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Sign up todayIf This Was Happiness
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Learn moreRita Hayworth was the epitome of 1940s Hollywood glamour. A huge box office star, her sultry figure was pasted by GIs onto the first atom bomb ever detonated. Yet behind the smoldering image lay a tragic secret that wrecked her private life. A pathologically shy child, Rita was thrust into the sordid limelight as her vaudevillian father’s dancing partner at an early age, suffering sexual and physical abuse at his hands. A desperate need for protection led her into five disastrous marriages, including those to Orson Welles and Prince Aly Khan. At the age of forty-two, Alzheimer’s disease began to ravage her mind, cutting short her career at its peak.
This is a haunting and sympathetic tribute to a talented but insecure beauty who was created, and ultimately destroyed, by the movies.
Barbara Leaming is the author of the New York Times bestseller Katharine Hepburn. She was for many years professor of theater and film at Hunter College. Her articles have appeared in Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Connecticut.
Anna Fields has received five Audie nominations from the Audio Publishers Association and is proud to have won in 2004 for All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki. She has also been honored by Audiofile magazine with more than a dozen Earphones Awards. She has voiced over 250 audiobooks.
Reviews
“Hayworth fans will learn much from this biography by the author of Orson Welles. The surprising story of the acutely shy Margarita Carmen Cansino, who was dubbed ‘the Love Goddess,’ contains more melodrama than most romance novels.”
“Anna Fields simply aims to make herself disappear into this heartrending narrative, giving center stage to Leaming’s economical and insightful chronicling of a train wreck of a life. The reader paces the story with precision, giving emphasis where needed but taking care to avoid theatricality.”
“Hayworth made her name in films such as Cover Girl and Gilda. She also attained fame and notoriety through her marriages to Orson Welles, Prince Aly Khan, and Dick Haymes, among others. Finally she became probably the best-known victim of Alzheimer’s disease. Leaming…contends that Hayworth was sexually abused by her father…The truth will never be known, but she does make a reasonably convincing case.”
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