This book is a fictionalized story of the relationship of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. I have no idea how much of the book is true, and I don’t really care because I’m generally not interested in the biographies of movie stars. At times it reads like a filmography and at times it reads like tales from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Those parts of the book were more interesting to me than the Hayworth/Welles soap opera. Hayworth was obviously gorgeous, but also shy, insecure and drunk a lot of the time. She was sort of pitiful in this book, with no control over her life or career and not much personality. Welles was certainly the more creative of the two, but he wasn’t a fully fleshed out character either. I guess I wanted either more old Hollywood glamour and pizzazz or more of the creative process of Welles.

I received a free copies of the ebook and audiobook from the publisher.

BIG RED: A Novel Staring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles by Jerome Charyn just wasn’t for me. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Natalie Duke and it was fun to hear the slang of that time and learn more about Rita and Orson but I found it weird the way Rusty was telling their life stories. Maybe if you’re a big fan of Old Hollywood and these two stars then you’d enjoy this book more.
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Thank you to HighBridge Audio via NetGalley for my ALC!

An old school and fun story for readers to get lost away in. The story takes a little history and historical information and brings it together in a new, fun way.

Big Red is a perfectly fine novel for fans of old Hollywood, but it reads it large part like a recitation of facts that plenty of film buffs already know about Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. I had more fun learning the stuff I heard here from Karina Longworth's "You Must Remember This" podcast just because the point of that podcast is more intentionally informational rather than blurring lines between reality and fiction.

I think this book feels a bit more like a love letter to Welles's craft than to Hayworth, which isn't really a problem, but doesn't fit with the title or advertised focus of the story. I also had a hard time figuring out Rusty as a protagonist—she never felt like a real person to me, which maybe also says something about the difficulties of inventing characters while also writing about real people.

On a separate note, I read this on audio and didn't much enjoy it in that format, particularly because it seemed that the narrator didn't have the background in the field necessary for the text. A narrator who doesn't know the correct pronunciation of Marlene Dietrich's name in a book about Old Hollywood is a real bummer.