Jack White’s obsession with Rita Hayworth inspired two classics White Stripes songs
Worshipped around the world for her porcelain beauty, she was the archetypal female sex symbol. Sadly, Rita Hayworth’s life as Hollywood’s most glamorous star wasn’t all roses and fairytale endings. She was eroticised from a young age, both by her mother and the many men who wanted to possess her body. Whether it was relationships with cruel men, lavish parties or the warm oblivion of alcohol, Hayworth was always finding new ways of running from her troubled past. Sadly, she never quite succeeded.
“All her life was pain,” her second husband, the director Orson Welles, would later observe. To this day, Hayworth is as much an object of obsession as was when she appeared as the titular femme fatal in Charles Vidor’s Gilda. Just ask Jack White, who had many posters of her on his wall, and immortalised the actress in not one but two songs for The White Stripes.
2005’s Get Behind Me Satan features two songs which reference Hayworth. In the first of these, ‘White Moon’, Jack offers up a manic rumination on her era-defining beauty and the obsession it stimulated. “Oh Rita, oh Rita,” he begins, “If you lived in Mesita / I would move you with the beat of a drum / And this picture is proof / That although you’re aloof / You had the shiniest tooth ‘neath the sun.”
In ‘White Moon’, White evokes the kind of fan mania Rita was subjected to at the height of her fame. He does a similar thing in ‘Take, Take, Take’, in which White frames himself as a superfan who is drinking in a bar when Hayworth walks in. First, he asks her for an autograph. She signs a napkin and presses it to her rouged lips. He inspects the message, which, to his delight, reads: “My heart is in my mouth.” Then he asks for another favour, a photograph. Again she submits to his request. Then he wants a piece of her hair, but she is already walking through the door. All the while, White chants the same refrain: “take, take, take,” drawing attention to the world’s view of Hayworth as a resource to be plundered.
Of the two tracks, ‘White Moon’ is surely the most ambitious. Where ‘Take, Take, Take’ is a simple recollection of some fan fantasy, ‘White Moon’ is an exploration of how the spirit of a person can live on and influence culture in the unlikeliest of ways. In the final verse of ‘White Moon’, White sings: “She met me, then led me / And I ate what was fed me / Til I purged every word in this song,” implying that he was moved to write the song by some powerful creative connection to Hayworth.
Discussing the title of the album in an interview with Guitar World in 2006, White appears to support such an interpretation. “When you write songs, you become a conduit for all kinds of energy,” he began. “I may think the inspiration is coming out of me, but I’m not so sure sometimes. It makes me question what power is driving certain things. It’s hard to talk about because you can sound a little ridiculous.”
