Jerome Charyn has made something of a specialty of writing novels centered on historical figures, among them Jerzy and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Now Charyn strikes Tinseltown gold with Big Red: A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, a look at the doomed romance and up-and-down careers of two Hollywood legends.
Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn is convinced that Orson Welles, the now out-of-favor genius behind Citizen Kane, will ruin the career of Columbia screen goddess Rita Hayworth, Welles's girlfriend (and eventual wife). Desperate, Cohn hires Rusty Redburn, a cinephile and self-described "basement clerk" in Columbia's publicity department, to spy on Hayworth and Welles by posing as Hayworth's private secretary. (If Rusty wasn't a semi-out lesbian, this could be the premise of golden-era screwball comedy.) But Rusty quickly sours on Cohn's assignment: she develops a genuine friendship with Hayworth and a professional relationship with Welles, even becoming his script girl on one picture.
Rusty is, indeed, a "pipperoo," as Welles calls her, functioning as not just the novel's narrator but also its conscience. ("All the girls in the film were fleshpots--merchandise for the men," Rusty grouses about the Hayworth hit Cover Girl.) Spanning 1943 to 1958, Big Red is manna to fans of Old Hollywood, with Rusty, as Charyn's mouthpiece, riffing eloquently on key films on Hayworth's and Welles's résumés. The book includes delicious cameos by real-life Hollywood players besides Cohn, among them the conniving gossip columnist Louella Parsons and, hauntingly, a coked-up Errol Flynn. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer