She Was a Rainbeaux

Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith illuminated movie screens with talent, beauty, and star quality that was groovy, spooky, and uniquely hers.

Once Youngman McBeardo laid eyes on Rainbeaux, nothing - and no body - was ever the same.

Technically, the following piece is something of a “big reveal”.

My ongoing examination of The Top 100 Cult Movie Nude Scenes has counted down all the way to number 11.

Number 10 is Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith changing shirts 13 minutes into Jack Hill’s The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974).

So I got to writing up the little tits and tidbits section after the scene description, and I just kept writing. And writing. And writing. And so now it’s an entire article unto itself.

The Top 10 Cult Movie Nude Scenes will go live on Thursday, July 30, 2009. Wait with bated breath for numbers nine through one, but you can still pretend to be surprised by Rainbeaux at #10 if that’ll add to the joy of it all.

In the meantime, read all about her. And me. Mostly me. Of course.

NUMBER 10
Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith
THE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS (1974)
(0:13)
Sexy soul sista Rosanne Katon and undercover hippie radical Jo Johnston prep Rainbeaux for a night our by offering her a sheer silk shirt to slip into. Rainbeaux takes off the top she’s got on and out pop two huge, swollen, perfectly round casabas topped with full, lush, power-puffy, deep pink nipples.

• Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith is my favorite movie star of all time.

This became fact the moment I first saw this angelic, doe-eyed, flaxen space-case one April 1982 morning when New York’s WOR (channel 9) aired Lemora the Lady Dracula.

And that was the title that the announcer used - Lemora the Lady Dracula - even though, on-screen, the movie plainly calls itself Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. I’ve also seen it listed as The Legendary Curse of Lemora and when Synapse Films finally put out a definitive Special Edition DVD, it was simply called Lemora.

WOR aired eight movies a day, every day, and many - perhaps even most - of them were horror flicks.

When Christopher Lee hosted Saturday Night Live in March 1978, he even joked that not all of his films “air on channel 9 at 3am.”

That was a golden moment for 9-year-old McBeardo, as I knew that channel 9 regularly scheduled horror movies at 3am.

Throughout the 1970s, WOR’s Saturday morning film case was charmingly titled Spaced Out Films. I was severely bummed, then, in early spring ‘82, when they changed it to Adventure Theater.

However, that clearly proved a misnomer when, a week or two later, I stumbled across Lemora.

The movie so excited and enthralled me, I took notes (with digressions) as I watched. Sometimes I’d do that, then type up my noodlings or decorate them with nonsensical drawings and pass them out to my 8th-grade Brooklyn contemporaries.

If you ever want to get labeled “fag”, there are few quicker ways I can recommend, and that includes having out-and-proud gay sex in view of your peers.

**

Lemora is all fire-and-brimstone Southern gothic weirdness with a touch of Bonnie & Clyde and Night of the Living Dead while being, overwhelmingly, an original concoction of vampirism, incest, homosexuality, and child abuse translated as plague fears.

It’s heady stuff held together, hard, at its core by Cheryl Smith as 13-year-old Lila Lee, a blossoming church belle who wanders into Lemora’s dead woods and never makes her way back out - at least not the same way she went in.

“Snow White lured into Hell,” wrote The New York Times when WOR showed Lemora a few months later. “Watch it and you’ll be riveted. We did and we were.”

For once, I knew where that Old Gray Lady was coming from.

**

Monday, at school, I handed out some odd musings on Lemora and Deidre Flynn - a neighborhood knockout with whom I had been romantically/erotically/mortifyingly obsessed for fully half (or more) of our shared 13 years - shot back: “You saw that movie Lemora? So did I! That was so fucked up, wasn’t it?!”

Whoa. Wait. What? DEIDRE FLYNN had seen Lemora and was asking me to commiserate with her about its fucked-upedness? And she was, like, smiling? This could not be. But it was!

“How hot was Lila Lee?” I said. “What a body! You see her jugs? And that part where Lemora gave her a bath! That was so LESBIAN! Lesbians rule! Did you like that part, Deidre? The LESBIAN part? I loved it! I loved that chick! I loved that movie. You loved it, too, right? You know you did! You loved the vampire lesbian stuff in Lemora the Lady Dracula.”

From the get-go, my strategic means of connecting with females was to bombard them with my own masturbatory preoccupations in hope that they’d latch on to some aspect of the downpour, and from there I’d try to hypnotize them

I hadn’t had it all thought out that way back then but, in retrospect, that’s what I did. And, rest as assured as you can, this did not work on Deidre Flynn, but I kept trying this technique until it did work. And I still do.

Hi, ladies. I’m McBeardo. Welcome to my gonads.

**

Lemora became an immediate touchstone, but I assumed that would be the only movie in which I’d ever see Cheryl Smith, as it turned out to be for Lemora herself, Lesley Gilb (and who, I am sad to note, died in a car accident in April 2009).

Then came Christmas 1982 and, with it, the McBeardo Family VCR.

Shortly thereafter, The Swinging Cheerleaders swung before my eyes and I was immediately, eerily captivated by blonde playing Andrea.

Her luminous allure was resplendent, but somehow chilling and distant. But also very, very familiar.

I watched closely and engaged in an internal monologue:

“Who is she? Is that … it can’t be. The girl from Lemora was 13, just like me, and this babe is clearly, like, at least a junior in high-school and these movies were probably made around the same time and FUCKING FUDGE FART! … She took her shirt off!

LOOK AT THOSE THINGS!

They’re huge! They’re perfect! They’re not like any other tits! HOLY SHITTING TIT FUCKS!

And that IS her! That’s Lila Lee from Lemora the Lady Dracula! And I just saw her boobs and they’re the greatest boobs anybody has ever seen because they’re hers, but because they … just LOOK at them! They’re … WEIRD! Kind of. But in the awesomest way weird can be!”

Rewind and repeat, rewind and repeat. Forever. And ever.

A check of the credits confirmed my hunch, even though instead of Cheryl, she was listed as Rainbeaux Smith. Maybe it could have been her older sister, but I didn’t think so. I knew Lila Lee and that bare-breasted Swinging Cheerleader were one (two?) and the same.

An immediate consultation of the 1983 Leonard Maltin Film Guide illuminated Rainbeaux’s career path beyond Lemora (which he infamously rated a “BOMB”) and Swinging, which is the most extraordinary cult filmography of any single actress.

The mere highlights include: Evel Knievel (1971), Caged Heat (1974), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Video Vixens (1976), The Pom Pom Girls (1976), Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976), Drum (1976), Massacre at Central High (1976), Slumber Party ‘57 (1976), Cinderella (1977), The Choirboys (1977), Fantasm Comes Again (1977), The Incredible Melting Man (1977), Up in Smoke (1978), Laserblast (1978), Melvin and Howard (1980), Vice Squad (1982), and Parasite (1982).

Rainbeaux appeared nude in almost all her films. I found this out the best way, by hunting each title down and keeping records of what she did/how much she showed, movie by movie.

Forever. And ever.

**

In the late ’90s, I caught back up with Swinging Cheerleaders on a battered (in every sense) VHS tape under the title H.O.T.S II (likely from the same outfit that repackaged Bloodsucking Freaks as Heritage of Caligula: An Orgy of Sick Minds; definitely from the same mooks peddling Revenge of the Cheerleaders as H.O.T.S. III).

I bought it at a Manhattan porn shop on Sixth Avenue after Giuliani passed the 70/30 rule in which smut peddlers had to stock 70-percent non-X-rated content.

F-training home as quick as I could, I fast-forwarded right to Rainbeaux’s rack reveal and I drooped, aghast.

DID CHERYL “RAINBEAUX” SMITH HAVE BREAST IMPLANTS?!

That’s what they looked like on this worn-past-shit VHS bootleg of a bootleg times a thousand.

And not just that - they appeared the Dr. Mengele-worthy caulk-gun-straight-into-the-tit ’70s-style breast implants.

The anti-quality image was muddy and wobbly, but I knew Rainbeaux’s boobs from all her other movies and they were never that hefty and round and sticking out so far, from so high up on her chest.

Not only that, Swinging Cheerleaders had to have been made later than 1974, because all her non-implant movies had come out after that.

For the next several years, I suffered, wounded.

**

Alas, the new millennium brought with it DVD and among my first acquisition was The Swinging Cheerleaders, so I could hear director Jack Hill’s commentary track.

Hill had been toolbaggish to me once, when I asked to interview him for Genesis magazine - he opted to keep his distance from a publication he labeled “gynecological” - but my hope was that he could clear up the facts regarding Rainbeaux Smith’s breast implants.

So I get to the part where Rainbeaux exposes her upper anatomy and - her tits were gorgeous. Huge and luscious yet, somehow, lighter than air. And they were absolutely natural, too, and not augmented as I had suspected.

Still, her boobs were bigger in Swinging Cheerleaders than in subsequent efforts. How could that be.

I switched on the Jack Hill commentary:

“Oh, that Rainbeaux Smith!” he said. “She was five months pregnant when we shot this, and she didn’t tell anybody!”

Ah-HA! That explained it! Rainbeaux Smith did NOT have breast implants! She was just five months pregnant!

Then I came.

Forever. And ever.

**

All of my many years of research into Cheryl Smith further revealed that she hit Hollywood at 14 in the go-go dancing Riot on Sunset Strip era and got her nickname from hanging out with rock stars and those who consume narcotics like them at the Rainbow Bar & Grill.

She performed in Cheech & Chong’s live act, and one of Eric Burdon’s Animals is reportedly the father of her son, Justin (who, as a baby, makes an adorable post-credits cameo at the end of Revenge of the Cheerleaders).

Notorious L.A. waifanizer Kim Fowley chased the Rainbeaux, too. She played drums in one incarnation of the Runaways and later with solo Joan Jett. That’s Cheryl smacking the skins behind Joan in the West Coast punk head-scratcher Du-Beat-e-o (1984).

Rather spectacularly, Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to Rainbeaux at a film festival and provided the world with this quote: “”What Pam Grier was to blaxploitation movies, what Bruce Lee was to kung fu movies, what Burt Reynolds was to good-ol’-boy movies, Rainbeaux Smith was to cheerleader movies. She truly has, without trying whatsoever, a Marilyn Monroe quality. She doesn’t look like Monroe at all; she just has that kind of vacantness. She’s not so much acting as she is existing. Imagine Marilyn Monroe as kind of a ’70s hippie junky, then you kind of have Rainbeaux Smith.”

**

In 2002, I was working at Celebrity Skin magazine, and I became determined to score an interview with Rainbeaux. I knew she’d been in and out of jail a few times on heroin charges but I heard she was free. I just had to find her.

I wrote an article saluting Rainbeaux’s magnificent career and pleading with her to emerge from wherever she was holed up. I wanted her to contact Celebrity Skin and, I hoped, I could help put her in touch with her legions of fans, which were emerging with unprecedented strength in the DVD age.

The magazine shipped off for the printer on Friday, October 25, 2002.

Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith died that very day.

I shit thee not.

The news reached that Saturday. I couldn’t pull the article at that point. It just how to go out there, to be ignored, as were all the other words, by the “readers” of Celebrity Skin.

This remains the most bizarre coincidence I’ve ever experienced, and I just wish it could be associated with something happier.

Shortly thereafter, I set out to write a book titled Rainbeaux With an X, a biography of Cheryl (nobody steal that name: this is my official 2009 calling of dibs).

Seeing how its subject’s tumble down the Hollywood rabbit hole careened from the swinging Sunset Strip ’60s through the brilliant exploitation films of the ’70s and finally into early-’80s Black Flag/Germs/Circle Jerks-era punk, I pitched it to the heroic fellow traveler Adam Parfrey of Feral House. He said there might be something to this idea.

Research commenced in spring 2003. A friend of a friend delivered my office phone number to Cheryl’s son, Justin. He left me two late night messages from a blocked number, thanking me for my interest in his mom and saying he supported my efforts. I haven’t heard from him since.

Then Mr. Skin found me, swooped into New York for an afternoon, brought me back with him to Chicago, and I’ve been here ever since - not working on Rainbeaux With an X.

But there is, as Mr. Parfrey observed, something to the idea and here I am and there is Rainbeaux - haunted, haunting, and beautiful.

Forever. And ever.

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