The Real Tura Satana Was Wilder Than Varla: Burlesque, the Mafia and the FBI
- Aug 7
- 6 min read
Tura Satana is best remembered as Varla, the merciless leader of a girl gang who kills a man with her bare hands in Russ Meyer's 1965 cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It's one of the most iconic performances in exploitation film history. It's also, by a wide margin, the tamest thing about her actual life. Long before she ever stood in front of Meyer's camera, Satana had survived an internment camp, run with a street gang, danced burlesque under a false name to hide the fact she was a minor, and quietly spent two years feeding information to the FBI about one of Chicago's most powerful mobsters. Almost none of it made it into the version of her story that gets repeated at film festivals.
A Childhood That Started Behind a Fence
Satana was born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938, to a Japanese father of Filipino descent and a mother of Cheyenne and Scots-Irish heritage. After the family moved to the United States, they were swept up in the wartime internment of Japanese Americans and held at the Manzanar camp in California for roughly two and a half years. Once released, the family settled in Chicago, where Satana's early physical development and mixed heritage made her a target for constant harassment at school.
Satana said that shortly before her tenth birthday, she was gang raped by five men while walking home from a bakery, and that her attackers were never prosecuted. She spoke about it publicly many times over the decades, in interviews and in an unpublished memoir, always telling it the same way. There's no surviving police or court record to independently date or confirm the attack, which isn't unusual for a case involving a child in that era, when assaults like this went unreported and unrecorded far more often than not. It's simply worth noting that what's known about it comes from Satana's own account rather than an external record.
Satana said the experience pushed her toward martial arts, and that over the following fifteen years she tracked down each of the men responsible and confronted them one by one. She also formed a street gang with Italian, Jewish and Polish girls from her neighbourhood, calling themselves the Angels, and her frequent trouble with the law eventually landed her in reform school. At thirteen, her parents arranged a marriage to a seventeen year old named John Satana in Mississippi. It lasted nine months, but she kept his surname for the rest of her life and career.
Miss Japanese Beautiful
By fifteen, Satana had moved to Los Angeles on a fake ID and started modelling, including a series of nude photographs taken by the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, who'd become a serious amateur photographer in his later years. She soon moved into burlesque, performing a martial arts inflected act billed as Miss Japanese Beautiful, working her way through clubs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago and reportedly earning around a thousand dollars a week on the circuit, serious money for a teenager in the 1950s. She also became a fixture of the era's celebrity gossip circuit, later claiming romantic relationships with Frank Sinatra and the actor Rod Taylor, and famously saying she turned down a marriage proposal from Elvis Presley while still keeping the ring he gave her.
The Secret She Kept for Fifty Years
What almost never makes it into her story is what she was doing off stage. In 1958, an FBI agent named William Roemer was surveilling a Chicago Outfit boss named Gus Alex, who oversaw the mob's gambling and vice operations, and spotted a striking young woman aboard a yacht owned by Alex's associate Henry Susk. That woman was Satana, who'd become romantically involved with both Susk and, eventually, Alex himself.
Roemer tracked her down and interviewed her three times before she agreed to become a source, feeding him information about the Outfit for roughly two years. Her most valuable tip concerned a suite at Chicago's St Clair Hotel that Alex used to hold meetings and take calls, information detailed enough that she provided the FBI with the room's floor plan in case they wanted to bug it. Roemer later wrote about a burlesque dancer who became one of his most interesting informants ever, but he never named her publicly, protecting her identity for the rest of her life. Her role was only confirmed after her death, when declassified FBI files identified her as Roemer's source. It's a documented, records based story, a sharp contrast to the unverifiable claims about her childhood, and it means Satana was quietly informing on the Chicago mob at the exact same time she was building the reputation that would eventually get her cast as a knife wielding gang leader.
Becoming Varla
Satana moved into acting in the early 1960s, appearing in Billy Wilder's Irma la Douce and television shows including Burke's Law and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. before Russ Meyer cast her as Varla. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was shot for around 45,000 dollars in the Mojave Desert, with temperatures on set reportedly climbing toward 120 degrees, and Satana did her own stunts and fight choreography, drawing directly on the martial arts training she'd built up since her teens. Much of the character's swagger and line delivery came from Satana herself rather than the script.
The full film is actually on YouTube
The film was not an immediate hit. Meyer himself later said flatly that it laid an egg on release and that nobody cared about it at the time. It took decades and a champion in the filmmaker John Waters, who called it one of the greatest movies ever made, for the film to find its real audience. One detail that rarely comes up: Satana had negotiated to retain legal ownership of her own image and likeness from the production, an unusual position for an actress in a low budget exploitation picture in 1965. It meant that for the rest of his career, whenever Meyer wanted to reuse her image on a poster or re-release, he legally had to ask her permission and, in some cases, pay her royalties all over again. Whatever else was true of Satana's life, she never lost control of Varla.
A Quieter, Harder Second Act
Her acting career didn't last. After filming The Doll Squad in 1973, Satana was shot by a former lover and survived, then largely stepped away from performing. She trained in nursing at a Los Angeles hospital and worked there for several years, and later took a job as a dispatcher for the Los Angeles Police Department, about as far from Varla's world as a career choice could get. In 1981 she broke her back in a serious car accident, spending the next two years in and out of hospitals through roughly fifteen operations. That same year she married a retired LAPD officer, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2000.
Satana returned to acting periodically in her later years as cult interest in her work grew, giving interviews and appearing at conventions, though she reportedly kept the FBI chapter of her life to herself even once every figure involved was long dead. She died of heart failure in Reno, Nevada, on 4 February 2011, at 72.
What's Verified and What's Legend
Satana's life sits at an unusual intersection: the childhood trauma and revenge story that's been repeated as fact for sixty years rests entirely on her own account and has never been corroborated, while the FBI informant chapter she kept quiet about for her entire life turned out to be the one piece of her story with an actual paper trail behind it, federal surveillance reports, declassified decades later, confirming details she never spoke about publicly at all. It's a strange inversion for a woman best known for playing a character who was, by design, larger than life.
A Documentary Finally Caught Up With Her
In 2025, an authorized documentary called Tura! opened in theatres and on streaming, directed by Cody Jarrett and narrated by Margaret Cho, with contributions from John Waters, burlesque star Dita Von Teese, longtime collaborator Ted V. Mikels, and Satana's own two daughters. It's the first serious attempt to separate the woman from the myth she spent decades cultivating, drawing on home footage and family archives rather than just the convention circuit interviews that shaped most of what's been written about her. Even that film, for all its access, doesn't touch the FBI chapter. Some parts of Satana's life, it seems, she managed to keep secret right to the very end.
