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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.