Rita Hayworth "Dance of the Seven Veils" scene from the film "Salome" 1953 Καλλονές Κινηματογραφικά

 

Rita Hayworth

Dance of the Seven Veils

O χορός των επτά πέπλων

from the film: “ Salome ” 1953

directed by William Dieterle

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προωθητική αφίσσα της ταινίας “Salome”

Modern Screen magazine March 1953

Cosmopolitan magazine, April 1953

 

 

 

 

   With the Rita Hayworth dollar sign firmly in mind, Columbia Pictures decided to give its princess the works this spring. The works is “Salome,”

    “Salome” boasts not only Princess Rita in Technicolor, but a dance staged by Valerie Bettis, devastating gowns by Jean Louis, vivid direction by William Dieterle, and the impact of backgrounds actually photographed in the Holy Land.

 

   The ex-Mrs. Aly Khan's co-stars are Stewart Granger and Charles Laughton. They are buttressed by such stalwarts as Judith Anderson, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Basil Sydney, and Maurice Schwartz.

   It was Oscar Wilde who defined Salome for moderns; he made her exotically evil. Hollywood conveniently bypassed this bit of unpleasantness, and the story written by Jesse Lasky, Jr. makes her an innocent, searching girl.

 

 

Rita Hayworth – in “Salome” (1953)

(φωτογραφία από το δημοσίευμα του Cosmopolitan )

 

The Casting is an Enigma

 

   “It’s an extravaganza, a spectacle, a supercolossal opus. It’s got Laughton smirking, Judith Anderson snarling, Stewart Granger with bare legs, girls dancing, sex, murder, and even John the Baptist—in Technicolor yet. It'll probably make a mint. So tell me, why do they need Hayworth?”

   This kind of question is best answered by the caliph of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn. Mr. Cohn is not a social climber. He does not aspire to the plaudits of the avant-garde for arty cinema experimentation.

   For Cohn, the music of applause is the symphonic wwhuuummpft of the box-office ticket expeller. A man with an actuary’s approach to public taste, Cohn never chances when he can insure. And to him, there’s no better insurance than Rita Hayworth.

 

She’s One of the Big Four

 

   “She’s one of the four big properties in the business,” trumpets Cohn, with the executive decisiveness of a man who knows.

   Since 1937, when she came to the Columbia lot, Rita Hayworth has made twenty major pictures; all made money. Few in the industry would dare venture that this blessed state won’t continue.

   The reason why has never been quite understandable. Almost nobody attributes it to her acting. A disarmingly honest woman, Rita Hayworth would never pretend that her dramatic skills ever captured a Bette Davis fan. As a dancer, she’s heads up on the average Hollywood hoofer, but better dancers have flopped. All that seems left is the ripe Hayworth looks. But anyone who follows the press output of the Hollywood tub thumpers (and who can avoid it?) knows that the world capital of flesh always has in basic training platoons of well-endowed and ambitious young ladies.

   The precious Hayworth property rests upon something harder to define. It is an intangible femininity that makes women identify themselves with her and awakens the protective impulse in men. In publicity stills, she never seems like the femme fatale who slinks, smolders, or hisses. When the movie script calls for her to do so, it’s a struggle for her.

   That inhibition carries over in her personal life. For all of her success, Rita Hayworth has never consciously done the obvious to achieve it. It’s been done for her by a quartet of strong. men who recognized raw material when they saw it. In his own way, each shaped it to fit what has evolved into the Hayworth mold. Throughout this ordeal she remained pliant, retiring (much as she is today), always ready to please.

   It started with her father, Eduardo Cansino, a Spanish dancer from Seville. His father danced for Spanish royalty and never let his family forget it. When it became apparent that Eduardo intended to forsake the family trade in favor of bull fighting, the old man had him locked up in a local pokey until he got the heresy out of his system. Eventually, Eduardo turned to the pumps, came to America and married Volga Haworth, a beautiful ex-Ziegfeld girl, and immediately launched the Cansino dance act.

   Rita, christened Margarita, was born between bookings. Four years later, the dancing lessons began. At six she had learned so much that she was taken into the act. Eduardo quickly withdrew her when it became apparent that the six-year-old stood in danger of skull fracture from the heels of the high-flying Cansinos. When she turned fourteen, Eduardo judged her hardy enough to take the risk and she rejoined the act.

 

 

Her Career Started in Mexico

 

   Two years later, Eduardo got himself and his daughter booked as a Spanish dance team into the gilt Agua Caliente Casino, across the California border in Mexico. The four-week stand lasted two years. Rita became the darling of the tourists, including many from the movie colony.

   One of them was Winfield Sheehan, head of the old Fox studio, who saw great potentials in the plumpish, blackhaired, shy girl. He changed her name to Rita Hayworth, adding the “y” to her mother's maiden name, put her into a horror called “Dante’s Inferno,” which was followed by two similar pieces.

   During this period she met Edward Judson, a slick, hard-eyed ex-gambler who had graduated to selling swank foreign cars. She was seventeen, he about forty, but to the naive, strictly brought up girl, he was a cosmopolitan dream. Moreover, Eduardo approved him as a son-in-law, recognizing Judson as a paternalistic successor to himself.

   Judson manipulated her like a showpiece, ordered her hair dyed red, dieted her, selected her clothes, and haggled for fatter contracts. He commanded, and she obeyed. Finally, even the outwardly phlegmatic Hayworth temperament could take the commercialism no more. She succeeded in getting a divorce by paying Judson heavily for the privilege. In one of her rare notes of bitterness she blurted, “He wanted me only for an investment.”

   Before he departed, one of Judson's smarter moves had brought her into the Columbia fold. Her appearances in such Technicolor offerings as “Blood and Sand" (1941) and “Strawberry Blonde" (1941) served as mere apéritifs for the public's tastes for bigger helpings of Hayworth.

   Cohn promptly serviced the demand. First, dancing pictures with Fred Astaire (“You Were Never Lovelier" (1942) and “You'll Never Get Rich" (1941)).

   Then Cohn presented her in three glamour roles in “Cover Girl” (1944), “Tonight and Every Night” (1945) and “Gilda” (1946). They hauled in more than $20,000,000.

 

[ Orson Welles ]

   But Cohn wasn’t ready for the new demand in Hayworth’s personal life—Orson Welles. A hyped-up professional intellectual, Welles played the courtship and subsequent marriage as an affair “Pygmalion." He loaded her with fat, smallprint books, nagged her into political searchings, terrified her with impromptu quizzes on any of the varied subjects quartered in the Welles mental storehouse. It didn't really work, but as usual Rita tried awfully hard to please.

   When Welles assaulted the vault of Columbia Pictures, namely the Hayworth public personality, Harry Cohn squawked like a stabbed fowl. It was Welles's edict that his wife's auburn tresses had to go. The soft, lacy, long-haired pin-up was to perish in favor of a lacquered, platinum blonde, skin-bobbed “smart” type. The idea gave Cohn a temporary seizure of the screaming meemies. At the shearing, he squirmed. The hairdresser snipped while “that genius" (Cohn makes it sound like an epithet) kept shrieking "cut more, more, more."

   All this reincarnation was to prepare for "that genius " production of “The Lady from Shanghai" (1947), an involved whodunit in which the great man moved like the wind while his wife served as immobile décor in the background.

   Soon afterward it became apparent that, as Rita put it, “you can’t live with a genius." The divorce left her with the miseries, her freedom, and her child. The relieved Cohn gave her a European vacation with the admonition to "forget that genius and grow some hair."

 

[ Aly Khan ]

   Her amorous adventures with Aly Khan hardly need reviewing. Cohn suffers over those emotional peccadilloes more than almost anyone except the one who gets hurt by them the most—Rita herself.

 

   Today, divorced again, mother of two children, aged thirty-three, Rita is still atomic fission at the box office. That alone should compensate Cohn for her cinema dry spell.

   The first picture she made upon her early separation from the prince, “Affair in Trinidad" (1952), a nondescript bauble, made: a fortune.

   “Salome” (1953) is the second. In it she wears enough clothes to outfit an entire musical comedy. More important, she also takes clothes off. In one scene she begins with seven items of wearing apparel and dances six of them off, while the music rises to a furious crescendo and Charles Laughton gasps like a tubercular seal. Hayworth dancing, Hayworth undressing, how could anything go wrong at the gate? Of course, nobody expects that anything will, only that this one will break the bank.

 

 

 

She Can't Explain Her Success

 

   But even today, three husbands after she began in this era starved for a love goddess, whose dimensions she apparently fits, Rita can't figure it out too well. She thinks simply, pliantly, and despite her heartaches, sweetly. Her answer to a rather cavalier question from an elegant intellectual illustrates the point well.

   Didn't she feel somewhat empty, he asked, knowing that all she really had to offer was the capacity to be sexually attractive?

   She nodded her pretty hirsute head and answered thoughtfully, “Well, maybe. But it’s nice to know you’re good at something.”

 

  The End.

 

 

Rita Heyworth – in “Salome” (1953)

( φωτο από το δημοσίευμα του Cosmopolitan ) 

  

 

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Rita Hayworth

Dance of the Seven Veils scene 

From the film “ Salome ” (1953)

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