CHICAGO — Raquel Welch died Wednesday at the age of 82. From her teenage pageant years onward, her career was defined and in many ways confined by a gilded cage of marketable, exploitable beauty, sold primarily to men who couldn’t quite believe their eyes.
She was also a lot more interesting and versatile and ambitious than what those men, women and children saw in 1966. That was the year of her star-making turn as Loana, a coastal tribeswoman in a deerskin bikini in the schlocktastic fantasy “One Million Years B.C.”
It was a modeling job more than an acting job, with more screams than lines. Her one line was, in fact: “Me Loana … you Tumak.” But it launched a highly visible career, even if rarely led to roles she prized.
“I am living proof,” Welch wrote in her 2010 autobiography “Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage,” “that a picture speaks a thousand words. It seems like everything that’s happened to me since has flowed from that moment, frozen in time.”
In early childhood Welch herself, like Loana, became a coastal dweller, when her family left Chicago for San Diego. It’s strange how a celebrity’s Chicago years, or months, or even days, skew the perspective of appreciations of legends now gone. The local angle has a way of distorting things. Take Charlie Chaplin. For nearly a century after he made one short film and spent a mere 23 winter days here, in 1915, he was routinely described as someone who spent years here. Not days.
On the other hand, someone like Welch — if there are any someones like her — is generally remembered and so very often photographed as a coastal phenomenon, Southern California division. That she was, most of her life.
But she spent her first two years in an Andersonville apartment at 1354 W. Berwyn Ave., according to the National Archives. The building’s still there.
Arriving in 1940, Jo Raquel Tejada was the first of three children born to Josephine Sarah Hall, an American of English ancestry, and Bolivian-born Armando Carlos Tejada. Her parents met at the University of Illinois in the 1930s. Armando became an aeronautical engineer, while Josephine eventually worked as an executive assistant at Mattel.
In her autobiography, Welch has little to say about those first two Chicago years, remembered as tense, warring ones between her short-fused, frequently violent father and her dutiful, long-suffering mother.
The Chicago climate? Welch writes: “Not ideal for a newborn baby girl with thin Mediterranean blood, courtesy of my Spanish father. … Luckily for me, my folks moved to California when I was barely two; a good thing, because my baby brain was frozen solid until that point. That’s probably why I’ve had an aversion to anything cold ever since, from icy drinks to frigid people.”
Beyond learning to walk a few blocks away from The Hopleaf, there’s another Chicago angle to Welch’s family roots.
Her grandfather on her mother’s side was architect Emery Stanford Hall, at one time the president of Illinois Society of Architects. His best known building? A bungalow located at 3536 S. Lowe Ave. in Bridgeport. A bungalow like many others. But for decades, this one housed Richard J. Daley and family.
Female or male, we think of our screen lust objects as something more and less than human, maybe less so in recent decades but probably not. Welch actually played Lust, the Deadly Sin to beat, in the 1967 comedy “Bedazzled.” It was another measurements-first role, one of a million Hollywood has filled throughout its filmmaking and flesh-peddling history.
Later, on screen and on Broadway, Welch got to actually act and stretch out and take her looks beyond what everyone could see at first glance.
Out of necessity, like so many before her, had to fight for respectability, which she found in comedy, notably Richard Lester’s “The Three Musketeers.” She resisted every strong-arm attempt to take her clothes off on screen, though plenty of her movies, including the Westerns “100 Rifles” and “Hannie Caulder,” played peek-a-boo on cue. Cue the outdoor shower scene. Cue the indoor bathing scene. The first Welch movie I saw as a kid was the spy lark “Fathom,” which starts with Tony Franciosa inspecting her cleavage. The first movie I saw of hers in theaters was “Mother, Jugs and Speed,” in which her character continually protests her loutish nickname while starring in a movie called “Mother, Jugs and Speed.”
The minute she put on the deerskin bikini, she wrote in 2010, “I knew I was going to have to fight to stay afloat in the most treacherous of identities: the role of sex symbol. There I was, stranded and easy prey in that desolate realm of overnight success. But I was nobody’s pushover.”
We don’t readily think of our symbols of sexuality as people, because they’re symbols, or posters, or come-ons. We don’t think of Raquel Welch as earthbound or ordinary. The way she spoke on screen, with her precise and vaguely coached diction, she sometimes sounded as if she were in the process of discovering her true voice in real time. She grew up in a household where Spanish was not spoken. Ever. In her 60s, she wrote, she took it upon herself to learn it, and well.
We all start where we start. A little piece of wherever we begin our lives has a way of sticking around in someone’s personality. Maybe it’s just another load of homerism hogwash, but: Whatever tenacity or career-survival instinct Welch relied on, all those ups, downs and decades — it came from those first two years in Chicago.
In 2000 she told the Tribune: “My only recollection is a faint memory of being cold.” She was the star who came in from the cold. And unlike espionage, the career she made for herself was mighty public in ways millions appreciated.
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(Tribune reporter Joseph Mahr contributed to this column.)
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