On my television set tonight, in the black-and-white movie Gilda, Rita Hayworth is seducing Glenn Ford, heartbreakingly refuting the old adage “the camera never lies.” It is close to 40 years now since last we were together, and the woman I had known in real life is, for me, still the single most tragic example of how far from the real person an image can be.

Rita Hayworth

When dinner is over, we walk through the chilly, dirty streets and she gathers her black-fringed shawl close around her shoulders, slips her arm into mine, and forgets my name. “Oh, yeah, yeah, Frank,” she says. “You’ll be Frankie. I love Frankie. Not Sinatra. The guy was never on time.” We pass an open-air market and she insists we buy fruit and cheese to keep in our rooms. “Just to have, you know, for the ghosts.”

As we walk back toward the hotel holding string sacks of food, she clings to me, her arm tight in the crook of mine, our bodies finding a rhythm, and she whispers words I cannot understand. When I see her to her door, she leans up to chastely kiss me good night and says: “Do me a favor, baby: don’t ever call me mother.”

Film sets, particularly on remote and distant locations, can be anything from warm, collegial good times to lethal, tension-filled bloodbaths. Without the familiar surroundings of home, family, and routine, these shoots can become a breeding ground for heightened drama, soaring libidos, and neurotic behavior. Ours becomes a polarized, not altogether homogeneous collection of crazy loners. At night, doors are closed tight and the cast mostly isolates. On this set a lot of the crew, a mix of American and hard-bitten Mexican wranglers, hits the seedy whorehouses regularly. There are torn-up hotel rooms, hallways reeking of marijuana, heavy bar bills, and drunken brawls at 3 a.m. on the barren streets.

Rita and I drift toward each other like two boats on an unfamiliar sea, torn free of their moorings. We could just as easily have floated in opposite directions, but real life is now reel life, and on movie locations personal relationships are less often chosen than grasped at. Rita grasped at me and I chose to take her on. The 20-year difference in our ages suited the unreality of time and place. Each of us wanted something from the other, and neither of us much contemplated motive or consequence.

A ritual began. Dinner most nights in her rooms. She buys dozens of candles, lights them all, and puts them on every surface, including the floor. I start a fire and pour the wine. And we sit by the open window, our elbows resting on the low wooden sill. Three stories below is the main street of the town, brightly lit, dusty, dirty, and noisy. She wants to make another deal.

We will count trucks. All trucks passing by her window going left to right are mine. All going right to left are hers. Whoever has the most trucks by dinnertime gets treated. I stay with the wine, but she graduates to bourbon. Dinner is served on the floor, and we eat to the cacophony of noise from the street. Her hair is washed free of the day’s set and spray, her face polished clean of makeup, her dress a plain white caftan thrown over her naked body. She crosses her legs, barely touches the food, and talks and talks. Mostly about men. Shards of these ramblings stay with me.

“He found me when I was a kid. Brought me to L.A. What the hell did I know? I went along.” Of another she said, “Oh, Christ, he beat me bad. Then he skipped. I had to sign with Cohn [Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures] for another seven to pay off the debts.” Of Orson Welles she said, “He tried to help me to be a great actress, but he always needed money.” And Prince Aly Khan: “I didn’t want to live nowhere where they kiss the hem of your skirt. I mean, what is that, for Chrissakes? Two guys laying on top of each other outside my bedroom door so I couldn’t get out. I didn’t want to be no f–kin’ princess anyway. So I went to the old man. He liked me, and I said to him, ‘Just give me my kid and let me out of here. I don’t want anything.’” And then she says, “Geez, they were always around. Husbands, boyfriends, lawyers, managers, press agents—the bosses. Where the f–k did they all go?” Her voice is tinny and high, almost childlike—until she picks up the telephone and says in movie-star timbre: “This is Miss Hayworth. Would you please send up another bottle of bourbon.”

When it becomes late and she has had enough of it, she flings her head back, hair flying about her face, and, in the candle’s light and fire’s glow, once again becomes the Goddess. She knows I am looking and she holds the pose, lowers her head, tucks in her chin, raises her eyes to mine, grabs my hair, and says, “Don’t stare at me, baby. You can see me in the movies.”

We will be seven weeks on this turbulent sea, and no other boats take notice of ours or even float past—none but Mitchum’s. A man whom very little escaped. As regards Rita and me, he becomes my one and only confidant. We never discuss their past together, nor does he offer any wisdom or make any judgment. He would just listen and then say: “Frankie, it is what it is.”

But one day he comes to me and says: “Listen, pal, we’re never going to finish this f–king picture if we don’t get your girl to work on time.” Mitch, Rita, and I have our own local drivers, and each of them regards the harrowing ride along narrow, unfenced mountain roads as challenges to be met with daredevil speed. Mitch sleeps through his rides and so do I. But Rita, who is terrified of all moving things, makes her driver go at a snail’s pace and often arrives at work an easy hour or more after everyone else. So Mitch comes up with a plan: “Look,” he says. “Let’s the three of us ride together. You sit up front and we’ll put Rita in the back with me.”

Early mornings become a struggle of manipulating Rita into a broken-down jalopy and laying her down on the floor of the back seat. Mitch tosses a blanket over her as she pulls her floppy sailor hat down past her eyes. I then hop in the front and off we go. These rides become a hilarious routine of Rita laughing and screaming at the top of her lungs, with Mitch stretched out on the back seat outshouting her, singing Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, exactly as written, in perfect pitch, while a non-English-speaking driver careens close to the narrow road’s edge as wildly as he dares. When we reach the location, I get out and Mitch and I lift Rita from the floor, remove the blanket, pull up her hat, and calm her down. “Cheated the old Grim Reaper again,” he says and saunters off to his trailer.

On set, Rita continues to be a nightmare for everyone. There is not a shred of temperament, not a demand, not so much as a hint of cruelty. Rather, it is like watching a schoolgirl desperately trying to learn her times tables and unable to get past the twos. Very little sympathy is shown for her. It is assumed she is a drunk and is boozing in her trailer. No one, including Mitch, reaches out to help her. So little was known then of her disease that even I regarded the panic and terror in her eyes as the neurotic insecurity of a fading star.

In all her scenes, large placards are put next to the camera and her lines are written out in huge block letters. It becomes an agony for her to try to hold on to what little she can, and an embarrassment to face each daunting day. But she does face them, and she does make it through. Her pride and happiness at the smallest of her achievements are pitifully touching.

The nights are another kind of hell for her. She has climbed into my boat, and I come to see I have set a dangerous course for which I am woefully unprepared. There are stretches of time when the mist in her mind clears and she is very much with me. But often she desperately clings, weeps, and talks in words I cannot understand, and it is not always my name she calls out in the dark. When at last she sleeps, I leave her and go back to my room. There is, sadly, never a time when we awake in the same bed.

Our film comes to its predictable end, and on our last night, with my bags packed and waiting in my room, late in the candlelight I say the words I know she wants to hear. An easy lie to tell. The next morning at dawn I abandon her and fly back to real life.

A year later there she is on the Christmas cover of Esquire, looking like a waxen image of herself, smiling and confident, her arms wrapped around a Santa dummy, once more facing a lying camera. Our film is the last movie she ever makes. Her physical body passed out of existence on May 14, 1987, but Rita’s essence had faded from the frame long before.

Now, almost 40 years after I faded from her life, there she is in black and white on my television screen. And the camera’s lie is actually welcome and soothing. Her beauty is staggering. Her sultry voice, her body, the way she moves close to a man, the sway of her hips as she drunkenly belts out “Put the Blame on Mame,” stop time and obliterate what had been our reality. Her acting is honest and true. A thoroughbred, desperate to be taken seriously, cursed with a divine beauty, who could not find a man to desire that beauty as only a part of the whole woman.

Near the end of Gilda, it seems she has lost Glenn Ford forever because he believes her character is what she has been pretending to be: a loose woman out for a good time with as many men as she can find. Feeling profoundly alone and misunderstood, sitting at a bar, shyly smiling at the bartender, her face full of loss and vulnerability, she is hauntingly lovely. The bartender asks: “Would you like to have a tiny drink of ambrosia, suitable only for a goddess?”

In the movie’s final moments, the villain is killed and the lovers reunite.

“Let’s go home,” Rita says to Glenn as they face a new sunrise.

Those nights we spent together in Mexico, she’d say:

“Put all the lights out, Frankie, and open the shutters.”

And by the light of the candles and fire, she would once again become the legendary beauty who had obsessed and haunted my young imagination, swaying and dancing for me.

“Stay with me, baby. Stay with me tonight.”

I never shared a sunrise with Rita Hayworth; and I did not try to save her, nor could I have. The best I was able to do was take into my arms someone no longer any of the things she had once been: Movie Star, Princess, Goddess, or Gilda. Just a 54-year-old courageous and gentle woman named Margarita Carmen Cansino, one of God’s lost souls, clinging in the night to a man whose name she could not remember.

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From the book Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them by Frank Langella.

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Further out he could see the silhouette of the city, first the UOB building and then the Singapore Flyer, sparkling out and standing firm against the cool breeze of the night. He thought of how the world would start in another couple of hours and how serene it looks right now. Nick took another look at his watch, it says a little past two. The party was in all the rage in the room right now and the door could barely contained the noise of fun and loving.

“Why are you here?” Nick wondered to himself.

He had found himself wanting the toilet but found it locked, passion emanating within, and embarrassed by his intrusion had muttered a soft apology which he doubt would reach the ears of anyone and instead went over to the balcony for a smoke. Nick recalled that it was Cherie party and this was her apartment. Speaking of which, he realised that she was not seen since he arrived at the party a little while back.

The wind was making his affair a quick one, and as the embers of his cigarette died out Nick contemplate between taking out another one or making his way back into the party. He decided with the latter, and with that succumbed to his mischievous impulse of flicking the butt of the cigarette out and where the wind may carry.

Nick then return back to the party.

His first reaction was how packed the room itself was. There were maybe 10, 15 people and most were huddled close in the middle, swaying with the music. The rest were around the corners of the room on square beanbag sofas, either making out, passed out, or trying to chat under the music.

A few girls had came up to Nick after his horseplay with his baseball jacket and one of them had borrowed it. He scanned around the room and saw her dancing, but did not felt compelled to approach her to take it back. Nick thought that she was a little too aggressive. The trouble with parties like this was that there were only two ways to get out of it, dead drunk or dead sober. Nick knew that if he start he would no doubt enjoy himself, being the state he was in he could do with a little easing up. He abstained from alcohol because he was looking for an opportunity to talk to her.

She was Nick’s perfect stranger in this cold night, and he wanted her.

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Sitting at the corner of the room and sipping soda, the night has been outright boring for her. Granted that even though there was everything required out of a party, drinks, finger food, blaring music, and lots of cute guys, it was still in the early hours of the evening and the atmosphere seems to be more on an awkward level, the hour where people wear their most polite faces and mingle in the crowd with small talk and whispers. That would have summed up her entire night.

He came in at a little bit before midnight. By then the crowd had already began to liven up, there were the occasional sporadic burst of cheers and laughter from somewhere in the room, before being absorb back into the deafening roar of music. Cherie, the birthday girl, was leading him into the room by putting her hands around his arm, the same way a girl would do when she brought a guy home to introduce to her parents, except that he was not hers. A couple of guys came up from the crowd and slapped him on the back, commenting on how all latecomers would have to drink extra. Already she was writing him off as just another guy in the party when what he did next really caught her attention.

He was trying to take off his baseball jacket, unaware that the zipper at the edge had latched onto each other. His arms were already at the back and he was unable to tug at it further when he notice the point that brought all the strain. He looked at it with his half cocked eyebrow, a feature which she would so love in time to come. She also thought he look kinda cute and quirky in that half arm locked position. The crowd apparently thought the same thing as well. All the attention was now on the new addition in the room.

“A little help please?” he mumbled after awhile to some laughters, as if trying to break the deadlock both physically and atmospheric wise.

“I’m serious!” to more laughters.

Cherie, giggling hard and with her face flushed from colour, came up and tried to unzip the latch for him. She thought Cherie did a poor and fumbling job out of it, not helped by the fact that he teased Cherie on, making some comment which sounded like, “be careful of the gun”.

The jacket came off, and she gasped as there really was a gun sitting with half its barrel tucked in his jeans, just beside the suspender. He took it out, pulled at it, and pointed at Cherie in between her eyes and slightly above the forehead. Cherie had stopped laughing. Then he pointed it at the ceiling and what sounded like a spring being released from its tension sprang forth, together with a plastic pellet ricocheting off the ceiling.

“Hah, hah. Gotcha!” the tension in the air broke and the crowd went crazy. So did Cherie. And for the first time since she arrived at the party, she cracked up as well.

And that was the last time she would smile, for she thought he’d never notice her. After all, she’s seen how a few girls had came up to him, and how he had brushed them away.

If only she had known that he had brushed them away because he had saw the way she was laughing at him and his antics when he came into the room, and how he thought that was the most lovely and charming thing he saw that night.

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Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

- Stephen King

Green. Good to go. I roll on the throttle as I savour her initial roar as it engulfs around me. I’ve always enjoyed the sensation, a hungry burst of fire unleashed from an excess of idling. The growling gets louder and I need to contain it. I roll off the throttle, pull in the clutch, and kick up the gear. Steady as she goes again. The euphonic humming indicates her sweet spot while I watch the meter goes. So far so good.

Then he came.

First, a small speck of flicker. Nothing to worry about. I pay no attention and continue with my routine. A fleet moment passes and it grows into a coruscate blaze. Like a lion stalking his prey he gains no further. I can barely see that silhouette of him. Yet his frame betrays his intention.

Big boy wants to play.

My grip on the throttle widens and like a sleeping ancient beast awaken by an intruding disbeliever she howls to life, very annoyed. I’m taken aback by the sudden rush of power as I struggle to control her. Man, it’s been a long time since I did this. The vibration gets heavier and resistance hack through me, reminding me of my mere mortality even though its greed for higher power blinds me. I tame her after three lamp posts. I glance back and to my surprise he’s still behind me. Damn, he’s fast. I could almost see something of a smirk through the dark of the night. Or maybe I’m imagining it. His visor is down and he’s clad in black.

At least he’s got some fashion sense. I make out a glowing eye instead of two through my mirrors. One headlamp. He’s a Kawasaki KRR150 rider. KRR. The nemesis of SP. My nemesis. Maybe that explains the hostility. Guess I won’t be making a new friend around here.

I knew the next stretch very well. Heck, I use this road all the time. Few placements of traffic lights, wide lanes and most importantly, a low volume of users. This is my territory. You don’t mess with me around here. There would be a hairpin bend ahead due to construction work along the road shoulder. The trap is set.

I slung a submissive posture, slow down and watch him pass by. I could see a redbull sticker across his lower plate of fairing. Very nice. He smells victory. I think otherwise.

He sees it. What he did next was something I wasn’t expecting. He executed a perfect corner of the hairpin bend. No flashes of brake lights. He went in with just his engine brake. He was mocking the ground inability to graze an immortal with his legs hanging just slightly off the gravel. And then he disappears across the foliage, leaving a wake of dust and smoke and a triumphant roar of victory. It fades away soon enough leaving me with the tranquil of the night again, like an old friend trying to console me.

Wow.

No doubt I was disappointed, but I was grinning face to face from that experience. He did more wonders than I could imagine, with his steed.

I’ve finally met a true racer.

spi·ral (sprl)
adj.
 - Coiling or developing around an axis in a constantly changing series of planes
 - Circling around a center at a continuously increasing or decreasing distance.

It’s a hard life we lead out there..