Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 50. Trained Perfection

On the way home in the cable car I watched the motorman working the grip lever and brakes. Another metaphor: how do I grip my destiny cable? And what about the brakes? I could feel the movement of that cable under me but I didn’t know how to make my life-car do anything useful.

That evening I didn’t feel like going out for dinner and I didn’t feel like cooking so I ordered Chinese from the Kwan-Yin. I had most of a bottle of Cava with it, scanned the TV schedule and decided to watch Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai. Welles has never been venerated by me as much as he is generally thought to deserve but Rita Hayworth had married him and now they were both dead and she had outlived her beauty and her wits and was all gone, like champagne spilt on desert sands while her dancing flickered on demand for anyone with the necessary equipment. Fred Astaire said that she had been his favourite partner. ‘She danced with trained perfection and individuality,’ were his words. ‘Trained perfection’! From childhood up trained to delight an audience with the dazzle of her beauty, the grace and vividness of her movement, the spell of her charm, and to die knowing somewhere in herself that all of it was gone and she was alone except for her faithful daughter.

My mind drifted in and out of the twists of the plot, Welles’s dreadful brogue, the horrible voice of the actor who played George Grisby and the passionate whispers of Rita Hayworth. Part of the film was set in San Francisco, and Welles obviously liked the noirish melancholy of the horns on the Golden Gate Bridge because he kept them blowing even when there was no fog.

The picture wound up rather like the last act of Hamlet: Rita Hayworth died along with the evil husband and his evil partner, and she herself was revealed as no better than she should have been. Welles and his dreadful brogue survived the whole mess — after all, he directed. The film left me unmoved but internally I was weeping for Rita Hayworth of the Dancing Cansinos who grew up to become Fred Astaire’s favourite partner. I ejected the Welles film from my mind and inserted the scene from You’ll Never Get Rich in which she and Astaire are practising a dance routine from a show they’re working on. She was wearing rehearsal shorts that allowed her leg action to be fully seen. The gallantry of that trained perfection! It made the world seem a better place. Not content with my mental playback, I put the DVD of the film in the player and watched it tearfully. To give so much and end with so little! I poured myself a large Laphroaig and raised my glass. ‘Thank you, Rita Cansino,’ I said, ‘for making the world a better place while you were in it.’ Then I drank it down and woke up the next morning with a bad taste in my mouth but no regrets.