If This Was Happiness - A Biography of Rita Hayworth (1989)

A beautiful actress, a gifted dancer, a fiery screen temptress linked to some of the most handsome men of her generation, Rita Hayworth seemed to live the life that dreams are made of. But the reality behind the fantasy was a harsh one. Sexually abused by her father as a young girl, Rita constantly searched for a man to save her, marrying five times. At the age of forty-two, Alzheimer's disease began to ravage her mind, cutting short her career at its peak. A haunting and sympathetic tribute to the talented but insecure beauty who was created, and ultimately destroyed, by the movies.
“If this was happiness,” said Orson Welles of their time together, “imagine what the rest of her life had been!” In reconstructing that life, Barbara Leaming has drawn on medical records, government documents, trial transcripts, movielot memoranda, and the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses to create an astonishingly moving portrait of a woman at odds with herself, whose present was continually compromised by her past. Perceptive, intelligent, compulsively readable, IF THIS WAS HAPPINESS is a rare biography — one that combines the pathos and allure of its subject. [From the inside cover.]