Word: rita
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...Rita's chance came in Agua Caliente. Booked for four weeks at the gaming Hotel Agua Caliente, they were a hit. The Cansinos stretched their stay to seven months. While little Eduardo could pass for a good ten years younger than his age, Rita's well-developed figure, Spanish features (topped by straight, black hair, parted in the middle) disguised her youth...
...signed Rita for a dancing bit in a picture Spencer Tracy would like to forget: Dante's Inferno, one of the worst big-budget movies ever made. After the picture she became a Fox Wampus Baby. But at that point Darryl Zanuck breezed in, took over the studio (renamed it 20th Century-Fox), and his new broom swept Rita out. (Mr. Zanuck recently had cause to regret this haste, when he had to pay Columbia a stiff fee to borrow Rita for the role of Seductress Dona Sol in his pale epic. Blood and Sand. Rita and the bull...
Husband Judson displaced Father Eduardo as Rita's counselor. He knew promotion, and his knowledge has been invaluable to his wife's career. She was signed by Columbia after her marriage and played in 14 cheap B pictures. Then she set her sights on a part in an A production called Only Angels Have Wings. Squandering $500 of her husband's money on a lush evening outfit, she got a table in a Hollywood nightclub in full view of sulfurous Harry Cohn, Columbia president, and Director Howard Hawks, and let nature take its course...
...ecstatic male huzzas that greeted Rita in Only Angels impressed Columbia. They also impressed Rita, who set out to train herself for stardom. She had never got beyond first-year high school, but under Eddie Judson's guidance she barged into lessons in voice, drama and other useful things. She changed her name, dyed her hair (cinema range: blonde to russet red), slowly sloughed her Spanish looks and pounds. Columbia's new publicity head, Lou Smith, took one look and began talking stardom-if she would do what she was told...
Gradually Rita was transformed from a Spanish heavy into a livelier, Americanized Hedy Lamarr. Despite her promise to do what she was told, she never wholeheartedly gave in to the painful process until she saw her great success in The Strawberry Blonde (with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland). By that time Columbia's style expert, Maggie Maskel, had taught her how to dress, made her shapely, impeccably clad figure a fashion-plate fixture of the women's style magazines. She had even brightened the earth-bound pages of the National Geographic...