howtimeslipsaway:

“We`ve travelled together, lived together—we`re everything to each other. I`m strict, they respect me, but I also respect them and we have fun.”

(on her two daughters Rebecca and Yasmin)

Rita’s friendship had survived all of my dad’s relationships with women, and it survived Cynthia’s too.  For years their relationship had been so close and casual that Dad would often come home to find Rita at the bar fixing herself a drink or sunbathing by his pool.  Sometimes she wanted to talk and unburden herself about something, other times she wanted to be left alone.  His home was an escape for her, and my father respected her whims.  They would go out to dinner on occasion or accompany each other to events and premieres.  During the “Cynthia years” Dad saw much less or Rita but still stayed in touch.  When he called to check on her now and then she seemed either in a perceptual state of unreal enthusiasm or on the verge of tears.  Suspicious of most people, she seldom admitted visitors or came to the phone.  Sadly, she was an alcoholic, and much of her depressed and erratic behavior was due to her drinking.   

In 1979 Rita sold the house next door and took an apartment in Beverly Hills, and most people agree that she was never the same.  She had fallen in with some people who took control of her life, and they did not serve her well.  Much alter we learned that Rita was suffering from a debilitating disease few people had ever heard of at the time:  Alzheimer’s.  It slowly eroded her mind, with tragic results. It wasn’t long before Rita’s loving daughter, Princess Yasmin, decided to bring her mother back to New York to live with her in a large condo on Central Park West.  My father stayed in touch with Yasmin, but he declined to visit Rita in New York.  He found the prospect too heartbreaking.  “I wanted to remember her as she was,” he said.  My father was one of the pallbearers at Rita’s funeral. 

—Peter Ford, Glenn Ford:  A Life

(Source: mrglennford)

Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda - and woke up with me.

Happy Birthday Rita Hayworth | October 17, 1918

“There she was. Oh yes - a beautiful sight. […] I then asked her how tall she was as I stood alongside of her. This was always an important item to me because if the lady happened to be about five feet seven minus shoes and came up on the set with three-inch heels, she’d be just a bit above my five feet nine and one half. I think Rita mentioned she was no more than five six. As we stood there, both in flat heels, I was easily three inches taller and I told her I hoped she didn’t have to wear very high heels with me. […] I kept thinking how extraordinary it was to find myself about to play opposite my friend Eduardo Casino’s lovely daughter, and I told her so. She laughed.”

Fred Astaire - Steps in time | Page 247

(via mephistosschreck)

As Jacques Doniol-Valcroze has rightly observed, the average American moviegoer couldn’t forgive Welles for killing off Rita. Even worse, he let her die like a bitch on the floor of a hellish chamber while he walked out indifferently, eager to have things over and done with, without even obeying the elementary rule that the heroine should be paid the courtesy of dying in the arms of the rugged sailor. For some years, the misogyny of the American cinema has become a commonplace of intellectual criticism. Rita Hayworth was undoubtedly one of its first victims, and remains, through Welles’ genius, its most glorious martyr. - André Bazin, “Orson Welles: A Critical View”

(via presentinglilymars)

“She had a unique beauty, just the structure of her face alone was exciting to look at.”

mrglennford:

Glenn Ford’s account of a gala preview of Affair in Trinidad with Rita Hayworth, who, at the time was very uneasy about the film and Harry Cohn:   

I called Rita.  She was very reluctant. I said, “Come on — it can’t do any harm to see it.”  She finally agreed, if I would be her escort.  We arrived at the studio and went to Projection Room One.  There was Harry, Vincent Sherman, and a bunch of other people.  We took our seats, and they started the picture.  I could tell she was not enjoying herself.  She would grip my hand, and hers was shaking.  She didn’t like what she was seeing, not just the picture but her own image, I thought.  She looked older, maybe that was it, or part of it.    

Then, about halfway through the picture, she began to fall apart.  She was crying and whimpering, pressing her head into my shoulder.  She whispered, “Please, please, Glenn, take me out of here!”  I tried to calm her, but she had to leave.  She got up and started rushing out to the aisle.  Harry Cohn saw her and called out, “Where are you going?”  Rita didn’t say anything, just kept going.  He called after her, louder this time, “Wait!  Where are you going?  You can’t do this!”  And Rita shouted back at him, “I’m getting out of here!  You son of a bitch, how could you do this to me!”    

I hurried out of the projection room and caught up with her.  She was a wreck.  I took her outside, and we drove to the Fox and Hounds Restaurant in Santa Monica, a place we had gone to together many times.  She was still upset, even after the long drive, still crying off and on.  We had a drink, and she began to get worked up again.  She yelled for someone to bring a phone to the table.  I knew who she was going to call, and I tried to talk her out of it.  “Call Harry tomorrow,” I said.  “No,” she said, “the bastard’s not going to get away with this.”  She managed to reach Harry at the studio and began berating him.  I couldn’t make much sense of the things she said to him.  They were all vague complaints and threats.  One thing she kept saying to him: “You’re using up my life….You’re using up my life.”  What did it mean?  She couldn’t — or wouldn’t — explain.     

Glenn was disturbed by the changes he saw in his friend.  “I don’t know if it was a depression about her failed marriage, or the feud with Harry, or just the passage of time, or maybe illness, or everything,” he wrote in his journal, “but she had changed.  She was still beautiful, still a marvelous girl, but the flame did not burn as bright.  There was a tiredness about her now, a sadness in her eyes.  She was unhappy a lot of the time.  Those of us who loved her tried to bring her out of it but without a lot of success.”  In later years Glenn and other friends of Rita’s would speculate whether her depression and erratic behavior had been early signs of the mental disease that would consume her life in the 1970s.

—Excerpts from Glenn Ford: A Life by Peter Ford

(Source: thelittlefreakazoidthatcould)