Word: raquel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...