MoviesThey were the impossibly voluptuous screen sirens who turned Russ Meyer's B-movies into cult classics. Forty years later, they are as celebrated and as contentious as ever. Jessica Berens tracks down the dolls of the Valley

Buxomatically breastastic. That is how Russ Meyer used to describe Miss Kitten Natividad. His love. His Ultravixen. His girl with the gravity-defying giganzos. Miss Kitten. She always knew she wanted to go places - ever since she worked as a maid in a movie star's house and saw the pools and Warren Beatty and all those Hollywood things, she wanted to go places. The giganzos helped. She didn't have many other advantages. She was short, poor and Mexican, for a start. The eldest of nine, she did not speak English until she was nearly 10. Then her mother married an American and they all moved over the border.

She met Meyer when she was 27. She was stripping at the Classic Cat, a club on Sunset, and one of her friends was Shari Eubank who had starred in Supervixens. Meyer likes big tits, Shari said. He will like you. And he did. Kitten turned on the charm - she has a lot of charm, 25 years later, you can see that; she has a lot of charm, because she is kind and she laughs a lot. She wanted to be in a Meyer movie. It was 1975. He was quite well-known by then, having made 21 films and established himself as one of the most controversial film directors in America.

The Immoral Mr Teas, his 1959 comedy for unashamed adults, had enjoyed record-breaking box-office success and opened the way for a genre of saucy nudie flicks that were the precursors of porn as we know it. Mr Teas featured a man on a bicycle secretly enjoying the sight of various naked ladies. It owed a lot to Monsieur Hulot and it established Meyer's personal burlesque of pop-eyed men and Amazonian women. Lorna in 1964 and Vixen! in 1968, both seized by the police in various states, had ignited debates about censorship and made millions of dollars. This last fact did not go unnoticed at 20th Century Fox, who bankrolled Meyer to make Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Described, variously, as "insanely funny" and "completely repulsive," it was followed by Blacksnake!, a commercial failure starring Anouska Hempel as the whip-wielding Lady Susan Walker.

Hempel (now better known as Lady Weinberg, the owner of London's Blake's Hotel) joined the cast at a late stage when the original actress suffered a drug overdose. Hempel was not "buxomatic" and the failure of the film everywhere except Barbados, where it was made, confirmed Meyer's belief that acting ability must never take precedence over anatomical consideration. Supervixens had seen a return to formula and was a commercial success, reaping more than $17m on a $221,000 investment. There were some who thought that Meyer had "genuine comic vision" and there were some who thought he was a "Neanderthal hack."

Meyer was 53. He was rich thanks to years of making low-budget movies with enormous returns, and he was alone, having split from his third wife, actress Edy Williams. The romance had begun happily enough with Meyer filming Williams for a nude water-skiing scene, but had ended acrimoniously. She told the Hollywood Reporter that it was not going to be easy to move 134 bikinis out of their Beverly Hills mansion. He, meanwhile, told the Toronto Sun that she was a "thoroughly unpleasant person" who had married him to "further her own career." The exploiter had, apparently, been exploited. Tit for tat, in every meaning of the words.

So Kitten was stripping at the Classic Cat, and Shari Eubank was right. Meyer liked her tits. They were quite big because when she was 21 she had gone to Tijuana to get silicone implants. She had won Miss Nude Universe and wanted to do topless work, but her agent, Sparky, told her she must be bigger. Go to Tijuana, he said. It's legal there. So she did. It was not until she contracted cancer and her breasts were removed that they discovered the silicone used was industrial, not pharmaceutical.

Her tits were big, and then they got bigger, because Meyer paid for implants so that she could play Lola Langusta ("hotter than a Mexican's lunch!") in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens. So this was ironic. Meyer paid for the implants then, 25 years later, he helped to pay for the double mastectomy.

Kitten's husband George, a wig importer, encouraged her to be nice to Meyer, which was a mistake as it turned out because she left George and moved in with the director.

Even in the breastalicious world of Mr Russ Meyer, there were few actresses as willing to "go nood" as Miss Kitten Natividad. She was noodtastic. She had been raised a Catholic; the entire family were in the back seat of the car when she went on her first dates to LA drive-ins, but jeez was she uninhibited. Still is.

Meyer hired a dialect coach at $100 an hour to help her lose the Mexican accent that she hadn't minded that much anyway and made her the star in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, where she was all mouth and giganzos that looked as if they could leap clean off her body and order their own coffee to go.

After this she modelled for girlie magazines, became a name dancer in the strip clubs and developed an act, stolen from the burlesque queen Lili St Cyr, where she bathed in a giant glass of champagne to the tune of "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin. In 1981, she split from Meyer, married a mechanic and then separated from him in 1987. She appeared in films such as Thanks for the Mammaries, Fresh Tits of Bel Air and Zombie Ninja Gangbangers, and she danced at Sean Penn's bachelor party. Harry Dean Stanton was late for it. "Here," said Penn, shoving Stanton's face into her chest. "Look what you missed."

She lives alone now, Miss Kitten. She is 53. "I don't want to be taking care of men, making the dinner. It's just terrible! I feel like it's fun for a week, then, go and get our own meals, do your own laundry."

Her apartment is right down the bottom of Melrose Avenue, way into an Hispanic neighbourhood. There is her cat and her memorabilia. Nowadays, the money arrives from selling her porn videos, which she owns, and from telephone sex, for which she charges 30 bucks for 10 minutes. The telephone rings a lot. When I was there, a man rang her long-distance from London. There was a lot of ooh baby ooh. Big Boy.

"I have a metal cast of my fanny," she says. "It's really good. I just sold one to a doctor in Madrid. I only have two left. My God, I had 15. I must reorder some guy in the Valley made it."

The priorities have changed. Last year, she started going to Alcoholics Anonymous. When she talks about going to meetings, she does not mean with producers. "I drank everything. Beer, vodka, wine... If I got sick of them, I drank Jack Daniels. I would stay home, get a video, and pass out. The next morning, I would vomit and start the whole thing again. When I was nine months sober, I still wanted to drink. It was very difficult. Sometimes I had to pray.

"I stopped doing porn in my forties. I did it for 30 years. There are other things you can do. Anyway, I don't care if I don't have to do anything. I'm fine with my life. I have family and friends. I just want to take care of my health, take care of being sober, just be happy. That's a big enough job."

Kitten's relationship with Meyer was volatile and complicated, and, though she remembers fondly that he paid for her grandmother's false teeth ("She lived with us for a bit"), he was a perfectionist. "Picky about everything," as she puts it.

"People always say that he loves women, makes them the heroes," she says, "but it would make him look very bad if he had not. He was still using women's bodies - to make them the heroes was a way of covering his ass."

It is difficult, one might imagine, to be an ageing voluptuary. One minute you are big and busty and paid, the next you are middle-aged - all you have is your family, your personality and your inner strength, and boy do you need them.

The Ultravixens seem to have survived with their wit and wits intact. Lori Williams (a lead in 1966's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) is a happily married grandmother living in Brentwood. She went on to appear in Charlie's Angels and Beretta. "I wasn't always the hooker," she smiles. When she was 40, her agent kept sending her up for 20-year-old characters, so she stopped acting and went into real estate. "I was good at it," she says.

Haji, who appeared in several Meyer movies and subsequently worked backstage on others, lives happily (alone) in Malibu. She has had a nose job ("The doctor gave me a cute one even though I do not have a cute personality!") and her morale is intact. Asked how old she is, she says she does not know, but she knows that she is still attractive. "A lot of men like older women, they really do," she says. "Would I get a face-lift? If I came into a lot of money now, I probably would get one, but if I met an older man, I probably wouldn't." Times have changed, though. "Look at the talk shows!" she exclaims. "Jay Leno brings on these beautiful women, but their hair! They look as if they didn't wash it! Where is the beauty and glamour?"

Haji's own hair is dyed red and quite big, as are her breasts, which, she says, destroyed her posture because she was so embarrassed. Then she took up dancing, became a show-girl in Vegas, and enjoyed it. At the age of 16, she had an illegitimate daughter to support. She liked the night life. Her brother taught her how to do headlocks. She could look after herself.

She was one of Meyer's favourites, particularly memorable as Rosie, snarling and demonic in Faster Pussycat. She does not work as often as she used to, though she and Kitten and Raven De La Croix (who starred in Up!) were recently paid around $2,500 to appear in William Winckler's The Double D Avenger. Winkler, 36, a fan of Meyer, set out to make a homage. His plotline sees Kitten, in the lead, as a "super-stacked costumed crime fighter in booby battles of gigantic proportions."

Some remember their experiences as Meyer's cantilevered cartoons with more affection than others. Erica Gavin came to dislike her role as the busty bisexual temptress in Vixen!. The 1968 film came with the tag-line "Is she woman or animal?", grossed more than $15m on a $72,000 budget and caused more legal problems than any other Meyer movie. Gavin, disaffected by Hollywood, dropped out of sight for years until (now 51) she was tracked down by a fan, Siouxzan Perry, who offered to manage her and persuaded her to appear at conventions where, to Gavin's amazement, fans remembered who she was and where an autographed poster of Vixen! could be sold for hundreds of dollars.

"I do not think that Meyer was nice to work for," says Perry. "And I don't think he really likes women, judging from the way he treated some of the actresses and from the way that they are cast as evil in his films."

"He is," Haji observes, "a very odd man." Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, released in 1979, was Meyer's last film. Despite continuous criticism from women's organisations (which he tended to welcome as a useful promotional tool), his work has received many honourable accolades (including a retrospective at the National Film Theatre in 1983). He has even been called a "radical structuralist" and compared to Jean-Luc Godard. His films are easily available on video and, as they continue to circulate, so the "buxotic cohorts" of his vision have taken their place as revered deities among the bloodsucking freaks and vampire mermaids loved (and immortalised) by the B-movie brotherhood.

Respected director John Waters, in particular, assured them long-term cult credibility when, in his 1981 book Shock Value, he said that Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was the best film that had ever been made. Which brings us to a demented lesbian named Varla.

For every argument that can be made against Meyer (sexist, adolescent, vulgar, dated) there is one that can be made for his representation of women as having a sexual appetite and physical strength equal to men. The Vixens are rarely victims. They do not cower. They cavort. And they have a lot more simple sexual fun than anybody Candace Bushell ever created.

Varla has taken her place in the collective post-fem consciousness as a psycho go-go gang girl made enormous by Meyer's characteristic low angles. Varla, dressed in black, a demonic dyke in a fast car, uses her sexual charisma to fulfil her ghastly desires and, by so doing, has become an admired icon. An American band named themselves after Tura Satana, the actress who played her, and in New York night clubs there are theme nights in her honour.

Tura Satana is now 61 - a big woman with long, dyed black hair. She, like Lori Williams, is a proud grandmother. "I get fan letters from all over the world," she says. "It seems the older I get, the more popular I get."

Raised in Chicago, her father, a Filipino, worked on the railroad while her American mother performed in a circus. As a 10-year-old child, Satana was endowed with mesmerising Oriental beauty and a pair of 34C breasts that arrived far too early.

"There was always somebody coming up hands first who wanted to see if the bumps were mine or if they came with the sweater." The unwelcome attention did not stop there. At the age of 10, walking to the bakery, she was gang-raped by five men in an alley.

"The youngest was 17, the oldest 21. All Italian. They put me in the back of the car. I crawled home bleeding and my father went ballistic. Eventually they were arrested, but at that time you could buy a judge in Illinois," she says. "So they did, and I went to a juvenile detention centre for three years - they said I was enticing them. If it wasn't for my father, I would have hated men all my life. He sat down and he talked to me and he listened."

Over the next 10 years or so, Satana says, she tracked the rapists down and exerted her personal revenge. How? "Put it this way," she smiles. "They talk in high voices now."

She was married at the age of 13 to a friend of the family. "Mississippi was the only state that allowed it - we weren't in love, but we had been friends all our lives." Destined, then, to be different, Tura started dancing in nightclubs when she was 15. "I got the acrobatics from my mom," she says. "But learned the tassel twirling on my own... I still have the tassels. Most girls could wear them as bras."

So were the giganzos an advantage or a disadvantage, I wonder.

"In some ways, they have been an advantage because they helped me earn a living and support my children - they were an asset - but nine times out of 10, people couldn't tell what colour eyes I had."

She met Meyer in 1965 when she was 26. She was dancing at the Pink Pussycat, a strip joint in West Hollywood. Filming in the desert for four weeks, Tura bought her personal anger to Varla, as well as the martial arts which her father had taught her after she was raped. Varla is required to karate-chop various men to death. "Russ would always listen to my suggestions," she says. She subsequently starred in The Astro-Zombies, but she did not work with Meyer again. "I felt I had too much talent for the other films," she says. "They were just tits and ass."

Now she lives in Reno, a widow, but surrounded by a huge family. She works as a uniformed security woman at the local Hilton, wearing a badge and handcuffs. Like Varla, she can look after herself, particularly after her late husband Eddie, a former policeman, taught her how to use a gun. "I have a licence to carry a concealed weapon," she says. "And he gave me a .38 special for my birthday."

Satana remains one of the most famous of the Meyer icons, but she, like all the women involved in his work, receives no residuals from the sales of the films which still sell in high numbers all over the world, because she, like the others, accepted a flat fee.

"When you think what we could have made off Faster Pussycat, it's frightening," says Williams. "We were all dumb, and we all signed off. I was 20. I got $350 a week. I thought that was pretty good at the time."

Now 69, Russ Meyer is suffering from senile dementia. He lives in his house in Hollywood where he is attended by a caretaker, a secretary and various attornies who look after his business, Russ Meyer Films International Inc. He is ill, and he is isolated.

"It is very difficult to get to see him," says Haji. "And that is sad."

"His house used to be a museum full of memorabilia," says Kitten. "Then everything was taken down. He started writing obscenities on things and destroying them. Now he has a cardboard table and chair."

Meyer, always the auteur, controlled the production of most of his movies and reaped the financial benefits from them. He applied the same policy to the publication of his autobiography, A Clean Breast, which runs to three thick volumes and which he published himself. The price, £200, is prohibitive to loyal fans and unlikely to attract any new ones.

"I was told I was going to be given one," says Haji. "But I'm not going to hold my breath, you know?"

The man they called King Leer is not thought to have any family to whom to leave his strange kingdom, but Kitten insists he has an illegitimate son. "There is a picture of the mother in his book," she says. "The caption does not give her real name. But I remember him telling me that the kid looked like his [Meyer's] mother. So, somewhere out there, there is a legal heir."

The "breastman extraordinaire" used to answer his office telephone himself, but now he can't run his own show. His place in film history is assured; the arguments about whether he is an unsettling genius or inane pornographer will continue, but it is the goddesses that he created who breathe life into the legend. It is they who have the websites, who attend the conventions, sign the autographs, give the interviews. There is some money in these things, but not a lot. Russ Meyer Films International Inc holds control over most of the breastastic images. It is ironic that their efforts are not always encouraged by the businessmen who now run the director's affairs.

Tura Satana recently received a letter from Meyer's attornies informing her she could not sell the Faster Pussycat T-shirts. "That is not Russ," she says loyally. "He was always very generous to me." But Tura is Varla and without Varla the Meyer myth is minus one very important buxomatic babe. It is a very delicate balance and the Ultravixens are bristling.

"We love Russ," says Kitten. "He is sitting there waiting to be put in a box in the ground. This man has so much money! He could have had a great exit."

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