This Day in Film History (Rita Hayworth Sued by Her Studio)

December 27, 1955—The long-fraught relationship between Columbia Studios and star Rita Hayworth took a sharp turn for the worse, as the studio sued her for refusing to appear in the planned Biblical epic Joseph and His Brethren—presaging the end of a nearly two-decade association.

Hayworth didn’t show up for the proceedings, having departed for Europe with her two daughers to clear her head from the fallout of her latest marital disaster. In any case, the sex symbol didn’t want to be anywhere near studio head Harry Cohn.

Now, if you look hard enough you’ll eventually find something good in every person, no matter how seemingly evil they are, and Cohn did bail out some people down on their luck.

But in the main, his reputation—lecherous, crude and tyrannical—was well-deserved. Actress Jean Arthur and director Frank Capra had no use for him, and comedian Red Skelton, observing the size of the turnout for Cohn’s funeral three years later, let out one of the most wicked one-liners in Tinseltown history: “It proves what Harry always said: Give the public what they want and they'll come out for it.”

Hayworth particularly loathed the man, claiming he subjected her to sexual pressure in order to obtain good roles.

This time, Cohn was presenting her with the female lead in a big-budget picture, Joseph and His Brethren. Louis B. Mayer, out of power after nearly three decades at MGM, now an independent producer, had sold this property to Cohn.

Cohn had high hopes for this project. The 1950s, after all, were the era of the sand-and-sword Biblical epic. As a Time Magazine piece from June 1953 noted, the advent of widescreen and the chance to lure older viewers out of the home with wholesome subject matter made such films an event that would help the movie studios compete with television. At the time of that article, Quo Vadis? and The Robe had recently mined box-office gold, and before the decade was out Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of his The Ten Commandments and William Wyler’s version of Ben-Hur would bring all the money the moguls could ever dream of.

You can imagine the pitch the studio made to Hayworth—whom it had signed back in 1937, when she wasn’t even 20 years old—on why the project was bound to work:

“Rita honey, everybody knows this story. It’s got everything—betrayal, love. It’s got class written all over it. Know Eugene O’Neill? Well, his father James played in this story for two years, and Thomas Mann wrote four volumes about it…You’re asking me if I personally have read them? Come on, I’m too busy making sure my best stars get just the right vehicle!

“Which is what I’m doing for you now! Look, you saw On the Waterfront, right? Well, we got Lee J. Cobb from that to play Potiphar, and Clifford Odets to write the screenplay. It’s gonna be in Technicolor, and we’re sparing no expense on the costumes—in fact, we’ve got them planned now, you wanna see them?

"In other words, this is first-class, all the way. Now, whaddya say?”

Rita said she wanted time to think about it. In particular, she wanted to check with her latest (fourth) husband and producing partner, Dick Haymes.

Cohn and the rest of the Columbia top brass waited impatiently. Over the last several years, they had presented Hayworth with a couple of movies that could have been major financial and even critical successes for her: Born Yesterday and From Here to Eternity. But, for one reason or another, she had dragged her feet or turned them down.

They didn’t like the idea of Haymes (widely derided as a Svengali, though some later observers, such as biographer Ruth Prigozy, dispute the notion as arising from anonymous and/or biased sources) nosing around the project, either.

Three decades after his death, controversy still swirls about this singer-actor who could have been another Frank Sinatra.

Actually, the best way to think about Haymes is by imagining if The Chairman of the Board had never made his great comeback. Both men were big recording and film stars in the 1940s, but were coming apart at the seams in the early 1950s: depressed, hitting the bottle and desperately holding on, after several well-publicized marriages and romances, to a a screen goddess (in Sinatra’s case, Ava Gardner).

Sinatra’s connection to Gardner helped him land the role that saved him from the entertainment scrap heap: Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Now, Haymes hoped he would have similar luck, holding out for the role of Joseph himself in his wife’s proposed picture.

But the studio was not at all happy about the crooner’s presence in Hayworth’s life, let alone in one of her pictures. And now, a veritable perfect storm in the couple’s personal and professional lives brought them to the brink:

• Hayworth was tense from having to maintain civil relations with ex-husband Aly Khan—the man she had left Hollywood for at the end of the prior decade—in order to retain custody of their child.

• Haymes had his own child-support and alimony issues resulting from two failed marriages.

• Columbia was allegedly behind the scenes in a failed but (to Haymes) costly attempt to deport the singer to his native Argentina.

• In June 1955, Columbia sued Hayworth for defaulting on a $17,844 note she signed the prior December.

• Not surprisingly, with all of this money flying out the door to lawyers, Hayworth and Haymes were miserable and drinking heavily. Their marriage, after two years, was on the rocks.

So, though Columbia was willing to offer Haymes $50,000, the possibility of him starring as Joseph was a deal-breaker. Hayworth didn’t help matters by not returning an advance payment Columbia offered as an inducement to star in Joseph and His Brethren.

At this point, Cohn may well have fully lived up to his reputation for crude intimidation, telling Hayworth in no uncertain terms what she had for years and what she would be left with: "All you had were those big things and Harry Cohn. Now you just have those two big things."

By the time of the lawsuit, the marriage to Haymes was kaput, along with the movie. From then on, the studio and the woman it had transformed into an international sex symbol—the WWII pinup, the dancing darling of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, the temptress of Gilda—were headed for their own parting of the ways.

The writing was clearly on the wall in Pal Joey, the 1957 musical in which she co-starred with Sinatra and the blonde being groomed as her replacement at Columbia, Kim Novak. (To add insult to injury, Hayworth--despite a striptease number that recalled her incendiary similar moment from Gilda, "Put the Blame on Mame"--was playing a woman older than Sinatra, even though she was in fact two years younger.)

From this point forward, Hayworth’s screen appearances would be inconsistent and sporadic. She could not capitalize on fine roles in Separate Tables and The Story on Page One, partly because, like Gardner, heavy drinking exacerbated the usual problem faced by fortysomething actresses in those days before cosmetic surgery entered its golden (or, one should say, plastic) age.

“Whatever you write about me, don’t make it sad,” Hayworth told one interviewer. But you really can’t do otherwise. It’s not just that her erratic behavior in subsequent years—associated solely, for far too long, with drinking—in fact also resulted from Alzheimer’s Disease.

No, the disastrous marriage to Haymes was part of a longtime pattern of allying herself to strong men she could look to for emotional support. This, in turn, may well have resulted from Hayworth being a victim of incest at the hands of her father.

Barbara Leaming, who first floated that idea in her biography of Hayworth, If This Was Happiness, heard it secondhand from one of the goddess’ ex-husbands, Orson Welles. Any account from the latter, who loved to embellish the simplest tale, can hardly be accepted as gospel truth.

But I sense that this particular story has a hard core of fact to it. One frequent after-effect of child molestation, after all, is substance abuse.

Hayworth was, in fact, a shy homebody, hardly like the mantrap she played so often onscreen (as you might be able to tell from the image accompanying this post). But she could never really possess the security she craved so desperately from men. The men she hoped would be strong enough to protect her as an adult either exploited her or were too weak themselves to be any good for anyone else.