Racquel Welch, 1940-2023

A few thoughts on a comedy-adjacent sex symbol

Last night, after live-tweeting Blake Edwards’ “10” on our Substack Chat, I found myself wanting to watch moore Dudley. So I popped in my DVD of Bedazzled—the original of course, not the 2001 remake. A retelling of the Faust story set in Swinging London, Bedazzled is particularly beloved by comedy people, and my mother. Bystander Joe Dator and Susan Tekla discussed it at length on this episode of their podcast Comedy Film Funnel, and anyone who wants a deep-dive on the film should go listen. Not only is Peter Cook’s script a pristine example of sketch-to-cinema, I think Bedazzled is one of the best British comedies ever made, as important to its time as Withnail & I was to the Eighties. If you watch something like The Ladykillers (1955) then watch Bedazzled (1967), British comedy’s great leap forward is evident.

I stopped watching right at the point when Racquel Welch, as “Lillian Lust, the Babe With the Bust” tries to tempt poor old Stanley Moon (Dudley). I can’t embed the clip, but it’s here. (Nice Profumo joke at 3:04.)

And then I woke up to the news that Racquel Welch was dead. If you’ve ever been in a movie, please let me know; apparently I have the power to kill actors just by watching them.

Racquel was less successful selling tickets with this poster than with One Million Years B.C., but being entirely creatures of the BBC with very few fans in the U.S., Pete and Dud needed all the help her ample bosom could give.

I was never an acolyte of Racquel’s—Farrah Fawcett-Majors was the poster-totem for my generation—but for some of the comedians I love, she most definitely Was It. According to Harry Thompson’s brisk and stylish Peter Cook: A Biography, “Peter wanted to call the movie Racquel Welch, so that the posters would read, ‘Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Racquel Welch.’” Thompson also reports that Dudley wore three pairs of pants while filming the Lillian Lust scene, in an unsuccessful attempt “to hide his inevitable erection.” Only in late-stage capitalism would vast corporations move heaven and earth to secure the talents of one of Earth’s most beautiful women, arrange for her to squirm, scantily clad, all over the male lead’s body, then attempt to hide the natural consequence of all this. What nonsense we get up to. Anyway, in the Seventies, Cook took Racquel out for an evening, much to the consternation of his wife. History does not record Ms. Welch’s opinion of all these shenanigans; History never does, and how much better would History be if it did?

Racquel also appeared in 1969’s The Magic Christian, once again as pure male fetish—this time as a dominatrix cracking the whip over a bunch of galley slaves. (Oh, Terry Southern, you naughty boy.) You can see a snippet in the trailer, beginning at 2:09.¹ As in Bedazzled, Welch is a brief walk-through…who figures prominently on the poster.

Welch as “The Priestess of the Whip.”

I have not seen Myra Breckinridge, mostly because it fits with a bunch of other satirical novels of the time that mostly misfired as movies—The Loved One, Candy, Catch-22, et cetera—better the book live unimpeded in my noggin. Apparently Southern’s Blue Movie was optioned by Stanley Kubrick (the obvious inspiration for Boris Adrian, the novel’s film director), but never saw celluloid. Some suggest that the movie Alex is forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange is the closest approximation of what Kubrick might’ve done. If so, I’m glad he didn’t; like Hitchcock, I find Kubrick’s idea of sex substantially curdled. But if he had done, and Blue Movie had been greenlit, it’s likely that Racquel Welch would’ve figured prominently. At least on the poster.

• • •

When you are born, you are given a house, and that house is your mind. From the starting gun of consciousness, you begin furnishing that house, filling it up with furniture, bric-a-brac, art works, everything you need right down to the toothbrush. Finally, it is totally filled and completely comfortable. It is your home.

Concepts, news, favorite songs, celebrities—these are all part of the furnishings. Some are very large and important, and you use them every day; your bed, or your favorite hat. Others are minor, a bottle of silver polish you use once a year to make things a bit more festive for Christmas dinner. Some of these items, you don’t even like…but they are all yours, and all essential to orienting yourself in a busy and frightening world, to feeling safe and secure.

Then at some point, the robbers start to come. You wake up as if it’s a normal day, and open up Facebook or Twitter and find that something has been pilfered. A celebrity has died; a hot dog stand you used to go to has been demolished; your favorite used bookstore is now online-only. First, it happens once in a while, and you can afford to be philsophical—you still have a houseful of things you like. Then it happens more, and you get cranky. Young people around you don’t get it; they smirk and go back to furnishing their houses. More and more things are removed, until finally you’re standing there in a mostly empty house wondering what the hell happened. A chill breeze ruffles your leg hairs. You sure hope they don’t steal your boxer shorts, they’re all you have left.

Racquel Welch wasn’t important to me. She was more like a framed poster, given to me forty years ago by my Uncles Pete and Dud. But today there’s a brighter spot on the wallpaper above the couch where that print used to hang, and whenever I walk by it I’ll miss it, sincerely. And I’ll wonder what they’ll take next.

Terry O’Neill, Racquel Welch on the Cross, Los Angeles, 1966.

I hope Racquel Welch’s life was all right. While the internet is full of men fulminating over the power female beauty grants, very little is said about what we do to these human objects of our unrelenting desire. I can imagine a world where beautiful women are treated fairly, but it ain’t this one. Sure, we give a few of them fame and money and a certain kind of limited-time-only power—but we make them pay for the lust they arouse. Why should they pay? Why should anyone, but least of all them?

I was raised by a gaggle of young, beautiful women—sometime I’ll tell you that story—so I’m very comfortable around them. Beauty blinds us; we don’t see their real qualities. My mother is beautiful (Hi Mom!), but even more than that she is a Dante-reading art-collecting Montepulciano-loving Renaissance cardinal—which is why Bedazzled is one of her favorites.

I have a friend who, in her mid-twenties, was the romantic lead of a very successful comedy. She was, and is, staggeringly beautiful. And like Racquel, she is extremely smart. The hair-raising stories she’s told me—especially when she was a young woman, the sheer weight of all that unwanted attention nearly crushed her.

Racquel didn’t seem crushed. It seemed as though she—like my friend—was able to get through that time of dangerous ripeness, the ripeness that drives strangers mad. I hope I’m right, and that her life was mostly sweet. I hope that the fur bikini didn’t itch, the push-up bra didn’t pinch, the whip didn’t hit her shin by mistake. I hope Racquel had a time in her life—decades—where she could eat carbs.

When a great sex symbol goes to Heaven, she doesn’t ever have to wear makeup again. St. Peter doesn’t have a casting couch, and she doesn’t have to laugh at anybody’s jokes, not even God’s. She can just be herself. And that is beautiful.

1. My favorite part of the trailer is when Cambridge man Graham Chapman, dressed as a member of the Oxford crew team, informs Peter Sellers’ tycoon, “You should realize, sir, that Oxford men cannot be bought.”