Remembering Raquel Welch (1940-2023)
while digging up an old conference paper I wrote about her fifteen years ago
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Remembering Raquel Welch (1940-2023)
Last night’s news of the passing of the 1970s icon Raquel Welch hit me differently than I might have expected. Normally, when such news lands, I find myself reflecting on which of the recently departed performer’s works meant the most to me or which provided my most memorable introduction to their particular skills and talent. But with Raquel Welch — I started (and couldn’t stop) thinking about a weird little conference paper I wrote and presented before an audience of maybe a dozen academics about fifteen years ago.
Rereading the paper this morning, I realized how pivotal this forgotten fragment of an essay was to my development as a scholar… My deep dive into Welch’s filmography — I really did watch every one of her movies — in tandem with my excavation of popular media coverage of her at the apex of her stardom forever shifted how I understood my method and mission as a writer. I wouldn’t say I found my voice in this piece but, revisiting it, I can see that — perhaps because this particular presentation “didn’t matter” all that much to me professionally — I allowed myself to write about what mattered to me. Which, I can now appreciate, proved to be a breakthrough of sorts. Some of this material made it into my book but most did not. Even so, I don’t see myself taking up the mantle of being a Raquel-scholar again anytime soon…
So. Rather than just let the piece continue accumulating digital dust on my harddrive indefinitely, I thought I’d send it up “as is” — unedited, with all its flaws, frailties and incomplete citations intact— as my tribute to the goddess herself…
But by way of prelude, I invite you to take a moment to marvel at the weird wonder that was LaRaquel at the height of her superstar superpowers in this brainbending excerpt from her enormously successful television special Raquel! — which aired on CBS in April 1970, just two months before the release of what might be Welch’s most notorious film Myra Breckenridge, which I discuss in some measure below…
Translating Raquel
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, March 2008.
In 1959, eighteen-year-old beauty queen Raquel Tejada was “thrilled in having been selected to portray the heroine of California’s Greatest Outdoor Play.” The winsome Raquel already wore the Miss La Jolla, Miss San Diego, Maid of California, and Fairest of the Fair crowns. But winning the title role of Ramona in the annual Ramona Pageant held greater promise for the aspiring actress. In but a few years, Raquel Tejada — using her married name “Welch” — would burst forth as an international superstar in such films as Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C. In the spring of 1959, however, young Raquel was thrilled to appear before the tens of thousands of live spectators filling, at several thousand per performance, the outdoor amphitheater built into a hill in Riverside County. The tenth actress, and first Latina, to portray the pageants’ “half-blood” titular heroine, Raquel’s appearance made the emerging starlet part of what was, by 1959, a long line of performing Ramonas.
But I’m here today to talk to you about Raquel Welch’s body – to kick off our contemplation of “The Hard Work of Screen Beauty in the 1970s” with a serious look at one of the period’s least seriously regarded actresses – one of the era’s greatest international box office stars who rarely received affirming notice of her acting talent or technique, even as her formidable physical charms garnered sustained cinematic attention and acclaim. Indeed, I’m here to talk about actress Raquel Welch as a performing body while, at the same time, I’m here to commence the work of translating Raquel’s body of work in racial as well as sexual terms – to translate the queer racial work done by Raquel Welch’s performing body. My premise this afternoon is simple: I submit that, in addition to being an emblematic international sex simple of the later 1960s and early 1970s, the crypto-Latina performer Jo-Raquel Tejada Welch (known throughout the world as simply Raquel Welch) is perhaps most interesting as a transracial figure, a performing body whose body of work routinely enacts racial passing, racial crossing, and racial surrogation.
Raquel Welch might have been the most iconic Latina of the 1960s and 1970s, the first historical moment in which what we sometimes now call a “Latino identity” was affirmed politically and culturally in the United States on a national level. But Raquel Welch was not a Latina superstar in this period. She was simply a superstar. Who happened to be what we might now call a Latina. But what’s important to remember is that Raquel Welch was not simply “passing” as white or non-Latina in this period. Nearly every press account of Raquel Welch’s burgeoning career is careful to note the actress’s mixed ethnic heritage. As Time magazine put it in 1969, “Her father, Armand, is a Bolivian-born structural engineer; her mother, Josephine, is of English stock.”[1] Likewise, most reports included mention of Raquel Welch’s maiden name in their discussions of her backstory, as the Los Angeles Times Magazine did in 1968 when describing “the all-too-human girl who was Raquel Tejada from San Diego’s fashionable La Jolla [district].”[2]
Indeed, the fact of Raquel’s Latin-ish heritage remained an easily accessed “open secret” during her rise to fame. For Latino audiences and fans, this “open secret” could provide an affirming source of ethnic pride. Celebrated Chicano film director Gregory Nava, best known for his films Mi Familia and Selena (as well as the television series American Family in which Welch took a featured role in the 2002 season), recalled how Jo-Raquel Tejada’s early success was a source of pride for Latino San Diego in the 1950s. “She was the prettiest girl in town,” Nava remembered, “The whole Latino community was very proud of her.”[3] Latinos outside Raquel’s hometown shared similar affinity for the rising star. As Chicano film critic and historian Charles Ramírez Berg observed, “Those of us who were Latinos knew that Raquel Welch was a Latina, and we got to enjoy her success all along.”
In this way, the “open secret” of Welch’s Latina heritage is but one example of a larger historical phenomenon I have termed “stealth latino” or “crypto-latino.” (I’m still trying to determine which phrase I like better.) The phenomenon of “stealth Latino” or “crypto-latino” occurs when Latino actors “pass” in certain roles, “come out” in others, yet remain legible as Latino to Latino audiences the whole time. As a critical device, “stealth Latino” aims to codify what Felix Sanchez, the executive director of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, has described as certain performers’ distinct ability “to be ethnically present to the Latino audience and ethnically invisible to a majority audience.”[4] For me, “stealth Latino” approaches the performative construction of Latina/o legibility – and illegibility – in twentieth century popular performance through the parallel critical rubrics provided by queer theory and theories of racial formation.
However, the “open secret” of Welch’s off-white heritage did not operate solely as a source of praise for the rising actress in the later 1960s. Indeed, queer insinuations about Raquel’s ethnoracial heritage inform many press accounts of her rise as what one commentator described as “a dark heroine to fill the goddess gap.”[5] In these vaguely suspicious reports, commentators often seem especially invested in determining whether or not Raquel Welch is more Mexican than her official biography might indicate. When queried about 1968’s newest sex symbol, one “self-described ‘hardened lady reporter’ from a news desk” told a Los Angeles Times entertainment writer that “‘She [Raquel] used to look like a Mexican waitress from Tijuana! Heavy eyebrows, greasy face – they’ve done wonders for her.’”[6] Other observers showed keen interest in the neophyte actress’s lack of facility with a Mexican accent for her roles in the films Bandolero (1968) and 100 Rifles (1969). One journalist wagged that Raquel’s “accent, like her blouse, keeps slipping,”[7] while another noted that her vocal performance in such roles “scotched rumors that Raquel was a crypto-Chicano; her accent was pure Hollywood.”[8] (Years later, Welch would herself contextualize these “accent issues” by describing her father’s adamant assimilationism in post-war California. “He never spoke Spanish in the home,” Welch recalled, “so as not to have us have an accent.”)[9]
This duality – that Latino audiences might seek and find proof of Welch’s authentic Latina-ness at the same time non-Latina audiences could seek and find proof of her inauthenticity – is essential to my notion of the stealth- or cryptolatino. Moreover, it’s evocative of what I am to highlight when I submit Raquel Welch as a transracial – a queerly racial and racially queer – figure. Moreover, media suspicions of Welch’s raciality find provocative parallels in comparable suspicions about Welch’s eroticized physicality. Welch’s “measurements” – a chant of 37-22-35 repeated dutifully in nearly every profile published between 1968 and 1972 – appear as often as mentions of Raquel Bolivian father. Comparably, such descriptions of Welch as a “raw, unconquerable, antediluvian woman” are just as frequently punctuated by insinuations of plastic surgery, whether she had the “high Latin ridge” in her nose corrected, or whether “Raquel’s bust was nature’s handiwork or the result of silicone injections,” or – the most urban legendary – she had one or more ribs removed to highlight the contours of her 37-22-35 hourglass figure.[10]
I find the coincidence of these parallel insinuations – these sideways questions about Welch’s physical and ethnic authenticity – fascinating, especially for the way that they telescope toward what is certainly Raquel Welch’s most notorious performance as a performing body, her portrayal of the transgender terrorist Myra Breckenridge in the 1970 film of the same name. As such, Raquel Welch’s presence and performance as the title character in Michael Sarne’s notorious box office bomb, Myra Breckenridge (1970), arguably the first major studio film to be headlined by a transgender character, provides an evocative site for my exploration of Welch as a transracial figure.
On first glance, it might not seem that the cinematic adaptation of Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel is about race at all. Director Michael Sarne’s giddily exploits Welch’s sex symbol status in constructing the character of Myron/Myra and uses Welch’s notoriety to fundamentally structure the film’s garish satire of the collapse of Hollywood narrative and convention. Indeed, at times, the film (despite balance-tipping supporting performances from the likes of Mae West, John Huston, and Rex Reed) seems to be all about Raquel Welch as the sex goddess role-icon. (Performance theorist Joseph Roach offers “role-icon” as a device to describe the process by which certain performers “satisfy[y] the audience members by embodying their expectations while exciting them by transforming their preconceptions.”[11]) Indeed, at times, the production seems built around the visual pun of casting Raquel Welch as a transsexual. One paper snorted, “Supershape [Welch] playing the abbreviated man-woman-man?”[12] Producer Robert Fryer explained, “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.”[13] For his part, in a 1969 interview, Myra Breckenridge director Michael Sarne mused, “Myra Breckenridge is an important commentary on the American way of life. And Raquel Welch is a comment on American tastes. That’s why she is so perfect for the role.” [14]
Sarne’s film – an adventurous but attentive adaptation from Gore Vidal’s novel – departs from the novel’s satiric Hollywood picaresque style as Sarne, as screenwriter as well as director, reinvents the narrative according to the racially-charged genre conventions of a “passing” tale. For Sarne, Myra is the character who secretly inhabits a privileged identity – signified by Welch’s eroticized female body – from which she might be excluded should her “actual” identity be revealed. Indeed, in what is perhaps the film’s greatest – and subtlest – departure from Vidal’s original, Sarne draws implicates the spectator in collusion with the secret of Myra’s – and Myron’s – passing. (The novel withholds these details from the reader until its climactic series of revelations). Even more, Sarne draws conspicuously upon the history of racial surrogation and cross-racial performance in U.S. cinema to establish the core conceit and narrative tension of his film.
In the film’s title sequence, after a surreal prefatory interlude in which Myron (Rex Reed) insists on surgically adapting his penis and augmenting his breasts with silicone because “Myra’s waiting,” Sarne interposes a brief scene of from a Shirley Temple film in which a “Chinaman” asks her “You know Amelican song?” and little Shirley replies, “Yes, I do. It’s called, ‘You Gotta S – M – I – L – E.’” The scene then shifts to Myron’s feet tap-dancing down Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, pausing to do a quick step-ball-change atop Ann Miller’s honorary star as the title credits of the film begin to roll as Shirley continues to sing the song.
We follow Reed’s Myron until he pauses his light-footed stroll before a plate glass shop window in which we might faintly see a twirling female form. Moments pass as the dancing female form spins, her dress flaring as she twirls, before she steps from the Myron’s reflective glass and into full view. Of course, the dancing woman is Raquel Welch in her first scene of the picture as Myra Breckenridge’s title character. As Shirley Temple continues to the sing, Welch’s Myra continues her twirling down the city street, performing herself for both Myron’s and our visual pleasure. An applause break interrupts the synchronicity between Shirley Temple’s underscoring and Welch’s street dancing. As Raquel does a series of skirt raising twirls down the sidewalk, the child singer raps a syncopated request for permission to sing the song again “the way it would be done” by Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Then, Temple’s child voice reaches deep within her girlish register for a masculine voice with which she sings the song again, adapted to an approximation of full minstrel style. As Temple vocally surrogates the racialized masculinity of the minstrel singer, Reed’s Myron and Welch’s Myra begin to dance together, first mirroring one another’s movements before joining together in a high kicking, tap-dancing finale which concludes as Reed’s Myron and Welch’s Myra get into a cab together and speed away into the horizon – an interposed image of a mushroom cloud, color-processed in yellows and oranges to resemble a sunset.
This stylized musical credits sequence does little to forward the narrative and bears no resemblance to any sequence in the novel. But for my purposes, this concatenation of cross-gender and cross-racial performative surrogations provides an evocative cue to the racialized aspects of Sarne’s elaboration of Vidal’s novel and, especially, his utilization of Raquel Welch’s performing body to reshape, to remake, to translate American tastes and traditions…
I suspect that this is where, as my gesture toward conclusion, I almost certainly inserted one of my signature off-the-cuff final flourishes — which is a bad conference habit of mine where, rather than committing to a conclusion when I write the paper, I leave it to the twin forces of inspiration and improvisation to fill my mouth with an aptly concluding sentence or two in the moment of my delivery of the paper. I seem always able to find something that at least sounds good — which is fine in the moment but a disaster when I return to the paper days, weeks, years later to find it without conclusion.
Blessings, dear Jo-Raquel, blessings…
[1] Time, 11.28.69
[2] John Hallowell, LA Time Magazine, 9.29.68.
[3] Navarro, NYT, 6.11.2002
[4] Navarro, NYT, 6.11.02
[5] Time, 11.28.69
[6] Hallowell, Los Angeles Times Magazine, 9.29.68.
[7] Time, 4.4.69.
[8] Time 11.28.69.
[9] Navarro, NYT, 6.11.2002
[10] Respectively, Time 11.28.69; Parade 10.26.75; and tba.
[11] Roach, It, 130.
[12] Dan Knapp, LA Times, Pacific Stars and stripes, 9.19.69
[13] Time, 11.28.69
[14] Marilyn Beck, Pasadena Star News, 8.8.1969.