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Subculture, Commoditization, and Kinship

Some say the first pin-up of the war years is the cover of the November 10, 1941 Time magazine, which has a George Petty illustration of Rita Hayworth (Figure 17). Legend also has it that a pin-up of Rita Hayworth was taped to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. So, Rita Hayworth can claim the first and last pinup of the war years. In between, Rita was voted or named “most popular pin-up” many times.

Feminists writing on beauty in American culture tell us that the movie “goddesses” and pin-ups of the 1940s were all blonde. Susan Brownmiller adds a racial spin: “America's cult of blondenesss reached its zenith in the Forties and Fifties, ironically at the moment in history when Nazi Germany and the cult of Aryan supremacy went down to defeat.” Yet Rita Hayworth, the undisputed queen of 40s glamour, was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Southern California in 1914 and began her career as a flamenco dancer in a Mexican border town during Prohibition.

On her father's side, Rita's family, immigrants from Spain, had long been dancers on the stage. As live performance passed into the age of film, Margarita's father, Eduardo Cansino, moved the family to Hollywood and tried to hold the act together by playing night clubs, working by day as a dance teacher to the stars. In 1926, with Prohibition making work in clubs hard to get, Eduardo was inspired to rejuvenate the act by putting his daughter in it. He had Margarita dye her light brown hair black so she would look more Hispanic in the Mexican border towns where nightclubs still operated. She was a sensation. When Prohibition ended, the new “Dancing Cansinos” could work at the best clubs in Hollywood.

Her father probably would have been satisfied with things as they were, but Rita wanted a film career. Hers was a long, but determined climb to fame. She began making films in the early 1930s for Fox Studios. She made 32 films as Rita Cansino, some of them in Spanish, before she was “made over” as Rita Hayworth. Film historians like to say that Hollywood “Anglicized” Margarita in order to make her more easily “commoditized” for the American audience. But wartime America was fascinated by everything Latin. The early 1940s saw a rush of successful movies with Latin locations, stars, music, and themes: Mexican Hayride, Down Argentine Way, A Weekend in Havana, That Night in Rio, to name just a few. Hispanic fashions were popular throughout the war. In night clubs, sophisticated crowds danced sambas, rhumbas, and tangos. Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio were highly successful, appearing even in ads for nationally-branded beauty products. When Margarita Cansino first arrived on the scene, in fact, she was often compared to Velez and Del Rio. With these two overshadowing her and so many Latin vehicles being made, Margarita was not particularly distinctive. So, Rita was de-Latinized by Hollywood, but not because Hispanic women were unwelcome. On the contrary, it was because they were becoming a cliché.

Margarita's hair was dyed several colors for assorted roles before she settled on the copper color that became her trademark. She did have her hairline lifted through electrolysis. Her low hairline had been inherited from her Irish mother, not her father, whose hairline was quite high, a feature not atypical of people born in Spain. Her new name was actually her mother's maiden name. So, while Rita's Latin (and patrilineal) origins were obscured by her makeover, her Irish (and matrilineal) roots were brought forward. Ironically, the critique of Hayworth's “makeover” takes its authority from emphasizing the male lines of her kinship, rather than the female.

Rita Hayworth changed her name in 1937 and appeared in five movies that year under the new name. Though she later played women with Hispanic names, the characters she played her first year were named Sue Collins, Mary Gillespie, Betty Holland, and Betty Morom. Throughout her career, Hayworth played Latinas as well as other ethnic (and supposedly “nonethnic”) characters. She also played a broad range of “types,” from the sex goddess to the super-cheery star of musical extravaganzas. Her first “big movie” was as Fred Astaire's new dance partner in You'll Never Get Rich, for which she won rave reviews. She dyed her hair blonde for the leading role in Lady from Shanghai. Her red hair came about for the remake of Blood and Sand, which she won over 37 other actresses. In short, Hayworth seems to have had been given the opportunity to play many characters and ethnic subtypes, just like any other “ordinary American.”

Consider, though, that another very popular star of the war years, the “Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda, played exclusively Latina roles. Feminist Historian Shari Roberts complains that Miranda always appeared as herself or “as some stereotypically Latin persona.” Her names across several films include Querida, Chiquita, Chita, Marina, Carmelita, and four Rositas. Roberts announces that such type-casting robbed Miranda “of any actual claim to her heritage.” Roberts further decries the fact that Miranda's films were set variously in Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba and that her accent was inaccurate for some of these roles. A casting policy that would comply with Roberts' agenda would have required that Miranda appear in roles where her names were Gretchen, Molly, or Elizabeth, but all settings would have to be Brazil. This would entail “Anglicizing” Miranda on one hand, but restricting her roles to those true to her country of origin, thus “stereotyping” her.

Roberts also complains that the typical plot of the Carmen Miranda film entailed a marriage between a North and South American. In these narratives, she says, “The gender difference overlays the ethnic and national differences, and the sexual resolution works to resolve all differences. The underlying assumption of this logic is that 'it's a small world after all,' that 'under the skin' we are all essentially the same, and that any differences between cultures are only superficial and irrelevant. Cultural and ethnic differences are seen as problems that can and should be easily resolved.” Such films undeniably reduced complex geopolitical issues, as Roberts points out. But looking at stories about intermarriage was not an entirely ridiculous proposition for an audience that was already swimming in a mix of historical matrimony so deep that many Americans couldn't even tell you what their ethnic lineage was.

Indeed, we might ask what constituted “authenticity” for American Latinas of the 1940s. In the early history of the West, Spain's policy forbade marriageable girls to emigrate to the New World. Thus, the first generation born in the Western United States after the Spaniards arrived would necessarily have been mestizo. In some sense, then, even the earliest “California belles” were “inauthentic,” since they were as closely related to the native tribes as to the people of Spain. Throughout the history of the West and Southwest, Spanish, Anglo, French, German, Native American, and Russian peoples mingled commodities and bloodlines through (and alongside) intermarriage. So, the ideal of ethnic authenticity held up by Roberts (and others) is overly simplistic when held up against a population with such a complex kinship/trading history.

When a writer condemns an actress for being untrue to her ethnicity because of her characters, hair color, plots, or locations, it implies that the authentic Latina self is easily identifiable and representable. Such criticism assumes actresses should be limited to playing roles that reflect their real identities, an imposition that is not made on the talents of “nonethnic” actresses. It also omits consideration of what should perhaps be a key question from a feminist perspective: is the actress in control of her own commoditization through selection of these roles?

Carmen Miranda’s character, for example, was already developed before she came to the United States from Brazil, where she had been a big star. That “tutti frutti” persona was the result of careful study and creation on the part of the star herself. Though a native of Portugal, she adopted the Brazilian dialect, but included the dress and grooming of women in the black Brazilian subculture. She was highly conscious of the theatrical nature of her persona and, therefore, could (and did) play it “straight,” comic, or even as a self-parody. No one forced this persona on Miranda; it was the result of her art and she doesn’t appear to have suffered for it.

On the other hand, in spite of her stardom, Rita Hayworth was a very unhappy woman. The source of her sadness appears to have been her need to rely on men and her inability to set limits on their power over her. Though it's clear that Rita was very ambitious for herself, she was always vulnerable to the influence of strong men upon her career. The first man in her life, her father, not only dyed her hair, he took her out of school to pursue a career of his choosing. He also took great pleasure in presenting her as if she were his wife. When Rita had a chance at Hollywood, she eloped with a much older man in order to escape the control of her father. The first husband is the one who arranged the electrolysis and helped her get a career in movies started. Though Hayworth continued to play beautiful women in the movies until she was well past fifty, she never was able to get control over her own “commoditization” as an actress, thus leaving her at the mercy of manipulating men who “managed” her career. A quiet woman in private, Rita Hayworth was well-liked and respected by others in Hollywood, but she spent the rest of her life going from one domineering husband to another, including Orson Welles and even a prince. The inability to control her own career was continuous with her unsuc-cessful attempts to “commoditize” herself as a wife, since she seemed unable to separate the two exchanges. While it may be easy to write off Rita Hayworth's sadness to the myth of “the beauty that destroys” or to pity her for being an “inauthentic” Latina, her real problem was her passive sexuality, the poison of which seeped into every corner of her life. Ironically, some of Hayworth's most famous roles were of manipulating, “castrating” beauties like Gilda, the title role in what was probably her best film. The beauty who controlled men, rather than letting them control her, was a role Rita could never personally carry off.

Hayworth's sadness, however, does not negate the potential for her positive effect on other women caught in the same oppressive subculture of kinship from which she came. In Los Angeles between the Wars, the Mexican immigrant community struggled with the rebellion of its young, especially its daughters. Young Latinas rebelled against their subcultural system in several consistent ways, many of which pointed to their emulation of screen stars. If they went to work, they spent their money on movies and grooming products. They cut their hair and dressed in a manner their parents thought provocative. One mother observed: “My Lupe says she will bob her beautiful hair if I say, 'yes,' or if I say, 'no.' What makes her like that? She knows that her father will beat her if she does not mind us. Since we have been in the United States she has always been a good girl, until now when she says that she will do what she wants.”

The young females of this subculture were victims of a marriage exchange system controlled by their fathers. As one historian observed: “women were not to be emancipated, only passed on to other men.” As part and parcel of that exchange/kinship system, the fathers also had the right to completely control their daughters' grooming and social lives, specifically in order to enforce sexual abstinence. One eighteen-year-old Latina said in 1932: “I never had any fun since I was sixteen years old. As soon as I was sixteen my father began to watch me and would not let me go anywhere or have any friends come home. He was born in old Mexico but he has been here long enough to know how people do things. The way it is with the Mexicans, the bigger a girl is, the farther they pull her into the house.” Fathers strongly resisted their adopted society's requirement that their daughters as well as their sons go to school. As early as possible, girls were taken out of school and brought home to cook, keep house, and wait for a marriage only their father could arrange. Some virtually became prisoners: “My girl Theresa wants to go out but Perez won't let her, not even to a Christmas party. . . . She says she's going to marry an American and do as she pleases. She cries all night. Perez says if she won't stop, she'll see what she'll get.”

Expressing the desire to “marry an American” was the ultimate rebellion because achieving that goal would take the girl out of the native kinship system. Such threats had real power over parents. In America all a young woman had to do to get married was to attract a husband--she did not need her father to arrange it, nor a dowry to pay for it, nor a pedigree to deserve it. All she needed was to win someone's heart. A young woman who insisted on choosing her own mate dealt a direct blow to the Mexican patriarchy. Any behavior that seemed likely to end in that result--dressing “like an American,” for example--was perceived as a serious threat.

Young women of the Mexican community sneaked out to see young men and quite often eloped. After marriage--whether to an American or another young Mexican--these women used grooming to express their desire to run their households differently from those they had grown up in: “The first thing I did [after getting married] was to bob my hair. My father would not permit it and I have wanted to for a long time. I will show my husband that he will not boss me the way my father has done all of us.” These behaviors would be seen as “conservative” or even antifeminist by critics today, because of the emphasis on sexual allure. However, I would argue that the tactics used by Latinas—actions taken to gain control over their own commoditization--were explicitly feminist in this context. Women behaving this way provoked anger and disruption among those whose power they aimed to destroy--not lovers, not husbands, but fathers.

Though “nonethnic” American women were also subject to an oppressive kinship system, one that would be reinforced after the war, they did not have to endure the level of restriction that Mexican fathers put on their daughters in order to commoditize them. American women were usually allowed to choose their own mates. They still had restrictions on their sexuality (expected to be abstinent outside marriage), their dress, their choice of friends and social life. Yet they had enough freedom within those restrictions to be enviable to Mexican immigrant daughters.

Taking Control

Dorian Parker was the descendant of Irish immigrants who ended up in Texas. She was the least pretty of three beautiful sisters, but she was the smartest. Her parents, though happily married themselves, discouraged all three daughters from thinking of marriage. Dorian, especially, was expected to remain single and do great things with her mind. When Dorian married early and had two children right away, there was disappointment. Nevertheless, the family stuck by her even when she and her husband soon divorced. Dorian moved back in with her parents, bringing the children with her. As she and her parents listened to the reports of Pearl Harbor, they worried about the sister who was at the base in Hawaii. That night, Dorian was filled with an insistent need to do something toward the war effort. She enrolled in an engineering training program and became a promising young tool designer. Soon employed by Eastern Airlines, Dorian Parker managed a team of men and submitted a number of design improvements to her employer. When her designs were repeatedly rejected, she felt frustrated and quit.

Wartime regulations precluded Dorian from getting another engineering job, so she went to New York and got a job writing advertising copy. At lunch with a friend one day, Dorian heard that fashion models made $25 a week, then good money. Her friend thought Dorian was pretty enough to get a job. So, Dorian applied to a modeling agency. She was sent for her first assignment to see Diana Vreeland, then the fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar. Vreeland and the photographer, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, looked at Dorian for a long time. Then Vreeland told Dorian to go home and get some sleep, to come back in the morning, and no matter what, not to change her eyebrows. With uncharacteristic obedience, Dorian went home, returned the next day with untouched brows, and ended up on the cover of Bazaar.

Dorian’s new career was one that was stigmatized, much like acting had been before movies. Models were considered little more than prostitutes, an extension of old social purist ideas about display of the body, relationships between artists and models, and the general sin of picturing. Because of the potential shame to the family, Dorian and her parents agreed that she would not use her surname professionally, but would go by her first and middle names, “Dorian Leigh.” In some sense, it mattered little, since models were not known to the public by name in the 1940s.
Soon Dorian was making a lot of money, but she was still broke most of the time because the agency was so slow to pay her:

It all depended upon how honest the agency was and how much the model could de-pend upon its bookkeeping. If she wanted to find out how much her agency owed her, she had to make an appointment with the bookkeeper, who would then total up how much money her clients had already paid. If the agency said they hadn't paid, what was the girl to do? Go to the client? Yes, she could do that, but very often the client would lie and say he had paid when actually he hadn't. A girl could spend most of her time chasing down the money she had earned and still not get it. And it was true--some girls making $100,000 a year were one step away from poverty.

Dorian was quick to get impatient with this situation, so she marched into her employer's office and told him she didn't like the way he was running things. He laughed and Dorian, incensed at not being taken seriously, announced she would start her own agency and handle her own bookings. “Are you crazy?” he said, “You can't operate outside an agency!” Dorian answered: “I certainly can. My clients would call me if I were in Grand Central Station!” Making good on her threat, Dorian hired a secretary to answer calls and schedule appointments from the Elyée Hotel in New York. Soon other top models joined her. Dorian Leigh became the first woman to run a modeling agency in either America or Europe.

Let’s stop and recollect the ways in which Dorian had employed exchange and kinship. First, she was not encouraged to marry by her family, but did so against their wishes. Divorce was not a very acceptable alternative in most American families in the 1940s, particularly among the Irish and particularly in Texas. Yet her family gave her sanctuary when she left a marriage they had considered ill-advised. Dorian took up war work in a gesture of support for her sister, who was on a military base in Hawaii. As an engineer, Dorian clearly was no intellectual slouch. Though she pursued a nontraditional field, she was quick to give it up when she was not fairly recognized. Instead of slugging away for the “dignity” of being in a job that used her head rather than her body, she ended up in a career that most feminists would consider unambiguously demeaning. Yet, as a model, she not only earned more money, she also aggressively wrenched control of her own commoditization away from men and took it over for herself.

Dorian then committed the ultimate transgression by taking control over her body as a sexual being. “All through the war, I was quite promis-cuous, although I didn't think of my behavior in that way. I never went to bed with a man for money or any kind of favor, such as a job or a promotion, and I was able to say that for the years that followed as well. I was rather proud of the fact that I chose the men I loved.”

Dorian became the first of the “jet set” models, who hobnobbed with royalty and million-aires, like showgirls of the Gilded Age. “I knew or came to know almost every millionaire in the world while I was a model, and they were only too willing to lavish money on me--for a price I wasn't willing to pay. I didn't want to be a rich man's mistress or even his wife; I didn't want to be bought. I wanted to choose the man, or men, I was to love; it just happened that the ones I chose were young, good-looking--and broke.” The money Dorian made helped her to have the kinds of lovers she wanted, but led to unconventional financial arrangements. “I had to be myself, or so I thought. I had to live the way I chose, which meant that I needed an accommodating man--someone who could travel with me on assignments so we wouldn't have to be separated for such long periods of time; someone who would be ready to relax with me or have a good time together after I finished work, even when I finished at odd hours in the morning, which often was necessary. I didn't want to sit around and wait for a man to find time for me; I wanted him to be there when I needed him. And, if I had to pay some bills to make that possible, what difference did it make? It was only money, and I happened to have it.” Dorian's attitude and expecta-tions—often shared by her fellow models--were more in line with what was traditionally the male role. What gave these women the freedom to choose as well as “keep” their men was financial independence--and what gave them the money was the ability to commoditize their own beauty.

Dorian Leigh was an independent woman who took responsibility for her own sexuality, even though it occasionally caused her pain. She married twice more and had five children, many lovers and untold pregnancies. Her life was a constant battle between society's expectations and her own choices. She experienced triumph, but also tragedy. She made money, saw the world, and knew famous people, but she also experienced poverty and despair. Throughout, she had the love and support of her family. Dorian worked at reconciling the contradictions of her upbringing with her needs and hopes, but unlike many of her peers, she sometimes transcended her enculturation, usually maintained her autonomy, made and owned her choices.

Many feminists would discard whatever modest claim Dorian Leigh could make to having achieved freedom through taking control of her own exchange and her own sex life. As an “object” in an image, a model sells herself to be looked at. To them, this act of exchange is indistinguishable from prostitution, or even slavery, because they stubbornly insist that commercial images of women commoditize those women and not just the objects being offered for sale.