City of Nets (30 page)

The only movie of 1943 that dealt seriously with Mexicans was
The Ox-Bow Incident,
based on Walter van Tilburg Clark's novel about a lynching. But it dealt with the racial aspect of the lynching by never mentioning that the victim, played by Anthony Quinn, was a Mexican. (And Quinn, in an autobiography filled with self-pity over the hardships of being a Mexican in Hollywood, never mentioned this oddity either.) It was Henry Fonda, apparently, who persuaded Darryl Zanuck to film
The Ox-Bow Incident
as a vehicle for his yearning to do good deeds. When the two men subsequently fought about future projects, and when Fonda said he wanted to do more pictures like
The Grapes of Wrath
and
The Ox-Bow Incident,
Zanuck hauled out an account book on all his films. “Read this,” Zanuck said. “See how well
The Ox-Bow Incident
did.” Fonda looked at the account book, saw all the figures on the page in red ink, and charged out of Zanuck's office, slamming doors behind him.

 

Hollywood's final verdict on Latins was its transformation of a young Spanish dancer named Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino into the greatest romantic star of this decade, a transformation that could take place only after she had dyed her hair red and changed her name to Rita Hayworth.

That had been approximately the maiden name of her mother, Volga Haworth, a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies, who had fallen in love with a dancer from Madrid named Eduardo Cansino. The Cansinos liked to proclaim a family tree that was rooted back in the Middle Ages, when they were Sephardic Jews. Their fifteenth-century progenitor, Isaac Cansino, bowed to the threats of the Inquisition, converted to Christianity, and bequeathed to his descendants the accursed brand of the Marranos.

Young Margarita, born in New York and educated at P.S. 79 in Jackson Heights, Queens (she never did get beyond the first year of high school), knew nothing of that. She was chubby and shy, and she liked to dance. Indeed, she had no choice. “They had me dancing almost as soon as I could walk,” she said. “They” were her father, who toured the vaudeville circuit with his sister Elisa, and her uncle Angel, to whose dance classes in Carnegie Hall she was sent at the age of four. Eduardo eventually wanted to retire from the stage, so he moved his family to Los Angeles in 1930. He worked as a choreographer at Warners and opened his own little dance studio on the second floor of a building at the corner of Sunset and Vine. His sister Elisa returned to Spain and had children and grew fat. But when the Depression began crushing little operations like Cansino's dance studio, he found that he had to go back on stage, found that he had to train a new partner, found that there was no prospect better than his own daughter, Margarita, who was then a blossoming thirteen. The first time he saw the effect she had on an audience at the Carthay Circle Theater, it was a revelation. “All of a sudden I woke up to the fact that my baby was no longer a baby,” he said. This revelation filled him with proud anticipation, not about her future but about his own. “Here was a girl, my own daughter, with whom I could build a whole new dance act.”

There were legal problems. California law required that thirteen-year-old dancers go through elaborate procedures of pretending to do homework to make up for lost schooling. More important, the law forbade them to dance in any place where liquor was sold, which eliminated most of the places that were interested in hiring Spanish dancers. Cansino followed the obvious course and took his daughter across the Mexican border to the Foreign Club Café de Luxe in Tijuana. “Between shows,” said one of Cansino's friends, “Eduardo locked his buxom daughter in the dressing room to keep her out of harm's way as he saw it, while he and Volga spent their time and money gambling.”

One of Cansino's pupils was a rumba dancer named Grace Pioggi, a protégée of Joseph Schenck, who, in addition to being a founder of 20th Century–Fox and a friend of Willie Bioff, was also the head of the Agua Caliente Jockey Club. It took only a few phone calls for the Cansinos to make an appearance at the Jockey Club, which called itself “A Dreamland in Old Mexico eighteen miles below San Diego.” Hollywood producers came here to gamble and sometimes paused to observe the girls onstage, like Margarita Cansino. “I first saw her around 1933,” said Max Arno, who was then the casting director at Warners. “This very young, beautiful girl came down the steps of a very high staircase, moving to the music like some marvelous big cat. . . . I did nothing about her then because she was still immature, but about a year later we made a photographic test of her at Warners, just a head close-up—turn this way, turn that, smile, no dialogue. She didn't say much and we thought she couldn't talk English. In the end we decided not to sign her because of certain hair problems she had.”

The “hair problems” were that her thick, dark, curly locks, which she parted in the middle, sprouted very low on her forehead and made her look not only very Hispanic but somewhat primitive. She was also quite inarticulate: shy, timid, nervous. She danced, though, with a marvelous sensuality that she seemed to take for granted, leaving it to others to explain. “Where most dancers move from the hips down Hayworth moves from the knees up, her shoulders drawn back, projecting her breast cage forward in the most enticing manner, only acceptable in the young and very beautiful,” explained Jack Cole, the choreographer who started working with her in
Cover Girl
(1944), then staged
Tonight and Every Night
(1945) and ultimately
Gilda
(1946). “To see her in that moment's hesitation [her entrance] is to experience a sense of joy pure and simple.”

Middle-aged men were always trying to take care of Margarita Cansino. One of the first of these, back in the 1930's, was Winfield Sheehan, another friend of Joe Schenck's, and vice-president in charge of production at the Fox Film Corporation. After watching the Cansinos dance at Agua Caliente, Sheehan duly introduced his new discovery to Louella Parsons, who found her “painfully shy . . . her voice so low it could hardly be heard . . . hardly the material of which a great star could be made.” Sheehan brusquely announced: “I've signed her to a contract.” It was a modest little contract that promised two hundred dollars a week (Sheehan originally offered seventy-five dollars) plus daily diction and drama classes. Cansino himself signed the document, since Margarita was still only fifteen.

Sheehan shortened her name to Rita and began casting her as an earthy Latin. She did a Spanish dance of sorts in a disaster titled
Dante's Inferno.
She did another one in
Under the Pampas Moon
and yet another in
Human Cargo.
Sometimes she was more exotic, as in
Charlie Chan in Egypt,
in which, much like Faye Greener in
The Day of the Locust,
she had three lines, one of which was “Yes, Effendi.” Allan Dwan, who directed
Human Cargo
(1936), saw the potential. “She was very nervous, terribly emotional,” Dwan said, “and when she got frustrated battling with the dramatic expressions required in some of her scenes she'd be inclined to burst into tears. . . . She was probably just an innocent little virgin, but on the screen she's always a woman. She looks as if she had the knowledge of everything when in fact she didn't know a damn thing.”

After five small parts, Sheehan announced that Rita Cansino would star in the title role of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular romance,
Ramona,
but then Fox merged with Twentieth Century, and in came Darryl Zanuck, thirty-three-year-old boy wonder, who asserted his new authority in the usual ways. Out went Winfield Sheehan, out went
Ramona,
out went Rita Cansino, fired. “I vowed I would show those people they'd made a terrible mistake,” she said later. She free-lanced for a while, but that only led her to routine roles at poverty-row studios like Grand National (
Trouble in Texas
), Crescent (
Old Louisiana
), and Republic (
Hit the Saddle
).

Then along came another middle-aged mentor who wanted to take care of her. This was Edward C. Judson, a suave and portly “man about town,” though of uncertain financial resources. He had been a moderately successful car salesman, and he now received a small retainer from a Texas oil promoter who wanted Los Angeles contacts. There was occasional talk of criminal connections. Judson met Sheehan just as the film tests for
Ramona
were being screened. Judson was so impressed by Rita Cansino that he asked Sheehan to introduce him to her. Judson was rather fat and getting bald, but he was also kind and solicitous, part Pygmalion and part Svengali. He asked Eduardo Cansino's permission to take Rita out on her first date. Cansino was suspicious, his wife openly hostile. Judson was not only Cansino's age, fortyish, but even had the same first name. Judson was persuasive, however. He began taking Rita to Ciro's and the Trocadero to show her off, and he also told her what to wear and how to wear it. Rita was impressed. When Judson proposed marriage, she accepted. They drove to Las Vegas for the ceremony in one of those roadside wedding emporia. She was eighteen, he was forty. Her parents were appalled.

But Judson, alone among the people around Rita Cansino, including Rita herself, knew what needed to be done and how to do it. He started by negotiating a new studio contract for her. If the best place that he could find was Columbia, which was just beginning to swallow up the other poverty-row studios along Gower Street, then let it be Columbia. Harry Cohn, who still kept a portrait of Mussolini in his office, grudgingly agreed to pay $250 a week, declared that the name of Rita Cansino would have to be changed, and then turned away to more important matters. And so, taking her mother's maiden name, Rita Cansino became Rita Hayworth. But that was just the beginning. Judson knew, and perhaps Harry Cohn also knew, that the possibilities of a Spanish dancer were limited. She had to be changed into something else.

There was the hair problem. Judson went to Helen Hunt, the chief hair stylist at Columbia, and said, “Tell me what we can do about Rita.” Miss Hunt suggested dying her black hair a gentle auburn, but the main problem was the low hairline. Miss Hunt recommended an electrolysist, and Rita agreed to begin the slow and painful process of having each hair removed, one at a time, and killing every single follicle on her forehead. Judson himself paid ten dollars for each treatment, and it took two years. “Eddie went to the top jewelry shops and borrowed jewelry for Rita,” Miss Hunt recalled, “and even evening gowns—he took her to the finest restaurants—saw that she was seated in a good view.” To make sure that these events became known to the world—not to mention her employers at Columbia Pictures—Judson hired a press agent at seventy-five dollars a week.

Since all these maneuvers cost money that Judson did not possess, he had the temerity to demand a financial accounting from Eduardo Cansino of the money that Rita had earned as a minor, money that Eduardo had long since spent and now had to repay under threat of litigation. The Cansinos' loathing for Judson became a passion. But at their daughter's little house in Brentwood, Judson still couldn't afford to buy any furniture. On the bare floor of the living room, he kept an electric train set for Rita to play with when she got bored. And it was only after she married him that she learned he had been married twice before.

The complex process of creating a movie star, which the nervous and inarticulate Rita Hayworth passionately wanted to be, had now begun. Harry Cohn put her in five forgotten pictures in 1937, five more in 1938, and then Judson decided to gamble on a chance at bigger things. Rita spent five hundred dollars to buy the perfect gray-and-silver dress in which to go to the Trocadero and sit near the table occupied by Harry Cohn and Howard Hawks, who were casting Columbia's big picture of 1939,
Only Angels Have Wings.
“I had a few uncomfortable moments thinking of my extravagance,” she supposedly said to some writer at
Photoplay.
“But when I saw myself in the mirror I felt reassured. I had never looked like that before.” Everything worked out just as Judson planned. Rita got the part, the film was a hit, and Harry Cohn renewed her contract, though he insisted that the fifty-dollar-a-week raise go not to her but to a dramatic coach, Gertrude Vogler.

The next step in the process was the traditional lucky break: Ann Sheridan got tired of playing the same sketchy roles, so she walked out of a Warners film that was almost ready for shooting,
The Strawberry Blonde.
Jack Warner called in the director, Raoul Walsh, and said, “Irish, we're up against it. The film's ready to go. Who can we get at this stage?” Walsh later claimed that his answer was instantaneous: “The most beautiful girl in pictures, Rita Hayworth.” And so she acquired not only a starring role in a major production, with Jimmy Cagney as her co-star and James Wong Howe as her photographer, but also the last element in her anglicization: flowing red hair.

Having then become the complete Anglo, she was able to compete for one of the big roles of 1941, that of Doña Sol, the femme fatale in Fox's
Blood and Sand
—able to compete not as a Latin, who would never have been considered worthy of such an important part, but as a Latin pretending to be an Anglo pretending to be a Latin. Darryl Zanuck, who had fired her a few years earlier, tested dozens of actresses for the role, including Gene Tierney and Dorothy Lamour, and then acquiesced in the inevitable. He not only had to hire back the girl he had fired, he had to pay five times her normal salary to Harry Cohn for the privilege of making her a major star. And she was sensational. Zanuck didn't even bother with the traditional sneak previews in little California suburbs. “No preview,” he decreed, according to Rouben Mamoulian, the director. “It's the greatest film I've ever seen. Ship it.”