Raquel Welch

It's taken me a few days to put together all the thoughts I have about Raquel Welch. When she passed away at 82 the other day I didn't think there was enough to write about. But after watching some of the video clips on #raquel more thoughts occurred.

There is one clip when she appears on the Dick Cavett show, coming out in a knit, figure hugging minidress that shows all the physical attributes. She's talking about a film she just completed, perhaps Bedazzled where she has a small part playing a devilish temptress. If nothing else, she was always well casted to her attributes.

Dick is sitting with a guest who initially I can't place. It's definitely sometime in the '60s, and the guest, a female, is sitting there in a multi-colored outfit with hair all over the place, smoking a cigarette in a long holder. There's nothing that tells you who the guest is, but after watching a few minutes of the clip it's plain to see it's Janis Joplin, the rock singer who pretty much never got past being a kid before she passed away at the age of 27 in 1970.

When I look at the cover of her LP Pearl I remind myself how much of a kid she really was when she was huge. She's still got a baby face underneath all the feathers and multi-colored hair.

Dick changes his seat next to Janis and moves to the center seat to let Raquel sit to his left as she crosses her legs. Raquel is commenting on some premier she was at where she's being pulled in all directions for someone's attention. Janis adds her experiences with idolatry.

Dick, as usual, displays his wit, as dry as Nebraska wheat in the sun. Dick went to Yale, so his diction is nearly as precise as William F. Buckley Jr. without the tongue rolls and pen clicks.

Dick's talk show was not set behind a desk. Initially it was only on the USA network, and was pretty much unavailable to the average viewer, since cable was not yet in NYC outside of Manhattan. Cable came to the "outer boroughs" only in the early '80s.

I remember when Cavett emerged from behind the scenes as a joke writer for Jack Parr and others and was on the Johnny Carson show one night. He told the story of his being taken as a Midwestern rube when he arrived in New York and someone sold him what was described to him as a priceless Van Gogh drawing. Dick admitted that it turned out to be one of the few drawings Van Gogh did with a ball point pen.

Of curse he told of his adjustment to Yale, when he thought taking a astronomy course would be an easy A because he figured all you had to do was look through a telescope. He later found out how much the course required a solid knowledge of advanced math and physics. It was not an easy A. He did manage to graduate, however.

There is another appearance of Raquel coming out onto the Cavett show some years later where she is dressed in what is anything but a plain knit mini-dress. She emerges in an elaborate gown designed to show off every pert of her body, in a stop traffic outfit, but with taste. Dick has all he can do to stop staring.

When Raquel passed away and I read her NYT obit I was waiting to read about how she started as a billboard girl on The Hollywood Palace, a mid-'60s variety show. No mention. No mention of how she was big in European modeling circles before the doeskin outfit in One Million Years B.C.

The photo at the top shows a smiling Raquel handing the host Victor Borge the billboard cards for the next act on a November 1964 show.  I was in high school then, and when you're a teen-age male in 1964 you don't forget someone who looked like Raquel. I informed the NYT obit editor, William McDonald, they missed it.

Raquel was not Marilyn Monroe, despite being considered a "sex symbol." Marilyn had  passed away in 1962 and is till revered. When Hugh Hefner of Playboy passed away he had his ashes placed in the mausoleum next to Marilyn's ashes.

Raquel didn't sing happy birthday to a president of the United States in Madison Square Garden and wasn't married to a  legendary playwright Arthur Miller, or a legendary ballplayer, Joe DiMaggio. Lyndon Johnson was not likely to act like JFK, at least not as publicly. Elton John is not going to compose an elegy to Raquel's passing, like Candle in the Wind. But Raquel lived a far longer life than Marilyn's suicide shortened life.

I never knew Raquel was of South American descent, with a Bolivian father, but considering her features, the Spanish side comes through. Certainly it did in her name, Jo-Raquel Tejada.

I had forgotten the Broadway stage appearances and critical praise in Woman of the Year. She could sing, dance and passably act, the old triple threat of needed talent, unlike what goes for celebrity status these days if you're a Kardashian, famous for being famous, if you even believe that.

I'm no longer 15 as I was in 1964. I was born at the back end of the '40s. But they're starting to call my class when I realize I'm reading obits about people born at the start of the '40s, like Raquel and baseball's Tim McCarver.

How many more miles to go before I sleep?

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