A Hollywood Tale
Jerome Charyn has given us a novelized biography of
Rita Hayworth and her tempestuous marriage to Orson Welles. The novel is
narrated by Rusty Redburn a sexually fluid tomboy from the Midwest newly
arrived in Hollywood in 1943. Redburn gets a job in the bowels of Columbia
Pictures and soon she hired by Harry Cohn, the big boss himself, to spy on Rita
Hayworth his prize property. Hayworth is, of course, a sex goddess of 1940’s
Hollywood who heats up the screen with her starring role in Gilda. Her “Put the
Blame on Mame” number is a Hollywood classic. (See:
We learn that Hayworth was sexually abused by her
father and her first husband made her available to more than a few producers.
She meets Welles and falls in love with the “boy wonder” who co-wrote and
directed the classic, “Citizen Kane.” There marriage is a stormy one of
opposites, Welles “the genius” and Hayworth being minimally educated. As a
result, when both were invited to the Roosevelt White House, Hayworth begs off
out fear of being intellectually intimidated by Eleanor Roosevelt. Further
Welles is on the way down, while Hayworth is on the way up. This being
Hollywood, Welles cheats on Hayworth and Hayworth, as a consequence drinks to
excess thereby cratering the marriage.
Nevertheless, the two do the surrealistic “The Lady
from Shanghai” movie together and Welles goes on to play Harry Lime in “The
Third Man.” The novel has lots of vignettes on the Hollywood of the 1940’s and
shows the power of the studio bosses and the gossip columnists. As the 1940’s fade
into the 1950’s the once proud Hollywood Boulevard scene turns seedy under the
pressure from television and as the glitterati move further west out of
Hollywood.
Charyn has authored an enjoyable book that puts you
into the mindset of 1940’s Hollywood. My one small quibble is that he used the
term “women of color, a phrase that would never have been used in the 1940’s.
* Amazon has yet again been late in posting my review. Amazon just posted at URL:
