Rita Hayworth: 1918-1987: The All-American Love Goddess

She had a perfect figure and a smile that could light up the Statue of Liberty. But the feature that most people will probably remember is her hair, whipping seductively around her in Gilda, cascading over her shoulders on the cover of LIFE and in thousands of World War II pinup posters. If Jean Harlow was Hollywood’s love goddess in the ’30s and Marilyn Monroe in the ’50s, the ’40s ideal was Rita Hayworth, who died at 68 last week in Manhattan of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

She never had to claw her way into show business. As Margarita Cansino, a member of a famous family of Spanish dancers, she was dancing 20 shows a week professionally when she was in her early teens. Her father made his daughter his partner, and dyed her brown hair black in an attempt to make her look more Latin. Precociously alluring as well as arrestingly attractive, Rita soon found a place in such B-grade movies as Under the Pampas Moon (1935). At 18 she married Edward Judson, a sometime auto salesman who at once saw what was wrong: her real appeal was not Latin but all-American. After lightening her hair, he introduced her to Harry Cohn, the shrewd, tyrannical head of Columbia Pictures, who substituted her Irish mother’s surname, with a slight variation, and inserted young Hayworth into her first important picture, Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939).

Offstage, Hayworth was — and was to remain — shy, unassuming and almost passive. But something magical happened when the cameras began to roll; her vitality warmed the set. “I don’t really think she knew how intensely sexy she seemed to others,” said Hawks. Hayworth was sweet and lovable in Cover Girl (1944), but she was also the timeless temptress in Gilda (1946), doing a wild rendition of Put the Blame on Mame for Glenn Ford, as well as Fred Astaire’s exquisitely gracious partner in You Were Never Lovelier (1942).

Hollywood has decreed that love goddesses never find lasting love, and Rita’s marriages unreeled like so many bad movies. After her 1943 divorce from Judson came Orson Welles, but “Orsie,” with whom she had a daughter Rebecca, was devoted mostly to Orsie. “I’m tired of being a 25% wife,” she later said. In 1949, with the whole world looking on, she wed the playboy Aly Khan, with whom she had her second daughter Yasmin. The match lasted only two years, but she remembered him fondly: “The world was magical when you were with him.” There were two more marriages (to Crooner Dick Haymes and Producer James Hill), neither happy. “They fell in love with Gilda and woke up with me,” was her rueful commentary on her men.

In the ’50s her career began to fade. Though she had proved herself a capable actress, she was given few parts. She began to look tired, and a line from Fire Down Below (1957) — “Armies have marched over me” — seemed sadly appropriate. By the early ’80s, Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed, and Yasmin, who has been active in raising funds for Alzheimer’s research, was appointed her conservator. Hayworth was perhaps the best judge of her life. “I haven’t had everything from life,” she once remarked. “I’ve had too much.”

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