Juan Villoro
In 1946, automotive engineer Louis Réard presented an invention capable of stopping traffic: the bikini. The two-piece garment was named after the atoll where the first atomic bombs exploded.
Twenty years later, the explosive garment was appearing on magazine covers, fashion runways, movies, and television. No one looked better than Raquel Tejada, a Chicago-born girl with a Bolivian father, who at 18 adopted her first husband’s last name: Welch. The society of show business, dominated by male fantasies, had found a cloth to fit her and the ideal woman to wear it.
If eroticism involves the mind, the bikini avoided that complication. Calendar girls had no other personality than their appearance. That supremacy of external beauty revealed something already suspected about men: their incorrigible superficiality.
Mass culture discovered that desire can be mass-produced and created a peculiar archetype: sex symbols. Beauty increases in value if statistics backs it, that is, if it has customers. Raquel Welch sold millions of posters in which she posed scantily clad; however, to be seriously successful, her behavior had to be even more primitive: in 1966, she starred in A Million Years Before Christ. The costume designers assigned her a Jurassic version of the bikini in that film, designed to excite even brontosaurs.
The film was so ridiculous that it had an overwhelming impact, and the attractive cavewoman became mega-famous. However, the filming was not easy. Raquel reviewed the script in which she only said three lines, had a doubt, approached the director, Don Chaffey, and said, “I’m thinking…” He looked her up and down and replied, “You’re thinking? Don’t do it. The actress recounts this misogynistic anecdote in the autobiography she published in 2010 with the eloquent title Rachel: Beyond Cleavage.
The muse of a generation, who has just died at the age of 82, was the victim of a media that reduced her to her body measurements. At the age of 44, interviewed by the English writer John Mortimer, she said revealingly: “They made me a sex symbol, but the most disastrous thing is that they didn’t give me sexy roles. The old movie stars were surrounded by mystery, and that was much sexier.”
Fed up with being seen as an erotic bombshell, she launched a career as a singer and dancer, triumphed on Broadway, and took up the lucrative business of giving advice on how to imitate her figure.
A bestselling author of self-help books, she discovered that “writing is a very unhealthy profession. It’s not easy to do a diet book when eating chocolate chip cookies is the best remedy for blank-page angst.
Not everyone admired Raquel Welch’s stage presence. In 1975, the diva performed in Mexico, and Vicente Leñero described her as follows: “Raquel moves, and nothing. She dances a samba, and less. She asks for a cup of coffee at the table that borders the stage to get in direct contact with the audience, and nothing either”.
Significantly, she, too, was aware of being an unreal creation. When Ronald Reagan had just assumed the Presidency, she told John Mortimer, “Actually, Reagan doesn’t govern America, but people we know nothing about. The Reagans are fantasy figures. Well, so am I. I don’t want to rely on politicians who deliver dialogue written by others as I do. I’ve spent my whole life among simulations, and I know that Americans are sold fantasies. We have soap opera politicians.
Raquel Welch existed “beyond cleavage,” but Mortimer was one of the few who cared to listen to her talk about other issues, such as the nefarious U.S. interference in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
I conclude with a paradox: Raquel Welch achieved a peculiar inner seduction. In the science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a group of doctors reduce their size to be injected into a body and heal it from the inside. In the end, they are expelled by tears that, for them, have the dimension of cataracts.
Nothing more disturbing than imagining a miniature Rachel in your bloodstream. In that film, the limited and wild yearnings of an era became, if not deep, at least intravenous.
This was published in Spanish by Reforma on February 17, 2023
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