Editor’s Note: Liz Smith has an article on one of Hollywood’s most captivating stars, Raquel Welch, in Q, the Quest magazine quarterly. Here we present the full story as Liz wrote it. It differs slightly from the magazine version and contains new material. To see the article, as it appeared in Q, click here.

"I’ve had the strangest career! I was a sex symbol in the age of flower children. Nobody knew what to do with me. Of course I wanted to be Rosalind Russell. Listen, that’s why I did ‘Myra Breckinridge.’ I thought, ‘Ooooooh … I get a chance to be articulate and sharp in a movie.’ Obviously, infamously, it didn’t turn out as I’d hoped!"
 
That was Raquel Welch talking to me a few months back, full of merry laughter, piss and vinegar, making fun of herself, rolling her eyes at her image, and – as always – planning ahead, looking for whatever project amuses or intrigues her.
 
Nobody who has ever analyzed Raquel’s career and status as a sex symbol says it better than the lady herself. Her career has been strange! Quick, name three Raquel Welch movies. Unless you are a hard-core fan, it is likely only "One Million Years B.C." and the above-mentioned "Myra" pop right to mind. And perhaps her endearing comic turn in "The Three Musketeers." But she’s starred in about 35 feature films, appeared in dozens of TV movies, specials and (usually very funny) sitcom guest appearances. Yet despite a curiously elusive screen oeuvre she has endured as a figure of glamour, defying all laws of showbiz nature.
 
Today, well into her 60s, she is a more lustrous and iconic personage than at her moviemaking peak. She has not ossified into some eerily smooth resemblance of her former self. Raquel wisely allowed nature to take its course with her body, showing a somewhat fuller – if still enviable – figure in recent years. The face – almost too strongly structured in her youth, is softer and more appealing now. Raquel actually lives up to the old cliché: "She looks better than ever!"
 
But it is Raquel’s increasingly elevated status as a movie queen (who really doesn’t make movies anymore) that is the most startling aspect of her survival. It has happened because Raquel Welch gradually learned to relax and accept Sigmund Freud’s dictum, "Anatomy is destiny." She always knew she was much more than the sum of her sensational parts – as a person and as an actress – but it took many years and many hard knocks for this intelligent and once-wary woman to say, literally and figuratively, "Oh, what the hell!"

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Raquel, one of the most exotic-looking movie stars of all time, was born in plain old Chicago, IL, to a Bolivian father, Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo (an aerospace engineer), and an Irish-American mother, Josephine Hall. The family – there were two other children – moved to San Diego when Raquel was two.

Raquel was a beauty right from the start. As a teenager she collected beauty queen titles such as "Miss Contour, "Miss San Diego," "Miss Fairest of the Fair." Obviously, she was not going to pursue a career in aerospace. Raquel studied dance and dramatics, but then took a surprising detour. She married her high school sweetheart, James Welch, and had two children Damon and Tahnee in quick succession. Childbearing did not alter Raquel’s figure in the least. Indeed, it seemed to improve! And her ambitions – she was, after all, "Miss Fairest of the Fair" – were still burning. Her marriage to Welch ended, for all intents, in 1961, though they would not divorce until four years later. Raquel moved herself and her kids to Dallas, TX, where she modeled, and then – but of course! – back to California, to Hollywood, where her jaw-dropping good looks were much appreciated.

Soon she was finding bit work here and there, most notably in 1965’s "A Swinging Summer," in which she danced, tossed her enormous mane of hair and sang a song that referenced her imposing measurements. (Welch’s rabidly discussed bosom has never varied much in size, despite rumors of enhancement. She was stacked as teenage "Miss Contour," and I’d venture that nature played a far bigger hand in shaping her body than anything you could purchase at the doctor’s office.)