RIP to w Bombshells: Raquel Welch and Stella Stevens
Ah the world of coincidence and timeliness.
February , 2023: Raquel Welch passed a few days ago, at age 82. Stella Stevens passed today, at age 84.
My first thought is that both ladies proved: you can be a bombshell babe like Marilyn Monroe was and lead a much longer and more fulfilling life.
Indeed, a LOT of former hot babes and pin up gals have lived nice long lives. I think Jill St. John is still with us, for instance. And of course, from the Hitchcock gallery: Kim Novak.
Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen told his young gorgeous daughter Candice Bergen -- in her 20's -- that he had known far too many beautiful young actresses who had given themselves over to depression, substance abuse and even suicide when age came and their looks faded. He cautioned Bergen to "develop a career for later" and Bergen chose photography. But the world changed and Bergen stayed quite gorgeous -- and then attractive, and then handsome -- right on into her 70's. So papa Edgar need not have been so worried.
Obits on Raquel Welch noted that she never appeared nude in any of her films or even in a 1979 Playboy spread. She was one of those sex symbols who maintained a certain mystery to the end -- those precious few inches of skin that society deems "naughty and not for public view" were kept private by Ms. Welch, who rather specialized in bikinis during her initial sex bomb years(famously in the animal skin prehistoric version for 1 Million Years BC) and who wore simply a tight white scuba suit for her initial movie splash(quite serious and respectable) in "Fantastic Voyage" (about a crew of scientists shrunk down to drive a tiny submarine around a man's internal vessels and organs.)
Welch "didn't get no respect" for a lot of her early career, but she ended up -- as all "names" do -- in some respectable movies besides herself. Like The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers(one movie split in half) , where (playing a role that June Allyson played in the 40's!) Welch was "the good girl"(Faye Dunaway was the bad one) and added pratfalling and bumbling and slapstick and good humor in a manner than melted her rather "stone faced" previous persona.
She was also in the "all-star whodunit" "The Last of Sheila" among more seasoned actors like James Coburn, James Mason, and Richard Benjamin(none of whom much liked her diva ways, it is said)...but she held her own.
I'm of a small clique who loved her 1972 revenge Western Hannie Caulder in which Welch played a frontier woman raped by three idiots(Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, and Jack Elam) but learns how to shoot and guns 'em all down. The real star of Hannie Caulder is Robert Culp -- a TV guy who just couldn't make it in movies but is "all star here" -- handsome, cool, humorous, deadbeat, sympathetic -- all the things he did cool on "I Spy" and as a Columbo killer but here in the service of a great doomed hero role. (The movie also features Christopher Lee as a good guy gunsmith and a great staging of a Western gunbattle on a BEACH.)
1972 also found Welch playing a "roller derby fighter" in Kansas City Bomber, which allowed her to beat on and get beaten by other women in the roller derby ring. (Roller derby has always been such a strange working-class sport for men and women, but especially for women -- inexplicable rules, roller skating at top speeds, and a feeling of lady wrestling with more clothes on. A weird choice for Welch to do -- but it proved her "true grit.")
Critics noted her inter-racial love scene with NFL great Jim Brown in the Western "100 Rifles" but the hidden star in THAT movie was Burt Reynolds, overshadowing the higher-billed Brown and Welch and making fun of Welch quite a bit on the Johnny Carson show. The Raquel Welch career always had the edge of dissing and feuding to it. Was she really a diva or was misogyny at play in the press? A bit of both, but she survived, threw it off, passes away as a true legend and a "successful" sex symbol.
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That Stella Stevens passed only a couple of days after Welch just seems weirdly fitting to me (as it would have had Jill St. John or Kim Novak gone. But I hope they'll stick around.)
Just as much as Raquel Welch never did nudity in her films, Stella Stevens DID do nudity -- not so much on screen, but in Playboy a couple of times, so men knew what she looked like and her reputation was more "loose." She's a perfectly young cheerleader type in Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor of 1963, but a mere 9 years later in the megahit The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, her sexuality had coarsened(part as a matter of her ex-hooker character and a squawking nag of a voice towards cop husband Ernest Borgnine) and she looked prematurely OLD. Yet extremely sexy. (Her dress shirt and panties ensemble for her "climb the ship's innards" adventure were famous.)
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