The Kenton Club Bombshell

[August 22nd, 2007] It has become something of a legendary story in Darlene Ward’s family, the time that ‘70s sex symbol Raquel Welch took a leak on Aunt Francie’s houseboat.

“So here’s what Aunt Francie told me,” Ward begins. She’s an accountant for the Portland Art Museum; her aunt, the late Frances Miller, owned a houseboat in Jantzen Beach. In 1971, that boat was people-watching real estate.

Raquel Welch—the then-31-year-old actress who by 1966 had already led millions of boys into venial sin by posing in an animal-skin bikini for the poster of One Million Years B.C. —had arrived in Portland five years later to shoot another steamy picture, Kansas City Bomber. This time she was playing a roller-derby star, which meant wearing tight shorts and roller skates, and getting into a number of rinkside catfights. It also meant shooting several scenes on and around the Jantzen Beach docks, since the script had its heroine living on a houseboat.

But on this particular day in 1971, the shooting wasn’t going very well. Welch and her co-star Kevin McCarthy were supposed to walk down a dock and have a pensive conversation. But the noises of airplanes and motorboats kept breaking into the dialogue. After several aborted takes, Welch made a declaration: “I have to go to the bathroom!” Frances Miller, who was watching the proceedings from her porch several yards away, offered the use of her facilities. “So she runs into Aunt Francie’s houseboat,” Ward concludes, “and uses the potty.”

Ward’s story, while lacking a certain amount of drama, has the virtue of including a beginning, a middle and an end. Which is more than can be said for Kansas City Bomber, a movie that returns home this Thursday, when the NW Film Center showcases it atop the Hotel deLuxe parking garage as part of its Top Down series. It is not a good movie. Actually, it is not precisely a movie at all—it’s more of an excuse for Raquel Welch to get tackled in slow motion, roll around on the ground with other women and take a shower. It’s like one of today’s Jessica Alba vehicles, but with less acting.

What little there is of a plot is preposterous: Welch is forced to leave Kansas City after losing a showdown with a rival skater, and winds up in Portland, where—surprise!—she faces a showdown with a rival skater. Also, there is an assault with a mop. It’s the kind of quality filmmaking you can expect from director Jerrold Freeman, who would go on to helm such classics as the 1980 Scott Baio TV movie The Boy Who Drank Too Much. But Kansas City Bomber , for all its shortcomings, is Portland’s movie, filmed on the north side of the city—in Kenton, Jantzen Beach and the Multnomah County Exposition Center—long before Hollywood crews were shooting big-budget serial-killer flicks like Mr. Brooks and Untraceable . The screening Thursday is a flashback to a time when America’s top sex symbol made a splash on the banks of the Columbia.

“She was a sexy broad of the time,” Rose Nightingale says. “Everybody wanted to see her.” Nightingale is a bartender at the Tavern on Denver in the Kenton neighborhood; in 1971, she was a bartender across North Denver Avenue at a place called Fort Kenton. “I was working bar at the time, so I never got to see her. I saw her walk back and forth from the Kenton Club to the corner a few times. That was as close as I got.”

The Kenton Club was probably the biggest beneficiary of Welch’s visit. It is featured—and named—in the movie, as the location where Welch rebuffs a male roller derby player’s advances with the line, “I don’t date skaters.” (Her character, K. C. Carr, is not above dating roller derby owners.)

After Kansas City’s 1972 release, the bar billed itself as the World Famous Kenton Club, which occasionally mystified bartenders until last year, when new owner Doreen Watts hung Kansas City Bomber posters on the wood-paneled walls.

“The bar hasn’t changed all that much,” Watts says, sipping a cup of coffee on a Friday morning. “It was pretty hopping then.” The Kenton Club still draws a sizable weekend crowd, but few of the people listening to Pure Country Gold last Saturday were likely to recall the filming of Kansas City Bomber . “A few of the old-time regulars remember,” Watts says.

In fact, as is so often the case with things that happened in the ‘70s, the people who recall the film best weren’t even there. When the Rose City Rollers, Portland’s real roller derby team, organized in 2001, they turned to Raquel Welch for inspiration.

“It was one of the movies that we got our hands on to look at roller derby,” says Rose City Rollers manager Kim Stegman. “That movie was a big influence on how we looked at what a glamorous thing roller derby would be.”

The Rollers played their first game in the same location where the film’s derby scenes were shot: Hall C of the Expo Center. But Stegman and her team quickly realized that their sport actually bore little resemblance to the staged, no-holds-barred “grudge matches” of Kansas City Bomber . “[Roller derby] doesn’t have the WWF antics that the movie has,” Stegman says. “And none of the girls would go out with the manager. Well, I’m the manager, and I’m straight, so that doesn’t make any sense.”

Considering that nothing in Kansas City Bomber makes much sense, Stegman’s verdict is as fitting a legacy as any.