![]() “For five years he treated me as if I had no mind or soul of my own.” “I married him for love, but he married me for an investment,” she later said, according to Leaming. In 1937, Hayworth married her first husband, Eddie Judson, a shady former car salesman who was twice her age. “For Rita, there was no life, no school, no friends, no girlfriends,” she said. Parkin felt awful for the shy little girl. She would simply do the routine again, until he was satisfied.” “He was kind of a small man, like a little banty rooster…I never heard her answer back at him, not ever. “He’d scream and holler at her ‘Don’t do that! Don’t be so stupid!’” Parkin recalled. Neighbor Loretta Parkin told Leaming that she and other kids would often peek into the Cansinos’ living room window to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Margarita practicing with her father. ![]() While her brothers played with the neighborhood kids, Leaming writes, Hayworth “never joined their games, although she often sat on the front porch staring silently ahead or seeming to watch as they played.” and Joseph Schenck in the swank nightclubs of Tijuana. The family soon moved to Chula Vista, near the Mexican border, so that Hayworth and her father could dance for Hollywood big shots like Carl Laemmle Jr. According to Leaming, Hayworth would later tell Orson Welles that during this period her father sexually abused her. That was not the end of the child’s torment. If…she returned empty-handed, he punished her with his fists-always scrupulously careful, however, not to leave any marks for the audience to see. Leaming writes:Īfter Eduardo had drunk and gambled away their earnings, he would send her out to catch fish for dinner. Hayworth’s dark brown hair was dyed black to make her appear older and more “Latin.” They began to perform on the raucous floating casinos off the coast of Southern California. According to Leaming, in 1931, a cash-strapped Cansino decided to revive the Dancing Cansinos, taking his daughter as his partner. “She did the best she could, which wasn’t too good.”īut 12-year-old Hayworth could dance. “All her life was pain.”Įduardo Cansino, Hayworth’s Spanish-born father, had once been a smash on the vaudeville circuit, performing with his sister as the “Dancing Cansinos.” His daughter, according to her school principal, was “one of the kindest, most motherly girls I ever knew,” but a poor student. “You see what she was,” second husband Orson Welles told Leaming. “I had to get away.”īut Hayworth could not escape her past or problems, run though she did. “I felt something deep within her I couldn’t help-loneliness, sadness-something that would pull me down,” Douglas would recall after their tryst, according to Leaming. ![]() Yet she found little solace in her relationships: “Men go to bed with Gilda, but awaken with me,” Hayworth famously said once. Married five times, Hayworth would have affairs with Howard Hughes, Victor Mature, David Niven and Kirk Douglas. She apparently figured it out in her mind while she was eating.” Yet once the work was done, costar James Cagney remembered, she’d simply “go back to her chair and sit there and not communicate”-a possible indication of the trauma that lay beneath her glitzy persona. She’d be back right after lunch and have it down to perfection. “She learned steps faster than anyone I’d ever known,” her costar Fred Astaire said, according to Leaming. But as Barbara Leaming writes in her heartbreaking 1989 biography If This Was Happiness, what happened to her as the child Margarita would scar Hayworth forever.Ī magnificent dancer and entertainer, Hayworth lit up when performing. The world would come to worship her as the sex symbol Rita Hayworth, star of movies like Gilda, You Were Never Lovelier, and Separate Tables. Margarita Carmen Cansino was born in Brooklyn on October 17, 1918.
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