Big Red E-Book

Jerome Charyn

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 366

Beschreibung

Narrated by a starry-eyed reporter, Big Red reimagines the tragic career of Rita Hayworth and her indomitable husband, Orson Welles. Set amidst the noir glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age, Big Red reenvisions the life of one of America's most enduring icons: Gilda herself, Rita Hayworth, whose fiery red hair and hypnotic dancing helped make her the quintessential movie star of the 1940s. With narrator Rusty Redburn - a feisty second-string gossip columnist from Kalamazoo tasked with spying on Hayworth by Columbia movie mogul Harry 'The Janitor' Cohn - as our guide, we follow the meteoric rise and heartrending demise of the actress, encountering her exploitative father, Eduardo; her controlling husband, 'boy genius' Orson Welles; and notorious journalist Louella Parsons, among many others. Mixing his trademark screwball comedy and unerring tragedy, Jerome Charyn, with his 'polymorphous imagination' (Jonathan Lethem) reanimates film classics such as Cover Girl, Gilda, and The Lady from Shanghai. An insightful, tender portrait of a seemingly halcyon age before blockbusters and film franchises, Big Red promises to consume both Hollywood cinephiles and neophytes alike.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR BIG RED

‘An affecting and searing portrait of Silver Screen superstars… Charyn offers rapid-fire dialogue and slapstick action (‘So it’s a bit of blackmail,’ Orson says at one point, ‘lunging’ at an adversary though he ‘wasn’t much of a gladiator with his big flat feet’) along with affecting character development. It’s a rewarding paean to some of cinema’s greats’– Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘Jerome Charyn’s movie-love dances like a flame over every page of Big Red. Like its gloriously outspoken narrator – who never existed but should have – the book is bewitched by cinema and also hardheaded about the crass, exploitative reality of the dream factory. It’s a dazzling romp through old Hollywood, and a fiercely loving effort to set the record straight’ – Imogen Sara Smith, film critic and author of In Lonely Places

‘Big Red is the most entertaining book I’ve read all year. It’s as if Herman Wouk and James Ellroy had a love child, and that love child was given a typewriter at birth. This is a wise, hilarious, and very deep look into Hollywood’s ambitions, dreams, and indulgences. I hope Jerome Charyn is already at work on its sequel’ – Brian Koppelman, co-creator and showrunner of Billions

‘In an astounding sixth decade of productivity, Jerome Charyn remains one of our finest writers… Whatever milieu he chooses to inhabit, his characters sizzle with life, and his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable’ – Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

‘Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature’ – Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

‘No one writes historical fiction better than Jerome Charyn, and Big Red, his latest, narrated by the marvelously wry Rusty Redburn, is the hilarious and moving tale of a bygone Hollywood – its glamour, its stars, its moguls, its dreams, and its victims – all told with the tender wisdom of a good friend’ – Brenda Wineapple, author of The Impeachers

PRAISE FOR JEROME CHARYN

‘Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination’ – William Giraldi

‘One of our most rewarding novelists’ – Larry McMurtry

‘Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature’ – Michael Chabon

‘Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy – a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘Charyn’s sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable’ – Jonathan Lethem

‘Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons’–New Yorker

‘One of our most intriguing fiction writers’ –O, The Oprah Magazine

To Robert Warshow, In Memoriam

‘He had not been to so many places, but wherever he went, he always went to the movies.’

‒ Sherry Abel

ONE

The Kid from Kalamazoo, 1943

1

I was an actress who couldn’t act, a dancer who couldn’t dance, a singer who couldn’t sing. So I went straight to Hollywood after my sophomore year at college in Kalamazoo. Still, I wasn’t much of a maverick. I had grown up on a farm in southern Illinois. Both my parents couldn’t read a word. I promised myself that I would become a reader, and I did become one, with a fierce regard for language. But language alone couldn’t imprison me with its pleasures. I saw every film that reached our rural landscape. There were no picture palaces on the plains, but we did have fifty-seaters in every nearby hamlet. That’s how I discovered the world, watching William Powell and Myrna Loy eat breakfast in their pajamas…

I lived in a roomette at the Hollywood Hotel, right on the boulevard, near Musso’s and the trolley car line, with the constant hiss of overhead wires, and despite the racket, I still felt like a grand duchess. I worked in the basement of the Writers’ Building at Columbia, belonged to a shadow crew. We were attached to the Publicity Department, but we barely existed at all. I was paid seventy-five clams a week to dig up dirt on the directors and stars of every studio, including our own. I was hired as a common clerk until the studio realized I was the best damn digger on the lot.

Columbia had swallowed up all of Poverty Row on Gower Street by then. It occupied an entire avenue of barns, storage facilities, sound stages, and half-empty lots. Its Administrative Building was a converted stable. I’d never been invited to the commissary, not once. The head of our crew, a shifty character named Archibald, kept trying to get into my pants. ‘Rusty, you don’t have much of a future here.’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ I said.

I couldn’t imagine ever returning to Kalamazoo. I was a fanatic about Photoplay and Modern Screen. All the dirt I collected was gold to a tomboy raised in movie houses. I knew where Gable and Lombard had their hideaway in a penthouse on Hollywood Boulevard before the King got rid of his first wife. I also knew about his dentures.

There was a deeper tale to tell. Carole and her mother had been killed in a plane crash while returning from a war bond rally in ’42, and Clark was inconsolable. Louis B. Mayer had to put him on leave at MGM. I once saw Rhett Butler in rags, tottering along the trolley tracks, and I had to lure him into the Hollywood Hotel, with its long verandahs and steeples that looked like a witch’s lair. The bellboys couldn’t believe it. His speech was so garbled, even I couldn’t understand a word. I fed him hot milk, and finally he sobered up. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘you’re a swell kid.’ He left a twenty-dollar-bill on the table and marched out of the Hollywood Hotel.

The King wasn’t my only customer. I could point to the table at Musso’s where Ty Power sat with one or two of the cowboy extras he’d picked up at Gower Gulch. I could talk about Tallulah Bankhead’s conquests at the Troc, where she’d wrap a tablecloth around herself and her latest catch, a starlet from one of the minor lots. She lived at the Garden of Allah on Sunset, and it was said she loved to swim in the nude…

I didn’t get fired. Archibald, who had once been a sergeant inside some crackpot sheriff’s office in Sonoma County, smirked at me. ‘The boss wants to see ya, chicken.’ Archibald’s smirk spread across his face like a lantern on fire. ‘I’m talking about the big guy – Harry himself.’

I was bewildered in that dank row of cubicles where we worked six days a week. What the hell would Harry Cohn want with me? But I never bothered to ask. I didn’t have to go back out onto Gower. I took the underground passageway to Cohn’s castle. He occupied an entire floor in the Administrative Building. He rebuilt his offices after visiting Mussolini in 1933. Cohn had even done a documentary on Il Duce, Mussolini Speaks, and the dictator had decided to decorate the president of Columbia Pictures in Rome. Harry never quite recovered from that trip. He kept an autographed picture of Mussolini on his mantle until the beginning of the war.

The walls of his entire suite were white on white, like Il Duce’s. The outer office was as big as a baseball diamond. A receptionist sat at the far end behind a tiny desk. Hers was the only chair in the room. A bleached blonde in a tailored outfit and a teal necktie, she didn’t bother to look up as I approached.

‘Rusty Redburn to see Harry,’ I said.

‘Mr Cohn,’ she rasped, correcting me in a clipped British accent she must have picked up in an elocution class on Hollywood Boulevard. ‘Do you have an appointment, young lady?’

‘I believe your boss is expecting me.’

The receptionist ambled out of her seat and sashayed into an inner office with all the aplomb of a starlet on Poverty Row with stiletto heels. I waited at least fifteen minutes for her to come back. Then she squired me into an inner office with a bump of her derriere. This office had the same barren white-on-white walls. It was occupied by the boss’s number-one secretary and her assistant, with deep suspicion in their hooded eyes. Both of them could have just stepped out of Max Factor’s Hollywood salon, that’s how artful their pancake had been put on.

Again, there were no other chairs in the room.

They murmured to one another as if I were a pimple that Max Factor could make disappear.

‘Rusty Redburn, honest to God, I can’t locate her file.’

‘Do you think she polishes saddles at the Columbia ranch?’

Then a buzzer sounded, and a curious door, without a doorknob or a keyhole, clicked open.

‘Enter, please,’ the assistant said.

And I stepped into Harry Cohn’s private office, which was twice as large as his secretary’s, with a Steinway near the door. It had a semicircular desk at the far end, on a platform, and two chairs that were much lower than the desk and looked as if they belonged in a nursery. But Cohn wasn’t sitting behind his desk. He stood near a picture window that opened onto Gower Street. It was his way, I had been told, to check when his employees arrived at his fiefdom. Cohn himself never appeared before noon. He often stayed until midnight, wandering across the studio to make sure that no one had left a light on. He liked to think of himself as Harry the First, or King Cohn, but the other studio heads called him the Janitor behind his back. I’d also been told how crass he was, but the Janitor didn’t seem crude to me.

He was a handsome man in his fifties with muscular shoulders, an assassin’s clear blue eyes, and an angelic smile. He’d once been a streetcar conductor. He wore a houndstooth jacket from a haberdasher in Beverly Hills, and a Sulka shirt open at the neck to reveal a hint of his hairy chest.

He dug into me with his blue eyes. ‘You’re a dyke, ain’t ya?’

‘Suppose I am.’

He laughed, and I could spot the amazing symmetry of his dental work. His teeth were whiter than white, like a mouth made of Chiclets.

‘Sweetheart, what do you think of Orson Welles?’

I wasn’t an idiot. Rita Hayworth, Cohn’s prize property, had just moved in with Welles on Woodrow Wilson Drive, in the Hollywood Hills. I adored Citizen Kane. We Hollywoodians had our own second-run movie house, the Regina, right on the boulevard, wedged between Grauman’s Chinese and Grauman’s Egyptian. I wrote reviews for all the classics shown at our little box of a theater, plus tidbits about the stars, and signed my pieces Regina X. There had been nothing like Kane, before or since. It exploded onto the screen – and into my head – from its first shot. I couldn’t catch my breath until after the final credits. But I didn’t tell that to Harry. You had to lie and lie if you wanted to remain in Hollywood, even as a basement clerk in the Publicity Department, who lived in a roomette.

‘Welles is a has-been,’ I said. But I was puzzled. ‘Mr Archibald couldn’t have told you about me. He hates my guts.’

‘Who’s this Archibald?’ Cohn asked, with a sudden gruffness in his voice.

‘My boss in the basement of the Writers’ Building.’

‘I’m your boss,’ he insisted, and then licked his lips with his serpentine tongue. ‘It was Louella. She said you were reliable. I could trust you not to be a rat.’

He meant Lolly Parsons, Hollywood’s premier gossip columnist and bitchiest bitch, with her wattles, her notorious triple chin. She had her own booth at the Brown Derby on North Vine, where she could snub you or greet you according to her own whimsical delight. The chef had to prepare a special grapefruit pudding for Louella, who was finicky about her weight. She lost a little of her allure after she became Hearst’s toad. Lolly had massacred Welles’ first film because she insisted that Charles Foster Kane was modeled after the Chief, as the newspaper tycoon was called, and that Citizen Kane was a parody of Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies. But it was the Chief himself who had wrecked Marion’s career, trying to turn a comedy star with a stutter into a cross-eyed tragedienne, who couldn’t really play Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Marie Antoinette. And Lolly was too thick to understand that Kane’s megalomania was more about Welles, the Boy Wonder, who had played the Shadow on the radio – Lamont Cranston, a vigilante with a deep-throated roar – than about William Randolph Hearst, a reclusive pasha with a girlish voice. Still, I moonlighted as one of Lolly’s stringers. I fed her tidbits from time to time, and she would toss a crumpled ten-dollar-bill into my lap while she sipped her vodka martini and spooned her grapefruit pudding.

‘Shucks,’ I said, playing up to the Janitor, ‘has Lolly ruined my reputation?’

He ignored my remark. ‘Louella has assured me that you’re reliable, and I have an assignment for you, Miss Rusty. I don’t like the Boy Wonder and what he might do to Rita’s career. So I recommended you to Rita. You see, my redhead needs a secretary.’

‘But why would Miss Hayworth ever want me?’ I asked, growing more and more suspicious.

‘Jesus,’ Harry Cohn said, ‘you can spell, can’t ya?’

I stared right at the Janitor. ‘You don’t really want a speller, sir. You want a spy.’

He laughed again. ‘I can tell that we’ll do wonders together. The job pays a hundred and fifty a week – more than some of my writers get.’

‘And all I have to do is become Miss Hayworth’s gal Friday and report back to you about her and the Boy Wonder? I don’t even have to think about it. I’ll take the job!’

I didn’t intend to spy on Rita or the Boy Wonder, but I was as grand a liar as anyone in Hollywood, and I had taught myself to be selective about details. Half-truths never hurt a soul.

‘I’m delighted,’ he said, stifling a yawn with his fist. ‘Rita is expecting you.’

Yet the manner of my compensation was full of mischief, to say the least. It seems that Rita and perhaps Orson would pay part of my salary, but the Boy Wonder was broke. And the lion’s share would come from the Janitor himself. It was pretty obvious. I was working for him. That was Columbia Pictures in 1943.

Cohn put me right into his planner. I would report back to him every Wednesday afternoon at four – without fail – unless I was presented with other instructions. His blue eyes fluttered, and he looked a little insane. It wasn’t hard for me to realize that he was in love with Rita, and he couldn’t bear the idea that she was with Orson Welles.

‘You won’t fail me, will ya, kid?’

‘Mr Cohn, I never fail.’

I heard an odd sound, like a cricket crying. His door opened, and I knew I was dismissed.

A resurrection had occurred during my time with Cohn. I had risen, the kid from Kalamazoo. Cohn’s secretary and her assistant leapt up the moment I reappeared.

‘We’ll be in touch, Miss Redburn,’ his secretary said. ‘Welcome to the executive club. I’m Sally Fall, and my assistant is Josephine.’

I didn’t acknowledge their sudden interest. I walked away from those barren white walls and returned to the tunnels. I felt much cleaner among the cockroaches and the rats.

2

Orson was easy. Declared a genius by the time he was six, Welles seemed to live without a sense of boundaries. He stormed into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and became a star at sixteen. He returned to America, captured radio in 1936 with his booming voice, rode from studio to studio in a hired ambulance, frightened half the country with his War of the Worlds broadcast, and stripped theater down to its bare essentials and then rebuilt it with whatever baroque or barren world he wanted. The Boy Wonder appeared on the cover of Time at the age of twenty-three and was courted by Henry Luce himself. He went out to Hollywood a year later with his own company of players and worked on Kane, the first studio film that defied the studio system. Louis B. Mayer and the other Hollywood moguls believed in strict, linear narratives, and Kane was a sarabande of moments and set pieces – flashbacks within a flashback. I had no idea what was coming next. Kane invented a grammar and a syntax I had never seen before.

Yet Welles was irrevocably wounded in the process. He couldn’t seem to understand that even a Boy Wonder had some limits. The Japanese war lords had attacked Pearl Harbor, and Orson couldn’t enlist on account of his flat feet. FDR was worried that the relentless propaganda of the Axis powers might sway Latin America to declare war on the Free World, and he wanted Orson to go to Brazil as a goodwill ambassador. Orson was in the midst of editing The Magnificent Ambersons, based on Booth Tarkington’s saga about the fall of a wealthy family in the Midwest. But he abandoned everything to prepare a documentary about the carnival in Rio. He plunged into the carnival with an entire crew and spent a month filming in the favelas outside Rio.

Meanwhile, Ambersons was ripped apart and reshot without Welles. It sank into oblivion as the second feature – at the bottom of the bill – in random movie houses. It played at the Regina, and I went to see it, of course. The film wasn’t completely ruined. Ambersons still had the Orson touch, but it didn’t have Orson. He should have played Georgie Minafer, a spoiled brat, just like himself. What the film lacked was the Shadow’s roaring radio voice. Ambersons was really a film about Orson’s patrician childhood in Wisconsin, filled with nostalgia and loss. Eugene Morgan (Jo Cotten), an inventor, was modeled after Orson’s own father, Richard Welles, also an inventor, who drank himself to death. Eugene was in love with Georgie’s mom, Isabel (Dolores Costello), who was the replica of Orson’s mother, Beatrice, a mysterious and magnetic lady of the arts who died young. Orson’s tracks were all over the place. But Ambersons’ homage to a lost time could never compete with the pyrotechnics of Kane…

He filmed and filmed in Rio with his usual fury until he was fired by RKO for wasting so much footage on the favelas, and his ensemble, the Mercury Players, was thrown off the lot. He returned to Hollywood without a studio behind him. For a while, I thought he would end up at the Hollywood Hotel, another misbegotten soul, like the silent film stars who couldn’t make the transition to sound and waited on line to become an extra in some epic by DeMille. But Orson still had one resource – radio. And he could always broadcast from the CBS studios near Hollywood and Vine with his Mercury Players. They did Treasure Island, Heart of Darkness, and other classics – in miniature, of course. And the Boy Wonder, now twenty-eight, had a new passion. Before he left Rio he glanced at a photo of Rita Hayworth in Life magazine, kneeling on a bed in her negligée, and he fell in love with the sweep of her magnificent shoulders. I’m going to marry that girl. That’s what Orson declared on the spot.

There was one little complication. Rita was in love with Vic Mature, or so the studio said. But Vic, who had appeared with Rita in My Gal Sal, joined the Coast Guard, and was now stationed in Boston. Both he and Orson were giants at six feet two and a half, but Vic was sleepy-eyed and sluggish, with a debonair attitude, and Orson was merciless in his pursuit of Rita, who wore the bracelet Vic had given her with a solid-gold heart.

Orson secretly arranged to have Rita invited to a cocktail party at Jo Cotten’s ranch house in the hills. Rita was shy and barely uttered a word. She wore a black dress that revealed her long neck and the incredible line of her shoulders. She walked with a dancer’s gliding grace, as if a panther had come to the party out of the wild, a panther with a mane of red hair.

‘I intend to marry you,’ Orson announced with a rogue’s smile.

Rita fled. Relentless, he phoned her for a month. Her maid said that Miss Hayworth was indisposed. Finally she picked up the phone.

‘What do you want?’ she asked with a slight tremor in her voice. ‘And if you talk about marriage, I’ll have Harry Cohn hire someone to run you out of Hollywood.’

He laughed – at least that’s how the legend goes. ‘You hate Harry.’

‘But he hates you as much as I hate him.’

‘Then let’s conspire, shall we? And we can hate him together.’

So off they went to Romanoff’s. They sat at a secluded table, where Rita, in a red shawl, wouldn’t be noticed, or pestered by the cocktail crowd. He never mentioned his films or hers. He talked about his childhood in Wisconsin and about his beautiful mother, Beatrice, who turned all yellow at forty-three.

Rita stifled a sob at her corner table. ‘You must have adored her.’

‘I did,’ Orson said in his deep, melancholic voice.

Their romance was very swift. She stopped wearing Vic’s bracelet and moved into Orson’s rickety ranch house on Woodrow Wilson Drive, though she still kept her apartment near Wilshire.

3

Rita was a less complicated creature than the Boy Wonder, but her own tale is sadder, and hard for me to tell. She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, in Brooklyn. Her father, Eduardo, who was illiterate, came from an illustrious family of Sephardic Jews; the Cansinos were once counselors to the kings of Spain. They had to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition, and practice their Judaism in secret, as Marranos, or so I discovered while researching Rita’s roots for Harry Cohn and Columbia.

The Cansinos gave up all ties to their Sephardic past sometime in the seventeenth century and also lost their high station within the royal house. They turned into a tribe of flamenco dancers, instead. And Eduardo arrived in America in 1913 with his sister as part of a team, the Dancing Cansinos. He fell in love with Volga Hayworth, a tall beauty from the Follies with the longest legs in Manhattan. He married her, and Rita arrivedin 1918, less than a month before the Armistice.

The Cansinos prospered until Eduardo’s sister returned to Spain with husband and child. Stuck without an income, Eduardo moved the family to Los Angeles and opened a dance studio on Hollywood and Vine. There were problems. Volga was chronically alcoholic and had an uncontrollable rage that Rita would soon inherit. Eduardo’s studio disappeared during the Depression, and he was forced to revive the Dancing Cansinos, but this time with Rita as his new partner. She was a chubby twelve-year-old who spoke in a whisper. But Eduardo had her dark brown hair dyed jet black, and arranged it in a bun at the back of her neck. Shy as she was, he turned her into a tornado on stage. They danced at military hospitals and floating casinos off the shores of San Diego. Eduardo had her wear a provocative black dress or a suit with a wide-brimmed hat. Men were immediately drawn to little Margarita. Eduardo locked her in the dressing room after each performance, while he pissed away most of their money at the gambling tables.

Eduardo’s favorite haunt was the Foreign Club, a casino-café in Tijuana, where Eduardo performed with Margarita, advertising her as his wife, since the clientele would have been disturbed by a father doing the flamenco with his twelve-year-old daughter. The Foreign Club was as grand and luxurious as a hacienda, and attracted Hollywood stars, producers, and gossip columnists. The chubby child was gone once Margarita was out on the checkered dance floor, and her body swayed in rhythm with Eduardo’s. I had heard many stories about the sensation that the Dancing Cansinos had caused at the Foreign Club, and something bothered me, didn’t feel right – father and daughter in what seemed to most like a sizzling embrace. Archibald, my boss in the basement of the Writers’ Building, got wind of it, and he thought Harry might notice him if he had some dirt on Rita. So he sent me down to Tijuana in my Ford coupé that I had picked up for a song at a junkyard in San Pedro.

By that time, the Foreign Club had closed, and Tijuana had lost most of its Anglo customers, at least the wealthy ones, while the ‘hacienda’ sat there like a ghost ship on dry land. I rummaged about on a street of dance halls and saloons near that dead casino and managed to find several folks who had once worked there – a hatcheck girl, a waitress, a master of ceremonies, a cook – and they all said there was something ‘unnatural’ about Eduardo and his daughter. The hatcheck girl was more explicit.

‘I didn’t like the way he touched her. I caught them once in their dressing room. She was naked, and he was biting her neck.’

My research ended right there. Eduardo had molested his own daughter, like a vampire who danced with silver teeth in the soles of his boots. As much as it pained me, I still left that out of my report to Archibald. I didn’t want Rita blackmailed by the Publicity Department – or Harry Cohn. But I understood the toll it had taken on the Cansinos, and especially on the girl who had been her father’s concubine. Volga must have turned to alcohol because she couldn’t protect her only daughter. Margarita had become the Cansinos’ meal ticket. She helped feed her two younger brothers. And she fed them well. The president of Fox Pictures had seen her dance at the Foreign Club and offered her a movie contract when she was fifteen. Margarita became Rita Cansino, a Spanish beauty with black hair, though she was half Irish on her mother’s side…

I happened to be at the Hollywood Canteen when I ran into Jane Withers. A teenager now, with a strong following, she had once been Shirley Temple’s only rival as a child star. Jane, I soon discovered, had also been one of the chief motors of Rita’s career. In 1935, while Jane was preparing for Paddy O’Day, in which she had the title role of an Irish immigrant girl, she wandered onto the set of a Charlie Chan film and saw a beautiful young dancer. This girl was ‘dynamite,’ Jane told me. There was a part in her own film for a young Russian dancer, and Jane used all her pull to get Rita the part. Jane had already become a dynamo at Fox by playing spoiled brats, and was allowed to have her own cameraman and other crew members follow her from film to film. Even Shirley Temple didn’t have such power.

Shrewd as well as talented, Jane attended a Hollywood writers’ conference when she was eight. Some of the writers objected to having her there, but Jane had more prestige at the studios than they did. ‘Honest injun,’ she told the Hollywood writers, ‘you don’t know the first thing about writing dialogue for kids.’ But they taught her things about dialogue, too, and made her realize that the words she had to deliver were like lyrics that she could sing as she recited them. Jane, who was ten at the time of Paddy O’Day, noticed Rita’s nervousness on the set before every take. Rita could dance like a dervish, but was morbidly shy as soon as she had to utter a line. So Jane taught her the art of ‘lyrics,’ how to find the rhythm for every sound. And the child star served as an acting coach to sixteen-year-old Rita. Jane, who was quite spiritual for a little girl, prayed a lot. She whispered to the Lord that Rita was frightened of dialogue, and asked Him to stick with the young dancer and teach her how to sing every sentence. It worked. Rita prevailed in Paddy O’Day.

But she didn’t have Jane Withers on the set with her for every film. The studio dropped Rita after a while. Her hairline was too low. It made her look primitive, and managed to hide her stunning features. And then a strange man came into the picture – Eddie Judson, who was thirty-nine years old and wore expensive suits; tall, with a fine crop of hair and a salesman’s smile, he promised to make a star out of Rita. No one knew what the source of his income was. He seemed to arrive without a discernible past, as so many in Tinseltown do. He must have heard about Rita from a friend of his at Fox and decided to ‘prey’ on her in his own manner. He approached the family, said he would like to take Rita to the Trocadero, and show her off to the movie crowd. Rita was seventeen. She’d never been on a date before.

It was an odd courtship; he never once declared his love. Still, she eloped with Eddie the moment she turned eighteen. It was the only way Rita could unfasten Eduardo’s grip on her.

Eddie was a wizard. Within four months she had a seven-year contract at Columbia. But starlets were little more than indentured servants whose contracts could be canceled at Cohn’s mere whim. So Eddie bargained on her behalf. He went to Helen Hunt, Columbia’s top hair stylist. He knew that Rita would never succeed with that low hairline of hers. Hunt suggested an electrolysis studio on Sunset. There, Rita had to endure a whole series of painful treatments, in which each follicle was removed with a charge of electricity, until the roots were destroyed, one by one – and it took two years. Hunt also changed the color of her hair from dark brown to a rich, vibrant red. Now Cohn began to notice her. He snarled at Rita, called her ‘Big Red,’ and insisted that he couldn’t sell Rita Cansino. ‘It’s too fuckin’ foreign,’ he supposedly said, and the Publicity Department had Rita usurp her mother’s maiden name. A new Columbia starlet was born, Rita Hayworth, with her signature shoulder-length red hair.

She now played Doña Sol, an aristocratic vamp, in Blood and Sand, seducing poor Ty Power with each sway of her hips. Her accent was ridiculous, but when she danced with Anthony Quinn, Ty’s rival as a bullfighter, each movement was like a savage musical note. Rita was noticed. Rita was adored.

She danced with Fred Astaire in two lavish Columbia musicals, You’ll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier, the first in ’41 and the second in ’42. Her dance steps made him look like a little boy stuck in a whirlwind – that whirlwind was Rita. But Fred was as nimble as she was. He did finally catch up with her, though he never danced with Rita again.

Alas, she still had the same rotten husband to deal with. Eddie played her up to the Hollywood press. He told her what to say at each interview. He groomed her, told her what to wear. I should have sensed her hysteria, the blank, terrified look in her eye when Eddie wasn’t around. But I didn’t know then about the incestuous life Eduardo had forced upon her…

Eddie made it worse, much worse; he pushed her to sleep with other men to help her career. Orson would call him a pimp, and a pimp he was. Eddie arranged to have Rita spend a weekend with Cohn on Cohn’s yacht. But Rita backed out at the last moment. Cohn never forgave her. Yet that’s how her independence began. Eddie wouldn’t give her a divorce. He threatened to disfigure her, throw lye in her face, if she dared leave him. He reportedly had a letter she had written to him that could damage her career. In the letter, which had become a kind of legend in our basement at the Writers’ Building, Rita had listed the producers she had slept with on Eddie’s orders, and why she didn’t want to do it ever again. The thought of Rita’s ‘purloined’ letter enraged me. It stank of all the power male producers had over starlets in Hollywood.

Eddie demanded $30,000 for the work he had done in making Rita a star. It was pure ransom money, but Harry Cohn, one of the cheapest men alive, paid the thirty grand just to get rid of him, and Rita finally got her divorce in ’42. It wasn’t charity on Cohn’s part. Rita was now the biggest star on Columbia’s lot. And that’s why I was brought in – to protect the Janitor’s investment in Rita, and feed his own delight in having me spy on her.

4

I rode my Ford jalopy into the hills. Woodrow Wilson Drive might just as well have been Mount Parnassus. This was a gated wilderness and wonderland far removed from the flat surfaces of Hollywood Boulevard, with its plebeian sensibility and all the bits of slow, irrevocable decay – it was a rallying point for those on the way up or on the way down; unemployed scribblers, actors, directors, and neophytes who had landed some petty job on one of the major or minor lots. There were ‘vultures’ of every sort, half-mad secretaries, clerks, and cowboy extras who lined up at the latest Hollywood premiere outside the Egyptian or Grauman’s Chinese, or watched Ty Power and Loretta Young leave their handprints in Sid Grauman’s cement, and then the whole crowd would vanish into a mousetrap like mine. We Hollywoodians had second-hand bookshops along the boulevard, as well as delicatessens, bars, lingerie shops, and drugstore counters with all the aroma of decay, and with the dust, the dirt, and the constant racket of the streetcar lines.

There were no streetcars on Woodrow Wilson Drive, just a single stagecoach from the depot near the Hollywood Hotel that allowed tourists to gawk at the castles, haciendas, and ranch houses of the stars tucked away in the hills. I knew the stagecoach driver, Byron Brown, an unemployed stuntman who had crippled his leg in a bad fall, working for Tom Mix, King of the Cowboys during the silent era. Byron was a familiar sight, with his company of tourists; that coach, borrowed from one of Columbia’s back lots, could carry nine or ten adults and a couple of kids.

I was mystified when the coach stopped right in front of the gate at 7975, Orson’s rented home. Orson wasn’t much of a planetary figure and shouldn’t have interested Byron and his stagecoach full of star worshippers. Both of Orson’s films had been flops. I held back in my coupé, remained hidden; I didn’t want the Boy Wonder to think that I had directed Byron to Woodrow Wilson Drive.

Of course, Byron wasn’t concerned with Orson Welles. He climbed down off the seat of the coach in his cowboy boots and dragged himself in front of the gate, tugging on the tails of his bandanna. He’d had so many falls he could barely walk, but he was the best Hollywood guide in the business. Folks had to sign up weeks in advance for one of his tours. He’d once been the highest paid stuntman in Hollywood, part of every Tom Mix deal. That cowboy in the tall hat wouldn’t do a film without Byron Brown written into his contract.

And here he was gimping along that gate.

‘Ladies and gents, this Art Deco chalet, constructed in 1937, with its oval-shaped pool, is where Hollywood’s love goddess, Rita Hayworth, lives when she isn’t working at Columbia. It’s Rita’s hideaway, not her official residence. She swims here and sunbathes in the buff, I’m told, on the porch at the back of the chalet, with deer from the forest nibbling on the lawn. I’d call it paradise, wouldn’t you?’

‘Will Rita wave to us, Byron, if you call her out?’ asked one of the tourists in a gray mackinaw that matched the grayness of his skin.

‘I couldn’t do that, sir. It would be violating Rita’s privacy. And no one would ever trust me again.’

The man in the mackinaw wasn’t getting his money’s worth. He’d come to Hollywood in the middle of a war, from a narrowing universe of ration stamps, and wanted his moment of glory.

Byron spotted me in my coupé, and I couldn’t avoid him now.

I left the car at the side of the road.

‘Hey, meet Rusty Redburn, a neighbor of mine. She works at Columbia,’ Byron said with his usual swagger. ‘Maybe Rusty can introduce us to Rita.’

The tourists encircled me and pawed at my leather jacket like a pack of wild animals. I was angry at that bastard, and I’d always liked him.

‘Miss Rusty, is Rita’s hair as red as fire?’ asked a woman who accompanied the man in the mackinaw. ‘That’s what I was told.’

I couldn’t abandon Byron, a fellow habitué of Hollywood Boulevard. ‘Oh,’ I declared, ‘it’s so red, sometimes they have to follow her around the set with a fire extinguisher.’

‘Gawd,’ the woman said. ‘I knew it.’

I must have lightened Byron’s load, since the tourists returned to the stagecoach.

‘Byron, take this stop off your itinerary, or you might lose your stagecoach. Mr Cohn wouldn’t like you pestering his biggest star.’

‘Rusty,’ he said, with a startled look, ‘you wouldn’t rat on me.’

‘But Rita might,’ I said. ‘There’s only one tour guide in these hills with a stagecoach, Byron, and that’s you.’

He climbed back up onto his seat and had to serenade his team of pintos before the damn horses would move. The stagecoach rumbled deeper into the hills with its rusty springs and rickety doors and wheels.

I didn’t move. I loitered for fifteen minutes, worried that Rita might think I had arrived with the star worshippers. Then I rang her intercom.

‘Miss Hayworth,’ I said. ‘It’s Rusty Redburn, from Ophelia.’

Ophelia was the most celebrated employment agency and secretarial school in Hollywood. Located on North Vine, it supplied a host of stars at the major studios with a cavalcade of secretaries and assistants. The agency was very secretive about its list of clients. And Harry Cohn must have paid the owners quite a bundle to have them claim me as one of their hirelings. But that wasn’t my affair. The Janitor and all the other studio chiefs did whatever they damn pleased. It was wartime, and the studios thrived – the movie palaces were packed with people.

Rita buzzed me through the gate.

I walked past the oval pool with its dark green glaze, as if it were covered with a ripple of glass, and rang the doorbell of Orson’s ‘Art Deco chalet.’ Rita met me at the door in a rumpled white blouse and rolled-up blue jeans, without her socks. She wasn’t wearing any Max Factor, like Cohn’s assistants. And she was far more vibrant than she appeared onscreen – a sweet temptress, a softer Doña Sol from Blood and Sand. And she didn’t have any toreadors, like Ty Power or Tony Quinn, to play with, just a counterfeit secretary from the Ophelia Agency.

There were tiles in the hallway, and the staircase had a mahogany rail. We went into the kitchen. She had a gliding step. Her shoulders swayed. Her red hair had its own natural cascade.

She poured me a cup of coffee, and we drank it together, out of the very same cup. She apologized. She had fired her maid.

‘Angela was a busybody. She read all my mail.’

‘Well, Ophelia is a full-service agency,’ I bragged. ‘We can find you another girl.’

Rita had an odd request – I felt as if she trusted me on the spot. She confided that she hadn’t hired me to help her write letters. She felt embarrassed, bewildered even, around Orson. ‘I had so little school, Miss Rusty, and Orson is such an intellectual. You’ve heard of him, I suppose.’

I’d found my heavenly match. ‘Yes, Miss Hayworth. I’m a devoted fan.’

Her eyes lit with flecks of enchantment. Then she pouted. ‘I’m Rita here in this house. Orson has given me Hamlet to read. And I can’t make heads or tails…’

‘Well,’ I said, with a sip of coffee from the same cup, ‘where should we begin?’

Rita was quite serious. ‘Who is Hamlet and what does he want?’

I’d read my Shakespeare at Kalamazoo. And so we went into the guiles of Hamlet, while Rita was at the stove, cooking dinner for Orson Welles. She had a dimple of deep concentration as she added paprika to the spicy chicken dish she was preparing. I was suddenly the sous-chef. I helped her snap a pot of string beans and cut the eyes out of a pile of potatoes.

‘What about that crazy girl Ophelia?’ she asked. ‘Why does the prince let her drown?’

‘That’s the problem. He loves her and loves her not.’

Rita laughed with a deep-throated innocence. ‘Hamlet is not that different from most men. They will chase a woman right up to the moment of capture and then pull back.’

‘Cowards,’ I said, ‘cowards all.’

Suddenly she looked at the clock on the wall. And that sensuous face, with the big brown eyes, froze with fright.

‘I didn’t realize… he’ll be home in half an hour.’

She disappeared into her bedroom, and within a flash she returned wearing a lace-edged negligée – I recognized the label, Juel Park’s, with its high-class lingerie shop on Wilshire, in Beverly Hills. It’s where all the Hollywood divas went to buy their lace pants. Juel Park’s was the premier house of seduction, pure and simple.

‘Oh, Orson,’ she said with a wink, wrapping herself in a very sheer silk robe – from Juel Park’s. ‘He likes me to dress for dinner.’

‘Shouldn’t I leave, Miss Rita? I wouldn’t want to intrude…’

‘Don’t be silly. We still have lots to do. Besides, you haven’t earned your salary yet.’

There was a welter of sadness on her face that was hard to reconcile. All the intensity had gone out of her eyes.

‘I’ll never learn,’ she said. ‘I’m just not smart enough. I don’t have the gift.’

‘What gift?’ I asked like a dumbbell.

‘The gift of words. Orson sings every sentence. I’ve tried. But I can’t really do it.’

‘Nonsense. You sing with your shoulders, with every step,’ I said. ‘That’s your gift.’

Rita stared at me. ‘It’s not the same thing,’ she said in a voice that was like a whisper.

‘Miss Rita, I’ll teach you whatever I can.’

That orphaned look was gone. I cursed myself for coming here. I was sentenced to stare at her beauty.

‘I’ll memorize sentences – about Hamlet. And then there’s War and Peace. It hurts my head just to count the pages. Natasha and Pierre… and Napoleon’s army. And then there’s Pride and Prejudice.’

‘We’ll read them all,’ I said, ‘every word.’

She didn’t feel beautiful, not even in her Juel Park’s. Perhaps that’s why there was only one Rita Hayworth. She had very little vanity at her vanity table. Gentle as she was, she combed her hair like a half-wild animal. She was Big Red, as the Janitor called her, unlike any other creature on or off Cohn’s lot.