Flesh! The Untold Origin of the Findlays and the ‘Flesh Trilogy’, Part 1 – Roberta’s story

Sex and violence have been part of movies since the very beginning.

Ever since Thomas Edison made and exhibited ‘The Kiss’ in 1896, an 18 second clip of a couple embracing, moviegoers have been shocked by onscreen depictions of lust. The outrage over ‘The Kiss’ was understandable: it was one of the first films ever shown commercially to the public, and kissing in public was prosecuted at the time. The Catholic Church knee-jerked instinctively, and said it was a “serious threat to morality and humanity”, and the film was met with the first demand for movie censorship.

Fast forward seventy years, and heaven knows what they would have made of Michael and Roberta Findlay.

The Findlays made a series of low budget films in the 1960s that combined sex with violence in a way that had rarely been seen. Sure, filmmakers like Russ Meyer or Herschel Gordon Lewis had already achieved success with exploitation flicks that mixed fornication with ferocity. But their visions gleefully and comically satirized the genre.

Michael and Roberta were different: theirs was a more shocking, sadistic vision that left an altogether different impression. More than with any of their peers, you find yourself looking beyond their work, instead wondering more about the filmmakers than the films. In short, you start to ask, “What kind of people made these movies?”

Over the last few years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to friends, family members, collaborators… in fact, anyone who knew Michael and Roberta back in the 1960s – including Roberta herself – to dig deeper into who the Findlays really were and where they came from. The new information I found was surprising, unnerving, and sometimes disturbing – and it changed the way I view the films themselves.

This is Part 1 of ‘Flesh: The Untold Origin of the Findlays and the ‘Flesh Trilogy’’ – Roberta’s story.

This podcast is 36 minutes long.

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Roberta Findlay walks into a midtown Manhattan bar.

Unruly dark mop, giant black sunglasses, scowling bad attitude. She looks like Bob Dylan in ‘Don’t Look Back.’ Or a microwaved Anna Wintour.

“I don’t like people,” is her opening gambit. “Especially not those who watch my sex movies. These people are creepy. With deep psychological problems.”

I’m lucky, I guess. I’ve known Roberta for years, and she insists I am one of her two favorite living people. I’m flattered until I learn that Dick Cheney is the other: “I like arrogant men who mistreat me” is her explanation.

Dick Cheney mistreated you? I ask.

“I can dream,” she grunts.

Today Roberta has decided to cement our friendship. She gifts me the copy of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ that sat at the bedside of her long-deceased husband, Michael. I’m strangely moved. This 1959 collection of crime-soaked, sleaze-boiled gossip from Hollywood’s golden age underbelly had been an inspiration to him when he first became a filmmaker in the 1960s. Their film titles bore the evidence: Satan’s Bed (1965), Take Me Naked (1966), The Ultimate Degenerate (1969), and the infamous Flesh trilogy (The Touch of Her Flesh (1967), The Curse of Her Flesh (1968), The Kiss of Her Flesh (1968)). Tormented black-and-white nightmares trading in imaginative, misogynistic violence. Kenneth Anger’s aesthetic updated to a low-rent 1960s New York tenement world.

Their movies found an audience, then as now. For a time, Michael and Roberta reigned supreme in grindhouse theaters as kingpin auteurs of low-budget east coast sex and violence. Their fingerprints were evident in every frame: they produced, directed, wrote, and acted in all their films. Michael even starred – as one-eyed, paraplegic serial killer, Richard Jennings, in the ‘Flesh’ movies.

Except that Roberta now disputes her involvement in these early operas of sadism. I point out that her name, or pseudonym, appears in all the credits. Furthermore, crew lackeys remember her shooting the films, and cast members recall her active involvement. Roberta waves away my persistence.

“I was adrift in that maelstrom. I was underage. I didn’t know what I was doing. I never knew what I was doing. I have no recollection of any involvement. Just leave me alone. I was young. Too young. Underage, in fact. You hear me? Underage.”

Not that Roberta is prudish. She admits to making a string of later hardcore sex films – without Michael – though she is quick to dismiss them: “I deplore anything violent, but sex… I didn’t care. I made the movies for money, and because I liked to shoot as a cameraman. That’s what I liked doing best: being behind the camera, shooting and lighting. That’s where I was happiest in life. I still miss it today.”

But I return to the question at the heart of their 1960s movies. The conundrum of her cinematic union with Michael. What kind of couple would make films that so single-mindedly focused on a such a twisted disturbance of revenge, murder, and sex? Was it merely a cynical commercial tactic? Or did it come from a deeper chamber of the soul?

Roberta is unimpressed by the query. Open-book self-analysis is anathema to her. Questions that probe motivation irritate. Her silent response smacks of annoyance, then defiance. I ask again. And finally, without warning, she opens up.

“What can I tell you? Michael was a troubled and deranged man. A cracked, overgrown man-boy. And I was damaged goods. Product of an isolated, difficult childhood. For a time, we only had one another. So we clung to each other. There was no calm, sensible person in our relationship, and therefore all our problems were amplified: all our scars, fears, obsessions, phobias, and neuroses. And we had a lot of them. We weren’t normal people.”

Let’s talk some more about that, I suggest.

*

When were you born? I start.

“That’s an indiscrete and ungentlemanly question,” comes the reply.

I apologize. How old were you in 1962 then?

“That’s the same question – with a tricky calculation. I can’t do math. And I can never remember my age.”

All the interviews with you, going back to the early 1970s, say you were born in 1948. On December 30th. But I’m not sure that’s correct.

“December 30th? Yes, that’s right.”

But what year?

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve forgotten over time. Why is this important anyway?”

Because you said that you were underage when Michael and you made your first films. So I want to figure out the timeline.

“Let’s say I was born in 1948 then. And move on.”

Here’s the problem I have with that. I have production records from the first film that you appeared in. Body of a Female. That film was shot in the summer of 1962. You had several nude scenes in it. But that would mean you were only thirteen or fourteen at the time of the shoot.

<Silence>

“I don’t know anything about that. I was underage when the ‘Flesh’ movies were made. That’s all I know. That’s why I know nothing about them. I was underage. Now leave me alone.”

*

Rubeena Hershkowitz (no middle name was necessary as it was already a mouthful, she says) would have been known to her goy friends as Roberta, except that she had no friends. More on that later.

She was born in the Bronx to Hungarian Jewish parents. In an undetermined year.

Moses Aaron Hershkowitz was her father, and a mean villain. “An evil man. He didn’t like anybody,” Roberta says. “And in return, nobody liked him.” What Moses lacked in charm and warmth, he also lacked in humility and generosity. Born into a family in rural Hungary with nine brothers and sisters, he stood out from the wolf pack by his street-smart intelligence and angry belligerence, a combination that did him little good. At Yeshiva, the rabbis beat him regularly for his back-chat and bad attitude.

“He was obstreperous and rebellious,” says Roberta, “as well as a violent agoraphobic who suffered panic attacks in crowds. I saw his first passport photo once: he was very good-looking as a young man, devilishly handsome, with a large mustache. But boy, he was bad.”

Moses dealt with his frustrations by becoming a small-town bruiser, part-time rat-catcher, and quick-fire brawler. When he was twelve, he ran away from home. Roberta remembers family lore about his vanishing act: “Apparently, he did some stuff and had to flee. I don’t know what it was. I have no idea. But that’s the story.” Moses returned home several years later at seventeen, only to be greeted by his mother’s withering contempt: “Oh, look, he’s back. And this time, he’s brought a little suitcase.”

He was also cursed with a spectacular lack of respect for authority. When conscripted into the Hungarian army, Moses shot himself in the foot, literally, to avoid serving. Instead, he shacked up with a local woman, Matilda, and they had two so