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2 Rita Lives for Love the family life of hollywood’s unhappiest star The revelation at the center of Barbara Leaming’s 1989 biography of Rita Hayworth, If This Was Happiness, is that Hayworth had been sexually abused and beaten by her father throughout her childhood and adolescence .1 Leaming acquired this information from Orson Welles, in whom Hayworth had presumably confided during the course of Hayworth ’s and Welles’s marriage in the 1940s. According to the biography’s jacket copy Leaming also employs “medical records, government documents , trial transcripts, movie-lot memoranda, and the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses” to create “an astonishingly moving portrait of a woman at odds with herself, whose present was continually compromised by her past.” Through these documents Hayworth’s story is “finally told.” Although there had been at least two previous serious biographies about the star, the publicizing of Hayworth’s childhood abuse, such copy implies, makes Leaming’s the only one with explanatory power, the true one, the one that is able actually to account for why Hayworth had a “tragic compulsion toward men who would victimize her.” To this date the only source for Leaming’s revelation remains Orson Welles, yet I have no trouble believing that Rita Hayworth was abused by her father and that the effects were traumatizing and long-lasting. It is ultimately Leaming, curiously, who hedges her bets on the issue, specifically in the chapter in which she chronicles the dynamics of Hayworth’s “‘incest family.’” As Leaming notes, part of Rita Hayworth’s star image from the beginning was her show-business lineage. Winthrop Sargeant summed up this aspect of Hayworth’s past in his 1947 Life “Love Goddess” article, writing , “At the age of 4, Margarita Carmen Cansino started her career of pleasing people by pleasing her father. She used to run the bathwater for him in the New York hotel where the Cansino family lived the restless, impermanent life of Broadway show folk.”2 (Leaming produces this anecdote , too, but without acknowledging its pop-culture source.)3 At the age of fourteen, Sargeant states, Eduardo’s daughter was being presented “as her father’s partner” while dancing with him “in nightclubs across [the] border in Agua Caliente,” where she was “discovered” for pictures. For Leaming, however, it is the way that Margarita was presented by her father , and the fact that she and her father were the family breadwinners (she had two younger brothers) from her adolescence on, that was itself abusive in its implications. Leaming writes: Love, sex, motherhood: In each of these key areas of Margarita’s life the memory of childhood abuse would have a clear and disastrous impact. For all that, even if one were still inclined to doubt Margarita’s disclosure to [Welles] about what her father had done to her in private, there can be no doubt whatsoever of the very public exploitation to which Eduardo subjected his daughter. . . . Removed even from the possibility of a normal childhood among others her own age, Margarita passed as Eduardo’s wife (he forbade her to call him “Father” in public). . . . Had an incestuous relationship not taught the child, as it so often does, to use sex to get and hold attention , the sexually provocative role that her father encouraged her to play onstage would have done the same.4 In other words, Leaming asserts that the public exploitation of the child by the father, that Margarita Cansino played sexually provocative roles onstage , and the misrepresentation of their relationship (husband and wife rather than father and daughter) in the nefarious contexts in which they performed would themselves have resulted in Rita Hayworth’s inability to be successful in “love, sex, motherhood.” Although in the previous chapter I quite vociferously problematized the notion that Hayworth’s contemporaries saw her only as a sex goddess or as an object of men’s manipulation , clearly her father’s abuse, and the family dynamics in which the abuse was embedded, does help to account for some of the tragic dimensions of Hayworth’s life story. What I do question, however, and equally vociferously, are two assumptions whose relationship is a bit paradoxical: first, that all of Hayworth’s tragic past, and its continual “compromising of her present,” was hidden from the public and, second, that her failures in the domestic realm resonate only as the predictable results of a highly individualized personal trauma. The sexual abuse of children has only relatively recently...

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