Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1963)

ever filmed, Hollywood’s Love Goddess, Rita Hayworth is living at the Chateau Marmont, at this writing. The girl Aly once moved into the Hotel Reserve near Monte Carlo into a suite draped in pink satin like the boudoir of a French empress, the girl he ensconced in his own palace, is now living in a small suite and she is alone. When she left Aly she said that essentially “I am a Spanish peasant. I’d like to work two days a week and run away with the children for five.” But her children are in school now, Yasmin in Switzerland. And her last picture “The Happy Thieves” was completed two years ago. You wonder what might have been the fate of Marguerita Cansino if she had not been a child dancer, if she had not won a movie contract at seventeen and started acting love scenes on screen before she’d ever had a date with some teenage boy. You wonder what might have been the fate of Greta Garbo if she had married Mauritz Stiller — the one man who ever gave her true moral support — or if she had been able to work with him over a long period of time. She was seventeen and Stiller thirty-nine, when they met. He taught her how to read, how to dress, how to think, he directed her so relentlessly before the camera that she sometimes ran off the set screaming that she hated him. But of course that wasn’t true. She has said many times, “He willed me to do as he wished. Everything I have ever done I owe to him.” He was the one who took her out of the Royal Dramatic School in Stockholm and gave her her chance in “Gosta Boerling.” He brought her to America, intending to be her director — but things didn’t work out that way. After ten days on “The Temptress” he was fired, and Greta distraught. “I thought the sun would never rise again,” she says. When Stiller died, she still kept him in her consciousness, “Moje says I must do this. He doesn’t want me to do that.” Symbol of glamour on the screen, often a lonely woman off screen, what would have happened to Greta Garbo if she had had no dramatic aspirations? If she had not plunged at seventeen into a world where she competed with men on their terms and simply exhausted herself emotionally? Clara Bow, the “It” girl You wonder what might have happened to Clara Bow if she had not become the toast of the 20’s, the symbol of flaming youth, the “It” girl, the symbol of sex. In 1928 there was nothing to match this girl’s popularity, she was receiving twice as much fan mail as Valentino. She’d been a high school kid from Bay Ridge, Long Island, who entered a magazine beauty contest — a little tomboy who’d been a darn good baseball pitcher but had never been to a party or a dance. Her mother loved her with a strange bitter love, and was so opposed to a movie career that she felt it her duty to kill Clara with a butcher knife (she actually made the attempt) to keep her from taking her first part in “Down to the Sea in Ships.” Tomboy Clara had never been in love, never known romance, until she got to Hollywood and started making “B” pictures with a jazz age background. Gilbert Roland was on the same lot (not yet discovered by Norma Talmadge) and he and Clara fell in love. “ ‘Clarita,’ he called me,” Clara says. “He still had a Spanish accent and we used to dream of being married and dream of the time when we’d both be stars. I don’t know what ever separated us. I adored him. There was one wonderful year, then he was working hard on one lot and I on another, we were both terribly jealous and everyone seemed to come between us. We had one violent quarrel, I certainly didn’t dream it was final but it went on and on and after that we were each too proud to make a move. I ran wild, trying to make up for all the starved years of my childhood. I’d have gone haywire without Victor Fleming, who directed several of my pictures. He steered me straight. I began to read, to enjoy music, grow calmer, even happy.” But Mr. Fleming was a good deal older and gradually their romance developed into a close friendship. Then Clara made a picture, “Children of Divorce.” Gary Cooper was cast opposite her in his first big part — and during rehearsals, even before the cameras started turning, they were in love. “It was wonderful and beautiful while it lasted,” Clara says, “but it’s difficult for a motion picture star to marry. Gary was so jealous.” And Clara went on and on. Bob Savage, the millionaire playboy, cut his wrists for her . . . The wife of a handsome Texas doctor sued for alienation of affections. . . . There was Nino Martini and Bela Lugosi. And Harry Richman, whose New York girl friend, Flo Stanley, told the press, “Harry’s my man. He doesn’t love that little kid. He’s only playing with her for all the publicity he can get out of it.” The press criticized Clara as today they criticize Liz. “She’s still behaving like a headstrong school girl, allowing her emotions to gallop off with her good sense,” they wrote. No one stopped to realize that of coarse she was acting like the school girl she’d never had a chance to be. She was the “It” girl. Elinor Glyn wrote the story for her and Clara believed it. She played the “It” girl and lived the “It” girl until the era of flappers ended — and with it her phenomenal popularity. She never came close to a woman’s life until she married Rex Bell and retired from pictures. Today the “It” girl is still pretty but in delicate health; she lives in a modest cottage with only a nurse companion. At the height of her fame as a love symbol, a discerning pen wrote, “Clara has everything but love.” Like Clara, Lana Turner had a childhood marred by violence. When she was ten, her father was blackjacked by thugs and dumped in an alley to die. After that, Lana and her mother were poor, and Mrs. Turner’s health was bad. Julia Jean Mildred Frances — later, Lana — spent a number of years in a convent. When they came to Los Angeles and she went to Hollywood High, she just didn’t care much for school. And then suddenly she was in movies — America’s sweater sweetheart — dashing from nightclub to nightclub, trying to cram into this minute all the fun she’d never had and up to her pretty ears in a torrid romance with twenty-seven-year-old Greg Bautzer. He was her mentor, a gay dashing lawyer whom Lana adored; they were engaged, but Greg was altar-shy and as Lana herself says ruefully, “I’ve always been a dead duck for a guy who’s hard to get.” Need Extra Cash? 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