of studio workers, the regular folk who oiled the wheels and cranked the cogs that ensured the big studios ticked. It was an “industry” area.
Get to know LA well enough and you quickly learn that almost every location is at the very least a footnote in film history. For example, our hospitable Angeleno friends in the bagel shop told us the apartment block in which they lived was once the summer residence of the writer Jack London, as well as home to a photographer who took a famed series of shots of James Dean.
The lane behind the block was even used for those famous Keystone Cops chases — not that many people under the age of 40 would even know what a Keystone Cop is.
But then came the clincher.
“And our landlord is this unbelievable woman, whose name is Kitten, who used to be in these sexploitation films made by this guy, Russ Meyer…”
Stop right there. You are talking about the actual Kitten Natividad?
“You’ve heard of her?”
I stopped short of saying I’d been intimate.
Within a minute or two, our Angeleno friend had called her landlord, Kitten, and arranged for us to pay a visit. A five minute drive later and we were in Kitten Natividad’s nifty courtyard, sitting at a table with a couple of other guests — actual friends, not just bagel shop interlopers — and eating pizza.
We were polite and asked a few questions about the old days, but we were in the presence of a Hollywood legend, someone who had come out of the old burlesque strip joints and made her way into the movies and had even ended up making a few hardcore type things in the ’80s — a real adult film industry icon.
We ate our pizza, posed for some happy snaps and got ourselves some signed glossies, in true Hollywood fashion. Kitten still exuded a very strong sexual allure at the age of 60 or so. It was no doubt there when she started her career as a teenage stripper and would likely be with her to her last day.
Our trip to LA was now complete. We had met a true legend of the big screen. Not someone hokey or lame either. We could now proudly tell our friends, family, children and future grandchildren that we ate pizza with Kitten Natividad.
Thanks for the mammaries.