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Tura Satana
By Catherine WagleyPhoto Courtesy of: Tura Satana
“Look, I don’t know what your point is,” says a boyish Rock Hudson doppelganger, trying to keep cool in front of the vixen who terrorized his girlfriend and stole his stopwatch. “The point is of no return, and you’ve reached it,” Varla retorts. Minutes later, the young man’s neck is broken and Varla is heartlessly speeding across the desert in a chic Porsche.
Tura Satana had no idea she would become a cult film demigoddess when she auditioned for Russ Meyer’s 1965 thriller Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill! “I went over to my interview in a pink dress with pink gloves, a pink pillbox and flowers,” remembers Satana, her docile outfit the antithesis of the tight black pants and boots she would wear while wreaking havoc in Meyer’s film. Meyer told her to read Varla’s lines. “Do you want her played soft, hard or what?” Satana asked. “He said, ‘Read it the way you would.’” She did, and a captivated Meyer wouldn’t let her leave until she’d accepted the part.
The daughter of a contortionist and an ex-silent film actor, Satana has had the brazenness of a performer coursing through her veins since infancy. Born in Japan, she spent her childhood first in a World War II internment camp and later in a bigoted, rough-and-tumble Chicago neighborhood. When a group of men gang-raped her at age 9, she was irrationally punished for her attackers’ behavior and sent to a detention center. Her father helped her escape. “He took me out to Los Angeles and dropped me off there,” Satana remembers. She moved in with one of her father’s friends. “But he was a bit of a lech,” she says. “I kept finding him crawling into my bed, so I got out of there real quick.”
Barely a teenager, Satana found herself living in a boarding house and working as a dancer. She kept to herself, not wanting anyone to discover her age. But her no-holds-barred, collaged approach to dance—bringing Polynesian and Spanish dances, acrobatics, contortion and a slew of other seemingly unrelated moves together into one striking routine—quickly launched her to burlesque stardom. By the time she reached her 20s, she was a nightclub celebrity who had caught the eye of Hollywood directors.
Before taking the lead in Faster, Pussycat, Satana played a sleekly brash prostitute in Irma La Douce, the cushy 1963 Billy Wilder romance, and made a few fleeting television appearances. Even in bit roles, her screen presence was always that of a dauntless non-conformist.
No role channeled Satana’s natural audacity better than Varla, who was foul as Divine in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and agile as Angelina Jolie in Wanted. “She gave me an opportunity to let out a lot of anger that I had,” says Satana.
Satana and Meyer made a forceful team, precisely because they butted heads constantly. Meyer knew he needed Satana to make Faster, Pussycat a success, and Satana needed to call her own shots in order to feel at ease on the set. Before shooting began, Satana told Meyer that he’d have to change the script. “I said, ‘I don’t do nude scenes,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘But you’re a stripper.’ I said, ‘I do not do nude scenes on stage and I do not do nude scenes on screen.’” Her adamancy surprised Meyer, but he relented, settling for a shot of her bare back. It was a good move, since the absent nudity enhanced Varla’s invulnerability.
The headbutting continued off set. “Russ had this rule,” says Satana. “Under no circumstances are you allowed to have sex during filming. And I said, ‘Well, then I have to quit.’ He said ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘I cannot go one day without release.’ He said, ‘Where the hell are you gonna find release in the middle of the desert?’ I said, ‘That’s for me to know, you to find out. It won’t be with you.’” Meyer had to let her have her way. “He said, ‘Don’t you ever tell the other girls,’” Satana recalls. “But it didn’t make a difference. They all knew anyway.”
Faster, Pussycat was a filmic milestone in more ways than one: women were ruthless without being femmes fatales, violence was sexy without degenerating into an S&M extravaganza, and heroines had no need for heroes. But Varla’s exotic brutality, while liberating, cost Satana work—directors avoided her, fearing she would overpower costars.
She had two other leading roles—one in the now-infamous Attack of the Astro Zombies, in which her disinterested, almost irritated ruthlessness keeps the otherwise languid movie afloat, and another in the Charlie’s Angels forerunner Doll Squad—before calling it quits. She couldn’t make ends meet, and she left Hollywood in the 1970s, becoming a nurse and focusing on her family. “It was frustrating to me at first,” she says. “Then I said, ‘Whatever.’ You can’t fight fate.”
Now nearly 70, she has taken Faster, Pussycat’s growing cult following in stride, writing a memoir and making new film appearances. A figurine featured on her website embodies everything that makes Satana unforgettable: dressed in black leather with gloved fists clenched at her side, the figurine is intrepid, vigilant and ravishing, a woman who knows herself and knows when to pick a fight.