As a teenager, Mercedes Carreño, better known as Meche, bared her breasts on a dare in a public pool and was arrested. She came out to whistles and applause, and in the next five years she showed off what she called her 'just female body.'
When at 16, some of her friends taunted her by saying that she would be too scared to appear topless in public, she promptly walked out to the public swimming pool on one of the bath houses along the Puebla highway. The bare-breasted teenager, who shocked older adults but drew admiring wolf whistles from younger males, was bundled up and hustled off to jail. Meche's public career had begun.
Meche's name was thus not launched by her face or outstanding acting talent, but by a bold baring of the youthful curves of her tomboyish figure, thus her career of undress was carved out for her. Her willingness to strip down to her bare essentials resulted at first in numerous appearances in newspaper and cheesecake magazines. Pin-ups, semi-nudes, nudes - it was all the same to her, and she became the darling of Mexican nudie photographers, and of course, all the males who bought up the issues which featured her in colour and black-and-white without a stitch on. Others have used nudity to scramble upwards for a film career, but Meche, in her own words, was very systematic about it, with plenty of patience, perseverance and no shame. She knew that the body she was showing off was 'not world-shaking or aesthetically beautiful, or disproportioned with fantastic jutting breasts.'
But the persistent large-scale distribution of the bared Meche figure, and her instant willingness to strip without any hesitation or false shyness, ultimately resulted in some minor bit roles in Mexican B-movies and, by a turn of circumstances, the female lead in a Santo film, El Barón Brakola (1967). Ana Martin was originally scheduled to appear opposite Santo and villain Fernando Osés, but she apparently filed a grievance with the Actors' Union, complaining that the producer was using Meche Carreño as a nude body double for her. This may lead us to assume that simultaneously a nude version of the story was being shot for the foreign markets, as was often the practice during these years (check some of my older posts for more on these alternate versions). Anyhow, this ultimately resulted in Meche taking up the acting honours as well, playing the lovely heroine in peril, Silvia.
Then, at an Acapulco, during a film festival, Meche met Zakani Almada, a successful retired businessman who was interested in motion pictures and youthful, eager pretty girls. Before long Almada was sold on Meche's charms and he agreed to bankroll an initial film, Damiana y los Hombres (1967). Surprised by the exciting rushes, Almada quickly set up a production company and starred Meche in a series of three additional films. One of these, Andante (1969) was shot abroad in the Italian Alps, Paris, Rome and London. Meche had now become a star in films that had no nudity at all! Furthermore, Mexican critics who had expected an untalented señorita with a propensity for nudity were more than a little surprised that she was actually rather talented. The bare-breasted teenager had grown up into a movie star.
(Images from Adam Film World).
