Rita Hayworth: The Time, The Place, and The Woman

Norton, 1978. Hardcover. Very Good. 9x6x1. 1978 hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, bright UNREAD COPY with unmarked, crisp-edged, well-bound pages. Glossy jacket shows minor edge wear. Front jacket flap is corner-clipped, but the original 1978 cover price still shows on the flap. This is NOT an ex-library book. A very good, sturdy copy! 328-page biography, including index. "To read about Rita Hayworth is to be dazzled by the grandeur and the folly of Hollywood in the forties. The author writes, 'This isn't just a book about Rita, it's the story of the only industry in the world that takes a person off the street, and tells her "you're special, you're a star."' But Hayworth is special. She danced with Astaire and Kelly, was directed by Hawks and Cukor, and acted with Tracy, Grant, Crawford, Cagney, Laughton, Cooper, and Wayne. The author, who befriended Hayworth in the early 1970s, describes her as 'an approachable Garbo: childlike, vulnerable, but still enormously dignified. There is something unmistakably majestic about that look. She had provocative poise.' The book is a mosaic of her private and professional life, based on over a hundred hours of interviews with her friends, coworkers, and family. As a 'dancing Cansino,' age sixteen, she came to the attention of Winfield Sheehan and in 1935 was launched as a Columbia Studio star. A hardworking professional, she was the eye of countless storms that fed the gossip columns and became notorious during her stormy marriages, to the young genius Orson Welles and later to a real-life Arabian prince, Aly Khan. Dubbed the 'Love Goddess,' she was the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in GILDA, PAL JOEY, and THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.