Books: “Big Red” by Jerome Charyn

Rita Hayworth was the love goddess of the 1940s. Born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn. she was reportedly the descendant of a long-lost Sephardic Jewish family, and the daughter of Eduardo Cansino, who swept her off to Hollywood at the age of 12 where they performed as “The Dancing Cansinos.”

After a couple of forgettable movies, Rita’s first husband Edward Judson convinced her to dye her hair red and change her last name to Hayworth. Slowly but surely her career began to take off. Not only was she the favorite dancing partner of both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in the early 1940s, but she became the pinup girl of GIs throughout WW II. Her career would reach its apogee when she appeared in “Gilda” in 1946, performing a striptease where she took off a single black glove.

As fate would have it, Rita soon entered the orbit of director Orson Welles, who would become the second of her five husbands. Having reached his own artistic pinnacle with “Citizen Kane” in 1941, his career began a long slow descent.  Welles was reduced to performing in movies that took no advantage of his talent. Yet his aura remained: few of us will ever forget his initial appearance as Harry Lime in “The Third Man” or the final shattered-mirror scene in “The Lady from Shanghai” in which he acted, wrote, and directed.

Which brings us to “Big Red”, the smashing new novel by Jerome Charyn. It is a fictional account of the real-life Hayworth-Welles marriage that lasted for several years during the mid-1940s. The story is told by the fictional Rusty Redburn, a movie-mad Midwesterner whom Harry Cohn, the CEO of Columbia Pictures, hires to spy on the Welles in their Hollywood home.

Rusty becomes Rita’s aide-de-camp, revealing the actress’s shyness and insecurity about her humble beginnings. “Men go to bed with Rita Hayworth but they wake up with me,” Rita was reported to say.

Charyn has a genius for getting inside his characters’ heads. You can hear Orson’s and Rita’s voices loud and clear, as well as those of Louella Parsons, Harry Cohn, and the Aga Khan (Rita’s father-in-law, when she married Aly Khan).

“Big Red,” by way of explanation, was Rita’s nickname, due to her lustrous shoulder-length red hair. And should you miss out on the chance to read this lovely, funny, and extremely well-informed novel, you might just see red yourself.