August 16th
In 1975, Raquel Welch visited the University of Southern California as part of a weekend festival of pre-release screenings. She was there on behalf of Richard Lester’s The Four Musketeers (1974), the sequel to The Three Musketeers (1973), which had earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress.
I was in attendance that night, a fledgling film major dazzled by the considerable star wattage onstage. I remember little about her post-screening interview with esteemed critic Arthur Knight, but one moment from the audience Q&A remains indelible. Someone (it wasn’t me) asked Ms. Welch if, in light of the positive reviews she earned with the Musketeer films, she no longer wanted to be considered a sex symbol.
“What do you think?” she responded mock-suggestively, and performed an exaggerated sashay across the stage that to this day has the same galvanic impact on me as Red Hot Riding Hood had on the Wolf in the Tex Avery cartoon.
Welch’s prodigious figure was the skin-deep measurement by which she was acknowledged by comedians and critics in the wokeless 1960s and ‘70s, her first blush of stardom. This Raquel riff from Bob Hope, circa 1975, has not aged well: “The other day at L.A. airport they searched Raquel Welch for three hours. And she was getting OFF the plane. What bugged her most was, six of the guards were from another airport."
Then there is the “Raquel Welch on an island” joke referenced by Francis Ford Coppola on the DVD commentary for Apocalypse Now Redux. Too long to get into here, but the punchline is something along the lines of: “You’ll never guess who I shagged last week.”
But Welch, a financially-strapped single mother trying to provide for her two children when she started her career nearly 60(!) years ago, is made of sterner stuff, and she developed an endearing sense of humor about her screen goddess status. To Dick Cavett during a 1972 appearance on his late night talk show: “I’m surprised you didn’t introduce me as ‘Raquel Welch, and here they come.’”
Welch is new to TCM’s annual Summer Under the Stars celebration (and about time, too). The dozen films on tap illustrate her trajectory from starlet to screen icon. To spend 24 hours with Welch is to appreciate what a—wait for it—Fantastic Voyage her career has been.
She was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago. Her father was a Bolivian immigrant, her mother American-born with family roots going back to the Mayflower. Her family moved to Southern California, where she pursued her show business aspirations. While in high school, she was a multi-beauty pageant winner (“Miss San Diego,” “Miss La Jolla,” “Miss Contour.”)
She attended San Diego State College on a theater arts scholarship, but she dropped out to marry her high school sweetheart. They had two children, but the marriage fell apart. She became a TV weather girl on News 8 in San Diego, and then moved to Dallas, where she modeled for Neiman-Marcus and worked as a cocktail hostess. Dreams of heading east to pursue a stage career in New York were dashed when her life savings was stolen, and with just $200 in the bank, she moved to Hollywood.
In 1964, she graced episodes of several popular TV series, including “The Virginian,” “Bewitched” and “McHale’s Navy.” She had an uncredited appearance in the Elvis Presley film, Roustabout. She was billed as Billboard Girl on the variety series, “The Hollywood Palace.” In one memorable episode, she was the object of guest host Groucho Marx’s quips: “You go to my dressing room; I need the rest.”
She rode the wave of the popular Beach Party films with a small role in A Swingin’ Summer (1965), in which she performs “I’m Ready to Groove.” Noted Variety: “It’s hard to look away when she’s in view.”
Her picture in Life magazine earned her a test for the James Bond adventure Thunderball, but it was a screen test opposite James Coburn for the James Bond spoof Our Man Flint that earned her a multi-film contract with 20th Century Fox. First up: the Oscar-winning Fantastic Voyage (1966), in which she costarred as a surgical assistant, clad at one point in a skin-tight wetsuit. (Mad magazine had a field day with that one).
“Who’s that girl?” star Stephen Boyd asks of her character at the beginning of the film. By the end of the year, everyone around the world would know, thanks to her next film, One Million Years B.C., a film that looms large in the Welch legend.
She had begged Fox studio head Richard Zanuck not to make her do a dinosaur film, but he insisted that it would make her a star. When she asked what she would wear in her role as Loana, a cavewoman, he replied, “They’ll work something out.”
What they worked out was a deerskin bikini, and Welch cut a formidable figure in it. “A marvelous breathing monument to womankind,” The New York Times raved in its review of the film.
The sauvage image of Welch in that outfit became an instantly iconic poster. “Fuzzy britches” would memorably turn up decades later as a pivotal piece of jail cell accoutrement in Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994): Hayworth to Monroe to Welch.
On One Million Years B.C.’s 50th anniversary, Welch told The Los Angeles Times, “Becoming an overnight sex symbol was not my plan, I can assure you. I thought, ‘This is not at all who I am,’ but then at the same time, I was thinking, ‘Maybe that’s the way fate has planned it so I could at least get aboard. Otherwise, I was a young mother, and if I would have had to wait around for a really wonderful role that more established actresses would be more likely to be cast in, I might not have been able to have a career.”
Indeed, it would be several years before Welch was afforded roles that would take her Beyond the Cleavage, the title of her 2010 autobiography and lifestyle book. In the meantime, she made the best out of her small but indelible role as Lillian Lust (“The babe with the bust”) in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967) .
An early treat in TCM’s Raquel-athon is Ken Annakin’s heist comedy The Biggest Bundle of Them All (1968), in which Welch is arm (and eye) candy opposite Robert Wagner. They make an outrageously handsome and charismatic couple, but a very potent drinking game could be devised by downing a shot every time Wagner calls her, “Baby.” Don’t do it, lest you pass out before the film gets to Edward G. Robinson’s cameo.
Things picked up for Welch in the 1970s, beginning with Richard A. Colla’s Fuzz (1972), an ensemble cop film based on the book in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series. Welch acquits herself admirably opposite Burt Reynolds (fresh off his Cosmopolitan centerfold), Tom Skerritt and Jack Weston as a detective called in to serve as a decoy to catch a rapist. Reportedly, producers wanted her to strip down to bra and panties in one scene. She refused.
This is followed on the TCM schedule by Kansas City Bomber (1972), her most physically and emotionally demanding role to date as a professional roller derby warrior. She told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2001, “I thought it would be a way of shaking up my image. I was playing a mother for the first time, and I was playing somebody who had struggled against a lot of adversity. It was a bit of a breakthrough for me, because people suddenly realized there was another dimension to me."
Welch established herself as a key ensemble player in The Last of Sheila (1973) and The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. In the former, she is among several suspects in Stephen Sondheim’s and Anthony Perkins’ stylish witty whodunnit. In the latter, she became one of the rare actors who impressed critics with her comedy—rather than dramatic—chops as Constance, the bumbling aid to the compromised Queen of France. “This is the kind of role I would dream to have,” she told Dick Cavett during a post-film discussion at a Film Society of Lincoln Center career retrospective.
TCM’s tribute also includes a trio of westerns, Bandolero! (1968), 100 Rifles (1969) and the revenge drama Hannie Caulder (1972) that further shattered the mold of what Welch called in her book, “the soft blonde queen of the boudoir.” She continued: “I think the reason my image made such an impact is that I was an early female action heroine. Kind of like a female Clint Eastwood, without the cigar and six-shooter."
Plus, she wears the serape better.
Welch’s career has encompassed Broadway, Vegas, health and fitness (with her line of books and videos), and even the Hallmark-verse of made-for-TV movies.
In Beyond the Cleavage, Welch refers to herself as “the Rodney Dangerfield of sex symbols.” She told Men’s Health in 2012, “There was this perception of ‘Oh, she’s just a sexpot. In my first couple of movies, I had no dialogue. It was frustrating. And then I started to realize that it came with the territory. Look at somebody like Marilyn Monroe. I always wondered why she seemed so unhappy. Everybody worshipped her and she was so extraordinary and hypnotic on screen. But they never nominated her for any of her musicals or comedies, as good as she was. Because for some reason, somebody with her sex appeal, her indescribable attraction, is rarely taken seriously.”
Welch described herself to Men’s Health as “just another American actress with a nice rack,” but these 12 films are testament to an artist who, in the bygone era of the studio system sex symbol, was determined to show she was more than just a body and prove that nobody puts Raquel in a corner.
