Eve Meyer went from Playboy model and steamy actress to hell on earth
Eve Meyer was a pin-up model in the 1950s who was chosen as Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Month in June 1955.
Her career got a lot spicier after that and she went on to star in Russ Meyer’s sex flicks of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Eve and Russ hit it off and got married. She worked with him on several movies including Vixen, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Motorpsycho and Mondo Topless.
Eve and Russ Meyer were married from 1952 to 1969.
The couple co-produced Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a sequel to the 1967 star-studded box-office hit Valley of the Dolls.
The script for Beyond was written by the late film critic Roger Ebert (that surprised me too), who took time off from his job at the Chicago Tribune.
Although panned by critics, the Russ and Eve Meyer production was a money maker, raking in $9-million from a budget of $900,000.
Eve’s flight to hell
On March 27, 1977, Eve boarded Pan Am Flight 1736 from Los Angeles to Tenerife in the Canary Islands off the Spanish coast.
After a long flight across the Atlantic, the Boeing 747 was diverted from Gran Canaria Airport and made an unscheduled landing at nearby Los Rodeos Airport.
A terrorist incident at Gran Canaria had caused many flights to be diverted to Los Rodeos, an airport that only had one taxiway, which soon became congested with airplanes.
Amid thick fog, the backed-up departing aircraft had to taxi on the runway instead of the taxiway. Visibility was near zero for the control tower and the pilots.
Collision course
The Pan Am carrying Eve Meyer was on the runway and about to turn onto the taxiway when another Boeing 747, KLM Flight 4805, loomed out of the fog at take off speed.
When the Pan Am captain spotted the KLM approaching, he was heard to say into the cockpit recorder, “Goddamn, that son-of-a-bitch is coming!”
The first officer yelled, “Get off! Get off! Get off!”
The Pan Am captain applied full power to the throttles and made a sharp left turn in an attempt to avoid a collision, but by the time the KLM pilots saw the Pan Am plane, they were already traveling too fast to stop.
The two planes collided and erupted into a ball of fire. Everyone on board KLM aircraft and most of the passengers on Pan Am plane died in the inferno.
Eve Meyer was among them. She was 48.
61 passengers in the front section of the Pan Am aircraft survived.
The total death toll was 583, making it the deadliest accident in aviation history.
Twenty-seven years later, in the Hollywood Hills, Russ Meyer died at his home on September 18, 2004. He was 82.