When Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles split up in 1948, she told the press: "I can't take his genius any more." Both sides were said to have been unfaithful. But David Camus and Nick Abadzis have come up with a loopily different version of the story, one they tell in this charming new graphic novel (words by Camus, who is French; pictures by Abadzis, who lives in Brooklyn and won an Eisner award for his 2007 book, Laika, a fictionalised account of the life of the dog the Soviets sent into space in Sputnik II).
As Camus and Abadzis have it, Welles and Hayworth parted because she smoked the most precious cigar in his collection, an irreplaceable Cuban rolled by Conchita Marquez, the island's greatest ever torcedora. After this, you understand, there was no way forward; whether these stars loved each other or not, divorce was the only possible outcome.
It's 1947, and Welles and Hayworth have just finished making The Lady from Shanghai. At home in Hollywood, the director takes receipt of a box of celebratory cigars, sender unknown. It doesn't take him long to realise that these are really special. Slightly oily, soft to the touch, and covered with a layer of dusty white mould, he soon recognises them as the work of the legendary Marquez: "The sweet smell of her cigars was unlike any other – a heavenly blend of perspiration and grime that drove cigar lovers mad."
Naturally, Welles is thrilled, though how he will resist smoking them all, he has no idea. And resist he must, for there are no more where these came from. Marquez is dead, having become suddenly allergic to nicotine. It was hoped that a clinic in Switzerland would save her, but she was unable to resist rolling the glorious dark green tobacco leaves she packed in her trunk for the voyage, and by the time she arrived in Europe, it was too late.
What Welles doesn't know, however, is that her spirit lives on in a single cigar – one that happens to be lying at the bottom of his box. Sure enough, Marquez's shade now appears before him, begging that this particular cigar might be locked safely in his humidor, alongside an exquisite carved pipe Welles bought at auction, in which, by happy coincidence, resides the spirit of a sailor she fell in love with on the boat to Europe. Welles agrees, and all is well until Hayworth, who is enraged by his smoking, raids his humidor in his absence.
Does all this sound surreal, even a little barmy? Maybe so. All I can tell you is that on the page it works wonderfully well, becoming an unlikely fairy tale that takes in both Hollywood's golden age and the mystique and ritual so beloved of cigar aficionados. Abadzis's drawings are voluptuous and comical, and Camus combines speech bubble wit with the narrative solemnity of a fable. Welles, you feel certain, would have loved it.
