The radical part wasn’t just their being in the same movie. It shouldn’t have been radical, putting this sexy, polemical Negro in a movie with a white woman, as Welch was perceived as simply being. Brown was cool, passive yet never a complete blank, the rare beefcake whose stolidity has soul. Instead, he led a vanguard of virility during what got called the blaxploitation era, in which the movies were contemporary and most of the heroes thrived outside the system. There was a notion back then that he could be the new John Wayne, but he didn’t carry many westerns. And even though he couldn’t deliver a line as smoothly or as confidently as he could sail to the end zone, Brown definitely had something. And if it wasn’t for that ‘attitude’ that people spoke of, I never would have made it to the Cleveland Browns.” It was shaped by being Black in America in the 1950s. It was shaped by society and my role in that society. “Paul and the other coaches didn’t like this about my attitude, didn’t like that,” Brown wrote in his 1989 memoir, “Out of Bounds.” “But they loved the damn performance.” He went on: “If my mind was limited to football, per the desires of the Cleveland Browns staff … what type of man would that make me? My attitude was shaped by personal conviction. He was more than a body that the Browns owned and that the coach Paul Brown controlled. He didn’t like the way the rest of front-office football treated him, either. But he didn’t like it when the Browns’ owner, Art Modell, threatened to fine him for missing training camp. He was 30 and still in the prime of his football career, maybe the best career of just about anybody to enter the N.F.L. This was 1969, and a dud of a western became about the time two pinups - her, reluctant him, ready - found themselves pinned to each other.īrown and Welch in “100 Rifles.” Film Publicity Archive/United Archives, via Getty Imagesīrown had already quit his running-back job more or less from the set of “The Dirty Dozen,” one of the biggest movies of 1967. Back in the old exploitation-film days, very occasionally, a producer would have the good idea to match what Welch had with another “use what you’ve got” star. (“Let’s get in shape,” she coos.) She had been on Broadway a couple of times, twice replacing Lauren Bacall in “Woman of the Year,” a proto-feminist romantic comedy role that Katharine Hepburn made classic, and later taking over for Julie Andrews in the musical gender farce “Victor/Victoria.” Ideal vehicles for the continental sharpness of her West Coast diction and comic timing whose speed nobody ever bothered to clock occasions, too, to consider lanes not completely filled. She had put out the “Raquel: The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program” video at 44, her hair short and “wet look” glamorous, her bathing suits busy, her attitude serene. By then, Welch had already made her peace. When Playboy published its “100 Sexiest Stars of the 20th Century,” she was third, equidistant between Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford. For nearly five decades, Welch was assigned a “sex symbol” lane, and she filled that out too. (Tejada was her maiden name.) That kitschy B movie (kitschy hit B movie) helped make an eternal item of her. The daughter of a Bolivian aeronautical engineer, she had come to Hollywood after doing weather forecasts in San Diego, her hometown. Raquel Welch was 26 and never seemed to stop working, in junk mostly even though nothing about her footed that particular bill. You’re a bombshell now, an offer you can’t defuse. Even if your timing is perfect and you’ve got a swear-to-God starriness about you, once somebody puts you on the poster for something called “One Million Years B.C.” looking 50 feet tall and dressed in wild-woman rags - rags you’ve successfully managed to fill out - there’s just no going back.
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