By Nancy Smith
Special Contributor
Raquel Welch, the brunette bombshell actress of film, television, and stage, passed away in her L.A. home Wednesday after a brief illness at age 82. As a journalist, I fondly recall my own interactions with Welch, who had several Dallas connections decades apart.
When I was the business editor for a group of community newspapers, I covered the grand opening of the Shops at Willow Bend in 2001, where I expected to spend my time at the new West Plano mall interviewing store owners. I walked into the nearby food court and to my surprise, there was Raquel Welch. It turned out her husband, Richard Palmer, owned Mulberry Street Pizzeria, a Beverly Hills pizzeria that expanded to the Las Vegas Strip and select mall food courts. When I told her I was a newspaper reporter covering the mall opening, she said she didn’t really want to be interviewed — she was only there to help support her husband. So I complimented her by asking how she kept looking good and she answered “High maintenance!”
Welch was known around Dallas after she moved here with her two children in the early 1960s, following her separation from her high school sweetheart James Welch. In 1963, she began working as a cocktail waitress in Nero’s Nook, the famous lounge inside Cabana Motor Hotel. Then she went off to Hollywood.
My only other connection to her was that I interviewed the actor Patrick Curtis while covering the 50th anniversary of the movie “Gone with the Wind,” which was hosted by Ted Turner in Atlanta. Patrick Curtis was one of the few surviving stars of the movie, in which he played the young boy Beau Wilkes, the son of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. He grew up to become a producer and married Raquel Welch in 1967, her second marriage. He became her manager and worked to get her a contract with 20th Century Fox.
She earned star status via the 1966 sci-fi films “Fantastic Voyage” and “10,000 B.C.,” in which she donned the famous fur bikini. Not surprisingly, she told me she kept fit with yoga and acknowledged that she consumed very little of the pizzas her husband was promoting. I’ll remember her as a beautiful, gracious woman.
