applause

Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring

the secrets and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. Part of the Panoply

network. I'm your host, Kareena Longworth. Last week we talked about Jane Russell, who

became a pin-up star thanks to publicity photos for the outlaw, which were released to magazines

and embraced by a generation of GIs long before anyone ever saw Jane Russell in a movie.

Today's story is sort of a spiritual sequel to that episode. It's the story of how a single

publicity photograph turned the former Joe Rekel Tahada, a 26-year-old single mom and former

weather girl into the star of the most popular bedroom poster for the next generation of Adolescent

American males. Even more than the images of Jane Russell that circulated in the 1940s, the poster

featuring Rekel Welch in the Doe Skin Bikini costume from the 1966 movie One Million Years BC

transcended the movie at ostensibly advertised. And it was an image which changed Rekel Welch's life,

turning her into the sex goddess of the moment, a moment in which the culture was factoring.

As the generation which had embraced sex goddesses like Russell and Marilyn Monroe,

watched the kids of the 60s with their completely different values start to take over.

Rekel was a new spin on an archetype that had started to go stale. But there was no going back.

There was nothing to go back to. Just a year earlier, she had been an anonymous fit model,

who was lucky to get an uncredited walk-on in an Elvis movie. But with those early PR images

birthed a relatively varied career for Jane Russell, Rekel Welch felt like a prisoner of her

first flush of fame. She had appeared on more than 75 European magazine covers before her first

movie was released. And she struggled for another decade or so to transcend the persona popularized

by that fur bikini. Welch would later describe the version of herself that was suddenly catapulted

...