Last respects paid to 'love goddess’

Press, 20 May 1987, Page 10

Last respects paid to 'love goddess’

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles Hollywood’s “love goddess,” Rita Hayworth, went back to her hometown yesterday for fellow stars, including Glenn Ford and Cesar Romero, to pay their last respects in a flower-strewn funeral service. The body of the red-haired Spanish dancer was wheeled slowly in a coffin into the packed Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd, in the film star colony of Beverly Hills, while a string orchestra played from a balcony. Miss Hayworth, aged 68, died of Alzheimer’s disease, which even robbed her of the memory of her triumphs, at the New York home of her daughter, Princess Yasmin Khan. Miss Hayworth, who said she had loved and hated the Hollywood that made her a world star, spent her last six years, often in great pain, in New York. But her body was brought back to be buried in a cemetery close to the M.G.M. studio.

A tearful Jane Withers, a former child star and now a grandmother, told the congregation of how she and Miss Hayworth had held hands and prayed before the start of a film scene together because she found Miss Hayworth trembling with fright. “I was startled to find how painfully shy she was,” Miss Withers said. "She was a sweet, kind, gentle lady.” Tourists and sightseers, in T-shirts and shorts, sat with the fashionably-dressed congregation in the modern cream church, where Elizabeth Taylor married her first husband, Nicky Hilton. The altar was festooned with wreaths and giant bouquets of white lilies and crocuses and white flowers decorated the pews. The coffin was covered in a blanket of lilies and white roses. The honorary pallbearers included Ford, who starred with Miss Hayworth in what was possibly her most famous film, "Gilda.” ■