Seventy-Six Inches of Bazoomas - The Chesty Morgan Story

by Bart Bull
"Just minutes away from showtime!” the deejay at Fantasy World announces. “We’re only minutes away from Miss Chesty Morgan and her monstrous 76-inch mountains."

We’ve been just minutes away from Miss Chesty Morgan for about two hours now, but this time the deejay happens to be telling the truth. In the meantime, he’s got a question he wants to ask. “Is thisapartyheretonightorwhat?”
Her first appearance is from the floor by the side of the stage. She’s wearing a green-and-silver-spangled gown and an immense matching sunhat, and she strolls the audience slowly, silently, her face set in ethereal abstraction. “Tits!” screams a fan. “Show us your tits!” She strolls on, silent all the while, then goes to the stage. Stepping lightly forward, stepping lightly back, stepping stage left to stage right and back again, she walks with the concentration of someone balancing a beer bottle on her head. When she takes off a piece of her gown and reveals an even more generous portion of herself, the nightclub crowd goes wild.

“Can you believe those bazoomas?”asks the deejay. “TITS!” screams a fan.

She steps forward, she steps back. She holds a beer bottle between them and shakes, then does the same with a pitcher. She squeezes them together between her forearms, releases, then squeezes them again. She steps forward and back, steps back and forward. She says nothing, nothing at all, not a thing.

When it’s over, the emcee brings her back to speak with the audience. “Hi, everybody,” she says. Her accent is broad and surprisingly thick. “It’s so difficult for me chust to carry my boobs, I dun’t have time really to do anyt’ink else.”

“You know, fel-lows, do we have any leg men in the audience? No leg men?”

“Pussy!” yells a fan.

“I kind off like dose leg men to get to see more,” she says, bending a knee, “because I usual get the wat-er-mel-on men come up to see my show, I would say so. Fel-lows, I feel my boobs belong to the public, they’re only ehtteched-uh to me. If I could, I would like for you to touched them but it’s ehgainst the law to touch et, really — that’s the Ar-izona law, you know.

“By the way, you know, fel-lows, I just got a divorce. The reason was we could not get to-gether because of my big boobs. Thet’s why I gotta divorce, huh. My husbend did try to drown me but no chence-uh. I took cold shower lest night, you know, but my feet still kept warm, believe it or no. Yes. I stay at the Hilton Hotel.  Goink into the olovator, believe it or no, I kept the olovator from closink. Yes.”

The crowd is restless. They’re here for tits, not talk. “I can’t understand a fuckin’ word she’s saying,” complains a fan. Somebody is hollering at her from the back of the room.

“Who is dot big mout’ — do you heve any question, you big mout’? Chust a minute, honey, get you hands out of you pockets — no self-entertainment. Thenk you. Appreciate. Yes. What is you question, honey?”

The deejay holds the microphone for the fan. “Does anybody ever give you a hard time about the size of your chest when you go anywhere?”

“What, what?! I din’t hear you?”

“Does anybody ever give you, you know, a rough time about the size of your tits — in other words, do people get freaked out about the size of your tits when you go out in public?”

“Honey, I chust knock them down.” She gets a laugh from the crowd. “Sweetheart, I chust knock them down.”

“You just kind of take those boogers and slap ‘em in their head, huh?" says the deejay.

“Thet’s right, honey. If I fall down, I bounce op wit’ no prob-lem.”

Another question from the audience. “Can you see your feet?”

“No honey. I don’t wanna see my feet-uh — I let the men see et, honey. I love my legs, and I love men and therefore I want them to see my legs. It’s so difficult for me just to car-ry my boobs, I don’t have time really to do anyt’ink else. That’s heavy weight really, you know. Very very difficult, you know. Appreciate you very much, very much. I would love for you to touch them, honey, but it’s ehgainst the law. I wish fellows that you could see it that they’re real. Thenk you very much for comink tonight — do appreciate you comink tonight, thank you very much.”

“The lovely Miss Chesty Morgan, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Chesty Morgan. Let’s put your hands together for seventy-six inches of incredible, amazing bazoomas! Insured by Lloyds of London! For one million dollars! Put your hands together for the lovely Chesty Morgan! Two more shows tonight, ladies and gentlemen, he sure to stick around! We are going to party!”

Hollywood Hookers and Parisian Pimps

(Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon were dear friends for decades. I thought maybe since this piece has a Lemmon-y twist to it, I'd plunk it in here. Et voila!)
So I’m watching, this very moment, “Irma La Douce,” a movie I’ve never seen before, and not one I’d ever even once considered watching either, even back in the day when the Catholic Church -- you remember them -- gave it the dreaded “C” rating. That’s “C” for “Condemned,” as in You Will Be Condemned Right Straight To Hell if you dare sneak in to watch the voluminously-cleavaged divorcee Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra,” or the licentious James Bond of “Goldfinger,” or theTechni-Colorful Parisian pimps and gold-hearted Parisian prostitutes of “Irma La Douce.”
(Admittedly, I haven’t been keeping up lately with contempo-Catholic doctrine/dogma/dictae, so I don’t know if I’m going partly to Hell on account of only watching part of it so far, or whether that merely gathers me extra time in Purgatory, Roman Catholicism’s metaphysical DMV. I do solemnly confess that I scrolled back during Shirley MacLaine’s bathtub scene to confirm the fact that you could absolutely certainly see a bare hint of bare left breast, one of the left breasts I’m personally least interested in seeing in all the world , true, but one that I can Confirm. With a capital “C." I am, after all, both a noted critic and an intrepid reporter.)

Set in Paris, this is movie Paris, a Paris set in Hollywood on a Hollywood set, a 1963 Hollywood set, a 1963 Hollywood Paris already weeping drippy nostalgia for a bygone Paris before that Paris has gone by. And 1963, I should probably remind you, is the last year of the 1950s. This is a Billy Wilder picture, but a Billy Wilder picture he didn't really write, based on a play, a Parisian sex farce, and based on Billy Wilder’s own nostalgia for his own brief sojourn in Paris, from back when he was working his way out of the Austro-Hungarian provinces en route to Vienna to Berlin to Paris to, finally, permanently, Hollywood; as a journalist working his the way up to screenwriter working his way up to director working his way up to screenwriting-director-producer, and working to keep his sardonic Viennese Jewish aesthetician’s ass out of Hitler’s frying pan.

But nostalgia, easiest and ickiest color in the whole box of cinematic crayons, is especially unworthy of Billy “All Laughs Cut On All Edges” Wilder, that impossibly rare creator of great comedy and great drama, the guy who maybe invented film noir, who wrote with Raymond Chandler, roomed with Peter Lorre, and worked with Marilyn Monroe and Ernst Lubitsch and Gloria Swanson and Eric Von Stroheim and Jimmy Cagney. Who escaped the Nazis but lived to learn that his family didn’t.

And who worked, again and again and again, in “Some Like It Hot,” and “The Apartment,” and “The Fortune Cookie,” and in “Irma La Douce,” with Jack Lemmon, determined clown-poet of corporate failure. Here he’s a hapless policeman, fired for putting too fine a point on his job of rounding up prostitutes, ending up a hapless pimp. (As you do.) All very Billy Wilder-esque, but inevitably, Jack Lemmon, genius film actor that he is, plays Jack Lemmon. Jack Lemmon in Paris, perhaps, Jack Lemmon, Parisian policeman, then Jack Lemmon, failed Parisian pimp {or mec, as the patois has it; you can bet we’ll be exploring and hyper-linking the hell out of that one, Mec-daddies) but above all, Jack Lemmon, the ultimate buttoned-down Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Organization Man with the extraordinarily empty existential briefcase. Never a boss, always a sheep, but an especially nervous, neurotic one, a sheep who can’t help foreseeing the shearing to come and the mint sauce to follow.

Lemmon would go on to age visibly, to wear and tear palpably, to fray at the Brooks Brothers cuffs of his nervous system, to survive the shearing sheds but to show every moment of humiliation in haunted eyes, in ever more poignant tics and twitches. Wilder’s movies declined, oddly, curiously, strangely, for so accomplished a master, and “Irma La Douce” marks the beginning of the end. It wouldn’t be long before he wasn’t makiing movies any more, Hollywood being Hollywood. It wouldn't be long, either, 1963 being the start of The Sixties, before Hollywood was done with Paris. A decade of post-WWII musicals served up to former GIs meant "Irma La Douce" was pretty much, uhm, the last time we saw Paris for the better part of a decade. London was swingin', the youth market was about acquire British accents and Beatle haircuts, and Paris sounded too much like accordions.

Style notes: Shirley MacLaine's Irma La Douce wears Paris green (we'll be discussing this at length some time further on down the road) throughout: hosiery, bra, negligee. And this despite the traditional French theatre ban on green costume. I bet there was some point to this. Maybe you know what it was.

Oh, and Floyd the barber was the helpful desk clerk at the hooker's hotel.