RITA HAYWORTH OLD MOVIE

Yasmin Khan Jeffries adds this, fidgeting with her blue-veined hands, playing with her long light hair, which she keeps flipping over to one side, absentmindedly, like a '40s movie siren: 'It's such a humiliating disease - for everyone. And it seems over now, this four- or five-minute soft-voiced chronicle of pain and splintered memory and illogic coming from a hunched-forward and elegantly slim figure on a flowered sofa in a Northwest Washington home. Do you know Haldol?' Maybe all a listener could hope to do here is wait until it's over. It was this brand new show, she had never seen it before, but of course there was no way you could make her believe that.

'I've seen it, I've seen it, Yas, it's garbage, turn it off,' she'd scream. She'd look at someone and say, 'I know you, I know you.' Her brain just couldn't find it. After she was dead I went through her things and found a book about losing your mind. She had to know her mind was being robbed. It was like she was trying to get a part. She got very gay, almost flirty, started laughing, being very charming and conversational and wonderful. He was going on about this and that, just chatting, then he said, sort of slid into it, 'Well, Rita, who's the president of the United States?' And Mom caught it instantly. 'Bennington, what's Bennington?' 'We went to the doctor - I'm jumping forward. Not forget the piece of music, forget Bennington. This was later, much later, after I'd left California - I know I'm skipping around, but it's the only way I can seem to tell it. 'I'd tell her I was working on a piece of music at Bennington. Oh, yes, and throwing the food out of the cupboards, I mean, just going through the refrigerator and the cupboards and pitching everything out. I can go back and all of it connects now. I kept wondering why her clothes were ending up in my closets. And did you know it's one of my mother's favorite roles? 'Maybe she'd reorganize her closets - over and over, obsessively.

Just something fleeting and fragmentary in her face. What is the date of that movie, late '50s? Maybe the world couldn't see it if they went back and looked, but I've gone back and I think I can see it. I think it's there in 'Separate Tables.' I can see it. The paranoia, her mood swings, the funny behavior. 'It was so many little things in the beginning. There were two decades of hell before that. She wasn't diagnosed as an Alzheimer's until 1980. We had a name at last, Alzheimer's! Of course, that didn't really come until the last seven or eight years. You can't imagine the relief just in getting a diagnosis. I thought it was alcoholism - alcoholic dementia. Rita Hayworth was about 40 years old when she began to go down in a way that told you there would never be any coming up again. The daughter's name is Princess Yasmin Aga Khan Jeffries, and she is nearly 40 years old and remarkably beautiful in several senses of that word. Listen to some jagged arrows in a daughter's talk, a daughter who nursed her mother in her own Manhattan apartment until she died two years ago, haggard and vacant as a witch in a child's nightmare. The way Hollywood and life devoured Marilyn Monroe is a better known parable, but it can't be any more wounding than this one. But it all went away so fast, that Rita, the one who played light on our most erotic '40s movie fantasies, and what came in its wake was the thing without name or explanation.

Once, she slinked through the Argentine as 'Gilda.' (Audiences were said to gasp at that first sultry sight of her.) Once, or this was another part of the myth, B29 flight jockeys decoupaged her image onto the atomic bomb. Once, she was never lovelier - that was the name of a movie she did with Fred Astaire. Fate has some cruel sorrows in its quiver, and the story of Rita Hayworth, who slid from sex goddess to Alzheimer's victim inside of three decades, is one of them.

Rita hayworth old