Myra/Raquel: The Predator of Hollywood

I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." I am the New Woman whose astonishing history is a poignant amalgam of vulgar dreams and knife-sharp realities. Soon, by an extreme gesture, I shall cease altogether to be human and become legend like Jesus, Buddha, Cybele . . .

FEW spectacles are more terrifying than the New Woman, bearing the twin torches of Desire to Succeed and Disdain for Mere Man. This quality of savage purpose was etched to its satiric extreme in Myra Breckinridge. Gore Vidal's travesty dealt with a sex change--the conversion of Myron to Myra--and with America's compulsive devotion to movies. It was Myra's unholy quest to vanquish man; the locus of her attack was the wellspring of his contemporary myths, Hollywood. Clad principally in feminine indestructibility, she sought to blind men with her beauty, determinedly "unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray, whom I resemble left three-quarter profile."

Raquel Tejada Welch bears no resemblance to frail, delicate Fay Wray from any angle. Her attack on the male world is based on calculated carnality, on the woman as animal. The parallels between her and Vidal's carnivorous heroine are remarkable. Says Raquel, "I understand Myra thoroughly. I've always identified with her." Now she is bringing her sense of identification to the screen in the title role of 20th Century-Fox's forthcoming film version of Myra. Not since Cleopatra has a movie provoked so much gossip, speculation, expectation--and guerrilla war--even before going into production. As the filming staggers into its ninth week, real-life and fantasy female forces keep colliding in Raquel Welch, and the collision promises the extreme moment of her career. If she can't convincingly play the invincible, pathologically ambitious Myra, she probably can't play anyone.

The Rock. Wonder Woman. The Plastic Sheena. Whatever unladylike sobriquets attach to Raquel, there is no denying her box-office attraction. Clad mainly in animal hides and bikinis, brandishing her publicity photos like the jawbone of an ass, Raquel set about five years ago to hold off the entire critical elite of cinema and conquer mankind through Hollywood. Now only 29, she has enjoyed extraordinary success. Her brooding, aquiline face and brimming, arabesque body (37-22-35) have launched thousands of picture spreads. The mere mention of her name (or the sight of it, in endless Laugh-In balloon gags) is high-premium chuckle insurance for every TV and nightclub humor writer in the land. After 15 films that range, except for Bedazzled, from unintentionally risible to just plain awful, she is worth more than $4,000,000, earns about $950,000 a year. Even more astonishing, she has succeeded in becoming the No. 1 sex symbol in a world in which sex has been stripped of its last, diaphanous shred of symbolism.

Why is there a Raquel? This is the Age of Lubricity--a time of topless shoeshine parlors and bottomless go-go dancers, of mouthwash ads that assure sexual triumph, of the Pill and unlimited campus overnights. Films like I Am Curious (Yellow) and Coming Apart depict explicit sexuality at your friendly neighborhood theater. Yet somehow there is still Raquel the Sex Goddess, who has bared neither entire breast nor buttock to the public eye, and whose career has never been galvanized by the iridescent zinc of scandal. Even she admits: "I think that whole sex-symbol thing is an anachronism."

. . . I exist outside the usual realm of human experience, a creature of fantasy, a daydream revealing the feminine principle's need to regain once more the primacy she lost at the time of the Bronze Age. Is there a man alive who is a match for Myra Breckinridge? . . .

The essence of Raquel's appeal lies beyond the relatively civilized pale of the Frantic Forties, or even the Salacious Sixties. Whether squaring off in well-cleaved wolfskin against a grumpy pterodactyl (One Million Years B.C.) or driving the federales from the Yaqui Indians' charneled fastness (100 Rifles), Raquel is raw, unconquerable, antediluvian woman. She dwells on the dark side of every man's Mittyesque moon; she is the nubile savage crying out to be bashed on the skull and dragged to some lair by her wild auburn mane.

At the same time, Raquel's atavism has the advantage of posing no threat to uncertain, post-Freudian man. Modern Man may indeed be no match for Wonder Woman, but his masculinity is not imperiled by such barbaric, unreal imagery. Today's male moviegoer can gambol with Raquel in fantasies and still not be discomforted by the possibility--in conscious, relatable experience--of ever having to do anything about it. This curious sense of inaccessibility distinguishes Raquel from a forerunner such as Bardot, who always seemed on the verge of sashaying off the screen and seducing the curly-haired kid in the second row. Producers have been careful to preserve and exploit this cinematic paradox; it is surely no accident that Raquel rarely plays an ordinary human being, much less an authentic romantic object.

. . . Olympus supports many gods and goddesses and they are truly eternal, since whenever one fades or falls another promptly takes his place, for the race requires that the pantheon be always filled.

Some observers feel that Vidal's anthropomorphic view of Hollywood applies directly to Raquel; that she happened along at the right time to fill the vacuum created by the death of Marilyn Monroe. Noel Marshall, a shrewd Hollywood agent who once handled Raquel's publicity, also insists that the exigencies of today's film market call for a dark heroine to fill the goddess gap. "The domestic market for films has dropped into the 40 percentile of the gross market," he points out. "The world wanted an international symbol--a brunette or an auburn-haired girl like Raquel rather than the Monroe type."

That may be partly true, but Raquel is unique among sex queens in another respect. Harlow had her seamy affairs; Hayworth her prince; Monroe her outfielder and her playwright; Taylor her high-rolling entrepreneur, Debbie's crooner and Sybil's Welsh actor. By contrast, Raquel has two children by a former marriage to her high school sweetheart, and is presently wed to an inoffensive uncelebrity named Patrick Curtis. She does not flounce around studio sets in see-through blouses by day or boogaloo at the Factory by night. She does not smoke. She does not drink. She rarely entertains. Says Writer Rex Reed, who will make his screen debut as Myron Breckinridge, Myra's alter ego: "Raquel is a very complex girl. She is terribly, terribly interested in being taken seriously. She has elected to be a movie star, but underneath that creamy skin and those bulging blouses beats a Puritan heart. She is a Jane Austen heroine, and the conflict has made her uptight."

. . . My own uniqueness is simply the result of self-knowledge. I know what I want and what I am, a creation of my own will ...

If Raquel has a shy Puritan heart, she also has the kind of forthright Puritan mind that in early America could probably have reconciled Scripture with slaving and rum-running. On-screen she may be the ultimate prehistoric predator, but in real life she is a carefully pre-fabricated commodity, a paradigm of the harddriving, self-made New Woman who just happened to choose acting as a career. "I'll admit I'm extremely strong-minded," says Raquel. "I don't know any other way to be."

Unlike most of her predecessors, she has always been the prime mover of her own star; she has played Professor Higgins to her own Eliza Doolittle. In a community where everyone minds everyone else's libidinous business, Raquel has a reputation for having climbed to the top without using her sex off the set.

She is also unquestionably bright, and can discuss at least a narrow range of subjects with intelligence and even insight. On the David Frost Show, for example, she scored a valid point in defense of romantic love when she described the female mind as "an erogenous zone." But her observations get lost in her incessant chatter and frequent malapropisms. For a time she referred to things she found attractive as "gauche" until she finally learned that the word she wanted was "chic." Editing one of her own lines in Myra, she struck out the word "germane" and substituted "superfluous."

She has few illusions about herself, and can examine her position with dispassion. "I'm trying to purge myself of all the mannerisms I've used up to this point. I have never had a high opinion of myself as an actress, but I'm determined to develop, and I keep looking for ways to improve. If after a couple of years I decide that I can't make it as a serious actress, then I'll just quit."

Maybe she will, maybe she won't. Meanwhile, Myra presents Raquel with her first real opportunity to show what she can do. Although the role is impeccably tailored to her assets and attitudes, the odds are stacked against her. In the first place, it is hard to imagine a book more difficult to transpose into quality film. Such scandalous scenes as a female-to-male rape with a leather dildoe may prove too much even for today's censors. When Author Vidal is not trumpeting the beatitudes of bi-sexualism, he is trying to convey another message: ours is a society dangerously worshipful of celluloid (there are no fewer than 95 stars mentioned in his book). Thus the film version of Myra comes full circle; it will be a movie about a book about movies.

Perhaps because of his embarrassment over his novel's exquisite self-revelations, Vidal failed in two efforts to bring off a light, witty scenario. Director Michael Same (Joanna) then tried his pen--to just about everyone's displeasure. Finally, a Hollywood genius-presumptive named David Giler, 26, was called in. To complicate matters, Mae West has insisted on writing her own lines. The script is now in its tenth rewrite, and the ending has yet to be decided upon. Regardless of what is done to the script, the success or failure of Myra ultimately hinges on the girl who wants to stop attitudinizing and begin acting.

. . . I was born to be a star . . .

Little Raquel Tejada (the last name means, in Spanish, "Spears of Clay") was born in Chicago on Sept. 5, 1940 (not, as she claims, 1942). Her father, Armand, is a Bolivian-born structural-stress engineer; her mother, Josephine, is of English stock. When Raquel was two, the Tejadas moved to La Jolla, Calif., a pretty, plasticized, middle-class community just north of San Diego. Raquel grew up in an all-American ambience that would have been a natural for a California Norman Rockwell. The family, which included Raquel's younger brother and sister, lived in a one-story stucco house near the beach with a pepper tree on the neat front lawn.

Armand decided early to bombard his brood with the self-improvement lessons that most children congenitally abhor. Not Raquel. She devoured them. She was particularly enthralled by the ballet lessons that Armand thought would give her poise. What they did was give her ideas, which she now sentimentalizes. "I saw The Red Shoes ten times," she recalls. "I decided then that I wanted to be a ballerina." She has plenty of aptitude for the dance, according to her former teacher, Irene Clark, but hardly the proper spirit. "There was no humility in her approach to art," remembers Miss Clark. "She enjoyed attention too much, and she knew how to get it."

The adolescent Raquel could have borne a touch of humility. A high Latin ridge gave her nose an unattractive hook; she was affectionately known around school as "Birdlegs." Then she began to grow in all directions, and soon became an established figure on the beauty contest circuit. She won her first local contest at 15; later she was named Miss La Jolla, Miss San Diego, and finally Maid of California. Says Don Diego, who ran another contest she captured called the Fairest of the Fair Festival: "There were prettier girls around, but none had her figure or her drive. Most girls tremble before they go onstage. Raquel never did. You could tell by the way she got up there that she was the queen."

Her classmate and boyfriend, James Welch, thought so. A year after she graduated in 1958, he married the Fairest of the Fair. They had two children, Damon and Tahnee. Raquel the housewife interspersed domestic chores with dramatics classes at San Diego State College, and soon grew restive. After three years, the Welches parted--"inevitably," Welch now feels. Raquel headed for Dallas, where she made enough money modeling for Neiman-Marcus and hustling cocktails to have her nose fixed before assaulting Hollywood.

. . . I must not complain, for a life dream has come true. I am in Hollywood, California, the source of all this century's legends. No pilgrim to Lourdes can experience what I know I shall experience once I have stepped into that magic world which has occupied all my waking thoughts for twenty years . . .

Raquel's screenland novitiate was typically rugged. She lived in a $70-a-month apartment with her children. She had no job, no car, and her only income was a meager allowance from Welch, who by that time was serving with the Green Berets in Southeast Asia. Raquel, ever resourceful, tied up with Agent Noel Marshall, who coached her in the fundamentals of studio saleswomanship. Every day she rose at 6 a.m., dropped her children at a day-care center and set off on her unappointed rounds of photographers. It was a dreary life, but she kept plugging, waiting for a break.

Enter Patrick Curtis, a Hollywood product if there ever was one. At age two he won the Adohre Milk Company's Adohreable Baby Contest, a ringing triumph that earned him the role of Olivia de Havilland's baby in Gone With the Wind. He later played Ma and Pa Kettle's ninth kid, changed his name from Smith to Curtis (after his boyhood hero, Tony). When he was 13 he landed the TV role of Buzz in Leave It to Beaver; his eternally boyish face and buck teeth allowed him to keep the part for six years. Patrick wanted to get into the production end, though. He eventually wound up with Rogers and Cowan, a show business p.r. firm, and waited for his own break.

Destiny's child and Beaver's buddy met in 1964--smack in the poetic middle of Sunset Strip. It was business at first sight. As Raquel recalls it: "He saw me and I saw him, and we put our heads together." The result of this cerebral huddle was the creation--three weeks later--of Curtwel enterprises. Shortly thereafter, things began to happen. Bikini picture in LIFE. Billboard girl on ABC-TV's Hollywood Palace. Twentieth Century-Fox contract. Said Fox Talent Director Owen McLean: "We thought we would build her up slowly; that it would take some time. But she got more publicity by accident than most girls get on purpose."

. . . At the moment, I feel like the amnesiac in Spellbound, aware that something strange is about to happen. I am apprehensive; obscurely excited . . .

It wasn't always by accident. Her first film was a microscopic nightmare, Fantastic Voyage (her best line, to a leering Stephen Boyd: "I run the laser beam here. That should tell you where to keep your hands"). After that, Fox lent her to Britain's Hammer Film Productions for its reprise of One Million Years B.C. Says Raquel: "It was the kind of movie you do just to go to Europe and hope everyone will forget."

No one who has seen B.C. will ever forget it. It was a ghastly, primeval Romeo and Juliet, with the Shell and Rock families replacing the houses of Montague and Capulet. Loana Shell (Raquel) and Tumak Rock (John Richardson) meet and fall agonizingly in love. Agonizingly, because he already has a mate back in the Rock family cave. Besides, every time they get together, a Tyrannosaurus rex clamps onto the scene or the families start crushing one another's noggins with clubs. After an apocalyptic earthquake, Loana stalks off with her inamorato, presumably to become The Second Mrs. Tumak.

Meanwhile, Patrick engineered a slick transatlantic crossruff. Starting with a girl who was unknown on either side of the ocean, Patrick billed Raquel to the European press as America's answer to Ursula Andress. European reporters lapped it up. Then Patrick shipped the publicity back to the U.S., where it was eagerly picked up by the American press. In 1966, Hammer Productions wished its friends a merry, merry Christmas by distributing 11-by-13 cards (3,000 of them) with Raquel's classic cave-suit pose on the front.

For the next 2 1/2 years she and Patrick gadded about Europe, and all the attention was almost, almost unbearable; in Italy, Raquel even took to toting a squirt gun to cool down ardent paparazzi who dared stick their heads in her Cadillac limousine. Nothing could deter the photographers, however. By February 1967, she and Pat decided it was time to seal the Curtwel merger. In Paris, bedecked in a crocheted minidress, Raquel took her marriage vows for the second time.

During this period she was cranking out most of her sparsely budgeted, highly profitable, eminently disposable movies. Bedazzled, a whimsical parable of the Seven Deadly Sins at work in British society, was the exception. In a brief appearance as Lust, Raquel buffeted the distressed, innocent hero, Dudley Moore, with forethrust bosom and broad double-entendres ("Would you like hot toast--or buttered buns?"). Raquel's own, equally broad brand of humor surfaced during shooting breaks. Once she and Moore repaired to a dressing trailer while the crew eavesdropped outside. Raquel, playful lass that she is, suggested that she and Dudley pretend that they were making love. Accordingly, they made the appropriate sound effects, and then emerged to a chorus of whistles.

Raquel had less fun in her celebrated confrontation with Jim Brown in 100 Rifles. She reportedly called Brown "a convict" during a tantrum in Fox Vice President Richard Zanuck's office. On location, Brown did little to smooth the situation, which took on unfortunate racial overtones. At lunch he growled at her: "Pass the salt; it isn't black." She and Brown finally stopped talking altogether. The picture was execrable. But it cost only $6 million and raked in money. Another south-of-the-border oater, Bandolero, gave Raquel the opportunity to demand of Dean Martin, "How duss hay man get to be han hanimal like ju?" Such lines at least scotched rumors that Raquel was a crypto-Chicano; her accent was pure Hollywood.

. . . Hollywood is finally at my feet. Beyond that, ambition stops and godhood begins . . .

Raquel desperately wanted parts that called for something more than guttural one-liners, but the pattern seemed set. Then, in March 1968, Fox announced that it had purchased the rights to Myra. Trouble was, Fox was at a loss to cast the transsexual title role. Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Lansbury and Anne Bancroft were considered. Fox even tested eight real transvestites, but decided that an uncloseted queen just wouldn't do. Then Producer Robert Fryer (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) had an inspiration. "If a man were going to become a woman, he would want to become the most beautiful woman in the world. He would become Raquel Welch."

Raquel got the part, and production began in September. But fitfully, oh so fitfully. Raquel's iron will and her proven ability to hog the spotlight were put to their most severe test. For sheer incompatibility, the volatile cast of Myra is rivaled only by the Burton-Lyon-Gardner gallimaufry of Night of the Iguana. There is crustaceous Veteran Director John Huston portraying Uncle Buck Loner, the sagebrush sybarite. Huston, an inveterate cigar smoker, has been unhappy with a no-smoking clause that Mae West had written into her contract. There is the epicene Rex Reed, who eats peaches, scribbles notes for his book (about the making of Myra, naturally) and regularly breaks up the crew with his lavender drawl. Towering over all is the ribald old empress, Mae West, who threatens to steal the show as Leticia Van Allen, the drunken, horny agent.

Mae and Raquel quickly clashed. Mae won the opening round with a splendid entrance. She stumped onto the set amid cheers, and, with a smile frozen on her seamed face, pumped her 77-year-old hips in a game imitation of her former self. Raquel sent flowers at first, but then threw down the gauntlet by appearing for their first scene in a black dress with a white ruffle--the color scheme West had demanded exclusively for herself. A three-way confrontation ensued, pitting Raquel against Director Michael Same and Producer Fryer (a grudging alliance, since they openly despise each other). The dress disappeared and so did Raquel--for three days. After shooting several takes around her, Same finally called Raquel back. She reappeared in a black dress with a blue ruffle--but the blue was so pale it might as well have been white.

Such childish conflagrations have put shooting two weeks behind studio schedule and kept most of the cast seething. Add to this the cast-wide dislike of Same and the inability of Fryer to exercise much control, and the wonder is that Myra is being shot at all. Some of the principals are less than enthusiastic about its potential. Reed insists: "I am going to be the only person in this film who makes sense." Says Writer Giles, who is beginning to despair of Raquel: "She types up these ten-page position papers and insists on reading them to me. Can you imagine anything more frightening than that?" Says Richard Zanuck: "It seems as if everyone has quit three times. I think I've quit once or twice myself."

. . . And so it was that Myra Breckinridge achieved one of the greatest victories for her sex. I have accomplished what nature intended me to do and except for one last turn to the screw, I am complete . . .

Raquel, of course, is not about to quit. "There is no way," she says, "that this is not going to be a good movie." Raquel has to be optimistic; no one else connected with the film has as much at stake. But Raquel would seem to have everything that she could possibly want: a splendid 3 1/2acre establishment in Beverly Hills, and she has been offered as much as $500,000 for one movie--plus 10% of the gross. When her Fox contract expires (after one more film), she will be in a position to name her own price. She has another movie (The Magic Christian) and a television special for Coca-Cola scheduled for early 1970. How many Mere Men can match all that?

Of course, there is that last, elusive turn that Raquel is determined to achieve--recognition as a legitimate talent. "I realize my image put me where I am," she says, "or I wouldn't be able to complain about it. But I think all sex goddesses have basically been unhappy. I know we sound like ungracious asses, but it's like being a shell and I'm tired of it. People don't think I have ability, and I think they are wrong. I've tried to fight it. Marilyn couldn't fight it because she wasn't strong enough. Well I am, and I think I can lick it."

Perhaps; perhaps not. Raquel may be forever relegated to the oxymoronic role of the virgin voluptuary, writhing in tattered wolfskin and muttering, "Ur . . . Loana ... gunkl . . . Tumak?" until neither she--nor audiences--can stand it any longer. Ah, but what if it turns out that Raquel Welch really, truly can act? In that serendipitous event, the world's moviegoers, as Myra would so aptly put it, are in for a real good time.

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