ON BERKELEY, DEL RÍO, AND WELLES—TOSS IN PARSONS AND HEARST AS WELL

BUSBY BERKELEY WAS RENOWNED for kaleidoscopic choreography. Dolores del Río with a career spanning 50 years was the first major female Latin American crossover star in Hollywood. Orson Welles was a polymath: actor, writer, theater and film producer, occasional enfant terrible. Louella Parsons was an American gossip columnist, a William Randolph Hearst syncopant. For more on Hearst, look to Welles’ Citizen Kane flick—and look hard.

Links among these personages abound. Here are several tidbits gleaned from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography, together with my usual Internet sleuthing. 

Orson Welles: A Biography, by Barbara Leaming, Limelight, 2004.

Bird of Paradise. As recounted in Wikipedia, “Producer David O. Selznick called the filmmaker King Vidor and said: ‘I want del Río and Joel McCrea in a love story in the South Seas. I didn’t have much of a story for the film, but be sure that it ends with the young beauty jumping into a volcano.’ ”

Here’s a pre-jump screen grab of Dolores del Río from Bird of Paradise (1932).

Wikipedia notes, “In 1960, the film entered the public domain in the United States because the claimants did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year per the Copyright Act of 1909.”

Click here to “HEAR THE HAWAIIAN SINGERS & DANCERS, SEE THE WONDERFUL VOLCANO SCENE.”

Hearst and Another Flick. Nine years later, another movie came out that plays a role in our tale: Citizen Kane is what Wikipedia describes as “a quasi-biographical film of Charles Foster Kane, a composite character based on American media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, as well as aspects of the screenwriters’ own lives. Upon its release, Hearst prohibited any mention of the film in his newspapers.” 

Gee, it might have had something to do with Kane’s last word being “Rosebud.” In the movie it’s the kid’s sled, but maybe it’s Hearst’s endearing name for his mistress Marion Davies’ er… private parts.

Whatever. Louella Parsons, Hearst’s hatchet lady in the matter, allegedly told Hollywood moguls, “Mr. Hearst says if you want private lives, I’ll give you private lives.”   

Picking Up With Leaming’s Bio: “Orson too found himself suddenly threatened with a well-researched expose of his furtive night life. If at this particular time he was especially vulnerable to this threat or thought himself to be so is because he had something to hide from the scrutiny of the press: his liaison with a married woman substantially older than he: Maria de los Dolores Asúnsolo y López Negrete, better known to her public as Dolores del Río.”

Leaming continues, “Although he had been having erotic fantasies about her since adolescence, Orson actually met Dolores at a huge Hollywood party given by Jack Warner: ‘We all moved to Darryl Zanuck’s ranch and there I met her,’ Welles told Leaming. ‘We went swimming together in the evening—oh she swam beautifully.’ ”  

“What Dolores did not know,” biographer Leaming writes, “was that Orson had watched her swimming once before in a movie he had seen and subsequently dreamed about in youth.’ 

Welles recounted to Leaming: “That’s when I fell in love with her. I was about 11 [actually 17] and she was in a picture about the south seas, a silent  [no, it was a talkie] with a lot of underwater scenes; you know, her little feet fluttering. She was as undressed as anyone I had ever seen on the screen and maddeningly beautiful. I had some young lady in the back row with whom I was fumbling; it changed my life.”

“But it wasn’t his young girlfriend who excited Orson,” Leaming says, “it really was the movie.” [See 18:49 of Bird of Paradise.]

“Oh I was obsessed with her for years,” Welles told Leaming. 

“Now some years later,” Leaming writes, “here she was in the flesh in exactly the same aquatic poses that had first gotten Orson going.” Orson and Dolores were an item 1940–1943. 

And guess who choreographed those Birds of Paradise Hawaiian dance scenes: Busby Berkeley—in one of his early uncredited gigs. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023