If This Was Happiness: Biography of Rita Hayworth Audio Cassette – Audiobook, August 1, 1997

Barbara Leaming's biography of Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Casino, 1918-1987), "If This Was Happiness" was published in 1989. Leaming has written a number of biographies on the Kennedy family, Winston Churchill, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Orson Welles (Hayworth's second husband) etc. and is a solid, professional writer/ biographer. She gave this book her all and obviously shows a love for her subject. Hayworth's film career is included, but the focus is more on her personal life. There are not really that many serious works on Rita Hayworth (Kobal, 1982, Morella/Epstein, 1983, Hill, her fifth husband's memoir, 1983; and after Hayworth's death Roberts-Frenzel, 2001, McLean, 2004 and Wilhelm, 2017.).Leaming's book needs to be read to help understand what a complex person Rita Hayworth was. Her thesis that Hayworth was abused at a young age holds water. But there are some flaws in this work. The sexual abuse upon which her father supposedly subjected her to has not been substantiated in other works about Hayworth and is based on Orson Welles's revelation about what Hayworth reportedly told him during their marriage. Leaming barely mentions Glenn Ford (Ford and Hayworth had a forty- year personal relationship which was significant to them both), and while Leaming does write about Alzheimer's disease devastating Hayworth's life, she does not write about Hayworth's final days, death and subsequent internment despite the book having been written two years after Hayworth's death.The overall tone of the book is one of compounding clouds and one does think of Rita Hayworth with great sadness. Hayworth did come from a show business background, her father being a performing star coming from a long family tradition of dancing and her mother a showgirl in the Zigfield Follies. She was forced at a young age to become one of the family's breadwinners by Eduardo Casino, her domineering and verbally abusive father. Hayworth did learn and perfect the art of dancing, but was denied a normal childhood, was exposed to situations and environments that a teenage girl should not be exposed to as well as basically having to pose as her father's "wife" in their dancing act. Hayworth was a painfully shy, sensitive and quiet girl and her formative years led to her lifelong professional and personal insecurities. It had to color her relationships with men and Leaming captures this in a first- rate manner. Hayworth's mother, Volga Hayworth, (who Rita loved), was an alcoholic and it may have predisposed Rita to the disease. Hayworth herself made a telling observation: "Basically I am a good gentle person, but I am attracted to mean personalities." More prophetic words were never uttered. Hayworth's martial choices were not suitable for one of her temperament and personal needs. Edward Judson, her first husband and twenty years older, was basically the taskmaster she tried to escape from in marrying him. Judson exploited her, but did get her foot in the door of the film making industry; Orson Welles, the "genius" who gave her a fleeting happiness, but put his career before his marriage-she was a "trophy wife" to him and eventually he treated her poorly (Welles did observe that Rita was capable of alcohol fueled rages-one does not want to think that the kind and gentle Rita Hayworth people universally gushed about was a monster behind closed doors); Prince Aly Khan, the profligate, high living and spending playboy who would not compromise his lifestyle for his wife; Dick Haymes, the truly evil exploiter of Hayworth both financially and professionally; and James Hill who wanted Hayworth to continue to act while she wanted to retire. Hill was abusive to Hayworth as well. Barbara Leaming captures this beautifully in her book and it makes for a reading laced with sadness.Rita Hayworth was not a formally educated woman (to her remorse and embarrassment, and through no fault of her own) and there is no doubt that she made some regrettable choices both personally and professionally. She came to hate Hollywood and wanted a normal life and a happy family and marriage. To her everlasting credit, she did single parent two daughters while surviving the dog-eat dog existence of Hollywood and film making. (Sadly, she seems to have had an estrangement with her first daughter, Rebecca Welles). Her second daughter gave up a dream of being a concert singer to take care of her disintegrating mother. Yasmin Aga Khan called it "twenty years of hell" and stated that her mother was very disappointed in herself as a person and turned to alcohol to combat the depression and frustration that "something" terribly wrong was happening to her. People thought alcohol usage was changing Hayworth's renowned consideration towards the feelings of others into increasingly erratic and bizarre behavior starting in the mid 1960s. It was the insidious spread of Alzheimer's disease. People were shocked by the change in Rita Hayworth. Her eventual death due to complications of Alzheimer's led to public recognition of the painful and awful realities of the disease and should be Hayworth's ultimate legacy.To this day one can make the case that " If This Was Happiness"-the rest of Orson Welle's quote was, "imagine what the rest of her life had been" is still a definitive work on Rita Hayworth. Barbara Leaming tells Rita Hayworth's story with compassion and conviction and if you love Rita Hayworth, you need to read this book to better understand her. This is an upsetting read and tells the story of an unappreciated artist who possessed sublime beauty, elegance and humanity. Hayworth expressed her wish for life, "All I ever wanted was just what everybody else wants, you know, to be loved." Rita Hayworth was always an honest and unpretentious woman.

If you read one biography on Ms. Hayworth, make sure this is it. The brutal honesty, the true nature of what went on in Rita Hayworth's life, and her courageous health battle is all gloriously and carefully spilled out among the pages to set the proverbial record straight. The sensationalist headlines of the day did little to showcase the inner hell and longing for love that Ms. Hayworth dealt with, and when coupled by a childhood secret and an ill-diagnosed Alzheimer's disease she was at the mercy of both the shadow of Gilda and her own fragile mind. It was an amazing read, highly recommended to anyone who cares about learning about the woman and not the image she could never live down.

I’ve long felt Rita Hayworth was the most beautiful of all the old Hollywood stars. After I grew bored of an incredibly bad video biography of her, I searched to find a book about her. I came up with Barbara Leaming’s If This Was Happiness: The Biography of Rita Hayworth. I’m so glad I did. I knew so little about her life, but I had loved her performances all my life, particularly those in Pal Joey and Down to Earth. There she was, gorgeous, elegant, and letter perfect. She seemed to do her acting and dancing with total ease. And that, having read this bio now, was an amazing feat. Poor Rita was a victim her entire life, from the control and abuse of her father to her stormy marriages to the final crushing blow, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in an era when little was known about the disease. In fact, initially, because the disease was so obscure, her erratic behavior was attributed to alcoholism. Leaming’s meticulously researched work informs us about the afflictions in Rita’s life, and it gives us great detail about the mess she made of it. She was her own worst enemy long before the dementia set in. But we find that all the bad and crazy behavior stemmed, as Leaming makes clear, from her relationship with her father. And yet—until her thinking process was taken away—she was the consummate professional. When she walked onto a soundstage to begin filming, she was letter perfect, totally prepared, and ready to wow her audiences as she did me many times. She has been dead now since 1987, but after having read this book, I weep for her.