Rita Hayworth’s Heartbreaking Vanishing Act: “She Looked at Me and Said, ‘Who Are You?’” Her Daughter Tells VF
The Money Trap publicist Bob Crutchfield said in the book: “I was at his house a lot in those years, and Rita of course lived next door. She was always calling Glenn or would just appear through the gate in the backyard. Sometimes champagne bottles would precede her arrival. She’d throw the bottles toward the skylight that covered the atrium. Glenn finally put up chicken wire or something to stop the bottles coming through. He was always tender and sweet with her, no matter how she acted.”
Those close to Hayworth believed she was succumbing to alcoholism. In a sense, they were right, but that was most likely a symptom of the Alzheimer’s. Looking back, her daughter believes it was a way to self-medicate, a way to soothe her endless agitation over her slipping mind. Her doctors didn’t understand that there was a deeper problem. Neither did Hayworth. “She had no idea,” Khan says. “She was drinking quite a bit, with bursts of anger and then sweetness. She was frustrated and of course I was frustrated. And then I was away at boarding school for a good part of my life. I’d go back to California and I’d see the different stages.”
Khan’s elementary school days were spent at the North Country School in upstate New York in the Adirondack Mountains, then high school in Massachusetts at the Buxton School. The time away from home highlighted the changes in her mother that seemed gradual to others closer to her. “She would come visit. But already I noticed something was wrong. She wasn’t quite right,” Khan says.
It was obvious to those in the Hollywood community too. Work opportunities dried up for Hayworth. The bombshell had become a ghost. “There was loss of memory, there was unhappiness, there was fear,” her daughter recalls. “In Beverly Hills, at our house, she would think that there were people outside, and she’d call the police. And then they’d arrive, and of course there was nobody there. There was quite a bit of paranoia.”
In 1968, John Hallowell set out to land an interview with the increasingly elusive star, and began trying to make connections at a Hollywood event showcasing a PR company’s new roster of talent. The result became one of the most alarming public moments in her decline.
Hallowell found that the film industry had largely written her off. “One of the biggest-deal press agents in the world, Warren Cowan, was making the scene with all the new and beautiful people, when someone tapped him on the shoulder and asked: ‘Do you represent Rita Hayworth?’” Hallowell wrote in his lead. “Cowan turned, pained. ‘Of course not. We only represent today people.’”
When the writer finally did make contact and secured an interview, Hayworth’s representative warned him: “She’s very shy. She doesn’t see people much.”
Hallowell described his encounter at her Beverly Hills home, lined with a wall of hedges, and said the star answered the door herself. “She stands a little unsurely in the doorway,” he wrote. “At first it’s all yes and no. She looks down at her hands, trapped. The house is so empty you can hear the silence.” He likened her to the fading silent film star played by Gloria Swanson in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard. Hayworth complained to him about the TV antenna on her neighbor Ford’s roof, spoiling her view.
After so many of her studio battles, the reporter asked if she thought contemporary stars have more freedom. “Honey, I have so much freedom, I don’t work,” she replied. Hallowell wrote: “And she starts laughing, an old, wide open Rita laugh that sends her hugging herself into a wicker chair. ‘Sorry, I just broke myself up.’”
Hayworth told him a story about being lectured by a film producer, who warned her that if she got a certain unspecified role that she couldn’t change any of it—an indication of her reputation for being “difficult” on set. Hayworth said she ended the meeting over the indignity. “I could have used that part,” she said. “I take care of myself. Nobody gave me this house. And I don’t get alimony and all that jazz.”
That’s when the press agent signaled Hallowell: “Time to leave” On a second visit to her home, the writer described Hayworth as even more erratic, scribbling circles in red ink on a notebook while she spoke to him, then crumpling the page. She lashed out at Harry Cohn, theorizing that he’d “purposely come up with a lousy picture” to spite her, and called him “a monster” while pounding her fist on a table. Other times she would ramble, or express non sequiturs. “Slowly, fading out with the last afternoon light in her dark red hair, Rita Hayworth walks you to the door, not saying anything now,” Hallowell wrote in his closing line. “But outside, leaning against the doorway, she all of a sudden summons up another great screen goddess: ‘Ava is smart. She’s living in Europe. Ava knows.’”
Knows what? She never explained. She may not have understood either. The article painted a Miss Havisham-like picture of Hayworth, delusional and wasting away in her manor at only 50 years old.
