Sad Life of a Love Goddess

By Paul Gray

IF THIS WAS HAPPINESS: A BIOGRAPHY OF RITA HAYWORTH

by Barbara Leaming

Viking; 404 pages; $19.95

The photograph appeared in LIFE's Aug. 11, 1941, issue and later became a ubiquitous pinup during World War II: a surrealistically gorgeous woman partially dressed in a shimmering negligee knelt on a bed and smiled enigmatically over her bare left shoulder. Inspired by this stunning vision in black-and-white, countless G.I.s knew exactly what they were fighting for. Mom, apple pie and Rita Hayworth.

Maybe one of those soldiers could have come home and saved her from her sad, passive fate. But If This Was Happiness makes such a possibility seem unlikely. Barbara Leaming, who has also written biographies of Roman Polanski and Orson Welles (Rita Hayworth's second husband), argues that Hollywood's Love Goddess was doomed from childhood to a private hell of uncertainty and unhappiness.

The principal villain in this piece is the actress's father, an itinerant Spanish dancer named Eduardo Cansino. He recruited his daughter, then barely in her teens, to be his partner in his nightclub act. Leaming contends that he also sexually abused her. The evidence here is spotty, based solely on Welles' word that Hayworth once admitted as much to him. But as a working hypothesis, the trauma of incest may explain a lifetime of otherwise inexplicable, self- destructive blunders.

Hayworth married, five times, men who were wrong for her. Her first husband, a drifter and grifter named Eddie Judson, was roughly her father's age. Although he helped turn a chubby young dancer into a screen siren, his methods were brutal; he offered her body to those in Hollywood who could advance her career. She claimed to have been happy with Welles, at least before his infidelities became too blatant. "If this was happiness," Welles told Leaming years later, "imagine what the rest of her life had been."

This biography leaves little to the imagination. Divorced from Welles and entrusted with the care of their daughter, Hayworth wanted a peaceful, anonymous existence. And then she married . . . Aly Khan, already fabled in the tabloids for his wealth and promiscuity. Before long she ran back to America, with another daughter, Yasmin, in tow. And then she married Dick Haymes, a failing nightclub singer with big problems in the area of unpaid alimony and back taxes.

Amid all these messes, she made some memorable movies, including Gilda and Miss Sadie Thompson. But the final years were awful. She abandoned her last film role in 1972. Eight years later, she was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease, and Yasmin cared for her until her death in 1987. Leaming's prose can gush ("the incomparable Hermes Pan," "the fabulous Eartha Kitt") and regularly descends to write-by-the-numbers cliche. But the material is poignant, another reminder of the chasm that can exist between public images and private pain.