The Trials of Chesty Morgan – Doris Wishman, Fellini, The Law and Me, Part 2 – Podcast 122

In the first part of ‘The Trials of Chesty Morgan’, Chesty endured unimaginable hardships in her life – a Jewish girl growing up in Nazi-occupied Poland, both her parents killed in the conflict, followed by a difficult life in Israel, and the eventual promise of a new life in the United States before her husband was killed in a botched robbery. Chesty decided to become a burlesque dancer to make ends meet, soon becoming one of the highest earning performers in the country on the stripping circuit.

The Rialto Report spoke to Chesty Morgan, now aged 84. This is the concluding part of her story.

Read the first part here.

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1973 – Double Agent 73

Doris Wishman was in a bind.

Hardcore sex films had just started to be exhibited in theaters – and were making good money, but twice-married, sixty-something Doris wasn’t keen. And that was a problem when the flaccid-soft nudie-cutie films you’ve been making for the previous decade were suddenly as unfashionable as a polka-dot poncho on a pole dancer. Explicit sex films would one day play a role in Doris’ career, but she wasn’t ready yet.

Instead, Doris listened to an acquaintance who’d just witnessed the full Chesty Morgan experience in the flesh so she investigated. Doris didn’t much like what she saw: “This was a woman born with a large bosom. To me they’re not sexy. It’s like a woman born with two heads…[but] she was a gimmick and that was what I was aiming for.” Doris appreciated that Chesty’s chest could make up for the lack of explicit kiss kiss bang bang, so she arranged a meeting. Doris and Chesty loosely agreed on a three-picture deal, the first of which, ‘Deadly Weapons,’ was shot in the summer of 1973. Chesty played an advertising executive who tracks down the mobsters who killed her boyfriend and then smothers them with her huge breasts.

To say that Doris Wishman worked in an idiosyncratic manner is like admitting the Pope sometimes attends mass on Sundays. For a start, her actors never received a script. Doris would tell them roughly what to do and say, while roughly scribbling down what they actually said on a large notepad so that she could roughly overdub the lines later. Filmmaking was not a precise science in her hands.

The relationship between director and star was testy as Chesty remembers: “I didn’t get along with Doris. She was unfriendly and not kind. I work best with people that I like, and I didn’t like Doris. I worked better with men, like Harry Reems. I liked him.”

Doris wasn’t enamored with Chesty either, with good reason, as she explained to a Boston Globe reporter: “She was a horror. Of all the people I worked with, she was the only person I couldn’t get along with. We were shooting Double Agent in White Plains, N.Y. I think the call was for 10 in the morning. Everybody’s there. Chesty isn’t there. 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4. By then, everyone’s weary. So I started to pay people. All of a sudden, she walks in. She says, ‘I vaz sick.’ I didn’t say a word. Next day, her boyfriend tells me that they were on their way to White Plains and she was reading the paper and she said, ‘Marty, there’s a sale on Delancey Street. Turn around!’ So he turned around. He was afraid of her. That day cost me a lot of money and aggravation.”

Doris Wishman

Deadly Weapons was first released in early 1974, and newspapers reported that it had a dramatic effect on cinemagoers:...