Una Flamenca Perdida;
a tragic story of wealth and fame.
When I was a teenager, one of the idols of the movie screen was Rita Hayworth (yes, I know, that dates me, doesn’t it). I remember her dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, but I can’t recall whether I saw her when these movies first opened, or I saw them later. She was just one of the stable of Hollywood stars that kept teenage boys’ minds busy in the dreary years after the Second World War.
photo:Bob
Landry 1941
Much later I found out that she was the daughter of Eduardo Cansino, a dancer from Castilleja de la Cuesta, a small village just west of Sevilla on the road to Huelva. It is best known as the place where Hernan Cortes died of pleurisy in 1547, and for the sweet pastries made there. Some sources say that Cansino was descended from a converso (jewish convert) family, others that he was gitano. Maybe he was both. Her mother, Volga Haworth (sic), was of English-Irish stock and was a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York. Their daughter was born in 1918.
Margarita Carmen Cansino began her performance career dancing in her father’s vaudeville dance troupe The Dancing Cansinos. They were performing in clubs in Tijuana, because at the age of thirteen California law prohibited her from performing in venues where alcohol was sold. At the age of sixteen she was noticed, while dancing in one of these clubs, by a producer from Fox Studios. At this time she had the dark hair of most sevillanas but the studio decided to change that and gave her the golden auburn hair that she retained for the rest of her life. After a couple of years in B Movies she moved to Columbia Pictures and changed her name to Rita Hayworth. Although she was much respected as a dancer, there was little to show that her family roots were in flamenco ... and, in any case, Hollywood would not have believed that the public was ready for that. In the forties she was much regarded as a sex symbol - a pinup girl – and her fame grew both as a dancer and as an actress. She made more than seventy movies in her career. At the end, in an obituary article, she was acclaimed as the All American Love Goddess by Time Magazine.
She was married five times; most of the relationships lasting only a few years. Her first husband, Edward Judson, pimped her to Hollywood directors and actors and others who might advance her career. She blamed her troubled relationships with men on abuse from her father when she was young. Her second marriage was to Orson Welles, the actor, director and writer, and their summer cottage in Big Sur, with a wonderful view down the coast, is now the restaurant Nepenthe; named after the mythic Egyptian drug which chases away sorrow. With Welles she had a daughter Rebecca. Then she married the millionaire Prince Ali Khan, and lived the life of a princess in Europe for a few years. They had a daughter, Jasmin. (The prince’s father was the hereditary Imam of the Ismaili sect of shia muslims, and was said to be a descendant of the famed assassins (al-hashishin) of the mountain stronghold of Mount Alamut in southern Iran, who operated there until displaced by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.)
Tragically, in her fifties she began to suffer the effects of what would later be diagnosed as early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and she died at the age of sixty eight in the care of her daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. The princess has since been active in raising money for research on Alzheimer’s disease.
When I go to Big Sur and stop at the Cafe Kevah to have my apple pie and Capuccino on the terrace just below Nepenthe, I think of Rita Hayworth.
Flamenquito 2007
Sources: The Rough Guide to Andalucía;
Wikipedia; Rita Hayworth, Cansino, Ali Khan, Hashshashin.
Darwin Porter, Howard Hughes; Hell’s Angel, Blood Moon
Productions, New York.