City of Nets (31 page)

Once Miss Hayworth had become a star as an actress, she could reenter the role of a dancer on a completely different level, not as a sexy Latin but as the whirlwind partner of Fred Astaire.
You'll Never Get Rich
inspired
Time
magazine to put her on its cover in late 1941 and to describe her as “the best partner [Astaire] ever had.” It added that she was personally “easygoing and sometimes inert,” but that “before the camera, she is bright as a dollar.” Everyone wanted to see more of her, so Cohn loaned her to Fox for a turn-of-the-century turn called
My Gal Sal,
then for a pastiche titled
Tales of Manhattan.
Then he brought her back to Columbia to pair her with Astaire again in
You Were Never Lovelier
, and then came
Cover Girl.

It was apparently Harry Cohn's idea, and, as usual, he stole it. Robert Taplinger, publicity man for Warners, had suggested to his own bosses the idea of doing a musical about a magazine cover girl—nothing more than that—and Warners rejected it, so he tried it on Cohn, and Cohn grabbed it. Actually, Cohn's real role was a kind of inspired delegation of authority. He hired as producer Arthur Schwartz, a successful songwriter who had never produced a single film, and Schwartz managed to sign up Jerome Kern to write the music. He also managed, over Cohn's strenuous opposition, to hire as co-star and choreographer the young and relatively unknown Gene Kelly, who had just achieved his first big success on Broadway as the star of
Pal Joey.
As for the script, Virginia Van Upp concocted a fairly familiar confection out of half a dozen other writers' preliminary drafts: Kelly runs a little nightclub in Brooklyn, and when some Broadway producers come to inspect his variety show, it is Miss Hayworth whom they lead off to the Great White Way, but it is Kelly whom she really loves, and so on.

Cover Girl
was an immense success, perhaps the greatest of all the Hayworth musicals of the early 1940's. To have seen it in 1943, in the midst of the hushed audience in some neighborhood theater, was to fall hopelessly in love with Rita Hayworth. There could never be anyone more beautiful, more romantic, more glamorous. But late-night television, which keeps alive all these nostalgic memories, which keeps the Alzheimer's victim Rita Hayworth a perpetual beauty of twenty-five, is a treacherous guardian of one's own memories. Not only does it show
Blood and Sand
as a creaky travesty of romantic melodrama, but it also shows Miss Hayworth as a creaky travesty of the femme fatale. By this time, she had learned to speak like a graduate of an elocution class, and her heavily rouged cheeks and long red fingernails implied not passion so much as long hours at the makeup mirror.

Cover Girl,
which also appears on television from time to time, is in some ways worse, for it demanded much more of its star. Miss Van Upp's script, which was considered above average at the time, rejoiced in its comic-strip characters: a stage-door guardian called “Pops,” a bespectacled comic called “Genius,” a suavely white-haired publisher who suavely said, “She wants luxury, beautiful things.” “How do
you
know?” snarled Kelly. “Doesn't every girl?” said the suave producer, and that, implicitly, was that. Well, it was 1943, a simpler time, and nothing dates
Cover Girl
more than the production number for the title song, in which Miss Hayworth, outfitted in flowing draperies that billow about in mysterious breezes, dances up and down a vast circular ramp while an orchestra plays romantic arpeggios and the camera admires various models posing on the covers of all the great magazines that no longer exist:
Liberty, Woman's Home Companion, Look, The American, Coronet, Collier's
. . . . Memento mori!

The purpose of the script, though, was to put Miss Hayworth on display not only as a beauty but as a talented actress. She was given a scene that required her to portray unhappiness by getting drunk. She was decked out in white boots and a feathered hat to sing a song with a British accent (which she doggedly practiced with the visiting Gracie Fields). On television, nearly half a century later, these demonstrations only demonstrate her limitations. She couldn't act at all, her face was a frozen mask of makeup, her speech stilted and lifeless. Her singing, we now know, was always dubbed in by someone else (in this case, Martha Mears).

Yet there was still one element that made up for everything else. When Rita Hayworth danced, she became transformed.
Cover Girl
gave her many dances but none better than “Make Way for Tomorrow,” in which she and Kelly and Phil Silvers went romping through the streets in an orgy of high spirits. When Rita Hayworth danced, the waxen makeup disappeared, the acting lessons, the elocution lessons, the self-consciousness, all the attempts to become something other than what she was—all that disappeared. She became not only supremely sensual but supremely happy in her own sensuality. She could do anything. The spectacle was electrifying then, and it still is.

She had another reason for her obvious happiness in
Cover Girl,
particularly in the scene in which she was supposed to marry a Broadway producer (she didn't, of course, for no Broadway producer ever got the girl in any self-respecting Hollywood musical). “She looked very lovely sitting there in her wedding dress while the crew were setting up,” said Lee Bowman, who played the doomed producer. “Rita sat there with her hands in her lap, her eyes very big and a lovely big pussy smile on her face. When any of us asked, ‘What is it, Rita?' she'd just shake her head and say, ‘Mmm, I've got a secret.' Wouldn't say anything else. The first we knew what it was came when somebody brought us the papers with the headlines.” What the headlines said, to everyone's amazement, was that Rita Hayworth had got married that day to Orson Welles.

The marriage to Judson was long behind her, of course. Having married Margarita Cansino and created Rita Hayworth, Judson had created something beyond his own capacities. He demonstrated that all too well at the time of the breakup, in 1942, when he demanded that his departing wife pay him thirty thousand dollars for his time and services in creating her. She refused, but her testimony in defense of her refusal tended to demonstrate (if, as Hollywood generally believed, everybody was to be judged by his value in the marketplace) that he was right. “I was never permitted to make any decisions,” she said. “He robbed everything of excitement.” She admitted, though, that “running my career was his only concern, and he gave it everything he had, and his efforts paid off.”

Harry Cohn, who suffered from a hopeless infatuation with Miss Hayworth, an infatuation that he expressed by browbeating her, eavesdropping on her, insulting her, and generally harassing her, did not enjoy this kind of publicity about her private life. It was Cohn, the penny-pinching tyrant of Columbia, who paid off Judson's claim of thirty thousand dollars. Perhaps Cohn hoped for some kind of reward. He got none. Miss Hayworth began going out on the town, and she was quickly picked up by Victor Mature, a sleepy-eyed actor of sorts who had made a reputation for himself by flexing his muscles in various crime dramas. When Mature joined the coast guard and was shipped to a base in Connecticut, Miss Hayworth followed him there; Harry Cohn forbade her to go; she went anyway. She wore a ring that Mature had given her.

Love is eternal as long as it lasts. At a dinner party given by Joseph Cotten, Miss Hayworth met the legendary Orson Welles, by now twenty-eight, who was not only the creator and star of
Citizen Kane
but also six feet four inches tall and quite attractive, endowed with an interesting face that he himself described as that of “a rather depraved baby.” Jean Cocteau spoke of him more elaborately as “a kind of giant with the look of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog that has broken its chain and lies down in the flower beds. . . .” And that sonorous voice that had recited on the radio every week: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” That voice, said Micheál MacLiammóir, reckoning back to the day when the sixteen-year-old Welles first appeared at Dublin's Gate Theatre in search of a job, “bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air . . . as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor.”

Welles asked Miss Hayworth out to dinner, and she accepted. And Welles, like every self-conscious intellectual, tried to impress her with what passed for erudition—books, paintings, famous people. She, who had never gone beyond the ninth grade, was appropriately impressed. He gave her books to read, and she struggled with them, trying to play a wholly new role. But there was already aflame in Welles a self-destructive folly that would devour both his marriage and his career.

The trip to the Rio carnival the year before had been orgiastic, a swirl of dancing and drinking and magic tricks from nightclub to nightclub, and even one episode of furniture being flung out of a hotel window. But Welles had discovered, in an old copy of
Time,
a wonderful way of telling his story: Four penniless fishermen had sailed a log raft nearly two thousand miles from the hump of Brazil to Rio, inspired by God, they said, to tell the government of the people's suffering. Welles promptly signed up these overnight heroes and made plans to film their leader, a wiry little man known as Jacaré, the alligator, sailing the raft into Rio at the height of the carnival. During the filming of this scene, there was suddenly a convulsion in the waters, and then a shark erupted from the waves, locked in combat with a giant octopus. The filmmakers' raft tipped over, and while most of the crew made their way to safety, Jacaré, the alligator, disappeared in the foam. A week later, the shark was caught and cut open. Its innards were found to contain Jacaré's head, along with various pieces of the octopus. Welles suddenly became very unpopular in Brazil, and several members of his film crew were afraid to be seen on the streets of Rio, but Welles insisted that the filming go on. Indeed, he shot a preposterous 400,000 feet of color film on the Brazilian segment of the project. Back at RKO, however, Rockefeller sold all his stock, leaving the studio in the control of the entrepreneur Floyd Odlum, who had no interest whatever in the wild installments of film being sent back from Welles's crew in Rio de Janeiro.
It's All True
was never finished; some of the film was never even developed; some began to deteriorate so much by the late 1950's, when RKO was taken over by Desilu, and then Desilu by Paramount, that it was dumped unseen into the Pacific Ocean.

But in 1943, Welles's South American adventures seemed like just another manifestation of his eccentric genius, and perhaps what Rita Hayworth loved best in him was the playfulness in this eccentricity. Ever since his childhood, Welles had delighted in performing magic tricks, and now that there was a war on, he performed a magic show for servicemen in a large tent installed on Cahuenga Boulevard. When he married Rita Hayworth, he entertained the soldiers, night after night, by putting her in a box and sawing her in half. Any magician who would put Rita Hayworth in a box and saw her in half was clearly no ordinary magician.

 

Of the Hollywood figures who actually put on uniforms, many did go and fight, of course, but a substantial number devoted their war years to doing what they had always done, making movies. Although these films were conceived as propaganda, some of them achieved considerable distinction. Major Frank Capra, head of an outfit called the 834th Photo Signal Detachment, was summoned to the office of the chief of staff, General George Marshall, and told to make a series of documentaries “that will explain to our boys in the Army
why
we are fighting.” Inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will,
which he regarded as a “lethal . . . psychological weapon aimed at destroying the will to resist,” Capra produced
Why We Fight,
a highly successful series of seven one-hour documentaries on the origins of the war.

Major William Wyler directed for Capra's series a documentary on
The Negro Soldier,
then went to England and began flying bombing runs over Germany to supervise the shooting of his remarkable film about one Flying Fortress,
Memphis Belle.
Lieutenant John Huston's orders were somewhat less exalted. He was told to go and shoot a documentary on the defense of Alaska. His
Report from the Aleutians
was to be followed, in 1943, by his celebrated documentary on the Italian campaign,
The Battle of San Pietro,
and then by his even more celebrated study of the army's psychiatric casualties,
Let There Be Light,
which the army, in its wisdom, decided to suppress.

Jack Warner, by contrast, responded to the call to service by saying that he wanted to start out as a general. He added that he would be happy to telephone the White House to get President Roosevelt's approval. Persuaded to settle for the rank of lieutenant colonel, and assigned to a public relations post in Los Angeles, Warner proceeded to the studio tailoring shop to get himself outfitted for his new role. Though his military duties never called him far from his office in Burbank, he let it be known that he liked to be addressed as “Colonel” while he produced films like
Winning Your Wings
and
Rear Gunner.
On the day that a full colonel came to the studio to discuss future film projects, though, when Jack Warner graciously welcomed his visitor by shaking his hand, and the visiting colonel said, “You should have saluted me”—that was the day Jack Warner resigned his commission.

Before that unfortunate encounter with military protocol, Warner had already organized his two major contributions to the war effort. One was to become a major embarrassment, the other a source of pride. The embarrassment originated, according to Warner's own account, with an invitation from President Roosevelt to lunch at the White House. (Warner insisted, in another version, on bringing along his own silverware, to the dismay of Mrs. Roosevelt.) The President apparently told Warner that he wanted him to make a movie of
Mission to Moscow,
Ambassador Joseph Davies's glowing account of his recent diplomatic service in Russia. “Jack, this picture
must
be made, and I am asking you to make it,” Warner quoted the President as saying. “I'll do it,” Warner answered. “You have my word.” “We simply can't lose Russia at this stage . . .” Roosevelt supposedly went on. “We have to keep Stalin fighting—and your picture can make a case for him with the American people.”