The Press: So You Won’t Talk?

One day last week, pretty Actress Rita Hayworth, whose face and figure are her fortune, and the opulent Aly Khan, who has less visible means of support, passed through Manhattan bound for Britain, Switzerland and, possibly, marriage. Readers of the tabloid New York Daily News choked on their gum when they read that Miss Hayworth looked “as pale and haggard as though she had walked all the way from Hollywood [to meet her] gold-plated boy friend from mystic India.” She scurried aboard the liner Britannic, the Daily News went on, over a gangplank “ordinarily used, dock workers said, to take bodies aboard, or to carry off the ship’s refuse.”

What sort of snarling cat had got hold of the News’s tongue? Well, Miss Hayworth had refused to be interviewed, and any celebrity who did that to the News could expect to be tabbed as looking pale and haggard. Reporters don’t like to be snubbed, and have their own unpleasant ways of showing it. On the other hand, in Elsa Maxwell’s column last week, “Rita, of course, looked beautiful.” Elsa had not been snubbed; she had lunched with Rita and Aly.