Cinema: Yasmin

The script had been carefully polished, as a major production should be, and Director Aly Khan had rehearsed the Lausanne police and the Lausanne-Palace Hotel staff time & again. As soon as Leading Lady Rita Hayworth felt the first labor pains, Aly was to pick up a phone on a private wire and simply breathe the secret password: “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre [Maryborough-is going to war].” At the other end, a police functionary would flash the word to the motorized cops who were standing eagerly by to escort the couple to the Mont-Choisi Clinic. Then, after Aly and Rita slipped out, the concierge would lock every exit of the hotel, thus trap the impatient representatives of the world press.

The Chase. Shortly before 3 o’clock one morning last week, just seven months and a day after their wedding near Cannes, Rita gave Aly his cue, and Aly, in his own words, “blew up completely.” Throwing away the script, he stopped long enough to get into his clothes and help Rita put a mink coat over her pajamas. Then he hustled her out of the four-room suite, through one of the hotel’s side exits and into a black Buick. Aly took the wheel himself and roared off to the clinic two miles away.

Like an old trouper, the concierge locked the hotel doors, but the 20 journalists on the job (awakened by inside tipsters) soon got them open and were off in pop-eyed pursuit. Catching word that something was up, two carloads of police screeched up to the clinic, a poor third behind Aly and the press. After that, 20 cops in uniform and plain clothes joined the newsmen in an eight-hour vigil outside the building. Excited Swiss who lived across from the clinic fed the newsmen hot tea. The manager of the Lausanne-Palace Hotel arrived with a milk can full of hot grog.

The Fadeout. Around 11 a.m. Aly’s pressagent stepped out of the clinic. “Gentlemen,” he said portentously, “will you please stand by for an important announcement by Prince Aly Khan himself?” Rumpled and unshaven, Aly told the world: it was a ½lb. girl, a normal delivery, though “Rita had a very tough time.” The baby would be called Yasmin, the Arabic word for jasmine. “I told you,” he reminded a newsman, “that premature babies run in my family.”

In her lilac-strewn clinic .suite overlooking Lake Geneva, Rita slept, woke to a happy world which poured messages of congratulation, flowers and presents upon her. On New Year’s Day a Swiss photographer was admitted to the Mont-Choisi Clinic to take pictures of a radiant Rita with Princess Yasmin on the pillow beside her, sound asleep. Ahead of Rita lay a sojourn in Aly’s 15-room chalet at Gstaad, the winter sports resort, where she would rest and recuperate under the care of a special masseur and the fond eyes, of course, of Aly, his pressagent and anybody who could read a newspaper.

And after that? Hollywood still beckoned, and millions of fans yearned. No enterprising cinemogul had yet announced plans to sign up little Yasmin (as David O. Selznick once bid for the services of Shirley Temple’s baby daughter). But thus far, the courtship-wedding-confinement-birth script from true life had been a howling romantic success.