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I was walking home

when I noticed a car following me.

But I'd seen it in our neighborhood before,

so I didn't think anything of it.

The car caught up to me. There were five men inside.

They asked me a question.

As I started to answer, hands were suddenly grabbing

and pulling at me.

They dragged me into the back seat and the car took off.

They shoved a rag in my mouth

and pushed me to the floor under their feet.

I tried to fight back by kicking them.

That's when the first fist hit me.

I was seeing stars

when one of them put his hand up my shirt.

"Hey, these tits are real," he yelled out.

Another one told him to "Shut up."

They'd "all get a chance soon enough."

My blood went cold because I knew what was about to happen

and no way would I make it out of this alive.

I prayed to God, "Please let me die now,"

so I wouldn't feel anything.

But I don't think he was listening,

because I felt it all.

Those men wanted to hear this Japanese girl beg for mercy

but that's the one thing they weren't gonna get from me.

In fact, and little did they know,

they'd just created Varla.

♪ On a starry night

♪ In the velvet shine

♪ It vanishes before my very eyes ♪

♪ In the darkest hour

♪ You're the brightest star

♪ Don't fade to black or wash away in time ♪

♪ With a whisper and a kiss, I'd never dream ♪

♪ That you'd exist

♪ And in my heart I know you'll never die ♪

When I think about her, calculating out

as a 10-year-old little girl about what she was gonna do

to get her revenge, it's like such an incredible story

and a great story about how to turn things around.

There were so many things that were against me

when I first started out

that I either had to be a fighter

and work on getting everybody's respect

or I would've gone down under

and I wasn't gonna let that happen to me.

I got even... with all of them.

Superwomen, belted, buckled and booted.

For your own safety, see "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

In the histories of film and burlesque,

few women have been as iconic, controversial,

or impactful as Tura Satana.

I think women like her, men are scared of her,

but they think she's hot.

She kicked ass, she was a leader

and she was sexy and she was in control.

She could stare right through you, you know.

She had a personality that was overpowering

to a lot of people.

She and I had a contest going all the time,

who was the strongest.

And she always felt she was the strongest,

but I respected her.

She combines everything that's great about

that propulsive fifties rock and roll rebel thing

with a female element, and she's bodacious on top of it.

She was a fantastic feminist role model.

See, 'cause those early feminists pretended

they didn't have tits

so she was kind of the opposite of that.

The idea of the femme fatale character,

like look at Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct."

Tura set the stage for characters like that.

But you don't just snap your fingers

and become Tura Satana.

I think there was a lot you

didn't know about her.

Yeah, she did go like get her revenge

on these guys, right,

which is amazing.

You know, I wanted to think

that Tura Satana was out there killing men

when they pissed her off.

You know, I wanted to believe in that.

A mass majority of the people, they only know her

from the movie.

We who knew her, we had the opportunity

to see the other Tura.

If something that happened to her,

something she lived through,

something that she suffered through,

could help someone else,

she felt that would validate her existence,

why she was who she was.

She had this amazing, colorful,

and dangerous and tumultuous life,

and there's a lot of people

that don't have the courage to have that.

Tura may have started down

the road to revenge,

but ended up somewhere more powerful

than she could have ever imagined.

Tura Satana!

She was a good actress

and she was good at being a cult movie star,

and those two things, that's why she'll last.

Good. Let's get started.

Filmmaker Russ Meyer was ready

to try something new.

He was fresh off a string of big box office hits

and not the kind you see at the Oscars.

Meyer was king of the "nudie-cutie,"

movies with simple plot lines

and a ridiculous amount of frolicking, naked,

big breasted women.

Those movies were sexploitation movies

that were incredibly successful.

That's what they were.

Now, Meyer was shifting gears

from sex to violence.

His latest project, "The Leather Girls," featured a trio

of gorgeous go-go dancers who race, seduce

and murder their way through the Mojave Desert.

This was proudly lesbian with punk way before punk though.

This was a burlesque star killer lesbian.

Tura Satana was cast as Varla,

the karate-wielding Asian gang leader.

An actress and exotic dancer,

Tura seemed to be more than the perfect fit.

She was definitely exotic for her time.

You never saw a leading woman who looked like her.

It was certainly "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'"

and all that kind of stuff was suddenly new and sexy.

Tura came up with a look that became a classic.

She was just so larger than life and over the top.

Wow. Look at her.

So tall, statuesque with that black outfit she wore.

The tiny waist, the long black hair, the bangs.

Those bangs.

She had the Bettie Page bangs.

Those eyebrows.

The Kabuki style eyebrows.

Oh, what a woman. And then she wore the black gloves,

I loved it.

She didn't reference anything.

She came up with something completely new

and that's why it still lasts.

The idea of Tura Satana was, there was one girl

that could play the role.

I mean, it was tailor-made.

I mean, she had this monumental figure,

she was Oriental, and she knew karate.

Filming began, and the movie's title changed.

to "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

You're all that's left, lover,

and you ain't gonna be around for long.

I don't believe it.

You better believe it.

I was in high school when I saw it

and I saw it at the drive-in,

and I went back the next day and took Divine

and we went every night and saw it.

For like a week, we went every single night

and smoked pot and got high and watched the movie

and I became obsessed by it.

And that's how I first knew about Tura.

Tura was scary and people thought, whoa, who is this?

That film, I could never get tired of watching it.

The way that it's filmed in black and white

and her look as it translates into black and white is

so intense, such a powerful and enduring image.

She was probably a bad influence on me

because her shouting of every line, we imitated.

So in my early movies,

it's like, god, these people have to shout all the time.

Well, we have it, good, it's like sensurround, basically.

What the hell happened?

She damn near killed me, that's how.

Me, a cripple.

And what caused that? Her pushing you outta your chair

or nothing you did, of course.

I am tied to this chair for life.

Better you should be nailed to it.

She just let stuff pour out of her.

I mean, she was different.

I mean, she was really different.

When the cameras started to roll,

even Meyer was caught a little off guard.

I don't think it was a conscious thing,

I think it just exploded out of her.

No longer just a character in a script,

Varla tore from the page

with a vengeance no one saw coming.

What the others didn't know, Tura wasn't just playing Varla,

and this wasn't just acting for her.

In many ways, this had been her life.

In our day, men beat the fuck outta women.

No woman beat the fuck outta men. She did.

There was no acting job.

Tura was Varla, that's why the film worked.

Tura smashed every stereotype there was.

Her performance was so groundbreaking,

you can see its influence in the worlds

of film, music, art, and fashion to this day.

But more than that, people felt a connection to Tura.

They took her to heart.

There was something more there.

It resonated so much more deeply

than just an actress playing a crazy part.

And when you hear the whole story, you know, you can sort

of connect those dots.

It's almost as if

Tura had willed Varla into existence.

It was a role she'd been working on since she was nine.

While other girls were still playing with dolls,

Tura's life took a different turn.

Everything started in California.

My father was a sailor who dropped anchor

in the port of Los Angeles before the war

then landed work doing bit parts in Hollywood B movies.

That's where he met my mother.

They married when she was 15.

She was a dancer, a traveling circus performer

who traded her Capezios for a life slinging Gerbers

to four daughters and a son.

It was a choice she grappled with all her life,

something she always resented us for.

My mother was white. My father, Japanese-Filipino.

As a mixed race Asian American family,

we were considered the lowest of the low,

treated like we didn't exist.

Forget that my father had served

in the Navy during World War I,

defending the people who now called us slant eyes

and gave us so much trouble.

I guess it was easier to pick on us than think about

who we might really be.

The insecurities that our family felt,

especially her generation,

being part Asian was not accepted.

I'm sure my grandmother

and grandfather were considered outcasts.

December 7th, 1941,

a date which will live in infamy.

Evacuations.

More than a hundred thousand men, women and children,

all of Japanese ancestry, removed from their homes

to wartime communities

established in out of the way places,

bounded by a wire fence and guarded by military police.

All our money was taken.

Property my father owned was lost,

confiscated by the government.

I was raised in Chicago's Jane Addams housing projects

during the Second World War.

My family was relocated there

from the Manzanar internment camp.

The life we led was not a very nice one.

My father could pass as Filipino

and got a job with the railroad.

Still, no one wanted to fraternize with the enemy,

especially after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

And that really affected my mother.

She did crazy things to try to make us more Americanized

like taping our eyes open to give them less of a slant

and threatening me with plastic surgery.

She sought refuge inside Kingdom Hall,

joining the Jehovah's Witnesses when I was young.

They claimed to be sympathetic to our plight,

but as much as she felt the false aura of inclusion,

my father and I felt the same prejudice there

that we did on the street.

I don't remember there being that flow of love

with Mom that there was with Dad.

School was no different.

I loved learning new things every day

and wanted to be a singer when I grew up.

But as the only Asian girl in class,

it seemed like everyone, the other kids, even the grownups,

were blaming me for Pearl Harbor.

The harassment never stopped. I had no choice but to fight.

The circumstances she faced,

that she had to fight her way to school,

even, just going to grade school,

had to endure all sorts of mistreatment.

As a child, I never understood

why others, also poor and mistreated like us,

would never leave me or my family alone.

To them, we were the non-people.

As a mix-raced Asian American girl growing up

in Chicago where there were just no Asians at the time,

it must have been incredibly difficult.

There were posters that likened Japanese

to lice, to apes,

to maniacal, animalistic reductions.

There was no distinction between,

really, Japanese Americans

and Japanese in the minds of Americans.

People are very much identifying all Asian appearing faces

as the enemy.

None of my actions sat well with my mother

and I was the lightning rod for her unhappiness.

Her biggest fear in life was

that one of us kids would bring more embarrassment

to the family than we already had by just being who we were.

That fear manifested into a nightmare I would never escape.

She was very young but as it happens in our family,

when you're first starting to hit puberty

and first starting to turn from little girl to woman,

the breasts are the first thing to develop.

It happened to all of us.

Mom was very well endowed

and I think she was, what, 10,

9 or 10 at the time?

She was walking home from the store.

She had to go to the store to get something

for either my grandmother or my grandfather, can't remember,

and a group of guys drove by.

She got cornered.

They like backed up and got out of the car

and they took her to another location.

The car traveled through back alleys

and parked in a garage.

The men wasted no time tearing off my panties,

grabbing at my breasts.

The five of them, one on each leg, one on each arm,

holding her down spread eagle, while they took turns.

I'll never forget the pain

as the first one drove himself into me.

On seeing blood from my vagina,

he gloated to the others that he was my first.

All five took turns getting great pleasure

from brutally raping this 9-year-old.

During the time they held her,

They raped her repeatedly.

Yelling in my face

and calling me names like "slant eyes" the whole time.

Several of them beat her as well, you know,

to get her to comply because she put up a fight.

By the end, my blood was on all five of them,

and they couldn't have cared less.

They dumped me in an alley, hoping I would die.

Bruised and bleeding, I crawled

and stumbled the two miles home.

People saw me, but no one stopped

or even offered to help the slant-eyed girl.

I've never felt such hatred in my heart as I did then.

I wanted to kill them all.

There are no words

to describe the filth I felt within my soul and body.

I tried and tried to wash away the feeling,

but it never quite came out.

She told me about being raped at a very young age, and...

I get asked a lot in my personal life about,

well, why did I become a burlesque dancer?

Did something happen to me, you know?

There are little things

that maybe influenced me wanting to be someone

that I wasn't born, you know,

but when I think about Tura

and what she went through as a 10-year-old little girl,

that's like something you don't even hear

about happening now, really.

That's so, so intense

and like what she went through with her ethnicity,

ostracized for something that wasn't even your fault.

Pretty tough stuff.

The local police weren't too interested

in investigating a crime committed

against the only Asian family in the neighborhood.

When my grandparents took her to the police,

no one believed her.

They did not investigate it thoroughly.

When they did get brought in for questioning,

they made some excuse about,

you know, she was coming onto them and...

I think that they had no idea

that she was as young as she was.

- But it didn't stop 'em. - It didn't stop 'em.

Even when she tried to tell 'em.

The doctor took specimens,

but somewhere between the hospital

and the courtroom, they got lost.

During the trial, I learned that one

of them was from a wealthy family,

and they paid the judge a thousand dollars

for their acquittal.

A thousand dollars. That was the price of my virginity.

In the end, I was the one at fault and I was punished.

According to the court,

I had tempted those men into raping me.

She was the one that the family was embarrassed of.

She's the one that got sent to reform school

and none of the boys got charged.

It should never happen to a young girl,

and yet I can imagine it happening

because there's no concern on the parts

of these white affluent men

that they could get away with it,

because that's just the expectation

that no Asian is gonna fight back.

After the rape, my father was furious

and went looking for the men himself.

My mother was a different story.

She said I was unworthy of being a human.

She said I brought disgrace to her, my father

and the family name.

She told everyone.

Now, I had to put up with even more taunts at school

and at Kingdom Hall meetings where I could feel the lust

of the men in the room all over my body.

I believed in God, and now I wasn't allowed to worship him

because of what happened to me?

But those people were hypocrites.

Later, when I started making real money

as a dancer, they wanted that money,

but they still didn't want me.

I don't think our grandparents were prepared

to help her through that.

She had to learn to cope on her own.

Back in those days,

you certainly never talked about going to therapists.

My mom had no one to talk to.

I don't think she learned how to cope.

In fact, Tura didn't learn to cope.

Something snapped and there was no going back.

Tura invented a new story for her life,

one where she was in control

and would never be the victim again.

That was a strength that she made

to protect herself.

It was empowering for her to say

I'm never gonna let this happen again.

I'm gonna learn martial arts,

I'm gonna learn how to defend myself,

and I'm going to be fierce.

I made a promise to my father and myself.

I didn't know it at the time,

but that promise... was my destiny.

My mother wanted me out of the house.

She tried to marry me off at 13.

Needless to say, that didn't work out.

But I had a plan of my own.

I was born and raised in Calumet City, Illinois.

If you've never been, it's a real shithole, so don't go.

It's the original Sin City.

I mean, before there was Vegas,

Calumet City literally was called Sin City.

There was a main thoroughfare, State Street,

which back in the twenties when alcohol was illegal,

Al Capone opened up all of these speakeasys and brothels,

and there were titty bars and strip clubs,

and it was just this den of iniquity.

I was 15 when I copped a fake ID

and landed a job as a dice girl at a Cal City Club.

One night, a dancer called out sick.

The owner wanted me to perform in her place.

Singing, I inquired?

Tsk... Turns out the audience was more interested

in my chest than my vocal chords.

But it paid a hundred a week, so I said yes.

She was stripping at this bar called

Club Ron-Da-Voo,

and she stripped under the pseudonym Galatea,

which was the statue that came to life.

But dancing in Cal City was hard.

A far cry from the popular images of the time.

There is a lot of like misconception, I think about

what burlesque was.

There's movies about burlesque dancers like Gypsy Rose Lee

with Natalie Wood, and it always paints this glamorous thing

with the big lights and the flowers

and the champagne and the fur coats.

They weren't all Gypsy Rose Lee and Sally Rand.

Those were like the 2%.

Very few burlesque dancers

back then were actually celebrated.

You know, they were kind of looked down on

as like, you know, only a few steps up from prostitutes.

Burlesque, it was so nice and

everyone went to burlesque shows.

No, it was like dirty entertainment for men.

In those days, Burlesque was all about men,

which was what I loved.

Generally, this was like working in a strip club.

Even now, you've got people, you know, still looking down

on lap dancing and strippers

and you know, those girls are still kind of those girls.

Even now. If you can imagine what it might've been

for someone in the fifties...

Totally different.

Cal City ended when a club owner told me

to start turning tricks with the customers.

I said I was quitting.

"Oh yeah? The only way you leave here is

with a scarred face or in a pine box."

That was a mistake.

I knew Tony Accardo and he owed me a favor.

One call to Tony

and the club owner was shitting himself, giving me

weeks of severance pay,

and wishing me the best of luck in my new gig.

But I already knew this was gonna be hot.

New Orleans was a blast.

I danced under the name Devilon Satana at first.

It seemed appropriate

since I was going from one hellhole to another.

I went to shows, dated various guys and a few girls.

The Big Easy was Tura's launch pad.

Visiting Japanese dignitaries

unofficially named her Miss Japan Beautiful.

She took the tassel and ran with it, ratcheting her looks

and Asian heritage up to insane new proportions.

Embrace what's different about you and go with it.

Her playing up her Asian heritage, definitely.

I don't think anyone looked like her back then. No.

That was part of her game plan,

and it really worked really well for her.

For Tura, dancing led to a seismic shift

in the power dynamic between her and the men around her.

She was the one in control,

and she really relished that, having the men,

she would like 'em to be actually down on their knees

in front of her, you know.

She was the one with the reins.

She also met an agent who put her on the road

for $300 a week, about 3000 in today's money.

Not bad for a 15-year-old.

One of the things I love about old Hollywood

and burlesque, of course, is that

every single star was self-made.

No one handed it to you. That's why we still remember her.

Tura hit the road and never looked back.

She played cities everywhere.

She was in St. Louis, she was in Hawaii, she was in LA,

she was in Reno, she was in Vegas.

It seems like all my money went into costumes.

Most girls spend money on things to put on.

I spent thousands on things to take off.

It was 1958 or nine.

I went to the Silver Slipper.

This fantastic performer

dancing, swinging her hair around.

What she did, the gyrations, her body, her look,

I called my buddies who were rambling around

and I said, "Come on over, you gotta see this woman.

You gotta see her."

And anyway, that was of course, Tura Satana.

Tura also discovered

and perfected a very unique talent.

She could spin those things like this and like this

on her back.

Oh my god.

Was that like one

of your specialties, was spinning tassels?

When I was a dancer? Yeah.

You spin 'em in opposite directions?

Yes, and one at a time

and I used to lay flat on my back and spin one at a time.

- Stop it. - Wow.

- And change directions. - Whoo.

With the very adult life she was living,

it's easy to forget. She was still a teenage girl.

It was a hard life.

Her life started as an adult very young,

she was almost an adult.

So to me that was sad because you're still a child

but she had to grow up very fast.

Tura's choices were a double-edged sword

that kept her demons at bay,

but one day, they'd be back.

The press loved Miss Japan Beautiful.

Tura toyed with reporters, recalling details

of her life differently in each interview,

depending on her mood.

These wild stories helped to build her legend.

Her shots as a pinup didn't hurt, either.

Tura's adventures and temperament are legendary

in the burlesque world.

There were some bad girls that were in burlesque.

She was tough. She was very, very tough.

If somebody made a remark in the audience like,

"Hey Joe, did you watch the game last night?"

That's all she had to see you do is turn your head

and the party was over.

She'd be off that stage, whipping 'em

to death with them tassels, bam, bam, bam

and then they'd be slappin' him in the face and everything.

And of course the drummer's laughing. Ah-ha-ha-ha.

Oh, you think that's funny?

And then she'd run over to the drummer and take his sticks

and throw his sticks into the audience,

and then take her tassels and do 'em on the top hat.

When she was stripping, she didn't eat.

Her meal was just the bottle of whiskey.

And it would make her so mean

that if any guy was rude to her, she'd just jump off

of that stage and clobber him.

Being a stripper gives you anger against men

because they just can't stand looking

at those piggish men every day

like, uggh, you know.

She soon was able to read the intentions

of the males that were around her,

and very often it plain just ticked her off.

But it wasn't all fistfights.

I was on stage in Union City, New Jersey.

Wait, was I seeing things?

No. The theater's whole front row was filled

with tiny men. Little people.

Well, you know me. I had to find out what that was like.

I met them after the show

and asked if they liked Oriental food.

The smartest, a pro wrestler named Tiny Tim,

caught on right away.

"I love Oriental food, but you have to keep it close

because an hour later you're hungry again."

After dinner, we went back to my hotel.

I stepped into the shower,

surprised when Tim followed a moment later.

Without saying a word, he picked up the soap.

Mmm, the feeling of those tiny hands reaching up,

lathering my breasts.

He definitely proved the old adage, it's not the size

that counts, it's how you use it.

Some of you might say I was promiscuous,

but I took my joy where I could find it.

She was a very deeply sensitive person.

She wrote poetry.

She wrote a lot of her feelings

and things down.

She didn't necessarily share them with people.

One person Tura did open up

to was former silent movie star

and photographer Harold Lloyd.

Famous for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield,

and Bettie Page, Lloyd saw something in Tura

that everyone else had missed.

"The camera loves your face.

You should do something with that."

For the first time,

I thought I could do something really constructive

with my life.

Exactly the opposite of what I'd been told as a child.

Listening to him built up my confidence.

From that point on, I walked

around feeling good about myself.

I would not have accomplished half

of what I did were it not for him.

She was on the road a lot,

but she also had the best time of her life.

Like, you know how most guys have a girl in every port?

She pretty much had a guy in every port, or two or three.

I don't wanna use the word was a starfucker

but, I think she did pretty good in Hollywood.

I don't know if you believe in love at first sight,

but that's what I felt with Rod.

When Rod would call, I would be there.

David Janssen...

Oh, I forget, but there's a lot of them.

Mom said the largest one she ever dealt with

was Forrest Tucker, from F-Troop.

She said, "That man was hung."

Yeah, I've heard that story since I was little.

Can you tell why I am a little whacked right now?

She told me some stories about these guys,

but you know, it's X-rated.

Oh my god. He ate pussy like nobody's business.

But it was a late night chance encounter

that had the most impact. Not only for Tura,

but eventually the world

and millions of screaming girls.

For me, Elvis was my first true rock and roll

love, and he started the whole thing rolling.

To say author

Pamela Des Barres is a massive Elvis fan

would be an epic understatement.

Well, he's the fucking king.

There's no one that comes close to his importance.

I went to a party at my friend Ali Willis'.

She invited a lot of the Russ Meyer girls this night,

and my ex-husband, Michael Des Barres was already there

and I walked in and you know, hanging out with people

and I saw him talking to Tura, right?

And I didn't even know at this point

that she had slept with Elvis, right?

Elvis, I still wear the ring because she wore the ring.

Oh my God, I've gotta talk to her.

And at that same time,

there was a bunch of the girls there talking

about the guys they'd slept with, right?

I said, oh, I've gotta get in on this and I've gotta listen.

So I piped out a few names, Mick Jagger, whatever.

They were talking about, you know,

she's from an era a little earlier than mine, right?

So they were talking about Frank Sinatra.

She threw his name out there and I went, whoa. My god.

And then finally when she threw out the name Elvis,

everybody became silent.

There was a competition, really, trying to one-up each other

who they'd slept with, right?

And so that was that.

Okay, well, competition over. She slept with Elvis.

She met Elvis when he was nobody,

when he was just burgeoning, just coming into himself,

on the beach, walking down the beach,

and she didn't even know who he was at that point.

I was dancing on State Street

when Augie brought Elvis backstage.

I could have fallen through the floor.

It was the man I'd met on the beach.

"I really enjoyed your show.

Some of those moves, the shimmy, the high kicks.

Phew. Would you show those to me?"

"From what I understand, you can do the shimmy already,

at least with one leg.

Are you trying to turn on every girl in the audience?"

"Well, no ma'am.

I wanna learn them in case I'm ever lucky enough

to get close to you."

Elvis came to my show the next night.

I could feel the exact moment he walked into the theater.

I did the best show of my life, knowing he was there.

He was very entranced with her.

And of course, you know, I mean, she taught him everything.

I taught him how to kiss.

I taught him how to please a woman in many ways.

I know I taught him how to please me

and he got no complaints after me, so.

Allegedly, Elvis had proposed to Tura

and she allegedly turned him down.

I said to him, "I have

to ask you a question about a friend of mine, Tura."

He said "Tura, oh, she's a babe.

You know, I wanted to marry her."

And I said, "So why didn't you?

You're the king. You can do anything."

We were sitting in Grant's Park in Chicago,

and he got down on one knee.

He said, "Would you please marry me?"

I said, "Well, I'll think about it."

He loved her. He loved her.

He gave her this beautiful diamond ring.

She said, "I never would've married him."

First of all, she was a stripper.

They had this wonderful friendship

and they were friends up until he died,

and she was very upset about his drug use.

He would call her and ask her for advice.

He could talk to her like a real person

and she wasn't infatuated with him

or, "Elvis called me last night," it was never that.

It was never that.

Like, I taught you how to kiss.

Yeah, I taught you how to kiss. Don't forget it.

It's hard to explain to people.

I knew he and Mom had dated at one time.

I remember Elvis sitting there and saying to me

when I was a little girl, "You know, you were supposed

to be my little girl."

"Mom, what's he mean?"

There was a lot of people

that discredited Tura and the Elvis thing.

You know what? Fuck you.

I was there. My mother was there, yeah.

Although they never married,

Elvis refused to take back the ring, telling Tura

"You keep something of mine because you belong to me."

You know, it's funny how things happen

when you least expect them.

For the longest time, I blamed my mother for what happened.

But it wasn't her fault.

I thought I'd put it behind me,

but take it from me, revenge is sweet.

I had a gig in Chicago.

After work, I dropped into the all night diner.

I was ordering when he walked in.

I recognized him right away,

but I knew he didn't recognize me

because I wasn't this gangly Asian kid anymore.

I remembered this man fumbling and hurting me

as he was trying to rape me.

She remembered because of them raping her

so brutally and repeatedly.

She remembered all their names, all their faces.

He was the youngest one.

He thought I had the hots for him

because of the way I was staring at him.

"Hi, sweet thing, can I join you?"

"Sure. I love having company for dinner."

After we ate, I let him take me to the motel.

He expected sex in exchange for buying me my meal.

He started to reach for me, but I stopped him.

"Let me ask you. Have you ever raped anyone?"

"Of course not. I would never do that to a woman."

"How about a child?"

The man went pale.

Tura beat and tortured him all night, leaving him tied

to the bed at sunrise,

the words "child rapist" scrawled across his chest.

Over the next decade,

Tura tracked down all five of her rapists

and took revenge, permanently disfiguring them.

And who could blame her?

She was handing out long overdue justice, society

and the courts were unwilling to.

That is exactly a Quentin Tarantino movie, right?

I mean, that's what it is.

It's like, I'm gonna go find you and kill you.

To take, I don't know, 20 years, 10 years,

whatever it was, to look for them

and kick their fucking ass.

Hurt them, hurt them.

I don't think that was the way to do it

but we didn't have a choice in those days

but to be the vigilante.

There can never be justice for what was done to her

or what's done to other people who are victims

or survivors of sexual assault, let alone as children.

You know, there can never be enough justice.

She obviously deserved that revenge.

Hm-hmm.

If it gave her some sort of peace

and some sort of closure, then I'm glad she did it.

That was a core part of her then,

and she didn't feel right

until she got even with all of them.

A lot of people admire

that about your mother.

Oh yeah. I do too.

She definitely wanted children

and she tried very, very hard

to have the the babies she did.

What's it like having Tura Satana

as a mother?

That is a question we get a lot, isn't it?

- Yeah, all the time. - All the time, and...

When you consider normal,

you'd probably think "Happy Days," okay.

I never knew that lifestyle.

When Tura was in Hawaii,

Lani was very much a part of her life.

She had several months

where she was contracted there.

We spent a lot of time on the beach.

She'd be doing pyramids and back bends

and some really muscly guy's, you know, doing a handstand

on her tummy.

People would come and stare and applaud.

She would stand like with five or six guys

and then Lani would be on the top

and she was a little, little girl.

I was afraid of heights,

so I ended up having to be bribed with popsicles.

But there was a problem.

In those days, it was a big no-no

to have a child out of wedlock.

Lani's father was married and a big star.

I didn't wanna cause any trouble.

So I paid Kenny to be my husband in name only.

It lasted just long enough, then I was back on the road.

Hollywood was now home,

and Tura danced at hotspots like the Body Shop

and Pink Pussycat.

In the sixties, dancing was one of the few careers

that let women with enough moxie break

through the glass ceiling of a male dominated world.

I was a key punch operator

and I didn't make much money and it was boring.

You just key punch and look at the paper all day long

and your head would get like sizzle,

and I said, I can't do this the rest of my life.

Graduated from high school,

was gonna go to San Francisco State. Got a job

and it was kind of a corporate thing.

So one of my girlfriends

across from where I lived had a sister

that was kind of chubby

and she told me she was a bottomless dancer.

And one of the girls ran into my office

and said, "Oh my gosh, Angel, you're not gonna believe this.

There's an amateur strip contest down on Broadway."

She made $800 a week. And I said, I wanna do that.

I won. It was $100 bill, a crisp $100 bill.

And I was making $99

as a professional secretary every two weeks.

I said, this is the kind

of career stuff they should have taught you at school.

This is the kind of math I understand.

Goodbye, job. Hello, burlesque.

And I went and auditioned and I got the audition.

Not only did I get the job, I got the guy too.

A few of the GTOs stripped.

I just didn't want to.

It wasn't because I wasn't flashing my tits everywhere

because I was, but I really loved to go see them dance

and I never, you know, thought anything negatively about it.

That's for sure.

I'll be back in a minute with your tranquilizer.

Would you remain in your room please?

Well, you know, I will.

Don't I always mind you, dear?

In.

It was inevitable.

Tura made the leap from stage to screen.

Maybe it needs more feathers on the bottom.

You know, I think you're right.

I think that's exactly what it needs.

Hello, Fred?

This is what I call onsite inspection.

But racial and gender stereotypes

were everywhere, especially in Hollywood.

Tura was typically cast as a criminal,

stripper,

or... a criminal stripper.

We have the boy, Mr. Solo. Must we harm him?

At least it was a notch up

from playing hookers or Geishas.

In those days, no one wrote leading roles

for women like Tura.

The fact that she's an Asian American woman

that was able to get into pictures

and even do what she did is inconceivably significant.

Tura as a mixed race Asian woman,

it's really, really hard.

There were very, very few films

that even had Asians as side characters

and certainly almost none that had leads.

Nancy Kwan, who's also huge around the time of Tura,

kind of had a breakout role in "The World of Suzie Wong"

and she was a prostitute, right?

They're stereotypes, right?

The characters that they're portraying is

very much disempowered.

Tura was very much not about being dominated

by somebody else and so that totally goes

against the kind of Asian woman type in Hollywood.

I thought it was the old Japanese custom

for the servants to follow the master by Hari-Kari.

You've got the wrong century, Jack.

Good show.

Anything I can do for you?

No, thank you. Just browsing.

Billy Wilder saw me dancing

and cast me in "Irma La Douce."

I wasn't in the habit of sleeping

with people I worked with,

but for him I made an exception.

He was funny, charming, and gave Forrest Tucker a run

for his money in the cock department.

We have till Friday.

Can I go back up and get my stockings?

No, come on, come on.

He was married

and dating other girls from the film, but I didn't care.

I didn't wanna marry him. I just wanted to screw him.

By the 1960s,

Hollywood studios were in trouble.

With the advent of television

and society in a rapid state of change,

the rule book didn't apply anymore.

Unwilling to accept the shift in moviegoer taste,

studios stuck to old formulas

and lost their audience to a new era.

Yet at the same time, one genre of film continued

to thrill moviegoers

and earn boatloads of money for its producers.

Exploitation film, also known as drive-in

or grindhouse movies.

They called it exploitation

because we exploited everything there was to exploit.

I first saw exploitation movies,

I knew about them

because in Sunday school the nuns would tell us we'd go

to hell if we saw these movies

so I wrote down the titles.

It blew me away, you know,

that this kind of filmmaking existed.

Any time you're not with a major studio

and you're putting together your movies any

which way you can with or without money, it seems

to fall into the category of exploitation.

We used Peter Falk's house for Astro-Zombies

and part of my house for Astro-Zombies.

The car I drove was my car.

You know, I mean, low budget films are like that.

You have to use or improvise with whatever you have.

What was the difference?

One was way out on a limb

and the other ones were staying very safely under the tree.

It had nothing to do with a studio would ever release.

Tackling subject matter

Hollywood wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole,

exploitation film had become an important part

of America's cinema landscape.

Getting into theaters

against the multimillion dollar movies was tough

so you got into drive-ins.

The drive-ins would play movies that were not rated

by the Motion Picture Board.

Meet Sugar. She's beautiful, in chains,

and she's bustin' out.

Night... of the Living Dead.

There are several reasons

why drive-in theaters were so successful.

A full carload could go into a drive-in for a buck.

'Cause you could go watch 'em in your pajamas.

A lot of times you just went to drive-in movies to screw.

We don't have drive-ins any more, which drives me crazy

because I think we've lost something there

in the experience.

Kind of dangerous, kind of sexy, kind of exciting.

You were outside the grasp of proper society.

There is no new genre that is causing trouble,

that's illegal, that's getting busted and that kind of stuff,

which those films were.

There was a magic to it.

When I was in high school, I would go to the drive-in theater

and we would go to the Burlingame Four or the Redwood.

Those are the two main ones.

And they always had "Mudhoney," or one of those kind of

super-sexy Russ Meyer seventies ones.

Russ Meyer was

a former World War II combat photographer

who segued into shooting pinups

and some of the first Playboy centerfolds.

In 1959, he directed "The Immoral Mr. Teas,"

which was not only a huge hit,

but an important movie moment.

Teas was the first American wide release film

to show fully naked women on screen

since the adoption of the Hays Code in 1934.

People went crazy about tits in the fifties

and they still never got over it.

Overnight, Meyer became king

of the "nudie-cutie."

But it's one personality trait he's best remembered for.

Look at the waitresses.

Yeah?

I haven't seen four women like this together

outside of a Russ Meyer film.

He wasn't that into me.

My breasts weren't big enough for him.

By the time that I met him, he was really

into like this thing, you know?

That's why that movie called "Up!,"

that was the perfect title for Russ

'cause he was always looking up

at tits like they were about to smother you.

In 1965, Meyer found himself

in uncharted waters.

1965. You know, Varla,

there's nothing like it before.

For the first time,

a Hollywood leading role had been written for an Asian woman

that destroyed every racist stereotype there was.

A defining moment in cinema history.

It was a statement basically,

I think on Russ' part,

that females really didn't have to be weak and mild.

We were feminine even though we were

kicking butt [laughter], you know.

♪ If you want wild livin'

Ladies and gentlemen,

go, go for a wild, wild ride

with the Watusi cats.

But beware, the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.

For your own safety, see "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" of course starts off

with that incredible go-go girl sequence.

You get to know that these are go-go girls

who are also very quickly introduced

to us as race car drivers.

A bunch of things happen

where the women are trying to find this fortune

and it erupts into violence, anger, lesbianism,

and other sorts of seduction.

I don't want to give away the ending,

but, you know, it's a fantastic film.

My favorite is how that movie opens

when the guy's yelling, "Go, baby, go, go."

We always say that every time anyone dances, "Go, baby, go."

And it's just so great, it's so great.

♪ Go, baby, go

♪ Go, go, go

I love the one-liners in the movie.

Are you trying to say something?

I never try anything. I just do it.

You know, that's what I believe in,

seeing America first.

You won't find it down there, Columbus.

What did she say?

"You won't find it down there, Columbus,"

when the guy's looking down her blouse.

My name's Dennis Busch.

I played "The Vegetable" in "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

and it was a real experience.

Everybody had to cook, everybody had to do everything.

Was it Haji who said, they had a five person crew.

So that means there's no money at all

and you're, you know, there's no catering.

I like the idea of having things hard.

I don't like it to be easy.

I like to slog up a mountain and carry the camera myself.

I'm a militarist at heart. I like that kind of stuff.

As far as him being a director

and everything, everybody really admired him.

He didn't squander language whatsoever.

He just made it real simple.

You're gonna do this and you're gonna do it that way

and if it didn't go,

he just said, you're gonna do it again.

Now listen to me carefully. You're going to do this,

and you're gonna do it that way.

That was Russ.

He loved her. He always called her Satana.

Get over here, Satana.

We were always at swords points.

One thing that helped a lot

with Tura was that she made it clear,

I had a law always

that nobody could have, you know, exchange wondrous

body fluids during the course of production.

She was very sexual

and she liked to have sex whenever she wanted.

Nobody was gonna tell her that. It was her life.

She says, "I know you got a thing

about not having people get together."

She says, "I need it."

And I knew she had me by the balls

'cause I couldn't very well discharge her.

She made it very clear she wasn't gonna sleep with him,

but he says, "Well, where are you gonna find anybody out

in the desert?"

And she's like, "That's for me to worry about.

Not you. Just, you know, go do your thing."

And she did.

Russ was a funny guy.

I chose Gil, the assistant director, to be my lover.

After filming all day, I looked forward to a nice shower

and the feeling of his body next to mine.

A few nights into our rendezvous,

I realized someone was spying on us

and I caught a glimpse

of Russ ducking around the corner outside.

Mmm hmm... It was time for those little episodes to stop.

The next night, we dimmed the lights before we began.

Gil bounced around on the bed

and I groaned like he was pounding me through the wall.

In the midst of it, I slipped outside.

Sure enough, there was Russ, peeking in the window,

pants down at his ankles.

I snuck up and nailed him with a bucket of ice water.

The shock value was priceless.

He didn't come around after that.

What's the matter?

The watch, she won't give it back to me.

Let's have it.

You've got a weird sense of humor.

Try again. I get funnier.

This was an outlet for her.

A way to get all of this out of her, from being raped

to being sent to reform school,

to being made fun of when she was a kid, all of it.

She seemed to really be into it

as far as wanting to do her scenes correctly.

I mean, she really was a stickler at that.

Very intelligent, carried on a great conversation.

She was very mild.

You know, it's interesting how people read her.

What is she really like?

Is she really like that? Did she yell a lot like that?

She was quite a different person when you got to know her.

And when she wasn't on camera, she was just an ordinary gal.

That woman had a heart.

9-year-old Tura's promise

to herself had become her destiny.

She had become Varla.

Where would the road lead next?

Terror stalks the streets as

a scientist's human transplantation experiment

runs amuck.

"The Astro-Zombies."

When I started "The Astro-Zombies,"

I had done, you know, other things in between,

"Black Klansman" and some of those movies.

Noted Exploitation director

Ted V. Mikels was casting "The Astro-Zombies"

when he got an interesting call.

Her agent called and said, "Can we make an appointment

for an interview with Tura Satana?"

"Wow. Yeah, of course."

So Tura comes in and she's got black leather gloves on.

She looked just like she did in Faster Pussycat.

I said, "Wow, you came like that to the interview.

That's interesting."

She says, "Yeah," her words,

"I just punched out the principal of the school

'cause he was mistreating my kid."

That was what she said, I punched him out.

Yes, and don't you forget it. Now shut up and listen.

After I cast her in the movie and we worked together

and became, you know, close friends, she would get off work

as a dancer at 2:00 in the morning

and she'd come to my editing room,

which was in my studio office across from Paramount.

Of course, I'm working on the Moviola

and cutting the movie and so on.

I'd bring food

and we'd have a lunch about 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning.

We are aware of your experiments, doctor.

We know that you have succeeded in creating an Astro-Zombie.

How did you know that?

The recent murders, the news description of the suspect

and a tape of your lecture at the Astro Science Conference.

I absolutely loved and adored Ted.

He was like family, utterly and completely.

He wrote his scripts with her in mind.

The beautiful, voluptuous,

deadly, vicious Satana.

A woman who would stop at nothing

to gain control over the Astro-Zombies.

It was a special friendship and relationship.

She certainly loved him and respected him.

We had something that's rare and it wasn't the right time.

Things changed in my life and in hers,

but I kept closely in touch.

I don't think he ever got over being in love with her.

You really loved her.

Oh, I did.

In the late sixties,

Tura faced an unexpected turn.

She had an affair

with a very nice man named Tim O'Mara,

and I was conceived.

Mom was not having a good pregnancy.

She was having some difficulties

and I remember watching her come into the front room,

jumping up in the air,

and landing on her behind

so that she could try and cause herself a miscarriage.

I don't really believe Mom wanted to be a mom.

It was pretty apparent when we were young.

She liked her freedom too much

and it was okay with one,

but two was kind of too much.

Tura was kind of like at the point

of, I don't think I want kids.

I wanna do what I wanna do, and you've got kids.

So Lani ended up being mom to Jade.

She was never taught the things necessary

in order to be a

"hey, let's bake cookies" type of mom.

Jade and I became very self-sufficient.

We learned a lot very early,

but I don't blame my mother for that.

She is a product of what she grew up with

and the things that she didn't know.

If she spent time at home, it was like a treat

to be able to sit with her and watch TV

or just sit and be near her.

So when I was young, she was always on a pedestal.

It's kind of hard being the oops baby.

But you make do.

Despite her prenatal misgivings,

Tura gave Jade a normal and loving childhood.

Well, as normal as it could be if you're Tura Satana.

Our mom loved to give, very generous heart and spirit.

It was not unusual for people to come hang at our house.

I would come home from elementary school

and Tony Curtis was in our living room

and he spent hours teasing me saying,

"I'm not Tony Curtis, I'm Bernard Schwartz,"

which of course is his real name.

We went to George Lucas's house,

and that was long before his "Star Wars" days.

Those were the people

that, they weren't in her life regularly per se,

but came in and out as old friends.

Her joy was being on stage. Her joy was making movies.

Her joy was dancing and being out and on the road

and kids don't fit in.

I mean, she loved 'em, my god, but it was this choice.

You can't do both.

The world of burlesque was changing.

The orchestras were gone. The topless era had begun.

Tura and Haji never wanted to go nude.

When the club went naked, all those girls stopped working.

What if we have these girls drink with the customers

and sit with them, then we make even more money.

What if, we better put a brass pole up

because the girls need something to hold onto

because they're drinking too much.

I mean, you got one leg on the East Coast,

one leg on the West Coast,

and the wife is sitting right there?

I don't think so.

So Mom turned away from all of that.

She actually got a job as a police dispatcher.

She did act in one more film for Ted Mikels,

"The Doll Squad,"

widely considered to be the inspiration

for "Charlie's Angels."

We invited Aaron Spelling to my screening

at 20th Century Fox

and it was actually Tura that invited him [laughter].

Tura finally stopped running,

and it wasn't long before her demons caught up.

I don't recall a lot about John.

I just knew as a little kid that I did not like him.

She had just lost her father who she was very close with.

She let herself be more vulnerable to him

than she normally allowed herself.

He was very jealous.

He didn't like people looking at her.

He didn't like the entertainment world.

He chipped away at her a little bit at a time.

He wanted her to be a more traditional type woman.

That husband, ugh.

She did everything to make him happy.

He made her get rid of all her costumes and pictures.

He says, "That's the past. Give it up."

So then Russ, he says, "I don't wanna be dealing

with some cuckold,"

so he never asked her to do another film, unfortunately.

With no creative outlet,

the effect was devastating.

It was a very bad situation.

It hit her really hard.

She almost became suicidal.

When Jade was a baby, my mom got very angry

and I grabbed Jade up and held onto her

and I turned so that Mom couldn't hit Jade.

I just let her hit on me

because she needed to get that anger out.

I quite honestly

believe my mom was a very undiagnosed bipolar.

That doesn't make her a bad person.

It just means she needed some help

that she didn't know she needed.

Tura was in a spin

and headed for the wall fast,

but no one thought it would end like this.

I remember coming home

and, "Your mom was taken to the hospital."

"What happened to your mom?"

All the neighbors are coming over.

I'm like, "I don't know."

Turns out she was shot in the stomach.

Now, the story that I was told

when I was young was that he shot her

and that it was covered up because he was a cop, you know,

and then there's always been whispers

that she did it herself

in front of him to make him pay for breaking up with her.

I don't know what the truth is. Only Mom and John know that.

For as beautiful and intelligent

and strong as our mother was,

there was a little insecure girl inside of her

always seeking approval.

She wanted the men in her life to fill a void for her.

Unfortunately, I don't really know any of 'em

that were able to.

Tura had survived again.

It wasn't long before the usual hijinks resumed.

Maybe nine or 10 years old, we were invited over

for dinner to Russ's house

and I'm wandering the house, kind of just like looking

at all the artwork and the things he had hanging

on the walls from his different movies and stuff.

And I made the mistake

of actually kinda looking in the bedroom.

Russ was very proud of his man parts

and there was lots of pictures of them on the walls.

I was a kid, I was traumatized. I'd never seen one before.

Wait a minute.

The first time you saw a penis,

it was a picture of Russ Meyer's?

On his wall [laughter].

The only negative I ever heard about the movie

during the course of the whole movie was from Russ Meyer

and he said, "I don't know what we've got here.

I'm really not sure of this."

I hated it. Hated it.

I was this kind of right on feminist.

I was, you know, very judgmental,

very sure of my stance.

Russ Meyer was just this leering exploitative director

who wanted to kind of make this movie to sell to guys

who wanted to jerk off.

Faster Pussycat was not a hit

when it came out, compared to his other movies

because there wasn't enough nudity in it actually.

It was marketed well,

but when the audiences saw it, they were just mad

because there wasn't any tits, that's all.

That's what you came to see Russ Meyer for.

You didn't come 'cause it was a good story.

You came to see gigantic tits.

It went into obscurity. I mean, it just disappeared.

Living in Reno,

Tura did her best to lead a quiet, normal life.

Little did she know a tsunami was brewing beneath her.

In business news,

the video cassette recorder is one

of the hottest products on the market.

Home videos have become the latest craze

in America, as indicated by the growing number

of video stores.

Every month now,

one million video cassette recorders are whisked

off the store shelves.

They are a wonderful piece of equipment.

You bet.

Home video was the holy grail for movie buffs,

especially in cult and exploitation films.

I found these other worlds through movies,

you know, through VHS tapes really.

So I remember I had like a weekend with my friends.

We watched Faster Pussycat and Beyond the Valley of Dolls.

And of course,

she's the strongest character in this film.

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" was named

as John's favorite movie.

He called it the best movie ever made

and the best movie that would probably ever be made.

I used to show it at my birthday parties.

I used to show it at Christmas.

I always showed that movie and it never disappoints anybody.

I've never met somebody that saw Faster Pussycat

and didn't like it.

I think you've seen a million pictures come off the back

of this, obviously, movies like "Thelma and Louise."

I love to write noir.

"Ringer" was a noir and Sarah Michelle played twins,

one good, one bad.

And there's no question that the role

that Tura played informed the characters that I write.

She played the ultimate femme fatale.

A whole new audience was discovering Tura.

This time around, they got it.

Suddenly I found myself seeing Faster Pussycat again

and going nuts for it.

What happened in those 30 years in between?

She was 30 years ahead of her time.

Some people said that "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

was an ode to female violence,

but I thought it was an ode to female empowerment.

She was out there kicking some butt and looking great,

proud of her tits and everything, I loved it.

When punk came along, when I was a teenager

Faster Pussycat was completely included in that.

It's got fast cars and dudes getting killed

and all the things that made punk awesome

as opposed to a bunch of white guys telling you

what was what.

It's just now.

It's just this moment of female rage

and empowerment and sexuality.

She knew it was going to be groundbreaking

for some people.

Isn't it amazing?

All the movies that Russ did, the soft porn,

all of that stuff he did,

and his only straight movie is what he's famous for.

At first, Tura wasn't even aware

her career was rebounding.

For a while she tried to teach me how to crochet

or she just let me watch her crochet.

You have like a regular private life now.

You're out of the mainstream.

She started to get reach-ins from people

that she had no idea she affected.

Tura, I don't think, knew what impact she had.

It was early days for Facebook

and I'd connected with Tura

and I started the first fan page on Facebook for her.

I was surprised.

I really was surprised when I found out

there was so much response to the film

when it got rereleased.

I'm just stunned, you know.

I thought, you know, the thing was old and dead and buried.

You know, it's 30 years ago.

Resurrecting Varla was the last thing

on her mind.

But Varla kept calling.

Tura's comeback looked like a sure thing,

but sometimes old habits die hard.

Tura had an accident.

A pickup truck come in and banged right

into the side of her, cracked her back and ribs

and really messed her up.

Her back was partially made immobile,

and that's when she did get married.

I remember her being carried by the husband out

of her wheelchair and to go up some steps

and then back in the wheelchair.

Ed was a wonderful man,

but just like Johnny, kind of did the same thing with Mom.

What happened in the past was great, but, you know,

and that was part of your past.

Right.

He never acknowledged her career,

didn't want to know from it, didn't wanna watch her movies,

but she, you know, she stuck with that.

She just adored him.

They weren't together that long before he died.

Tura's mother also passed.

For the second time in her life,

Tura found herself alone in a new world.

She had but one choice.

Our guest tonight has left a lasting impression

on everyone whoever saw her kick butt

in Russ Meyer's masterpiece "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Here's the fabulous Tura Satana.

It was like a butterfly happened.

It was perfectly timed, absolutely perfectly timed

for her to wanna do this again.

It just all fused and she just rocketed.

♪ Dusted off

♪ Shake the world one more time ♪

♪ You're the only one they couldn't stop ♪

♪ Kill the lights

♪ Check the mirrors behind

♪ The checkered flag

We have a clip of "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

It stars a lady, incredible lady, Tura Satana.

No one else could have done the job.

Yeah, she's amazing.

Spectacular lady.

I got a call in my office from my son.

He said, "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" is

all over Seattle.

I said, "What are you talking about?"

He says, "Your name's on a marquee right here.

I'm standing by it."

And I thought, my god, you know,

this movie is really making headlines.

We couldn't keep up with it. We could not keep up with it.

It was a constant flow of being asked

to do this show or that show.

Pent-up fan energy was exploding,

including in the LGBTQ community

who had embraced her as an icon.

Please give your big, warm, Seattle welcome

for Tura Satana [cheering].

♪ Tura

♪ Shine on

♪ Shooting through the stars

♪ Tura

♪ Shine on

♪ Forever, where you are

♪ Shooting through the stars

♪ I never try anything, I just do it ♪

♪ You have to please me...

I'm Rob Zombie. Welcome to TCM Underground.

Tonight we feature two Russ Meyer classics,

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" and "Mudhoney."

I was out on the lake with my dogs

and my cell phone rang and it was Rob Zombie.

Hey Squirrel, do I look like I wanna talk to you?

I ain't here to talk.

I'm here for the all American ass party.

TCM and all that stuff, no one could imagine

that was gonna happen.

Any plans to return to any movie stuff?

Well, I have had several offers

and I'm just gonna start reading some scripts

and see if maybe I wanna get back into it.

Hi, I'm Tura Satana.

Me, some Pussycats and the Dolls have just completed a film.

The name of the film is "Sugar Boxx."

You ought to check it out.

But if you don't, I'm gonna come out there

and I'm gonna kick the living shit out of you.

And, you know, I won't try it.

I'll just

do it.

Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

"Sugar Boxx" and don't you forget it.

We did a burlesque show in downtown LA

at one of the old theaters.

We needed to go in the front to sign the pictures.

It was like having Elvis.

I didn't, we were not prepared for what happened.

She got completely mobbed by fans.

People were reaching. It was that kind of crazy.

We were doing our show

at the Bridge Theater in San Francisco.

The line was quite long.

Everyone wanted to meet Tura

and there was some sort of kerfuffle and screaming.

And you know, Tura was up at the front

and I was there as Peaches with Tura

and someone who, you know, worked for me ran over

and said, "Oh my god, oh my god!

There's a man having a heart attack."

You know, and I said, "Call 911."

They said, "Yeah, he's having a heart attack.

His husband is terrified he's gonna die."

I said, "Call 911."

And then they say, "He's refusing to leave.

He's refusing to leave until he meets Tura."

So sure enough, man having a heart attack gets brought

to the front of the line.

You know, he's like holding himself, meets Tura,

as the ambulance is showing up, paramedics are showing up,

takes a photo with Tura while having a heart attack

and then gets, you know, taken away in an ambulance.

That is the kind of fan Tura Satana had.

She was really nice to everybody

and really great and funny and smart.

After the movie was out and it was suddenly a midnight hit

and all the hipsters knew about her

and I'd see a picture of her today when she looked happy.

To see her like that was touching and wonderful.

My role models were women like Tura.

If you didn't know very much about what they did,

it could be like, oh, well she's just a stripper,

or she just did this movie with this car and had big boobs.

You know, like, you could just say that

but, they're the ones that we'll remember.

By now, many were aware

of Tura's childhood trauma and tumultuous life.

I've met fans that have gone up to her

and have been crying and said

"You don't know what you've done for me.

You've changed my life.

You've made me see that I'm okay."

She loved hearing

stories from fans.

Yeah.

Because of you I was empowered to do this

or you know, I escaped this abusive relationship

because I saw your movie

or I saw you in an interview or whatever

and I think that all really gave her a lot of meaning

that she craved, you know?

But how's the saying go?

Even the fastest pussycats only have nine lives.

You know, her illness came real fast on.

She seemed to be doing okay.

When we were at that film festival in Cleveland,

she was fine.

Can you grab my purse?

Yeah.

Hi there.

She had problems that were undiagnosed.

Back issues from the old car accident that she had

and that was flaring up

to where it was painful for her to do things.

But she still so much wanted to meet with fans

that she would still go to the shows.

She would get cortisone shots in her back

so that she could at least travel and meet the fans.

She was also having a lot of heart issues.

It's supposed to keep my heart from stopping.

Why, does it stop often?

But it won't anymore?

Well, supposedly no.

She just would not listen to doctors.

She wouldn't do what she was told.

She was a horrible patient. That was her demise.

She just kept going and kept going.

And I knew she was too sick to do most

of the things she was doing, but she would not stop

until she was hospitalized.

Hi, Girlwerks Media.

This is one of your clients.

I just thought I'd give you a call.

I am in Renown Hospital right now

because of a falling

and you don't need to know all this crap, but

I am and will be here for next at least couple of days.

I've already been here for three days,

so I'll talk to you later.

Bye for now. Bye.

We kind of knew that she was on her way out.

We just didn't know when.

Mom was in the hospital, she was not conscious.

They did not have her on life support at that time.

Her body's shutting down,

but I don't think her spirit wanted to leave in front of us.

She wouldn't have wanted us in there like crying and pacing.

She wanted us to live our lives.

I went to martial arts class that night.

I went from the hospital to martial arts class

and then back to the hospital.

On my way back to the hospital, the nurses called

and said she was gone.

We went into the room where her body was

and we all said goodbye.

And pretty much,

we had to leave her.

There was no staying there, you know,

because she wasn't there.

It's hard to explain,

but what made her, her, wasn't in that room any more.

So we just said goodbye.

♪ Oh my love

♪ It's not time for us to say our farewell ♪

♪ Not to deny ourselves from ourselves ♪

♪ You are

♪ The drug in my veins

♪ And I'm waiting

♪ To feel it again

Tura's was a complex life.

For all that is known about her,

much remains shrouded in mystery.

During the making of this film, revelations surfaced

that give us deeper insight into who Tura was,

but also conjure up more questions.

She believed that Tony Bennett was Lani's dad.

When my mother came home to Chicago to have me,

Tony Bennett showed up.

It was the early nineties.

Tony Bennett was playing in Reno.

Mom called him up

and we were in the show that night, backstage.

He actually said "Kalani," when he saw me

and I'm like, "No, that's my sister."

He and Mom were sitting next together

on a couch, you know, in the dressing room

and they were just kind of holding hands

and talking, you know, having their little reminiscence.

Very soft spoken and very loving,

what a sweetheart of a man.

I had no reason to believe otherwise

because that's what my mother told me.

I decided to send in my DNA.

When I got my results,

there did not indicate any Italian.

My dad was Marty Allen, the comedian.

Marty Allen, a popular comedian who opened

for Tony Bennett and played the same venues

as Tura in the fifties and sixties.

She always did like a good laugh.

Asian, Asian-ish, you can't quite put your finger on it.

You couldn't really identify what she was,

and she was mysterious, I think because of that.

Tura spent her whole life living

as an Asian American Japanese woman.

She'd been Miss Japan Beautiful since 15.

But new DNA tests showed Tura

to be Filipino and Chinese, not Japanese.

It was really shocking.

You start questioning everything

you know about yourself.

Why would Tura identify herself as Japanese?

She always knew her ethnicity,

but she held onto her persona.

That was part of her image.

It was part of the appeal.

People found a Japanese beauty

with large breasts to be very attractive.

For Tura to be able

to take something like objectification, fetitization

and use it in a way where she was more in control.

We had just defeated them in World War II.

There was a shame associated

with what the Japanese had gone through.

She had been that for so long, she chose to be Japanese.

But was that a choice she made

or an identity slapped on her from childhood

by a society looking for scapegoats

or cowardly men wishing to harm her

as misguided payback for the war.

Why not turn the tables and use it to her advantage?

These terrible things could have happened to her

and she could have just like, you know,

just quietly gone away and submitted.

Or, the contrary,

which is she just like, threw herself into life.

Larger than life,

strong and capable and dangerous.

It's not over.

Her influence is living on right now.

Tura turned her biggest tragedies into a power

that transcended revenge, touched lives,

and created a legend that lives on.

I don't see it dying down anytime soon.

In fact, I see it more and more and more around the world.

Just respect for Tura Satana.

I think she'll be remembered forever.

I think it's very important

that women do keep their integrity, their stamina,

their, their ability to show everybody that they can do it.

They don't need anybody else. They can do it on their own.

And as long as I can show women to do that, I feel

that I've accomplished something.

♪ If you want, wild living fast and ♪

♪ If you want to end up giving your all ♪

♪ That's because pussycat, she's living reckless ♪

♪ Pussycat, she's riding high

♪ If you think that you can tame her, well ♪

♪ Just you try

♪ It's sad, she doesn't see

♪ What's wrong from right

♪ She's running fast

♪ And free, child of the night

♪ In her life will be no time for love ♪

♪ You'll never take her, make up your mind ♪

♪ You will find

♪ Pussycat, she's living reckless ♪

♪ Pussycat, she's riding high

♪ If you think that you can tame her, well ♪

♪ Just you try

♪ Just you try

♪ Come on and try

♪ Come on and try

♪ Come on and try

♪ Livin' with my eyes closed

♪ Goin' day to day

♪ I never knew the difference

♪ I never cared either way

♪ Lookin' for a reason

♪ Searchin' for a sign

♪ Reachin' out with both hands

♪ I gotta feel the kick inside

♪ All fired up, now I believe there comes a time ♪

♪ All fired up, when everything just falls in line ♪

♪ All fired up, we live and learn from our mistakes ♪

♪ All fired up, the deepest cuts are healed by faith ♪

♪ And I believe there comes a time ♪

♪ When everything just falls in line ♪

♪ We live and learn from our mistakes ♪

♪ The deepest cuts are healed by faith ♪

♪ Now I believe there comes a time ♪

♪ When everything just falls in line ♪

♪ We live and learn from our mistakes ♪

♪ The deepest cuts are...