Sex Symbol Raquel Welch on Aging - Oprah.com

With fame came the chance for Raquel to spend time with leading men like Burt Bacharach, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Elvis Presley. She doesn't believe a woman should kiss and tell, but Raquel does spill some dirt in her new book. "They were all interesting in their own ways," she says. In 1964, Raquel had a small part in Elvis' film Roustabout. "He was like high-octane energy set on idle," she says. "He had all this stuff in him. He was charged up. But it was all contained in this cool demeanor."

Still, she says he never actually seduced her. "He invited me someplace that I decided not to go," she says. "I just didn't want to be another notch in his gun."

In 1972, Raquel filmed Bluebeard in Budapest with Richard Burton. "He's like a heat-seeking missile, a smoking hot romantic," she says. "He was just so charismatic. He was just really something."

Raquel says a common misconception is that she's had lots of sex over the years. In fact, Raquel says sex is overrated. "Sex is great, of course. But sex to me is an expression of the relationship and the feelings that you have for somebody else," she says. "If those things are not working, and especially for women who are very strong and have a very high income—or at least a higher income than he does—it starts to just ruin everything."

Raquel says she falls for men who can see and feel the real her—not the girl on the poster. "All the men that I have really fallen for are those men that have reacted to me and have made me feel like I'm a person and it's not that they're going to bed with Raquel Welch," she says. "I'm a human being, you know. I put my high heels on one foot at a time."

Raquel say another misconception is that she's high maintenance. "I am for work but not the rest of the time," she says. "I'm usually just in sweatpants and some kind of raggedy shirt and my Keds."

Though her career brought many opportunities, Raquel says there is a personal cost. "When I'm running around the world and being Miss Sex Symbol and having this big career in film and everything and I'm running from place to place, I couldn't always be with my children when I wanted to be," she says. "Eventually, I could see that this was taking its toll on my kids, and it used to just break my heart."

Even when she was home, Raquel says she wasn't always present. In some birthday cards, Raquel says she signed "Raquel" instead of "Mom" because she was so used to autographs. "I was often preoccupied," she says. "I felt loving toward them and I would tuck them in and I would soothe them, but it wasn't the same as being there for them as a mother 24/7."

Today, Raquel says she has a great relationship with her kids, but it took work. "I just started out realizing that I really needed to swim out to the wave. I needed to take a lot more initiative and just keep letting them know that I wanted to be there in their lives with them, that I had something I could offer to them," she says. "Little by little, the disappointment or the lack of confidence they had in me melted away."

When it comes to aging, Raquel admits she was "totally" afraid of getting older. "To be an aging sex symbol is not exactly a picnic," she says. "If you're called old, you feel like it's over." Raquel says she loved her 40s but felt blindsided when she hit menopause. She experienced heavy bleeding and drastic mood swings. She found herself without energy and depressed. "I used to find myself just down on the floor in a corner crying my eyes out," she says. "I couldn't handle anything."

Though Raquel found some relief through hormone replacement, she says she didn't find peace until she faced unresolved issues from her past. "I felt like a lot of what I was doing with my career and with the different men in my life was really a kind of [avoidance]," she says. "I just had to unravel the things that I hadn't been dealing with because I was just too busy."

In the end, Raquel says she felt empowered. "I actually felt like: 'Oh, my God, this is a new time. This is like an awakening. I'm coming into the light. I get myself now."

Raquel says the lesson for every aging woman is to embrace it. "I want them to stop being scared of it, because it's just another chapter in life," she says. "It's not time for you to give up. You don't need to repeat what you did already. Don't keep comparing yourself."

Raquel says she likes to think of aging gracefully as a game. "We might as well make up our minds to play it or just bow out and be spectators," she says. "Sitting around doing nothing is far from the best option. Just as you maintain your home, your car, your garden, you should look after your greatest gift: your body."

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Raquel Welch deals with aging gracefully in new book | Reuters

By Basil Katz

NEW YORK | Thu Apr 8, 2010 6:52pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - 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.

PLASTIC SURGERY A LAST RESORT

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.

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Patricia Sheridan's Breakfast With ... Raquel Welch

She became an instant sex symbol the moment she appeared in that fur bikini in "One Million Years B.C." That was in 1966. Today Raquel Welch says: "That was also the moment the real Raquel disappeared." Her book "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage," to be released today, is about the real Raquel and the lessons she learned. The 69-year-old actress, author and businesswoman won a Golden Globe for her comic performance in the 1974 film "The Three Musketeers." She married her first husband, James Welch, when she was 19 and has two children from that union. She went on to wed three more times. She is scheduled to be on "Oprah" today and will guest host Turner Classic Movies with Robert Osborne on Thursday to present four of her favorite films.

Why write the book?

I had these things sort of bubbling over to express. I felt like because I had always been a symbol, a thing and somebody without a voice, just an image, that it was very important for me to voice those things. And I felt a kinship with other women. I felt a need to write down what my discoveries were. It was one of the few chances I have to use my real voice and people will not be distracted by the physical image.

You talk about the compromises of fame in the book.

What I was trying to do was make it a kind of handbook for women that touched on all of the things that concern every woman, not just actresses or people who are considered famous. My experience is maybe a little bit different from them because of my career. But otherwise we have so much common ground between us. You know, to show them that even with the fame and the wealth and the excitement of meeting fantastic people and travel and all that, underneath, the fundamental qualities of being women is very much there and shared by all of us. We have the same kinds of doubts and fears and challenges and insecurities that we have to fight and do psychological battle with.

You write about your parents' relationship, your father's dominance and your mother's subservience. Which personality did you identify with?

I think I'm kind of an amalgamation of both. The truth is I felt sometimes like I was identifying with my mother and she was a victim -- under his thumb. But at the same time there was a kind of anger and resistance rising up in me. I wrote about the confrontation [with her father] and I did something very forceful and confronted him and made him back down. When I had that confrontation it was not so much the outcome but that I had built a resistance to this kind of tyrannical oppression from my father. I was not going to let it happen to me. That very much shaped my personality. I never forgot the fact that my mother, as a woman, was enabling to a man and deferred to a man quite a lot of the time. What I'm saying is, I am two things. I am an independent woman who does not want to be mistreated. Who wants to be respected. Who has an identity outside of a man. Still, I am very much enamored with men and attracted to them as the kind of natural completion of what I am as a woman.

You found power as a sex symbol playing up the feminine qualities.

I did in a way. I think it was unconscious, but very much present in my image that I was a marked departure from the very vulnerable and very available Marilyn Monroe. I was athletic, independent, strong, forceful, a woman, yes, and a sexual creature, but somebody you had to deal with. You were not going to be dealing with a pushover. I think that was pretty explicit in that very first poster. I think that is why people saw me and recognized me, not because I was another girl in a bikini.

How did you deal with the casting couch scenarios?

Well, when I was the girl in the poster I was also the mother of two small children. People did not see me as somebody who was really a mommy, instead I came across as some sex symbol, goddess type. The real Raquel was just not up for having little dalliances for whatever reason. I was a mother. It was just not in me to have promiscuous liaisons for work or to advance my career or for any other purpose. Many of the young actresses, when I was starting out, I saw them going out with a lot of people because they thought it might help them, you know, partying with different people who were in power and making promises to them.

You've talked about your children as a grounding force. Do you think you would have made the same choices had they not existed?

I think I probably would have. I think there was something about me having those children and being the kind of woman who is only capable of falling in love. I think that was built into my DNA, and that's why I got married to the man. I thought I was in love. That's why I had the two children. That's why I followed my calling into a career, and that's why I reacted the way I did.

Did you take special care raising your son when it came to respecting women?

I think my son is respectful of women and others in general. He's a very, very kind soul but I don't think that is any of my doing. In the book I talk about how difficult it is to be a single parent and a working mother. But if you are in show business and now you are being dragged all over the planet and if your children come with you, they have to have tutors and people to take care of them while you are on a set. These sets aren't always in a sound stage like they were in the good old days of Hollywood. They are out in a desert someplace or on the top of a volcano, in the case of "One Million Years BC." So what you have is not toddler friendly territory. Today there are little nurseries provided on the set and mommy time and it's a much more user-friendly industry. In my day children were just persona non grata in the industry.

Were you concerned when your daughter would be trapped in a persona when she went into acting?

No not at all. She told me way ahead of time, "Mom I don't want to be anything like you." I said, "Well, honey, I agree. You should really go your own way." We do have a marked resemblance in so many ways. She has a completely different approach as an actress. I say in the book that all the good characteristics my kids developed were really their own achievements and not something I did for them. Because I was a career woman, I wasn't always able to be present when I would have liked to be. So that was a big price to pay for myself and for them.

Was your mother's passing a turning point for you?

I talk to older women -- I'm 69 years old now -- about the beauty after 50 and the vitality that is still there if you are interested in life and not just in yourself. I looked to my mother to see how she was coping with her life as she got older. My mother lived to be 93. I was aging and watching her ahead of me paving the way. I was changing. I think it's a natural progression that a lot of us try to resist. We don't want to get older. This is actually a beautiful period when you are figuring out what your life is all about and what things you really value, your real priorities and to kind of make an assessment of what you have done so far and what needs fixing. I feel like it is probably the best time, at least as far as your interior life goes. The things about youth that we concentrate on are the exterior, but so much concentration on the superficial doesn't really prepare you for when you get past 50 and you suddenly have to really deal with yourself and find deeper questions and answers to the larger questions. So, yes, my mother passing was very pivotal. What I realized, too, that my father, with all his bluster and temperament, was the weak one.

What is it you want now from your career and from life?

I want joy and peace in my own heart. I want the opportunity just to live as a person, not as a thing or a special celebrity. My faith and my belief system is very important to me. So I'm happy.

First published on March 29, 2010 at 12:00 am

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Raquel Welch takes herself seriously, and so should you - Los Angeles Times

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."

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."

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Raquel Welch talks women's rights - The Globe and Mail

The actress and sex symbol Raquel Welch, now 69, talks about her new book Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.

Your book is part autobiography and part practical advice. But a lot of it comes down to your ideas on how a woman should carry herself, right?

It’s my personal philosophy of being a woman. I feel women have had a radical role change since I first came on the scene as a young girl.

Is the change positive?

Some of it is, in that new opportunities opened up for women outside the home. But, in general, I don’t think the private woman has been represented by younger women in a way that is constructive, for their personal lives or for society.

Do you mean the poor examples set by Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears?

No, I’m not talking about them per se. Because I don’t want to judge people I only know through the media. I find both of them to be very attractive and talented in their own way. I’m talking about just regular folk out there. I mean, when you have 13-year-old girls that are performing fellatio on boys in school, and they think that’s just fine – “everybody does it, mom” – that’s a little daunting. You wonder how it got that way.

You must have some idea.

I went to school in the 1950s, and there were some things you just didn’t do. The sexual activity now is so prolific that it borders on devaluing the whole of society, and women in particular. I don’t think women have gained anything by that – imitating porn stars.

Is there something to be said for empowerment, though?

I think women should hold themselves with some pride, and as if they are a person of value – and not just for any taker. Let’s face it, these are the future mothers. We want them to be protected, and we want them to protect themselves.

You say in your book, “keep your legs crossed and protect your womb.” Again, are we looking at someone like Britney Spears here?

I would rather not put a name on somebody. I think Britney has had her share of bashing, and I don’t want to add to that. I think that young girls, including Britney, have been impressed by older women who have set a rather provocative, and a very promiscuous, role model for them.

In the book, you say your famous doe-skinned bikini is in mothballs. Did you mean that figuratively ?

It is in a trunk somewhere. I still have it with all my old costumes.

Was the image of your cave woman in One Million Years B.C. a healthy one?

I think it was. What I liked about it is that she is a very strong woman, and not somebody who is a pushover. And I liked that.

That movie came out in 1966, a time when sexual mores were changing.

I think there was a kind of celebration then. It was an awakening – that this was a new generation. Certainly the women’s movement helped a lot. But I think it morphed into something quite a bit different than we imagined.

Did you burn your bra back then?

No, I didn’t. But, then, I didn’t really have to wear one at that point.

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Raquel Welch Bares All - The Daily Beast

The bombshell actress talks with Rebecca Dana about her revealing new memoir, Beyond the Cleavage, why American women have lost their feminine side, and other issues she'd like to get off her chest.

"Everything's going to be all right," is the first thing Raquel Welch's publicist says one recent afternoon, when I arrive for an interview with the fiery 69-year-old sex symbol at New York's Le Parker Meridien Hotel. Until that point, there was no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Oh, but there were problems: small logistical frustrations that build into major crises when a star like Welch is waiting upstairs. The rooms were ugly. The schedule was off. After three hours of primping, the pin-up was growing restless.

Soon enough, all the wrongs were righted and Welch was sitting cross-legged on a couch, sipping Diet Coke through a straw, in a suite on the 36th floor.

"I haven't been in this hotel since I opened on Broadway years and years ago," she says, "and I thought it was going to be good luck, and it's horrible."

The morning had not gone well.

"It was nuts! First of all, I came in and of course I got disorientated, and I got ready an hour early. I was so ready and then I had to—oh!," she sighs elaborately. She had to wait. And they had just arrived in town last night. And there were all these necessary preparations—the hair, and the makeup and the deciding of "what the heck to wear," all of which were exhausting.

It has been 45 years since the actress donned a doeskin bikini and posed with a fraught, wind-swept look on her face for a scene in the film One Million Years B.C.—the image that would become the movie poster that would hang in millions of boys' bedrooms and cement her status as an international bombshell—but despite the passage of time and the struggles of transit, she looked resplendent.

Welch wore denim trousers, a starched white shirt and a trim navy vest, plus a full face of makeup and steep black open-toed booties. Her makeup was impeccable. Not a single perfectly highlighted strand of hair was out of place. Her smile was so big and bright it appeared to be backlit.

She was in town promoting her book, a hybrid memoir and self-help manual, featuring candid anecdotes from her life in the spotlight mixed in with health and skin-care tips for women of all ages.

The book is called Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, a title for which she says she fought aggressively (a fearsome prospect). "I had a big problem with that title," she says. "When we came up with it, I don't want to call any names but people in the publishing company said, 'No, no, no, you're going to turn off a lot of women with the world 'cleavage.''"

Beyond the Cleavage is also a passionate polemic against some of the consequences of feminism, which Welch sees as having lead to many great achievements and also a tragic debasing of femininity. "I don't recognize my country anymore," she writes in the preface, "or the role of women in this world of vanishing moral values."

In person, she's even more emphatic.

"I tried to make it historic so people could really see how, you know, it's like smoke under a door. It starts out with the Suffragettes and kind of gathers and gathers and gathers until pretty soon you turn around and say, 'Well, you know, I'm happy about the gains we've made but something happened here, and there was a misunderstanding, you know? We are not like men. We don't want to be like men, not really."

She is not a fan of "hook-up culture." She writes, "Once women started applauding themselves for 'talking openly about sex' and the reproductive process, there was no end to it. They couldn't shut up." Also, she recommends Frownies, a $19-a-box anti-wrinkle pad, which, when glued to the face, works similarly to Botox.

Welch's zagging back and forth between advice and invective actually makes for a captivating read. On pages 144 to 150, she details her daily beauty routine, including subcategories devoted to moisturizer, eye drops, eye makeup, foundation, "highlighting," blusher, powder, cheekbones, eyebrows, eyelashes (plus a guide to trimming and applying falsies) and, of course, lips. On page 32, we're told to "Cross your legs, girls! Guard that womb."

The best part is that she wrote every word herself, without the aid of a ghostwriter. You didn't know Dianna Brock from Darren Star's Central Park West could write, did you? That's probably because you were too busy staring at her breasts.

"To cut to the chase," she says, "after all these years of being an inanimate object or symbol, I thought I didn't have a voice. And I thought: 'This is a time, which has been very pivotal for you because you have had to look at your life and say, 'Where did I fail? Where did I succeed? And what does it all mean, Alfie?' And I've gotten to the point where I'm able to have a better perspective because I'm older, and I'm more mature, and I'm now entering old age, as we used to know it."

Welch talks openly about Hormone Replacement Therapy and other medical innovations that have changed the nature of "old age" as we now know it. She also addresses her four marriages ("My first was my best one.") and how she struggled to balance career and love. The Hollywood establishment comes across as predictably sleazy, applying constant pressure on Welch to disrobe in her youth, then dropping her like a rock once she passed the age of 40.

On the first day of shooting One Million Years B.C., things were not going as Welch anticipated. So she approached director Don Chaffey and said that she'd been thinking of a things she'd like to do. "You've been thinking?" he replied, then explained her job was to run, half-naked, from one rock to another. "When you get about midway between the two," he continued, "pretend you see a giant turtle coming over that hill. You scream… and we break for lunch. Got it?" And that's how the famous bikini pic was born.

After inheriting the sex-symbol mantle from Marilyn Monroe, Welch says she did everything she could to be a more modern pin-up girl—to be, in a way, "an anti-Marilyn, an antidote to the very, very vulnerable woman." She chose action roles. With two children from her first marriage, she strived for "the full experience of being a mother and a professional and an artist and just a full human being from the feminine aspect." Sometimes it worked; other times it didn't. When it didn't, she turned to yoga and to her Christian faith.

"Looking the way I did influenced everything about me," she says. "It's very easy to get addicted to people who defer to you because of your beauty. And then they just want to put you in a nice little box and have you just be beautiful, like a little objet d'art, and that's just very—you know, it's paralytic. It's being captured, like a butterfly, and now you're stuck up on a wall with a lot of pins, and then, that's it. Your life is basically over. You're just to look at."

At which point the publicist daintily reemerges, in a futile bid to keep her star on schedule. But once Welch starts talking, she will not stop until she's finished. She touches on death and spirituality, on the difference between "Raquel Welch," after three hours of hair and makeup, and Raquel Welch, the aging screen goddess who hasn't lost her looks—and who, with Beyond the Cleavage, has finally found her voice.

"If the beauty thing had not distracted me and pushed me in that direction," she says. "I think I probably would have been a writer."

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Raquel Welch on beauty | Style Goes Strong

“Look at her back; she has the most perfect back,” said my friend Abby.

Um, her back? I had told Abby I was off to the 92nd Street Y to see Raquel Welch talk about her new book, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.

"I know she’s known for her boobs," Abby said, "but many years ago Vogue did a series on perfect body parts and she had this absolutely perfect triangle."

Well, I thought, I’m going to hear her talk about “her internal struggle to age gracefully in the spotlight of Hollywood and make peace with the … mantle of ‘sex symbol.’” Or so said the 92nd Street Y’s website.

When Ms. Welch appeared on the stage, in a cream-and-coffee open plaid suit and a brown tank top demurely displaying a modest bit of cleavage, it was clear the large crowd, mostly women of a certain age, and men, were fans.

And she had lots to say, about the book, why she wrote the book, and what’s in the book, beginning with the infamous loincloth bikini that catapulted her to fame as a sex symbol, while secretly being a single mom with two little kids.

She shies away from giving advice about men, she said, because she’s had four marriages. “I love men but the battle of sexes goes on and on, ever fascinating." She expands on that theme in the book and she contributed more to that conversation on a recent Good Morning, America appearance.

But her book is chock full of advice on beauty, from how to wear clothes and makeup after a certain age, to diet, nutrition and exercise, to cosmetic surgery: “Botox and injectable fillers have been almost as life-altering at the Pill was in the ’60s,” she writes.

She has lots of experience in the realm of beauty: In 2007, she was named a MAC Cosmetics Beauty Icon; in 2008, she was included in People magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful issue, she has her own successful line of wigs; and this year, in addition to the book, she’s the spokesperson for Foster Grant sunglasses to spotlight their 80th anniversary. She became affiliated with the brand in the 1960s so it’s rather fitting that she help foster their charitable efforts now.

But with all this success at 69, she still says, “Can anyone have it all?” She admitted that she really didn’t start to feel her own power until after she turned 40. And with a mischievous smile, she added

We [women] get to be a real handful after that because we know too much.”

She spoke about her complicated relations with her parents, in particular her father, and coming to terms with mistakes they both made along the way, as we all need to do -- our 50s seem to be an ideal time to come to terms with all that. Even more poignantly, I thought, she spoke about her relationship with her own kids; how she had to sit down with them finally and go through a really painful outpouring of their grievances growing up so that they could all ultimately cleanse and heal and have a loving, healthy relationship now.

All of this was imparted with the easy grace of someone who’s comfortable in her own skin, and the dazzling smile (that recalls Farrah Fawcett’s, except that it predates it) that indicates she appreciates the hardship it took to get here with a wry and rich sense of humor.

Her secret for staying young now she says, is that she’s always hopeful, always interested. But when asked for more tips, she grinned, “It’s all in the book.”

One thing she’s retained from her years as a sex symbol -- the art of the tease.

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