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Destiny's child and Beaver's buddy met in 1964—smack in the poetic middle of Sunset Strip. It was business at first sight. As Raquel recalls it: "He saw me and I saw him, and we put our heads together." The result of this cerebral huddle was the creation—three weeks later—of Curtwel enterprises. Shortly thereafter, things began to happen. Bikini picture in LIFE. Billboard girl on ABC-TV's Hollywood Palace. Twentieth Century-Fox contract. Said Fox Talent Director Owen McLean: "We thought we would build her up slowly; that it would take some time. But she got more publicity by accident than most girls get on purpose."
. . . At the moment, I feel like the amnesiac in Spellbound, aware that something strange is about to happen. I am apprehensive; obscurely excited . . .
It wasn't always by accident. Her first film was a microscopic nightmare, Fantastic Voyage (her best line, to a leering Stephen Boyd: "I run the laser beam here. That should tell you where to keep your hands"). After that, Fox lent her to Britain's Hammer Film Productions for its reprise of One Million Years B.C. Says Raquel: "It was the kind of movie you do just to go to Europe and hope everyone will forget."
No one who has seen B.C. will ever forget it. It was a ghastly, primeval Romeo and Juliet, with the Shell and Rock families replacing the houses of Montague and Capulet. Loana Shell (Raquel) and Tumak Rock (John Richardson) meet and fall agonizingly in love. Agonizingly, because he already has a mate back in the Rock family cave. Besides, every time they get together, a Tyrannosaurus rex clamps onto the scene or the families start crushing one another's noggins with clubs. After an apocalyptic earthquake, Loana stalks off with her inamorato, presumably to become The Second Mrs. Tumak.
Meanwhile, Patrick engineered a slick transatlantic crossruff. Starting with a girl who was unknown on either side of the ocean, Patrick billed Raquel to the European press as America's answer to Ursula Andress. European reporters lapped it up. Then Patrick shipped the publicity back to the U.S., where it was eagerly picked up by the American press. In 1966, Hammer Productions wished its friends a merry, merry Christmas by distributing 11-by-13 cards (3,000 of them) with Raquel's classic cave-suit pose on the front.
For the next 2½ years she and Patrick gadded about Europe, and all the attention was almost, almost unbearable; in Italy, Raquel even took to toting a squirt gun to cool down ardent paparazzi who dared stick their heads in her Cadillac limousine. Nothing could deter the photographers, however. By February 1967, she and Pat decided it was time to seal the Curtwel merger. In Paris, bedecked in a crocheted minidress, Raquel took her marriage vows for the second time.