Rita Hayworth

Actress

• Born: October 17, 1918
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: May 14, 1987
• Place of death: New York, New York

American actor

A dazzling film star, Hayworth was renowned worldwide as one of the favorite pinup queens of American servicemen during World War II.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, New York, the first child of Eduardo Cansino, a Spanish-born vaudeville dancer, and Volga Haworth, a showgirl. Although Haworth was herself a dancer with a promising career, her husband preferred to keep together his own successful act, the Dancing Cansinos. In it he and his sister Elisa starred. Volga Cansino gave up all thought of resuming her career when her daughter Margarita was born, to be followed soon by two sons.

Hayworth was eight when the family rented a home in New York City and she was finally able to attend school and play with other children. Until then, she had traveled constantly from one theatrical hotel to another while the family was on the road with the Dancing Cansinos. Vaudeville was nearing its end, however, and Cansino moved his family to California in 1927 so that he could try to break into films at the start of the sound era. He never achieved success in films, and in 1931 Cansino revived the Dancing Cansinos. Hayworth, who had been dancing since she was four, became his partner.

Hayworth’s education again became secondary to the needs of the Dancing Cansinos. Since California law forbade minors from performing in clubs where alcohol was served, the act was booked in offshore gambling ships and in clubs in Tijuana, Mexico, near San Diego. Hayworth was exploited in every possible way: She was removed from school and denied any chance of having a normal education and friends her age, was made to perform in nightclubs while she was several years underage, was required to learn how to be sexually alluring on stage, and (according to biographer Barbara Leaming) was sexually abused by her father.

Two Hayworths had begun to emerge: a shy, insecure girl who was denied the chance to be a normal teenager, and a sensuous young dancer. After she had been dancing professionally for about two years, her father decided that she should have a career in films. She failed her first screen test at the age of fifteen, but in 1934 Fox pictures signed her to a contract. She now served two masters, her father and the studio, which required her to slim down through exercise and dieting, to take dancing, acting, and riding lessons, and to change her name to Rita.

Hayworth (called Rita Cansino at this time) soon began to find out that a young actress received many offers from older men claiming they could do something for her career. She did begin to pay attention to Edward Judson, a thirty-nine-year-old wheeler-dealer who approached her through her father. As usual, Cansino was trying to control his daughter’s career and hoped to use Judson’s interest in her to his advantage. She, in turn, was willing to use Judson to revive her career (her contract had been dropped when Fox was taken over by Twentieth Century) and to liberate herself from Cansino’s domination. Judson did succeed in getting Hayworth small roles as a freelance performer in several minor detective and Western films. Early in 1937, Columbia Pictures put her under contract, and Hayworth, her career once again on track, married Judson.

Life’s Work

Judson, who was living mainly on his wife’s income, began to pay even more attention to creating a star. Hayworth had to walk as he wanted, take voice and diction lessons, and undergo over a two-year period the painful treatment of electrolysis to alter her eyebrows and her hairline. She also took riding and tennis lessons so that she would be able to behave properly when she met the right people. To see that she did meet such people, Judson squired her to clubs where she could meet Hollywood’s power brokers, hired a publicist for her, and apparently even suggested that she offer her sexual favors to the right men.

Columbia officials also had a hand in molding their new “property,” and to help break with the Latin image she had developed in her early days in films, they changed her name from Rita Cansino to Rita Hayworth. The “y” was added to clarify the pronunciation and to anglicize the name. Ambitious herself, Hayworth also spent countless hours with makeup and wardrobe specialists to improve her appearance, and she dyed her brown hair auburn.

The actress got her first good role in a major film when she was cast as the “other woman” in the 1939 adventure Only Angels Have Wings, which starred Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. Harry Cohn, the Columbia mogul, now replaced Judson as Hayworth’s prime image maker. Cohn wanted her brought along slowly, casting her in good parts in several low-budget films and lending her to other studios such as Warner Bros., for whom she appeared in The Strawberry Blonde (1941) with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland. That same year Hayworth also acted in Twentieth Century-Fox’s Blood and Sand. Although Linda Darnell had the female lead, Hayworth stole the film with a scene in which she seduced leading man Tyrone Power.

The Columbia publicity specialists then went to work in earnest, sending out innumerable photos and thousands of stories on Hayworth. The buildup achieved its goal when Life magazine featured Hayworth in a black lace and white satin negligee on the cover of its August 11, 1941, issue. The photo became one of the popular pinups on the walls of servicemen’s quarters during World War II. More than five million copies of it were eventually distributed.

Although she had again played a Latin femme fatale in Blood and Sand, the Hayworth of 1941 could project another image as well one more likely to appeal to wartime film audiences. The image was that of a beautiful and desirable woman who was undeniably American. It was this Hayworth that Columbia teamed with dancing great Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), the first of two pictures they did together. Both critics and Astaire praised Hayworth’s dancing. Hayworth’s own favorite film of this period was Cover Girl, a 1944 release in which she danced superbly with costar Gene Kelly. In it she wore contemporary clothing as well as lavish costumes that showcased her beauty. As in her other musicals, Hayworth’s songs were dubbed.

Hayworth made news on and off the screen. Her marriage was in trouble, partly because Hayworth was questioning Judson’s handling of her income and partly because she and Judson both had other romantic involvements. Hayworth wanted a divorce, and when acrimony and negative publicity threatened to erupt, Columbia attorneys stepped in to end matters as quietly as possible.

On the day the divorce became final in September, 1943, Hayworth married actor Orson Welles, then regarded as a prodigy for his Citizen Kane (1941). Partly because she became pregnant, Hayworth starred in only one film, the musical Tonight and Every Night (1945), between her marriage and the end of the war. She did make numerous visits to training camps and military hospitals and did volunteer work at the Hollywood Canteen, where servicemen could relax while on leave. To the studio’s relief, the birth of her daughter, Rebecca Welles, late in 1944 did not detract from her image of sensuality.

In 1946, Hayworth had her greatest screen success: Gilda. Although the plot was convoluted, the film was a box-office hit that returned Hayworth’s screen image to that of temptress. Despite the dress and language codes that then governed the film industry, Hayworth performed a remarkably sensuous dance and uttered such lines as “If I’d have been a ranch they would have called me the Bar Nothing.” Her sexual allure was so compelling that Life soon did a feature on her in which Hayworth was acclaimed as the “love goddess.”

By this time, Hayworth’s second marriage was in trouble. Shy and insecure, the actress did not readily fit into Welles’s world, which was filled with intellectuals and politicians. Both began drinking, and Welles was openly involved with other women.

The one project they undertook together was The Lady from Shanghai, filmed in 1946 but not released for two years. For it, Welles got Hayworth to cut her hair and bleach it blond, a vivid contrast with the Hayworth that fans had come to know. The film failed at the box office, but critics would later consider it a minor classic. Before the film was even released, Hayworth left Welles, taking their daughter with her.

Soon Hayworth was involved in another affair, became pregnant, and had an abortion. She took pains to keep news of it out of the media. Her next romance was with Prince Aly Khan, heir to one of the largest fortunes in the world. Their affair attracted enormous publicity, much of it negative, since Aly Khan was still legally married and since Hayworth globetrotted with Aly Khan, keeping Rebecca with her. When his divorce became final in 1949, Hayworth and Aly Khan were married. They had one daughter, Princess Yasmin Khan, but marriage and fatherhood did not keep Aly Khan from becoming involved with other women. The couple divorced in 1951.

Hayworth was still under contract to Columbia, and in 1952 the studio teamed her with Glenn Ford, her leading man from Gilda, in Affair in Trinidad. Her first film in four years, it was a hit at the box office. The following year Hayworth starred in Miss Sadie Thompson, a role that emphasized her sensuality but required her to portray the character of Sadie as aging and somewhat weary.

Her personal problems continued. Hayworth had numerous affairs and was married twice more, to singer Dick Haymes and to producer James Hill. The marriage to Haymes was especially troubled and also cost Hayworth much of her money, which she squandered on Haymes’s unwise film projects and in paying for assorted legal problems.

By the time she played Sadie Thompson, Hayworth had also begun to have the problem that many actresses face: how to cope with aging when their film success had been built on glamour and beauty. Perhaps hoping to put the love goddess image behind her, she apparently handled the transition with grace, becoming more selective of her roles. In 1957, she appeared as a well-to-do older woman in Pal Joey, a musical in which Frank Sinatra leaves her for Columbia’s youthful new sex object Kim Novak. Hayworth then appeared in Separate Tables (1958) and They Came to Cordura (1959). In the latter film, a twentieth century Western costarring Gary Cooper, Hayworth did not even wear makeup. A worn, weary look was called for. Variety called her performance in that film the best of her career.

Hayworth performed infrequently during the 1960’s and had no screen successes. She began to make television appearances and twice was to have been in Broadway shows: Step on a Crack in 1962 and, a few years later, Applause. The transition to the unfamiliar routines of stage acting, however, caused her great anxiety. Rehearsals became such an ordeal for her that she could not perform in either show.

At the time, no one understood why such an experienced actress had such problems, but even in films her last film was in 1972 she began to have trouble with her lines. Later evidence indicated that she might have already begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, which causes memory loss, mood changes, and, eventually, leads to death. Consumption of alcohol (which she apparently gave up about ten years before her death) can aggravate the memory loss and changes in mood. Eventually, the disease robbed her of control over her body functions and of her ability to think. Medical experts had little understanding of the disease until the 1970’s and did not diagnose Hayworth’s Alzheimer’s until 1980. During her last years, she was placed under the guardianship of her daughter Yasmin, who used the media attention paid to her mother’s plight to raise money for research into the causes and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Significance

Hayworth once seemed to have everything beauty, glamour, and financial success. The height of Hayworth’s fame came during and immediately after World War II. Even though she starred in only half a dozen major films prior to Gilda, her screen magnetism, her good performances (primarily in musicals), the studio’s media blitz, and her pinup photograph of 1941 combined to establish the Hayworth legend.

Perhaps more than any of her film contemporaries even Lana Turner and Betty Grable, who vied with her in popularity as World War II pinup queens Hayworth transcended reality to become an icon of popular culture, the love goddess, an image largely created before the war and fixed by her performance in the otherwise undistinguished film Gilda. Her public, however, was unaware that years of work by Hayworth and by professional publicists had preceded the creation of the love goddess figure. As she aged, publicists would no longer labor to create a new image appropriate to a woman in her forties. She would have to make the difficult transition unaided, for by the 1950’s the publicity mill was at work trying to create new love goddesses Novak, Jayne Mansfield, and Marilyn Monroe.

Many of Hayworth’s anxieties and problems undoubtedly derived from her childhood experiences and from the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Hayworth’s career also exacted its costs, however, which provides a clear example of the difficulties that can arise from the needs of consumers of popular culture to have larger-than-life heroes and heroines in Hayworth’s case, the love goddess and the need of the rare performer who is elevated to this status to have privacy and a life apart from the image.

Bibliography

Hill, James. Rita Hayworth: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Hill, an acclaimed motion picture producer, married Hayworth in 1958. In writing this memoir of their years together, Hill tries to provide insight into the woman he knew while correcting the public image of the star.

Kobal, John. Rita Hayworth: The Time, the Place, and the Woman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Interviews with Hayworth and many of her coworkers give this book special value. One wonders, however, whether the author, who emphasizes her inner strength, was overprotective of Hayworth.

Leaming, Barbara. If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth. New York: Viking, 1989. The fullest account of Hayworth, this is the first study to say that she was sexually abused as a child. Also includes many interviews.

McLean, Adrienne L. Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. McLean, an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, describes the creation of Hayworth’s screen persona and analyzes several of her films.

Parish, James Robert, and Don E. Stanke. The Glamour Girls. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975. Hayworth is only one of nine actresses profiled in this book, but the lengthy account of her is valuable for its efforts to assess her career in the context of the studio system. Includes a filmography.

Roberts-Frenzel, Caren. Rita Hayworth: A Photographic Retrospective. New York: H. N. Abrams, 2001. A biography that is well illustrated with more than three hundred images.

Ringgold, Gene. The Films of Rita Hayworth: The Legend and Career of a Love Goddess. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1974. Provides a brief synopsis of each of Hayworth’s films, a description of her role in each film, a selection from the reviews, and an abundance of illustrations, many rarely seen.

Stanke, Don E. “Rita Hayworth.” Films in Review 23 (November, 1972): 527-545. In this valuable overview of Hayworth’s career, Stanke shows clearly how a Hollywood legend was created.

Thomas, Bob. King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1967. A useful biography of the Columbia Pictures magnate who controlled Hayworth’s career during its peak. An index makes it easy to find the material bearing directly on Hayworth.

Vincent, William. “Rita Hayworth at Columbia, 1941-1945: The Fabrication of a Star.” In Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio, edited by Bernard F. Dick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. A fascinating attempt to show how Hayworth’s managers and Columbia Pictures combined to create a sultry star from a young, insecure woman.

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