Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom

1. From Cansinoto Hayworth to Beckworth: Constructing the Star Person(a)

1 From Cansino to Hayworth to Beckworth constructing the star person(a) In February 1940 Rita Hayworth made her first appearance on the cover of a national mass-market magazine, Look. She is dressed as a Spanish dancer: there are red flowers in her black hair, her dress is red, and she brandishes a pair of maracas. The cover’s inside spread mentions that Hayworth is “half Spanish,” but what makes her worth an additional fourpage photographic layout is that she has been named “the screen star with the smartest personal wardrobe.”1 In these photos there is nary a maraca in sight, and Hayworth’s black hair turns out to be dark red. The importance of the Look cover and the spread to Hayworth’s career is that both signal the beginning of her rise to national prominence as a visual image and as a commodity. Her identifying features are an excessive femininity (she is mainly interested in clothes), the fact that she is married (to “oilman -husband” Ed Judson), and her Spanish background. The article notes also that Hayworth has appeared in several films, among them Only Angels Have Wings and a musical with Tony Martin. What the article does not mention, however, is that by 1940 Rita Hayworth , born Margarita Carmen Cansino, had already appeared in twenty- five movies, close to half of her lifetime output. Ten of them she had made as Rita Cansino, a shortening of her original name. Equally important to this discussion, then, is that the Look cover plays up stereotypical visual features of her Spanish heritage, but the article inside does not. Since her name had been anglicized only in 1937, the year she signed a contract with Columbia Studios, this ambivalence could be taken as a sign that her commodi fication as a star was not yet finished. She had not, in other words, been completely transformed from Rita Cansino, who had clearly failed to become a star, into the more marketable and more desirable Rita Hayworth. Yet contrary to popular belief this ambivalence remains a constant of Hayworth’s stardom throughout the rest of her career, and Margarita (or Rita) Cansino is herself virtually always present in Hayworth as a star text. In some sense the process of Hayworth’s transformation does conform to Danae Clark’s assertion that Hollywood studios consolidated their power over their star labor force by “erasing” an actor’s real name and personal history in order to create a “coherent, salable persona” whose public circulation the studio controlled.2 But in other ways the continuing existence of Margarita Cansino belies or complicates this scenario, as do the ways in which Hayworth’s own words—whether truly “hers” or not— participate in (changing) the meanings her star image produces over time. Rather than finding that “white” was always the symbolic “apotheosis of female desirability,” as Richard Dyer has put it, or that only in the “decomposition stage” of her star image did Hayworth’s “original name” begin to crop up in the discourse, as Jane Gaines has claimed, I will show that Hayworth’s ethnic background was always a prominent element in her star appeal and that Hayworth herself continually referred to it in pub32 S TARDOM OFF THE SCREEN “Rita Hayworth: Best-Dressed Girl in Hollywood,” on her first mass-market magazine cover, Look, February 22, 1940. Photo by Earl Theisen. Copyright 1940 by Look, Inc. lic as an important motivating source of her success as a star and even the locus or justification of her identity and behavior as a woman, wife, and mother.3 Another equally significant factor in Hayworth’s development as a star was the process of fabrication itself, which again seems a familiar component of Hollywood’s compulsion to erase a star’s previous identity. In Hayworth’s case, accomplished according to her biographers at the hands of various male mentor/Svengali figures, this involved diet and body reshaping through exercise, strengthening and homogenizing her voice with diction and singing lessons, changing her hair color from black or dark brown to red, and raising her low forehead through two years of painful electrolysis on her hairline. References to these aspects of Hayworth ’s transformation are relatively common also in discussions of stardom in classical Hollywood cinema, the details of the whole appalling process offered up as the shocking revelation of what once (surely) had been a...