Book Review: Rita Hayworth

Title: Rita Hayworth (Portrait of a Love Goddess)

Author: John Kobal

Date: 1977

Publisher: Norton / Berkley

ISBN: 0-425-05634-1

Length: 279 pages

Quote: "I was never a girl."

After doing the research for this book Kobal interviewed the long-retired actress and proposed, as a title for this book, The Time, the Place, and the Girl. Hayworth's comment was that it ought to be The Time, the Place, and the Woman, because she was never a girl.

Why do I find myself humming the classic words..."Trying to be a hero, winding up at zero can start a man aching down to the soul...and all the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills, in somebody else's name."

Though descended from more aristocratic stock if you went back a few hundred years, Margarita Cansino was the daughter of mid-list live stage performers who trained their children for futures in musical stage chorus lines. Nobody expected her to become one of the legends of old Hollywood--she was a shy child, pretty but not glamorous, with less than perfect teeth--but nobody imagined her ever having a right, chance, or inclination to become anything but a stage performer, either.

Half Spanish, half English (Haworth was her mother's real name), Hayworth had the sort of face that "could be anything"--which, in misogynist Hollywood, usually meant a pretty girl in the kind of dreary, sexist "love" relationship that makes you think that if that's love there must be something to be said for indifference. Her real forte was dancing more than acting or singing as such; after all her grandfather had been a dancing master, her father and all the uncles and aunts had been known as dancers, and dancing was what Hayworth had been trained to do as a child. Her voice never was great, and in the movies where she appeared to be dancing and singing, someone else's voice was actually what the audience heard.

Her dramatic range was arguably even narrower than Ronald Reagan's; Hollywood allowed cute, dull young men much more active roles than it allowed cute, dull young women. Let Ingrid Bergman demand the right to play murderers or missionaries, let Julie Andrews have the wholesome family movies where the female star kissed babies rather than boyfriends, let Dale Evans play the perfect wife and mother, let Lena Horne be a real singer, let Hedy Lamarr be a real scientist; Haywood was willing to be cast, over and over, as the sort of young woman of whom nobody--not even herself--notices much more than the body. Well, like most dancers, she had a beautiful body. It was not enough to endear her to the women I know who remember her movies. She was cast as a bimbo, though usually a high-class bimbo. It wasn't her fault, they conceded, but...Hawks and Cukor and that whole crew of proto-Weinstein directors did not like or respect women enough to produce a lot of movies with scripts that made little girls of the 1940s think "I'd like to have a friend or sister like her, I'd like to be like her when I grow up." Hayworth as actress was marketed to men, by men, with the comment that she had a way of playing her dismal one-dimensional parts that brought out empathy from some women.

Co-workers remembered her as a disciplined hard worker. Some people, they said, got bored enough on Hollywood "sets" that they came in drunk or hung over, or got drunk while "working," or even sneaked off and had sex while on the time clock but not actually doing anything. Hayworth, they said, focussed. She looked as if that were the case. She was very pretty when she grew up and had her teeth "fixed," and also very serious about getting every dance and love scene just right. In some ways, especially the three divorces, she may not have been a "good" Catholic, but she obviously had learned good lessons from that church.

To curb the immature behavior of actors, the producers and directors circulated a claim that they made or broke their "stars." Kobal questions this. The great movie stars certainly were creations of the movie studios, but the studios tried to produce several stars who just didn't sell. Even some of the great stars of the silent movies, already branded and capitalized products, didn't sell as stars in "talkie" movies; studios invested a lot in John Gilbert and Ina Claire, separately and together, and both of them had real talent as mimes, but when movie technology demanded that they talk, even their long-term fans didn't want to listen. Hayworth was sometimes perceived as an example of the merely good-looking "starlet" made famous entirely by publicity. Kobal argues that Hayworth was a real trouper who could be made famous because, behind the glamorous mask of her 1940s Hollywood face, she had and was able to project a lovably earnest, hardworking, fundamentally introverted personality.

Also debatably, she generated more publicity in semi-retirement than she did in her acting career. Her first marriage, to would-be manager Ed Judson, crashed and burned as Hayworth declared that being managed by her husband amounted to "extreme mental cruelty." Orson Welles, who worked well with her on stage and tried to fill in some of the more glaring gaps in the academic education Hayworth never had, lasted a little longer and may have lost interest in Hayworth before she lost interest in him; they had a child together. Then came Aly Khan, for whose sake Hayworth didn't have to claim to be a Muslim, but her Catholic church refused to recognize this third marriage at all; it didn't last long. A fourth, more private marriage, in retirement, might have been about love.

Was she happy? A quiet, private person, she might have liked a relatively early retirement. Kobal, a fan, obviously hoped she had. For a dancer who'd never really aspired to be an actress, and showed no great talent for acting, she'd certainly done well as an actress. Kobal shares lots of male insiders' reminiscences that reveal how badly Hollywood treated the women it treated best; Hayworth was one of those. She knew she had less to complain of than thousands of other beautiful women, and she didn't complain. The comments she allows Kobal to publish are positively charitable. At the end of the book I'm left with the feeling that whoever Rita Hayworth really was when she was alone, whether that person succeeded at what she wanted in life, will never be known...and that's as she wanted it to be.

She lived out the dreams of millions of women, across generations, around the world. It's hard to imagine a real introvert really enjoying that life story, even as a fantasy, much less as a reality; but Rita Hayworth made choices that enabled her to have it. We can hope that, some of the time, she was having as much fun as her big grin and lively dances suggested.

Still, I find myself reading her success story as a bit of a cautionary tale. I suspect the old woman who talked to Kobal missed whatever it was she meant by "being a girl."