The meaning of a beauty
Everyone is publishing pictures of Raquel Welch on the day her passing was announced. Yes, she was a very beautiful woman, and, yes, her beauty was her most remarkable feature. She was at best an ordinary actress. Yet I will be surprised if, when the acting greats of her time pass away, many of them will receive such a widespread tribute. Raquel Welch's beauty meant something to pretty much everyone, it seems.
And I think there is a reason for this. Rachel Welch's beauty is a transitional kind of thing. She was the first Latin star not to feature as deliberately exotic and alien. Until her, stars from Latin America and southern Europe, from Dolores del Rio to Sophia Loren, were perceived as having the charm and danger of foreignness, indeed they tended to succeed because of it. The splendid blonde Virna Lisi never made it remotely as far as black-haired, olive-skinned Sophia Loren. And that was because, to the American mind until the sixties, blonde was domestic. The girl next door, with the charm of wholesome familiarity, lively and friendly but in no way alien and very rarely dangerous, was the Doris Day type. Of course, a lot of girls next door in popular literature, films and TV were brown-haired, or even red-haired (like Nancy Drew), but their complexion and features always tended to northern Europe and light colours and features. Think of Betty and Veronica, Betty the blonde girl next door, and Veronica the seductive, dangerous rich man's daughter. The play is still that of wholesome blonde girl next door against dangerous, sophisticated, distant (if not alien) raven-haired temptress.
Today that pattern is gone. Hollywood's cleverest writer-producer wants to cast a cheerleader, high school goddess, and alpha bitch; he casts raven-haired, olive-skinned Charisma Carpenter. Latino beauties from Jessica Alba to Jennifer Lopez ("Jenny from the hood"!) are cast as local and native persons, as they indeed are (Jessica Alba has so many American generations in her past that she is not sure where she can reckon any non-Norteamericana origins).
What is transitional about Raquel Welch's beauty is that she is the most Nordic of Latin beauties. Lighter her complexion and hair a couple of shades, and you might have Ursula Andress' slightly taller sister. But while the distance is small, it is there. There is no way she can be mistaken for a Norse-descended lady from North Dakota. She is Latin and does not trouble to hide it; indeed, she could possibly have stressed her mother's American heritage, but she does not seem to have. Her assumed name is no more than the most careless of gestures towards that world of unspoken prejudice in which Anna Italiano would become Anne Bancroft. Perhaps the fact that her beauty had that inexplicable quality of duration and solidity - Reese Witherspoon describes her as "glamorous beyond belief" on the set of Legally Blonde, when she was at least 61 - had some subconscious connection with her confidence.
Mention of the blonde, charming, wholesome Reese Witherspoon brings home the fact that the Betty character type is not dead. It is not that there has been a reversal. But the range of possible domestic beauty types has grown - indeed, it has greatly grown. I think the iconic significance of Raquel Welch's beauty represents a fundamental stage in that progression.