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ent001321-018
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A Hollywood writer who stood by her side at Los Vegas when she married Dick Haymes tells: The truth about Rita's The glamorous Miss Hayworth has sacrificed her name, her PUBLICITY SHOTS of the Hayworth-Haymes marriage at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas brought the crooner $125,000 in job offers. Rita was nervous and shy of newsmen. Haymes, who was up to his ears in debt,needed publicity. "He is the first man I've really loved/' says Rita. She's? said that before. GREENWICH, Conn. a ll her adult life, Margarita Carmen ^L Haworth Cansino Judson Welles /Jm Khan Haymes, better known to the I ^ public asJRitaJHayworth^has yearned for love. To satisfy that persistent longing, she has married four times in 15 years and on occasion has willingly sacrificed her name, her career and her fortune. Only a few weeks ago, for example, a day before Rita was scheduled to marry handsome, near-bankrupt crooner Dick Haymes, I flew* to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., where the actress was staying with her two daughters, Rebecca, 8, and Yasmin, 3??/2. I told her that Columbia Studios expected her to report for work three days after her wedding, or be suspended and taken off her $5,000-a-week salary. "I've been suspended before," she said. 1 wo days later, announcing that her Hollywood home was up for sale (it cost her $80,000) and that henceforth she would live in Connecticut, Rita flew East with her two girls and fourth husband. So much for $5,000 a week. Another time, Rita was seeing Europe with Ted Stauffer, a Swiss band-leader who was later to marry Hedy LaMarr. One day* in Paris after a quarrel, Stauffer sought to make up with the sultry beauty by entering her room in cavalier fashion through a window overlooking the Rue BerrL A crowd gathered below and cheered the lover. Next afternoon, I ran into Rita in the lobby of the Hotel Lancaster. "Everyone,** I remarked, "is talking about you and Stauffer."' Hayworth tossed her beautiful red-haired head to one side. "No matter what I do," she said, "people will talk." So much for public opinion. "This Squalid Affair" A few months later when she fell in love with Aiy Khan and-began one of the most highly-publicized romances in modem times, she was advised by friends and studio to stop traveling with her Mohammedan playboy until he secured a divorce from his estranged wife. London newspapers condemned the romance as "this squalid affair" and other periodicals immersed it in similar literary acid. But Rita insisted upon seeing it through to marriage. "I'm in love," she said flatly, a little hurt and disillusioned that the world could hold love so cheaply. While married to Aiy, whose father?╟÷the Aga Khan?╟÷is his only visible means of support, Rita abandoned her career and spent most of her hard-earned fortune. To her it was worth it, for she felt she was loved. The truth about Rita Hayworth is that she is essentially a romanticist and a singularly simple girl?╟÷she refers to herself as a "Spanish peasant"?╟÷whose sensational motion picture career has been more the handiwork of others than her own. As a teenager, she was introduced to show business by her father, Eduardo Cansino. He worked her as a dancing partner in his act at the Foreign Club in Tijuana. They were booked as brother and aster. Strict Father A strict Spaniard of the old school, Cansino saw to it that his then chubby young daughter was completely denied masculine companionship. At an age when other girls were attending high school proms with adolescent Casanovas, this one, other than for her dancing, was forced to live the life of a recluse. "I guess I was too strict with her," Cansino says now. "People told me that I should allow her to go out with men or one day she would rebel." Before her first marriage to Edward Jud- son, a promoter as old as her father, Rita Hayworth never had a boy friend. She also made no decisions concerning her career. It was her father who accepted her first screen offer, her father who insisted that Columbia raise her $75-a-week stock contract to $200 a week, and her father who would take her by the hand each morning and lead her to the studio. Following her divorce from Judson?╟÷"He regarded me as an investment," she explained ?╟÷Rita rebelled against the strict supervision. Thus began her search for love. In 194r3, she was in the full flower of her beauty. Five feet six, 116 pounds, she had the kind of figure men looked at twice. With a 37-inch bust and 35-inch hips, she had as many curves as a scenic railway. She dated dozens of men. around town. But it was Orson Welles, then at the height of his eccentric and disputable genius, who took one look at Rita and fell for her the way coal shuttles into a cellar. Once they were married, however, he committed the same error as her father and first husband. He tried to change her into something she