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That may be partly true, but Raquel is unique among sex queens in another respect. Harlow had her seamy affairs; Hayworth her prince; Monroe her outfielder and her playwright; Taylor her high-rolling entrepreneur, Debbie's crooner and Sybil's Welsh actor. By contrast, Raquel has two children by a former marriage to her high school sweetheart, and is presently wed to an inoffensive uncelebrity named Patrick Curtis. She does not flounce around studio sets in see-through blouses by day or boogaloo at the Factory by night. She does not smoke. She does not drink. She rarely entertains. Says Writer Rex Reed, who will make his screen debut as Myron Breckinridge, Myra's alter ego: "Raquel is a very complex girl. She is terribly, terribly interested in being taken seriously. She has elected to be a movie star, but underneath that creamy skin and those bulging blouses beats a Puritan heart. She is a Jane Austen heroine, and the conflict has made her uptight."
. . . My own uniqueness is simply the result of self-knowledge. I know what I want and what I am, a creation of my own will ...
If Raquel has a shy Puritan heart, she also has the kind of forthright Puritan mind that in early America could probably have reconciled Scripture with slaving and rum-running. On-screen she may be the ultimate prehistoric predator, but in real life she is a carefully pre-fabricated commodity, a paradigm of the harddriving, self-made New Woman who just happened to choose acting as a career. "I'll admit I'm extremely strong-minded," says Raquel. "I don't know any other way to be."
Unlike most of her predecessors, she has always been the prime mover of her own star; she has played Professor Higgins to her own Eliza Doolittle. In a community where everyone minds everyone else's libidinous business, Raquel has a reputation for having climbed to the top without using her sex off the set.
She is also unquestionably bright, and can discuss at least a narrow range of subjects with intelligence and even insight. On the David Frost Show, for example, she scored a valid point in defense of romantic love when she described the female mind as "an erogenous zone." But her observations get lost in her incessant chatter and frequent malapropisms. For a time she referred to things she found attractive as "gauche" until she finally learned that the word she wanted was "chic." Editing one of her own lines in Myra, she struck out the word "germane" and substituted "superfluous."
She has few illusions about herself, and can examine her position with dispassion. "I'm trying to purge myself of all the mannerisms I've used up to this point. I have never had a high opinion of myself as an actress, but I'm determined to develop, and I keep looking for ways to improve. If after a couple of years I decide that I can't make it as a serious actress, then I'll just quit."