In Raquel Welch’s new book there’s a photograph of her and some other actress going at it hammer and tong in the 1972 movie “Kansas City Bomber.” In Pam Grier’s new book there’s a photograph of her and some other actress going at it tooth and nail in the 1971 movie “The Big Doll House.”

It appears from film databases that, inexplicably, no one thought to pair these two sex symbols in a no-holds-barred fight during their prime. A pity, really. Think of all the ground that could have been covered by that single poster: Welch, in tattered, bikini-shaped rags along the lines of her “One Million Years B.C.” costume, preparing to throw a left hook while Grier, in flimsy prison-chic à la “Women in Cages,” leans in for an uppercut. White against black. Classic come-hither against dangerous you-want-a-piece-of-this? Warm smile against cool stare. “Mom, I’d like you to meet my unbelievably hot but chaste fiancée” against “My wife absolutely cannot find out about this.” What heterosexual male age 10 to 110 wouldn’t want that hanging on his bedroom wall?

Instead we have to make do with their two books, Welch’s “Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage” and Grier’s “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts” (written with Andrea Cagan). And, dismayingly for those who learned to lust by watching these gals in mediocre movies, we discover that catfighting would not have been their natural reaction to each other at all. More likely they would have had some tea, chatted about their mutual alarm over the decline in moral standards among American youth and decided to found an Anti-Promiscuity, Drugs and Other Stuff League.

That, at least, is the impression they want readers to take away from these books. Welch is blatant about it, coming down hard and loud in favor of restraint and respect rather than licentiousness. Grier is less obvious, dishing in moderately graphic detail about her relationships with men like Richard Pryor and Freddie Prinze but painting herself as the moral rock in the immoral seas such people lived in.

There is, of course, a special afterlife — an unpleasant one — reserved for celebrities who work a “do as I say not as I do” shtick, and Welch and Grier may qualify for it simply because they built careers as sex objects and now are selling themselves as voices of feminine empowerment. But both women probably deserve a pass because (a) they’re gorgeous; (b) they came through some tough times, especially Grier; and (c) they managed to make it to their 60s with a measure of respect in the show-business world despite being in some dreadfully exploitative movies.

Welch, who turns 70 this year, doesn’t spend a lot of time in “Raquel” on autobio­graphical details; this is more an advice book than a memoir. She does, though, give the basics: birth in Chicago; childhood in California spent trying to avoid the wrath of a fearsome father; some beauty-pageant titles; a brief early marriage to a high school dropout named James Wesley Welch that left her with two children.

She ended up in Hollywood, her charms striking enough to overcome the fact that as a single mother of two, she didn’t exactly fit the starlet mold. There was “Fantastic Voyage” in 1966 and then, in 1967, the cavewoman flick “One Million Years B.C.,” a movie that was overshadowed by its own poster: an instant classic featuring Welch in rags that looked as if a gust of wind would blow them off, with an expression that said she was either about to battle a dinosaur or throw herself at some eager caveman.

“Even though people thought of me as a sex symbol, in reality I was a single mother of two small children!” she writes, showing an addiction to exclamation points that is evident throughout her book. She adds: “Can you picture the girl in the poster with a baby in one arm and pushing a stroller with the other? Kind of destroys the fantasy, doesn’t it?”

Welch goes on to give glimpses of other professional and personal moments that are as brief and frustrating as her cavewoman outfit, one of a career’s worth that never did fall off — unlike Grier, she would not work nude. She spends only a few paragraphs on her successful lawsuit against MGM over her age-related dismissal from the 1982 movie “Cannery Row” and barely mentions her sex life or four failed marriages. (“Despite my image, I prefer to be pursued rather than take the lead,” she says in an annoyingly vague section on cougarness.)

No, Welch is here to dispense advice, not dirt. Much of it has to do with how to age gracefully, and women will find it useful if they have an unlimited amount of time to devote to their skin tone and hair and an unlimited amount of money to spend on yoga classes, vitamin supplements and personally designed diets. But she is at her most entertaining when she shows her conservative side, as when she relates her reaction to “The Vagina Monologues.”

“Has the culmination of feminist progress led to this moment?” she says. “I fail to see how talking to your vagina can elevate a woman’s self-esteem.”

Here, oddly, is where she finds common ground with Grier, who has this to say about that same body part:

“When girls start having lots of sex at young ages, they wear their vaginas out,” she writes. “Literally. What do you expect if you have intercourse four or five times a week with different partners starting when you’re 15 years old?”

Grier, at 61, has been through a few guys herself, and the juiciest parts of her book involve them. She gets some topicality out of her relationship with a U.C.L.A. basketball player named Lew Alcindor, better known now as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: their romance, she says, went bad when he went Muslim and began doing things like sending her from the room when his male Muslim friends came over. As for Pryor, she offers a perhaps too-graphic description of how it is that a woman can end up with cocaine residue around certain organs even if only her boyfriend is using the cocaine.

Grier, born in North Carolina but dragged to various other ports of call as an Air Force brat, is also fairly blunt about her traumatic early life, including two rapes before she became a movie star. Yet fans of her eclectic career, which began in the early 1970s in the blaxploitation films of Roger Corman and others but has also included better-regarded material like “Fort Apache, the Bronx” (with Paul Newman) and the Showtime series “The L Word,” may wish she had gone into more detail about her on-set experiences and her career choices.

There is, though, a tasty anecdote about her first encounter with Quentin Tarantino and the screenplay he later mailed her. Both Grier and Welch can be said to have, in the showbiz cliché, paid their dues, but in Grier’s case that is literally true: 44 cents’ worth of postage due for the script of “Jackie Brown,” the 1997 Tarantino film that took her career to a whole new level.

Source: New York Times

Iconic actress and sex symbol Raquel Welch had to face the process of aging doubly -- as a woman and as an international celebrity famous by her body.

In her new book, "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage," the American actress discusses getting older, starting a career at age 19 with two children in tow and reconciling her public persona with her private self.

"We can all agree that aging is challenging, but believe me, it can be even more so for a fading sex symbol," she says in the book.

Wearing a white blouse with a stripped vest and flared jeans Welch, 69, spoke to Reuters from a Manhattan hotel room about her film star image, the real Raquel and growing old.

"The thing about aging is that its got all these wonderful answers attached to it," Welch said, adding that age alone should never define a person.

"Look at me. I'm holding together just fine, I'm not doing it with no effort, I'm doing my yoga everyday -- an hour-and-a-half of that -- but really guys, what is the point of starting to lie about your age?

"I represent beauty, an idealized look to women and so they follow me when I do things," Welch explained.

But she admitted that, as an impulsive person, findings answers was not easy.

Occasionally, she said, "something just hits me and I know I have to go for that, but sometimes it's like jumping off a cliff because it's really not where I should be."

In the book she explains how she navigated through menopause, experimenting with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and estrogen boosts, only to settle for regular yoga sessions and a healthy diet.

She abstains from salt, sugar and caffeine and has "egg whites or a non-wheat grain" for breakfast. She never eats after 6 p.m.

Welch also reveals that she views plastic surgery as a last resort, but favors Botox if done right.

"I felt that people really didn't give a damn about me, they only cared about her: the one in the doe skinned bikini with the legs astride, and arms like this and an impossibly skinny little waist," Welch said, referring to the scantily clad prehistoric tribeswoman she played in the 1967 film "One Million Years B.C"

"It was a formidable person, and they were in love with that, some superwoman Amazonian type. I am strong woman, but I'm not all that."

In the book she wanted to deal with the real Raquel.

Four times divorced, and often away from home shooting movies, Welch describes the challenges of raising two children and reconnecting with them later in life.

"There were a lot of things that could have been better," she admitted.

Welch said the point of the book was to remind women that their fears and anxieties "were not special to them." If her own travails, worries and insecurities, which were magnified by being in the public eye, were surmountable, so are theirs.

Source: Reuters

Raquel Welch has made her peace with Loana, the scantily clad cave woman she played in the 1966 camp classic "One Million Years B.C." The poster of Welch wearing pelts in strategic places made her a worldwide sex symbol. The image is so iconic, it was even a pivotal plot point in the 1994 film "The Shawshank Redemption."

"She's really pretty OK," says Welch of her reel-life character. "I recognize her as one part of my nature. But I just don't want it to be my complete legacy."

Welch is five months away from her 70th birthday. With a 50-year-old son and 48-year-old daughter, Welch is old enough to be a great-grandmother. But very few great grannies have looked like Welch.

Apologizing profusely for being about five minutes late for her interview, Welch breathlessly scurries into the living room of her Italian village-style house nestled in the West L.A. hills. Time has seemingly stood still for Welch, who looks more like she's in her 40s. She's whippet-slim with barely a line on her face (she swears by Oil of Olay). Wearing black pants, a crisp long-sleeve white blouse and a vest, Welch is a stunning near-septuagenarian.

Though not acting as much as during her peak of popularity, Welch certainly keeps busy. She was a regular on the 2002-03 PBS drama "American Family," and has guest starred on "Seinfeld," "Spin City" and "Welcome to the Captain." She's also appeared in the films "Tortilla Soup" and "Legally Blonde." And she's recently been featured in a fun Foster Grant sunglasses commercial.

For the last few years, Welch has been writing "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage," a compelling hybrid of autobiography and self help. She talks about her youth growing up in La Jolla -- her Brazilian-born father was tyrannical; her mother bent over backward to keep peace in the family -- her early first marriage, her children, her rise to superstardom, turning 50 and dealing with menopause.

"I did write every word of my own book," she says proudly.

"Approaching 70, it's a landmark of sorts and you feel that you know something and you have something to say," Welch explains. "I desperately wanted to speak to women of my generation and, being a mother, to younger girls as well. I wanted to speak about my experience being a woman because it might help by knowing that even if you are touted as some big doo dah, the trials and tribulations and the beauty of being a woman is something that we all experience in our own way."

But the four-time married Welch didn't want "Beyond the Cleavage" to become a kiss-and-tell. "You don't have to do just some dirty-laundry book," she says. "I wanted to speak about the unspeakable, like menopause. What we really don't need to talk about much has to do with plain old sex. But if we are talking about real life-changing experiences . . . I thought I would be useful and helpful."

Welch also frankly talks about her firing in 1980 from the box office flop "Cannery Row" and being replaced by a much-younger Debra Winger. She sued MGM and was awarded $14 million for breach of contract.

Her film career, though, went south with the firing. Welch then found success on Broadway, replacing Lauren Bacall in the musical "Woman of the Year." Still, she confesses, "I never really came back [to movies] 100%," she says.

Welch explains that there is a paranoia that as life goes on you get less valuable. "That is not true," she says. "As life goes on you get more valuable as a person. Many women look better. Personally, I think I look better because I have lived and I have a different kind of aura about me having lived."

She feels her career would have taken a different route if the studio system were still in place. "I wasn't working in the time of the studio system, where there were plenty of parts to do and parts that were appropriate for you -- not parts from left field where you had to somehow try to figure out how I am going to do this. . . . They do that now with Jessica Alba sometimes and Megan Fox and they get no respect."

Welch said she managed to turn the corner in her career when she starred and produced the 1972 movie "Kansas City Bomber" at MGM, in which she played a single mother who becomes a roller derby star.

"I said let's do something completely different -- not glam. I got very good reviews. I felt a rite of passage where I am over that part where I have to run around in a bikini forever. It's just so painfully uncomfortable and in a way kind of humiliating."

But she admits she never turned down sex kitten roles early in her career like the X-rated "Myra Breckinridge."

"I am not a fool," she explains. "I realized when I came along, I wasn't Meryl Streep who had been put into a bikini. I was somebody that got rocketed into the spotlight and superstardom overnight. I knew this was going to give me an opportunity and I should make the best of it.

"I think that I managed to do that but it was not easy. I didn't want to stay in people's minds just as a physical presence."

Source: LA Times

Raquel Welch, the 60's and 70's icon and sex symbol, has written a new book about her life called "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage," and was on "Good Morning America" today to talk about her career and why she wrote the book. She spoke about how little she had expected to be thrust into the life she had when she starred in the 1966 film "One Million Years B.C." She explained that at the time she was a single mother of two, something very few people realized at the time or afterwards, and that playing a sex symbol felt very incongruous to her. Welch had no idea that the movie would take off: "A caveman epic? Who cares?" she said.

Welch, who is now, she said, nearing 70, explained that she wrote her book because she wanted to show that there is more to her than the objectified icon that most people think of her as. "I'm a person, I'm not a... whatever," she said. She isn't upset with the way people think of her, though. The title of the book, "Beyond the Cleavage," is a chance to "hav[e] fun with my image," she said.

Source: Huffpost Books