California Carmen

(See Cover)

It was news in Hollywood that a new star had been made. But it was news throughout the U.S. that the best tap dancer in the world, Fred Astaire, had a new dancing partner. She danced out with him before the nation in Columbia's new musical, You'll Never Get Rich, and there could be no doubt that she was the best partner he had ever had.

It takes two to make a dance team, and a partner for Astaire is a Hollywood problem. She has to be good-looking, since he himself is no beauty, and she has to be a really able dancer to match his hummingbird agility. Few have filled that bill.

His first partner (in pre-Hollywood days) was his sister, pert, chic Adele, who left him in 1932 to become Lady Cavendish and live in an Irish castle. The second was Ginger Rogers, who joined him in his second picture, Flying Down to Rio, in 1933. Six years later, just as Adele had left him, so Ginger Rogers departed, to shroud her lyric legs in the toga of a dramatic actress. Astaire tried two new partners: proficient, metallic Eleanor Powell and gaminous Paulette Goddard. Neither Hollywood nor the nation was impressed.

In You'll Never Get Rich Astaire has the right girl: Rita Hayworth. Those who saw russet-tressed, incandescent Rita Hayworth dance before the movies drafted her knew she was a dancer to partner even the great Astaire. But few of them would have expected her to keep up with his wry, offbeat brand of comedy. She fills both assignments in You'll Never Get Rich.

The show itself is no extravaganza with bevies of beauties pouring out of cornucopias. It is an intimate musical comedy strung on an adequately comic story of U.S. Army rookies, and glittering at intervals with the shining beads of Astaire's exhilarating, airy acrobatics accompanied by Rita Hayworth's lambent looks and legs.

Fidgety Comic Robert Benchley, whose chief claim to charm is that he seems to be in a perpetual, ingratiating hangover, launches the picture. As a soft-shelled Broadway producer with an eye for nice little items named Sonya, he drives into Manhattan, sees the picture's title, cast and credits on a series of roadside billboards.

His favorite dancing master (Mr. Astaire) is caught in the draft and, unable to control his feet or his temper, becomes a permanent resident of the camp guardhouse. His favorite chorine (Miss Hayworth) turns up at camp in the wake of an Army officer (John Hubbard). She eventually solves everything by marrying the jailbird. Comic honors go to swivel-tongued Cliff Nazarro, double-talker extraordinary, who spreads utter confusion whenever he opens his mouth. The picture is well done and well directed.

But the high spots of the show come when its six Cole Porter melodies (not full-strength Porter, but good) tickle the dancing feet of Astaire & Hayworth. The best of them (Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye), jived in the guardhouse by a steaming Negro quartet, sends Astaire into one of his oldtime paroxysms of unabashed American buck & wing. Three others (one a nifty named Boogie Barcarolle) accompany the new dance team through routines that are light-hearted evidence of the fact that Rita Hayworth really knows dancing. Ballet-trained, as is Astaire himself, she is his first cinema partner with classical dancing equipment.

Starbright. Stars are to Hollywood what bonds are to the U.S. Government: you have to turn them out or you go bankrupt. And at present the cinema industry is feverishly working up new stars. The Government consent decree, requiring the five biggest studios to sell no more than five pictures at a whack, has forced them to depend more than ever on the drawing power of box-office names, has put a new premium on stars, of whom there are only about 60 in Hollywood who cut much ice at the box office.

The appeal that makes a first-magnitude star cannot be manufactured out of nothing, but Hollywood knows that a searchlight of costly publicity can turn a promising extra girl into a dividend-paying property. It could happen to any one of a thousand "Lana Turners" crowding the nation's drugstore counters.

But only the Big Three (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Bros.) are powerful enough to build a star by publicity alone. Paramount and RKO, whose pockets are not so well-lined for promotion, seldom manage to nudge their neophytes beyond the contract-player stage. With neither pretensions nor money to burn, the three remaining studios --Columbia, Universal, Republic--have to rely on pure ability to turn the trick. To get to heaven, their stars have to be good.

Rita Hayworth is. By all the rules of Hollywood she has won her "S." It took six years, and it wasn't easy. You'll Never Get Rich is her 33rd picture. Just turned 23, she owes considerable thanks for her varsity letter to the sagacity of stubborn, knife-brained Lou Smith, Columbia's publicity head. The rest was due to her own ability and constitution.

Carmen was a justifiable middle name for Eduardo Cansino to give his first child. Eduardo named her Margarita Carmen Cansino. He always called her Carmen. He wept when (for Hollywood purposes) she took her Irish mother's name (Hayworth) and shortened her own first name to Rita.

Rita's grandfather Antonio (now 76 and living in San Francisco) was the most renowned exponent in his day of Spain's classical dances. He was bravoed in the capitals of Europe and South America, where he made the bolero famous.

Eduardo was 17, his sister Elisa 15, when Father Antonio started them off as a team. They had danced through Europe, England, Canada and Australia when in 1913 Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, of Manhattan and Newport, brought them to the U.S. to appear, chiefly, at her swank functions. They were an instant hit. Knowing their business, they changed with the times, modernized their costumes and steps, remained successful. In vaudeville they got top billing. Sometimes they played on the same bills with an up-&-coming dance team known as the Astaires (Fred & Adele).

Grandfather Antonio danced only with his daughters or with some other member of the family, and the tradition stuck. When Sister Elisa died in 1928, Eduardo had to wait for Rita, who was ten, to grow up. The year before, certain that vaudeville was finished, he had moved his family from New York City, where Rita was born and schooled, to Hollywood. To earn a living he started a dancing school. Meanwhile, he settled on his daughter's future--motion pictures. Says he: "There was more money in it. and it provided the only logical future for Rita." But Rita, who can be exceedingly lethargic about things she isn't interested in, was not interested in dancing. Eduardo understood that, too. At 13, unknown to his father, he had trained to be a bullfighter. Just before his first fight, Father Antonio found out and yanked him off the bill. He became a dancer.

Vamp Till Ready. Rita made her professional debut at 14--in a stage prologue to Back Street, an Irene Dunne-John Boles special, at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. She danced a Spanish number with her Aunt Elisa's son. Eduardo watched them from out front. "I said to myself, 'Hey, she don't look like no baby any more.' Then I decided it was time to . . . start her off."

The customers at Tijuana's rococo Foreign Club, favorite relaxing spot for cinema bigwigs, saw nothing babyish about Rita, either. They applauded Eduardo and his new partner into an 18-month stay. The Cansinos' routine of 26 numbers consisted of modernized versions of the old Spanish classical dances (the Bolero, the Spanish tango, etc.). Between shows Eduardo locked his buxom young daughter in the dressing room. Tijuana was that kind of a place. After the last show of the day, they went back into the U.S. to join the family at Chula Vista.

Next, the Cansinos took a four-week engagement aboard one of California's notorious gambling ships off the Long Beach shore. That venture was a flop. Between acts, Eduardo fished off the ship, caught a fishhook in his finger and went to bed with an infection. Rita tried to carry the show alone, soon gave it up. "The management didn't think I had enough Spanish seductiveness," says she. "I was 15 at the time, and the only thing that really aroused me was food."

Rita's chance came in Agua Caliente. Booked for four weeks at the gaming Hotel Agua Caliente, they were a hit. The Cansinos stretched their stay to seven months. While little Eduardo could pass for a good ten years younger than his age, Rita's well-developed figure, Spanish features (topped by straight, black hair, parted in the middle) disguised her youth.

Eduardo saw that she sat at table with such cinema bigshots as Winfield Sheehan (then head of Fox), Sol Wurtzel, et al.--but only for a respectable minimum of time. This caution earned him the jeering nickname "Mama Cansino." But his tantalizing strictness worked.

In 1935 Fox signed Rita for a dancing bit in a picture Spencer Tracy would like to forget: Dante's Inferno, one of the worst big-budget movies ever made. After the picture she became a Fox Wampus Baby. But at that point Darryl Zanuck breezed in, took over the studio (renamed it 20th Century-Fox), and his new broom swept Rita out. (Mr. Zanuck recently had cause to regret this haste, when he had to pay Columbia a stiff fee to borrow Rita for the role of Seductress Dona Sol in his pale epic. Blood and Sand. Rita and the bull in Technicolor walked off with Zanuck's show, leaving his own star, downy Tyrone Power, a poor third.) The Works. After a year of being jounced around in free-lance Westerns (says she: "Those are the days I'd just as soon forget. I hate horses! . . ."), Rita made two major moves: she got married, and she met Columbia's publicity department. Her husband, Edward C. ("Eddie") Judson, now 42, sometime auto salesman, oil promoter, etc., was (she swears it) the first man she had ever been out with. She was 18.

Husband Judson displaced Father Eduardo as Rita's counselor. He knew promotion, and his knowledge has been invaluable to his wife's career. She was signed by Columbia after her marriage and played in 14 cheap B pictures. Then she set her sights on a part in an A production called Only Angels Have Wings. Squandering $500 of her husband's money on a lush evening outfit, she got a table in a Hollywood nightclub in full view of sulfurous Harry Cohn, Columbia president, and Director Howard Hawks, and let nature take its course.

The ecstatic male huzzas that greeted Rita in Only Angels impressed Columbia. They also impressed Rita, who set out to train herself for stardom. She had never got beyond first-year high school, but under Eddie Judson's guidance she barged into lessons in voice, drama and other useful things. She changed her name, dyed her hair (cinema range: blonde to russet red), slowly sloughed her Spanish looks and pounds. Columbia's new publicity head, Lou Smith, took one look and began talking stardom--if she would do what she was told.

Gradually Rita was transformed from a Spanish heavy into a livelier, Americanized Hedy Lamarr. Despite her promise to do what she was told, she never wholeheartedly gave in to the painful process until she saw her great success in The Strawberry Blonde (with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland). By that time Columbia's style expert, Maggie Maskel, had taught her how to dress, made her shapely, impeccably clad figure a fashion-plate fixture of the women's style magazines. She had even brightened the earth-bound pages of the National Geographic.

Indoor Girl. Although Rita's hair has turned, her head hasn't. As the modern exponent of old-school showfolk, she merely follows a new line of a traditional family business. Offscreen she is easygoing and sometimes inert. Before the camera she is bright as a dollar. Her family were always "clever show people," Rita is no exception.

Miss Hayworth is not unappreciative of her potent effect on males of all shapes and disposition. Unlike many of her Hollywood sisters, she prefers being feminine to being out-of-doorsy. One of her prime functions, Rita thinks, is to be glamorous.

Says she: "After all, a girl is--well, a girl. It's nice to be told you're successful at it." But she is volubly aware of the hard work that lies ahead of her, as an actress.

"Rare protection" is Hollywood's phrase for the kind of treatment Columbia has in store for its new star. Her salary, now $800 weekly, is due for a boost. She will also get star billing. At present she is scheduled to play opposite Charles Boyer in Tales of Manhattan, a lead in My Gal Sal, and the title role in My Sister Eileen. Then another musical with Fred Astaire.

Said Astaire of his decorative new partner after their picture was made: "She learned steps faster than anyone I've ever known. I don't know how she does it, but she learns routines at lunch. . . ." Rita, who had done almost no dancing in previous pictures and was unacquainted with her partner's modern steps, gives the credit to the ballet training her father gave her.

When You'll Never Get Rich was in the cans, Astaire invited Eduardo to come to the studio, told him; "She's what I've been looking for." Said Eduardo. with pardonable pride; "We planned it that way."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.