Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom
288
Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom
288Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
McLean explores Hayworth's participation in the creation of her star persona, particularly through her work as a dancer-a subject ignored by most film scholars. The passive love goddess, as it turns out, had a unique appeal to other women who, like her, found it extraordinarily difficult to negotiate the competing demands of family, domesticity, and professional work outside the home. Being Rita Hayworth also considers the ways in which the actress has been treated by film scholarship over the years to accomplish its own goals, sometimes at her expense. Several of Hayworth's best-known star vehicles-among them Gilda (1946), Down to Earth (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), and Affair in Trinidad (1952)- are discussed in depth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780813533896 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rutgers University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/23/2004 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom by Adrienne L. McLean
Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
Men fell in love with 'Gilda,' but they woke up with me."1 This quotation can be found in virtually any biography, book-length or otherwise, of the movie star Rita Hayworth. The context and the wording may vary, but always the statement is produced as a sort of revelation whose poignancy derives from the combination of bruised self-awareness and utter powerlessness it demonstrates on the part of an ordinary woman who has been engulfed or entrapped by an image (in this case the title role of the 1946 film noir Gilda) partly of her own making. Expecting Hayworth to be like Gilda, a fictional femme fatale who was a "roaring, sexy woman," men were attracted to her. Later, they discovered that she was actually quiet and not at all sirenlike, and were disappointed.
"A man goes to bed with Rita Hayworth and wakes up with me."4 This version of the quotation, attributed to Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) by journalist Leonard Michaels, is apparently a mistaken rendering of the first, and Michaels does not give a source for it. But it is a very interesting mistake, because it implies that men went to bed with one Rita Hayworth and woke up with a different Rita Hayworth, someone of Latin antecedents named Margarita Carmen Cansino. Unfortunately, Michaels's essay, which concerns his awakening teenage sexuality and its reaction to seeing Gilda, makes no other reference to Hayworth's ethnic origins; so he does not explain the basis on which one would recognize,the morning after as it were, that Hayworth had suddenly become, or reverted to being, Margarita Cansino.
Moreover, the fact that a great many people, male and female, claim personally to have heard Hayworth utter some version of the first quotation over the course of several decades makes it intriguing in other ways, too. It has been so widely published in so many venues that, regardless of how one interprets it, its very ubiquity and frequency of repetition as a line suggest that Rita Hayworth was not only aware of but might have employed various fictive aspects of her identity in strategic ways. That is, to read the line quoted now is probably to feel some sympathy for Hayworth as the victim of men unable to distinguish screen image from real woman (with Michaels's confused version interjecting the notion that Hayworth was being mistaken for a yet more "real" real woman, Margarita Cansino). But to imagine the line spoken, as part of a conversation with different people at different times, produces a more incongruous and paradoxical sense of who Hayworth might have been. In what manner did she confide the information? What was the next line, for example, or the reaction and response of her interlocutors? What, or who, was Gilda-and did Hayworth (or Margarita Cansino) herself act like Gilda (or Margarita Cansino) some of the time and, if so, to what ends and with what distinguishing features? In short, what was the nature of Hayworth's agency in manipulating her public and private images-how might the relationship between being Gilda, a fictional character in a narrative film, and being Rita Hayworth, a Hollywood star who was born with the name Margarita Carmen Cansino, be rearticulated not as the sign of the constructedness and phantasmic nature of the star image but of a more familiar struggle to understand and control the terms of one's identity and subjectivity?
In her book, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors' Labor, Danae Clark also considers the kinds of issues raised by thinking about stars as social subjects as well as commodified objects. Rather than focusing, as many scholars already have, on the fetishistic relationship of the spectator to the actor-as-image and the functional role of that image in constituting the spectator's subjectivity, Clark argues persuasively that, from a Marxist-inflected cultural studies perspective, the same unequal relations of power that construct the fragmentary and contingent identities of spectating subjects also constitute the movie star "economically, politically, and discursively." Although their connections to the specific practices of film production and to film texts are not the same, actors and spectators are always already "caught up in a continual process of cultural resistance, pleasure, and negotiation" in relation to their work and their place in the world. Thus, "actors are not that different from spectators" because they too have heterogeneous subjectivities, and Clark's main project is to show that labor power differences-"the fragmented and fought-over position of the actor as a subject of film labor and film representation" -produce a geography on which actors' struggles to define themselves, now and in the past, can be mapped. Primarily because of the lack of specific information about particular labor practices that can be linked to actors' involvement in known historical "events," however, it will always be a "tricky business," Clark notes, to situate "issues of subjectivity within actors' labor history" other than as broadly conceived "modes" or "positionalities" marked by labor power differences.
The most significant of the positionalities Clark names is that of the "actor as worker." Within Hollywood, historically as now, the actor as worker is not the "true" identity of anyone or anything but the site of "intersecting discourses involving the sale of one's labor power to the cinematic institution, the negotiation of that power in terms of work performance and image construction, and the embodiment of one's image (onscreen and offscreen) as it becomes picked up and circulated in filmic and extrafilmic discourse." To write about a historical movie star's subjectivity, then, will mean always, if not only, to seek and to consider the discursive signs that at once indicate and produce struggles between being and doing, between working at making films and working at having a private life, between defining oneself and being defined by others.
This book is about these signs as they circulate in the star image of Rita Hayworth (1918 -1987), from her elevation to stardom in the late 1930s and early 1940s through the end of her Columbia studio contract in the late 1950s. I am interested in how her subjectivity, as worker and as woman, and the commercial discourses in which it is produced and located interact with Hollywood's own labor power differences and with the social tensions and concerns of the culture at large. Clark's discussion focuses primarily on the labor of acting in relation to films. But for many women stars, work performance clearly included domestic labor too, the ability to perform successfully as a wife and a mother as well as a film character or glamour figure. Rita Hayworth was a constructed image, a persona, but that construction rested, as all star images do, on something that could be (as it is now with "our" stars) understood to be a "real person." Whatever else was significant and powerful in Hayworth's image, or powerfully deployed by Hollywood's publicity and promotion machinery as well as film texts, for much of her career she seemed to matter most as someone who found it extraordinarily difficult to negotiate the competing demands of family, domesticity, and professional labor.6
Indeed, it is the discursive agency of a conventional glamorous woman star like Rita Hayworth that makes her so fascinating as an object of study. Such stars are not only among the most famous of Hollywood's products, but they often can be just as interesting and complex, albeit in different ways, as Mae West, Dorothy Arzner, or any of the more overtly exceptional women who worked in the studio system. In Hayworth's case, particularly, she is a star on the screen during the period under consideration, but she is as big a star off of it, both because her stardom began as a process of publicized commodification and transformation (from Margarita Carmen Cansino to Rita Cansino, ethnic starlet, to the all-American Rita Hayworth) and because she was involved in a sequence of failed but nevertheless "enriching" marriages (most famously to Orson Welles and Prince Aly Khan) that became part of an ongoing debate about the compatibility of work, marriage, and family in American women's lives.
I do understand, however, that there are still many working in film studies who would hesitate to grant anything resembling subjectivity and agency to a female star image, much less a star so well known for her commodification, objectification, passivity, and one-dimensionality as a performer and as a pinup. Therefore, another concern of this project will be to trace the ways that, from the 1970s on, some scholars working in film studies have helped, if inadvertently, to flatten and collapse the meanings of the very vital Hayworth that emerges from study of her image as it circulated in publicity and promotional materials, as well as in film texts, in the 1940s and 1950s. At this point, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, film studies is well ensconced in the academy, with debates ongoing about how and what Hollywood stars mean on a number of levels and from a number of different critical approaches. In this sense scholars in the field no longer, if they ever did, merely study stars but also participate in the configuration of star images and the marking of their relevance to larger questions of identity politics. Thus, if I am interested in Rita Hayworth as a star in her own historical context, I am no less interested in the ways that this same Rita Hayworth has been positioned and made use of within academic film studies, particularly feminist film studies.