(4 of 9)
Maybe she will, maybe she won't. Meanwhile, Myra presents Raquel with her first real opportunity to show what she can do. Although the role is impeccably tailored to her assets and attitudes, the odds are stacked against her. In the first place, it is hard to imagine a book more difficult to transpose into quality film. Such scandalous scenes as a female-to-male rape with a leather dildoe may prove too much even for today's censors. When Author Vidal is not trumpeting the beatitudes of bi-sexualism, he is trying to convey another message: ours is a society dangerously worshipful of celluloid (there are no fewer than 95 stars mentioned in his book). Thus the film version of Myra comes full circle; it will be a movie about a book about movies.
Perhaps because of his embarrassment over his novel's exquisite self-revelations, Vidal failed in two efforts to bring off a light, witty scenario. Director Michael Same (Joanna) then tried his pen—to just about everyone's displeasure. Finally, a Hollywood genius-presumptive named David Giler, 26, was called in. To complicate matters, Mae West has insisted on writing her own lines. The script is now in its tenth rewrite, and the ending has yet to be decided upon. Regardless of what is done to the script, the success or failure of Myra ultimately hinges on the girl who wants to stop attitudinizing and begin acting.
. . . I was born to be a star . . .
Little Raquel Tejada (the last name means, in Spanish, "Spears of Clay") was born in Chicago on Sept. 5, 1940 (not, as she claims, 1942). Her father, Armand, is a Bolivian-born structural-stress engineer; her mother, Josephine, is of English stock. When Raquel was two, the Tejadas moved to La Jolla, Calif., a pretty, plasticized, middle-class community just north of San Diego. Raquel grew up in an all-American ambience that would have been a natural for a California Norman Rockwell. The family, which included Raquel's younger brother and sister, lived in a one-story stucco house near the beach with a pepper tree on the neat front lawn.
Armand decided early to bombard his brood with the self-improvement lessons that most children congenitally abhor. Not Raquel. She devoured them. She was particularly enthralled by the ballet lessons that Armand thought would give her poise. What they did was give her ideas, which she now sentimentalizes. "I saw The Red Shoes ten times," she recalls. "I decided then that I wanted to be a ballerina." She has plenty of aptitude for the dance, according to her former teacher, Irene Clark, but hardly the proper spirit. "There was no humility in her approach to art," remembers Miss Clark. "She enjoyed attention too much, and she knew how to get it."