Rita Hayworth

The Full Biography

Rita Hayworth. Actress. Dancer. The Brooklyn girl Columbia turned into a goddess, then spent the last years teaching a country the word Alzheimer’s because the goddess could not remember the steps.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a woman in black, tossing her hair, “Put the Blame on Mame,” a pin-up the war took overseas. Gilda. What the still cannot show is Margarita Carmen Cansino of Brooklyn, a Spanish-dancer father, a hairline a studio raised, five marriages including Orson Welles and a prince, and a woman whose public decline became, without her permission, a national lesson in a disease that did not yet have a famous face.

She was born on October 17, 1918, in Brooklyn. Eduardo Cansino had come from Seville and danced for a living. Volga Hayworth, the American mother, had been a Ziegfeld girl. The child danced too, in the family act, The Dancing Cansinos, in border clubs and at Agua Caliente, too young, a fact the goddess machine sanded. She was a professional before she was a teenager. The rooms were not a childhood. They were a paycheck. Fox put her in pictures as Rita Cansino: Dante’s Inferno, bits, a dark-haired dancer the camera treated as an extra with a specialty. Edward Judson, an older promoter she married in 1937, shopped her to Columbia. Harry Cohn invented Rita Hayworth: electrolysis to raise the hairline, auburn dye, a name taken from the mother’s family so it did not sound like a dancer from Tijuana nights. The invention worked. The person inside it still had to learn the lines.

The door is Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939), opposite Cary Grant, a small part that made the camera stay. The Strawberry Blonde (1941) with James Cagney. Blood and Sand (1941) with Tyrone Power, Technicolor, a bullring, a woman the poster could sell. That same year Life put her in a nightgown on a bed and the photograph went overseas in a million kits. She was the second pin-up of the war after Betty Grable. Servicemen taped her to bulkheads. The studio treated the bulkhead as a career plan. She was still, in the mornings, a dancer who had been working since she was a child.

The dancing is the work the pin-up cannot hold. You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) with Fred Astaire, a wartime musical in which she is not a decoration. You Were Never Lovelier (1942), Astaire again, a Buenos Aires terrace, a partnership Astaire took seriously. He said she was his favorite partner after Ginger Rogers, and he said it as a professional, not a press agent. She rehearsed the way a dancer rehearses, not the way a pin-up arrives. The camera could sell the face. The feet had to be true. Cover Girl (1944) with Gene Kelly, Technicolor, a magazine that becomes a life, Columbia’s proof that it had a musical star and not only a face. Kelly, who did not waste a partner, treated her as a dancer. Tonight and Every Night (1945), a London musical shot while the war was still a weather, put her in a Blitz theater that refuses to close. She was, for a stretch, the most complete female star Columbia had: a dancer who could be a wound, a face the camera treated as a climate. Cohn kept her under a contract that paid her less than the pictures earned. She went on strike more than once. She was the studio. The studio was not hers.

Then Gilda (1946), Charles Vidor, Glenn Ford, a glove, a song, a civic object. She tosses the hair, peels the glove, and a decade’s idea of glamour sits down in a nightclub and does not leave. The censors worried. The public did not. The war had already put her on a thousand bulkheads. Gilda made the bulkhead a story. She was twenty-seven. The picture is a noir that pretends to be a musical number and a musical number that pretends to be a confession. She was not a trained dramatic actress in the Actors Studio sense. She was a dancer who had learned that a look could do what a speech could not. The look is still the entrance students steal.

In 1946 the United States painted “Gilda” on an atomic bomb tested at Bikini Atoll. She was furious. The goddess had become a weapon’s nickname without being asked. That is the cost of a face the century decided it owned. She was already trying to be a person at breakfast.

She had divorced Judson in 1942. In 1943 she married Orson Welles. He was the boy genius of Citizen Kane and she was Columbia’s largest asset. The marriage was a picture and a wreck. He cut her hair and dyed it blonde for The Lady from Shanghai (1947), a hall of mirrors, a yacht, a performance the studio did not know how to sell because the goddess no longer looked like the pin-up. Cohn hated the hair. The picture is now the other civic object. Down to Earth (1947) put her back in Technicolor as Terpsichore, a goddess sent to Broadway, a joke the studio could understand. They had a daughter, Rebecca Welles, in 1944. They divorced in 1948. The Loves of Carmen (1948) put her back in the old weather, a gypsy the studio understood. She was still under contract. She was also, already, looking for an exit that was not another picture.

In 1949 she married Prince Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan, in a wedding the world treated as a fairy tale and the columns treated as a theft of an American property. They had a daughter, Yasmin, in December 1949. The marriage did not hold the prince still. They divorced in 1953. She came back to Columbia because the contract and the money required it. Affair in Trinidad (1952) with Glenn Ford again. Salome (1953). Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), a Somerset Maugham weather she could actually act. She married the singer Dick Haymes in 1953; that marriage was a public mess and ended in 1955. She married the producer James Hill in 1958; that ended in 1961. Five marriages. The goddess kept having to be a person at breakfast, and the breakfasts did not last.

Fire Down Below (1957) with Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon, a Caribbean heat the posters promised and a triangle the picture actually plays. Pal Joey (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak, a musical in which she is the older woman the plot uses and discards. She was thirty-eight. The town had already begun to file her as a former pin-up. She danced in it anyway. The steps are still hers. Separate Tables (1958) is the correction: a quiet, wounded performance in an ensemble that did not need her hair, opposite Burt Lancaster and David Niven, a woman who has already been looked at too long. They Came to Cordura (1959) with Gary Cooper. The Story on Page One (1959), which she also produced, a courtroom picture, a try at a second career as a grown actress who would not only toss a glove. The Happy Thieves (1961). Circus World (1964) with John Wayne, a big-top spectacle that used the famous walk. The Money Trap (1965) with Ford one last time, a cheap-caper noir in which the old pair is tired and the tiredness is the point. The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1966). The last feature is The Wrath of God (1972), a western, a nun’s habit, a face the camera still knew how to find. After that the lines would not come.

Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me.Rita Hayworth

The turn is the disease, and it is easy to miss because the pin-up is louder. In the 1970s the lines would not stay. She missed marks. She was confused on sets and in airports. The industry filed it as drink. The columns punished the confusion as a fallen goddess who could not hold her liquor. It was not only drink. Alzheimer’s. The word arrived late. The face taught it. She died on May 14, 1987, in New York. She was sixty-eight.

Rebecca Welles and Princess Yasmin Aga Khan have had to share a mother who is a glove and a diagnosis. Friends from the Columbia years describe a professional who was first at rehearsal and last to believe the goddess talk. She was shy off camera. She did not love the interviews. The Hayworth in a 1980s room was a woman who had already been a climate and was now a patient. Both are the life.

The later years

The last working decade was already a narrowing. After The Wrath of God there was no next picture that held. She appeared, briefly, in the kind of television that hires a famous face for a week. The lines slipped. Crews that had been told she was drinking watched a woman who could not find the mark and did not know why. On a 1971 set in Florida the confusion was already visible to people who had known her when the steps were exact. In 1976 she was asked to leave a plane in London after a confusion the press treated as a scandal. The columns had a fallen goddess. They did not have a diagnosis. The punishment was public. The illness was not yet a name the public used for a movie star. Friends who had danced with her said the feet still knew things the mind could not name. That is a dancer’s last weather, and it is not a joke about liquor.

In 1980 the doctors named it. Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The word was still, for most of the country, a private family weather or a joke about forgetting keys. It was not a famous face. Hayworth’s face, which had been a climate, became the lesson. In July 1981 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge placed her under the care of Yasmin, who moved her to New York. Yasmin became an advocate because someone had to speak and the mother no longer could. She publicized the illness. She raised money. The Alzheimer’s Association gained a famous daughter and, through her, a famous patient who had not applied for the job.

The last years in Manhattan were a care. Visitors who had known Gilda found a woman who did not always know them. Orson Welles, by then in his own last chapter, said he had never believed she was a drunkard — that he had believed something else was wrong and had not had the word. The industry, which had invented the hairline and the name, had no invention for this. She had spent a career being looked at. She spent the last years being looked at as a disease. She did not choose that job. It is still a job she did, without consent, for a country that needed a face it could attach to a word it had been using as a punch line.

Yasmin organized the first Rita Hayworth Gala in 1984. The event became, and remains, a principal public engine for Alzheimer’s research money. The daughter who had been a prince’s child became a health advocate because the mother who had been a goddess could no longer remember the steps. That is not a metaphor. It is the last choreography. Friends sat with her. The public was asked, at last, to stop filing the confusion as a bottle. She died on May 14, 1987, in her New York apartment, of complications of the disease. She was sixty-eight. The funeral was not a studio event. Yasmin had already turned the last years into a public education the studio had never hired. The gala still fills a room every year. The face that sold a war bond now sells research. That is the last use Columbia never planned.

What remains of those years is not a late masterpiece. It is a legal guardianship, a daughter at a microphone, a gala that still raises money, and a country that learned to say Alzheimer’s in the same sentence as a movie star. The pin-up could not do that work. The patient did. The work was involuntary. The effect was not.

After she was gone

Gilda still plays. The glove still teaches a certain kind of entrance. Every pin-up who came after still pays her a tax. Every public Alzheimer’s story still owes Yasmin and the woman who could not remember the steps. The Rita Hayworth Gala still fills a room. Brooklyn still has Cansino. Columbia still has the invention. Rebecca and Yasmin remain.

She came out of a dancing household, let a studio raise a hairline, made a glove into a climate, married a genius and a prince, and died of a disease the town had misfiled as a bottle. If you only remember Gilda, you have the still. If you remember Cansino, Welles, Yasmin, and the word the face taught, you have her.

Portrait: Unknown (studio publicity still) · Public Domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Rita Hayworth · Full Biography · 50 Plus Hub
https://50plushub.com/nostalgia/stars/rita-hayworth/story