She Was Hollywood's 'Love Goddess' and Married a Real Prince. The Thing That Destroyed Her Had No Cure.

Rita Hayworth could still face the camera, until she was forced to disappear

On a film set in Mexico in 1972, Rita Hayworth waited between takes while a hairstylist crouched just out of frame, ready to feed her the next line.

Director Ralph Nelson later said Hayworth suffered “total memory lapses” that were “not confined to acting,” and crew accounts describe hairstylist Lynn Del Kail speaking her dialogue to her one sentence at a time from off camera.

It was, by then, an old arrangement. Someone had been feeding Rita Hayworth her lines, in one form or another, for most of her life: a father who chose her dance steps, a studio that chose her name and her hairline, a husband who chose which men she was introduced to.

The Wrath of God was simply the first time the cue came from just outside a camera frame instead of from inside a career.

Hollywood spent years teaching Margarita Cansino how to become Rita Hayworth. The industry had far less patience when she could no longer remember the part.

The men who managed her started when she was 12. It began in a nightclub in Tijuana that didn't check ages, with a man who didn't ask permission.

That man was her father.