Sea of C Cups

Like the locale is different, see, but every time it's the same girl. The door bell rings and there she is, in a peekaboo miniskirt and a see-through blouse. She says she wants some ice cubes, but what she really wants is me . . . Half an hour later I look up from my pillow. "Pardon me," I say, playing it sophisticated, "but aren't you Raquel Welch?"

This scene, or something like it, expresses what is obviously a widespread current sex fantasy. Every so often, the movie business feels the need to create a new character--part joke, part sex bomb, seducible, available, palpable--to enliven the daydreams of the American male. The phase is familiar, and Raquel Welch is going through it. "People think of me as some zaftig lady with two stereo nose cones staring everyone in the face," she admits. "The American idea of sex is two outsized mammary glands."

The latest American idea has impeccable statistics. The skin stretches tight across her frame; one more inch, it seems, and she would burst like a succulent mango. Her measurements are 37-22-35; she bounces when she runs, she has legs that won't quit, and steam forms on the windows when she enters a room. Naturally, as she told TIME Correspondent Jon Larsen, she wants to be an actress. "I know the whole idea of a sex goddess wanting to be an actress is camp, but that is what I want to be."

Amazon Triumphant. It may be a 90-degree climb. In her latest film, 100 Rifles, she plays a Yaqui Indian temptress romanced by a U.S. lawman (Jim Brown). Her accent, like her blouse, keeps slipping; her emotional range is strictly Mount Rushmore. Yet she provides the torpid western with its most convincing scene. Under a water tower, showering in a shirt, she stops a train dead in its tracks. 100 Rifles makes it official: Raquel wet and draped is sexier than most actresses nude and dry. Along the way, audiences can review Raquel's entire body of work--a group of three poses.

"My stances have sort of become my trademark," she observes, then demonstrates on her Beverly Hills diving board. There is the Amazon Triumphant (Raquel with feet wide apart and arms overhead, embracing the sun). The Virgin Victim (Raquel crouching, head tilted upward, flinching). The Mistress of James Bond (Raquel with legs apart and hands on hips, eyes smoking).

Careers have been built on a lot less, but then Raquel started with a lot less. Daughter of a Bolivian engineer named Armand Tejada, Raquel moved to La Jolla, Calif., in 1944, when she was two. The proximity to Hollywood was not wasted on the skinny, ambitious child. At 15, she had a lead role in the local Mexican festival. After a little TV and some modeling, she decided, at 21, to make it in the movies.

"My mother took a dim view of my ambitions," she recalls. "She threw at me a copy of The Carpetbaggers. 'Read this,' she said, 'and tell me if that really is the kind of career you want.' " Raquel studied the book like a road map. "It was a tremendous help to me," she says, "because from it I learned what not to do. I made up my mind that Hollywood is not a place filled with sinister characters lurking in half-shadows waiting to seduce virgins. It's a place filled with hardheaded business people out to make money."

Raquel's kind of place, it turned out. Her third day on the Hollywood rounds she met Patrick Curtis, an ex-child actor turned pressagent. It was love (money?) at first sight. Recalls Raquel: "I saw him and he saw me and that kind of thing. I am a very impulsive lady." An earlier husband--a tuna fisherman--had been cut adrift by the time Curtis took over.

Everybody Knew. Despite a boyish faC,ade, Curtis knew all about the movie business. He had played Ma and Pa Kettle's ninth kid, he had appeared irregularly on Leave It to Beaver, and he had received a master's degree in cinemaphotography from U.S.C. by producing a documentary on weight lifting. He also had what his friends like to describe as a sixth sense for publicity. The other five did not really matter; Raquel's publicity raced pellmell ahead of her films. "20th Century-Fox billed me as a sex symbol in Fantastic Voyage," she recalls, but "I was nothing but a rotten little nurse." In One Million Years B.C. she was a cave lady lurking about in a pneumatically uplifted fur sarong. She did something for the costume, and the studio proved it by using a publicity still (James Bond Mistress stance) on 2,000 Christmas cards. In a twinkling, everybody knew about Raquel.

For 21 years she and Curtis traipsed around Europe just ahead--but not too far ahead--of the photographers. By his count, their chauffeur banged up four Cadillac limousines outrunning the press. Raquel took to carrying a water pistol so that she could drill an occasional paparazzo who leaned in the car a little too far. But what could one do? Journalists were everywhere. Was it her fault that she kept getting shot in bikinis and microskirts and plunging necklines? Was she to blame if some 80 magazines put her on their covers?

Three weeks after their epochal meeting Curtis and Welch were amalgamated into Curtwel productions. By 1967, they calculated that it was time to make the merger complete. In Paris, demurely outfitted in a crocheted wool miniskirt and a flowing train of photographers, Raquel took her second marriage vows, sighing confidentially, "I wish I had a double."

But so far, there is no second Raquel Welch. A recent Reuters poll of worldwide film exhibitors reported that Raquel was among the top ten box-office draws. Her pictures are all instantly disposable--but so is the wrapper around a candy bar. "Everyone pays a lot of lip service to sensitivity and artistry," she complains. "But when you come right down to it, it's all money and shooting schedules. They want to be able to write everything out like a financial statement and come out with a neat little sum at the bottom."

No Nudes. Also a neat little sum at the top--for the star. At present, her contracts call for $330,000 per picture plus a percentage of the gross--with a verbal stipulation that she will not be called on to appear undraped. "I have never appeared in the nude," she boasts. "It is a very personal thing to take off your clothes. I refused to do a nude scene in 100 Rifles, and for weeks the telegrams flew back and forth, arguing about who was going to get me to do it. Finally they gave up and had some other girl strip."

Nudity is only one of Raquel's no-nos. She does not smoke, or drink alcohol or coffee. On the set, she tends to be remote with her costars. Making 100 Rifles, she was so distant that Jim Brown stopped talking to her altogether. When he wanted to communicate with Raquel, he did so through her husband--even when it came to passing the salt. When a publicity photograph called for a seminude clinch, Raquel called for a towel to insert in the chest-to-chest confrontation.

The Curtis home is a Hollywood classic: two stories, 3 1/2 acres, a pool, a pool house and a steep, unplanted hillside. Also present: Curtis and the two children from her previous marriage, whom he has adopted. Inside the three-car garage sits Raquel's Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce with license plate RWC. "The Rolls-Royce is good for prestige," she feels. "And Patrick looks like a great manager when he's sitting in the back seat."

Raquel's next projects are Shipment of Tarts, a period comedy, Tilda, a story of a woman chasing her kidnaped son, and We Only Kill Each Other, a biography of Chicago Gangster Bugsy Siegel and his moll Virginia Hill. The roles are hardly calculated to win Academy Awards, but at least they call for more than pouts and poses. "I feel people are trying to bury me in a sea of C cups," she laments. There is little likelihood that she will go under. "Marilyn couldn't fight it because she wasn't strong enough," Raquel theorizes. "But I think I can lick it."

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