Mad About the Girl

In Rome not long ago, a stroller stopped at a traffic light and stared at the girl in the convertible. Was that a very short skirt she was wearing--or a long sweater? No matter; he couldn't stop looking. That was when the girl reached into her glove compartment, pulled out a pistol and let the gawker have it right between the eyes.

It was only a water pistol, but it made its point. Raquel Welch doesn't mind stares, but she likes to choose the time and the place. The time is now, but the place is pictures--the kind that move and the kind that stand still and stare back. Only last week she was simultaneously on the covers of no fewer than eight European magazines. The German Quick has put her on its cover nine times since January, and the French Lui recently ran 14 pages of her photos, and hailed her "old-fashioned, hot, sensual return to the curve."

Business at First Sight. That is the only old-fashioned thing about Raquel, who pursues her career with the smooth precision of a modern computer. Chicago-born and California-raised, Raquel, now 24, was a Neiman-Marcus model and played a few movie walk-ons before she met her programmer, Press Agent Pat Curtis. It was business at first sight. Two weeks after their first encounter, they met to plan her career in minute detail. Now, they share and share alike as equal partners in a company in which Raquel is the chief asset--an asset that Constant Companion Curtis shrewdly manages by camping much of the time at Raquel's 13-room Roman villa.

Curtis' aim was to market Raquel as a cool chick who knows her own mind --a sort of mens sana in corpore magnified. He trained her well. She told reporters that mother had given her a copy of The Carpetbaggers with the query, "Tell me if that really is the kind of career you want." Raquel said yes, with certain exceptions, of course. "I made up my mind," she told the newsmen, "that Hollywood is not a place filled with sinister characters lurking in half-shadows waiting to seduce virgins . . ." Reporters found this so refreshing that they didn't ask her for any further comments on moviemaking.

Such Eyes! There is only one flaw in Raquel's career so far: no one has seen her movies. She made Fantastic Voyage, playing a nurse who journeys through a man's bloodstream, and One Million B.C., in which she had but two words, "Tumak" and "Akita," but got to wear a doeskin bikini. Those films have not yet been released. But the bikini brought her to the attention of foreign moviemakers, who promptly cast her in seven major pictures, all of which still have to see the light of day. She is now winding up work on The Biggest Bundle of Them All, with Vittorio De Sica, who, when asked recently about her acting ability, replied passionately, "Such eyes! Such eyes!" Soon she will begin filming a comedy, Shoot Loud, Louder . . . I Don't Understand, with Marcello Mastroianni.

Not bad for a girl who, only two years ago, was a nobody with a yes body.

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