Word: myra
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...