RITA MORENO on the Actor’s Life
“How many times in my life have I said, ‘I’ll never work again’? How many times do actors say that to themselves? Over and over. It’s as though you somehow never learn that particular lesson, because show business is so bizarre, it’s so odd, it’s so demanding, it’s so mean.”
One creative cultural area where Americans have been at the forefront for over a century, even before recorded sound (“talkies”) was possible, has been the motion picture. From a base in Southern California, often referred to as Hollywood, entrepreneurs built studios, and young men and women came there to develop their acting skills, with the hope of becoming a star—a Clark Cable, Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, or Meryl Streep.
Some motion picture stars also become stars on Broadway or on television.
Few of those actors or actresses were at the top of their profession for seven decades and still performed in their late eighties. And fewer still were awarded all of the most significant awards of their profession: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, Kennedy Center Honor, and Golden Globe. And even fewer have also been awarded two of the highest awards a president of the United States can bestow on a performing artist: the National Medal of Arts and Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Actually, there is only one living person who has done all of the above, despite the fact that she suffered a great deal of discrimination in her career because she was Puerto Rican. That person is Rita Moreno, who first came into American consciousness as the Academy Award–winning Anita in the epic West Side Story movie of 1961. But that role did not free Rita Moreno from being typecast as the typical barefoot actress playing roles that Hollywood and Broadway thought appropriate for a woman of Latin descent.
In time, because of her considerable skills as a dancer, actress, and singer, and a larger-than-life personality combined with extraordinary beauty, Rita Moreno overcame prejudice and showed the full array of her talents through every medium available to performing artists.
She also led an at times tempestuous life. The longtime lover of Marlon Brando, she once came close to committing suicide over Brando’s infidelities.
I first came to know Rita Moreno when the Kennedy Center awarded her a Kennedy Center Honor in 2015, and I found her to be the most pleasant and engaging of persons, with no Hollywood star airs or pretensions. She had led a full life as a performer but still seemed to relish the thrill of entertaining others.
This interview, done on April 29, 2017, as part of the center’s Profiles in Creativity series, only summarizes some of the highlights of an exciting professional and personal life. The love of her life was actually not a famous performer, but a medical doctor, Leonard Gordon, to whom she was married for forty-five years until his death, and with whom she had one daughter, Fernanda, to whom she is very close. For those who want to learn more about this gifted woman, I highly recommend her autobiography, Rita Moreno: A Memoir. As in the interview, so too in the book, no holds are barred.
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You’ve now been in show business for more than seventy years. An incredible career. You’ve won all the kinds of awards, every award you can possibly win—the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, every award. Why do you think you’ve been so successful? You had good genes? You worked harder? You’re smarter? You’re more talented? What do you think was the reason?
RITA MORENO (RM): Why do I think I’ve been so successful? I have no idea. That’s for you to say! Why do you think I’ve been so successful, seriously?
DR: You worked very hard, you had a lot of innate talent, you practiced when you were very young, and you were really driven. How about that?
RM: Here’s the thing. I know a lot of people who did all of those things and haven’t gotten as fortunate as I. I know a lot of people who deserve all of the attention in the world, all kinds of honors, and don’t have them. I really think at a certain point it’s in the lap of the gods. I do.
DR: Let’s think of it another way. You’ve been in show business for seventy years. Many people your age are spending time with their grandchildren—you’re doing that too—but they’re not competing actively in the performing arts world. You are now filming a new show for Netflix, One Day at a Time [it ran for three seasons starting in 2017, the year of this interview]. You must feel young there because Norman Lear is the producer and he’s ninety-four. Why have you decided to continue your career? Not that everyone doesn’t want you to do it.
RM: Because I love it! I love what I do. Look at me eighty-five, for God’s sake. I have an album out, in Spanish, which is produced by Emilio Estefan. I have a book out, which I know you’ve been carrying around. I have all of these things going for me. What an astonishing life I have. I wake up humming.
DR: You should bottle that. That’s pretty impressive. But let me ask: You’ve won all these great awards. Which one surprised you the most?
RM: The Oscar. At the time that the Oscars came along, I was doing another crappy film in Manila in the Philippines, where I was playing yet another dusky maiden, a guerrilla girl in World War II. Then to my astonishment I got nominated and I was flown into Hollywood for the night.
I was really pretty sure that Judy Garland was going to get it, because number one, it was Judy Garland playing a dramatic role in a film called Judgment at Nuremberg. I thought, “I don’t have a chance.”
But I wanted to be there just in case, and they called my name. I damn near wet my knickers. I could not believe it! I had flown in, I was exhausted with the time change. You saw that really thrilling and touching speech: “I don’t believe it.” I’ve always wanted to make up for that. I think I did when I got the wonderful Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.
But the best part of that night is that as I got off the stage, Joan Crawford was there. She was the cohostess, and I think Rock Hudson—yes, he gave me the Oscar—Rock Hudson was the other host. And she, Joan Crawford, liked to drink. Vodka was her drink, and she had a Pepsi cooler in her dressing room because her husband was Mr. Pepsi, I forget his name, a very famous man. [It was Alfred Steele.]
She had been spiking her Pepsis with quite a bit of vodka. When I got offstage and into the wings, she was drunk as a skunk. A photographer came over to take a picture. She saw the photographer and she grabbed me and hugged me. She was built like a linebacker.
She’s got me in this grip like this and the photographer says, “Can I see Miss Moreno’s face, please?” She really was crushing my face against her bosom, such as it was. “Oh no,” she says, “she’s so upset.” She wanted the picture, right? I’m saying, “I’m not upset, I’m not upset!”
It ended up that they had to wrest me from her grip. She would not let me go! They wanted to take me to the press room because I just won this amazing Oscar, this girl that half the world hadn’t heard of.
DR: Let’s go back to the beginning of your life. You were born in Puerto Rico, and your mother was only seventeen when you were born?
RM: I think she was about seventeen.
DR: You were living happily in Puerto Rico for five years or so.
RM: It was lovely. I was born in Humacao, and then we lived in a town called Juncos, which is right close to the rain forest. It was an idyllic life for a little girl. The fragrances—I mean, you can imagine, it’s just pure paradise, Puerto Rico. I used to play with these teensy little frogs that were no bigger than your thumbnail called coqui because they made that sound. Coqui! Coqui!
It was a wonderful life. Then my mother decided that we needed to have a better life. She left me with my father, whom she had divorced, and she took a ship to New York City, and worked in sweatshops as a seamstress. She made enough money at some point to go back to Puerto Rico to get me and bring me back to the United States for this better life that she thought about.
DR: You went on a cruise liner, which is a very big ship.
RM: You know what, the funniest things happen. God’s editing room sometimes does some interesting things. The moment we were out at sea we had a huge, really nasty storm. And everybody came from the hold where we were, which of course was not smart, because that’s when you really get sick.
The trip took about three days longer than it should have because of this awful storm. We approach the United States, and there is this enormous green lady holding the biggest ice cream cone I have ever seen.
DR: You had a luxurious apartment waiting for you?
RM: Yes, of course. In a place called La Bron—the Bronx.
DR: With lots of your relatives?
RM: Yes, it was wonderful. It was a four-bedroom apartment, but each family had a room, and my mommy and I had one room also.
It was really very tough. It was very difficult. And it was cold. I had never seen a tree without leaves on it. I remember, in the bus on the way to La Bron, I said to my mommy, I said, “What happened to the trees? There’s no leaves!” She said, “It’s called winter.”
That’s when I learned that there was another different kind of weather. We didn’t have that in Puerto Rico. We had the rainy season, and we had hot and we had balmy, but we didn’t know about winter.
DR: Eventually your mother worked hard enough and you got your own apartment.
RM: We got our own apartment. We slept in one little small iron bed. And she sent me to kindergarten. I didn’t know a word of English. This was before the Puerto Rican diaspora. So there were very few Hispanic kids in kindergarten. That’s when I really began to understand that this was not going to be an easy life.
DR: There was discrimination. People called you names.
RM: Oh my God, I got called names. On the way to school, usually on the way back for lunch, on the way back from school in the afternoon. There were gangs, and I would do a zigzag route to our apartment building because these little gangs would gang up and call me names like “Spic” and “garlic mouth” and “gold tooth.”
I was very young. I didn’t understand why that was happening. When you’re very young like that, you are tender and you tend to believe what people tell you, and if they say you’re not worthy and that you don’t have value, you believe that. So I grew up feeling that way about myself. I never told my mom about those nasty occasions.
DR: Your mother decided that you might get some dance lessons and you became a child dancer?
RM: A friend of hers, Irene Lopez, was a Spanish dancer and she saw me bopping around the apartment one time and she said, “I think Rosita might have some talent. Can I take her to my dance teacher?” My mom said yes, and Irene took me to a man named Paco Cansino, who it turned out was Rita Hayworth’s uncle. He was kind of royalty in dance circles. That’s where I learned to dance professionally.
DR: You started getting some gigs. You were doing bar mitzvahs.
RM: I did bar mitzvahs! I did weddings, all kinds. Jewish, Catholic weddings. I was what, eight, nine, ten?
DR: When you get to the ripe old age of about thirteen, you’re doing Broadway.
RM: Yes, my very first theater experience.
DR: And what was that like?
RM: It closed overnight. One show. It was a shock. I found out that all of that kind of magic can go away literally overnight. We rehearsed for about three and a half weeks. We opened, and the next day they said, “Don’t come in.”
DR: After that show lasted one performance, you began to go back and do more of your dance routines in various places, but then somebody got you an interview with Louis B. Mayer.
DR: What happened was an actual talent scout came to see a dance recital by our dance school, which is what they did in those days. They would go to all kinds of places and see if they could find new talent.
He saw me and he thought I might very well have a future. He said, “The time isn’t right just now, but I’ll stay in touch with you, and when the time is right I’ll call you again.” He was with MGM Studios—the studio of my dreams, because that was the studio that had all of the great, great musicals.
Sure enough, about six months later, he called my mom and he said, “Louis B. Mayer is coming to town and I would like Rosita to meet him.” We did all that we could for me to look like Elizabeth Taylor. Little girls like me had no role models whatsoever, so I chose Elizabeth Taylor.
We went to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to meet him. We never even heard of that hotel. He had the penthouse. We didn’t know what that meant.
So my mother gets in the elevator and she doesn’t know what to do. So she goes to the desk, she says, “We are supposed to see Louis B. Major, what do we do?” He said, “Penthouse, P-H.”
Ah, okay. So we go up and it opens at his penthouse and there he is, all five feet four inches of him. You know, like the fellow in The Wizard of Oz, because that’s the studio that made The Wizard of Oz.
It didn’t take long. He looked at me and he literally turned me around, took my hands in his, and he said, he actually said, “Why, she looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor! So how does a seven-year contract sound to you, young lady?” I flew, I just flew. It was the dream come true.
MGM—you have to understand what a studio that was then. It was it for musicals. That was the studio. Fox made musicals, Warner’s made musicals, but nobody else had Gene Kelly under contract, nobody had Ann Miller, nobody had Judy Garland. That was MGM.
DR: So you had a contract and you went out to Hollywood. You’re what, seventeen or eighteen?
RM: I was seventeen. In fact they had to give me a guardian because I wasn’t eighteen yet.
DR: You go out and you show up in the commissary and you see Clark Gable.
RM: Oh my God, I see all of them start sauntering in like real people. It was just astonishing. I’m looking at the steam table, all these exotic foods like roast beef. I was brought up on rice and beans. And who is there? Elizabeth Taylor! I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was so thrilling.
DR: You made a couple of movies on your contract.
RM: I made a couple of movies there with Mario Lanza, who was the tenor of the time. He was actually quite wonderful.
DR: The eater and drinker of the time as well.
RM: Big drinker, big. He used to eat three pizzas for lunch. He really did have a beautiful tenor voice.
DR: So this is working out well. You have a contract for seven years. All of a sudden they don’t renew your contract.
RM: I did three films there. I did Pagan Love Song with Esther “The Backstroke” Williams. I lied. They said, “Can you swim?” and I said, “Yes.”
I had lied through my teeth about being able to swim. I suddenly thought, “I’m going to drown. I just better go in the hotel pool and start trying to do something.” I didn’t dare tell anyone, so I couldn’t have anyone teach me.
Believe it or not, one night I dreamt that I could swim, and I went into the pool the next day and I could do the backstroke. So in this big swim number with Esther at the head and all of these beautiful Polynesian-looking people—I’m supposed to be a Polynesian girl—there’s all of these people doing this graceful breaststroke and I’m doing the backstroke. But it’s the only way I didn’t drown. Probably nobody noticed because there were tons of people doing this
DR: Whatever reason they didn’t renew the contract, it wasn’t because of that, right?
RM: They didn’t know what to do with me. In those days, what are you going to do with this Puerto Rican girl? The fact that I didn’t even look exotic didn’t seem to matter. I had this name. Which was changed, of course.
DR: You might describe that.
RM: Moreno was my stepfather’s name, so it was Rosita Moreno, and they took me to Bill Grady, a casting director, who said, “You’ve got to change your name, kid. It’s too Italian.” They suggested some really hilarious names. The only one I really remember was—even I, as shy as I was, turned it down—Orchid Montenegro. It might have gotten me some jobs. Who knows?
I didn’t tell my mother I’d lost my contract for a couple of months. I would just go in the closet or in the car and cry and cry. Because it was as though Mr. Mayer was Daddy and he said, “We don’t want you anymore.”
Finally I told my mom, and it was a very scary time. How many times in my life have I said, “I’ll never work again”? How many times do actors say that to themselves? Over and over. It’s as though you somehow never learn that particular lesson, because show business is so bizarre, it’s so odd, it’s so demanding, it’s so mean.
I started to do television, doing westerns, and I started to do westerns outside of MGM. And boy, if you’ve ever worn buckskins at five in the morning on location in Kanab, Utah, you could die from the cold.
DR: While you were shooting something, somebody took some photos of you and Life magazine had you on the cover.
RM: That was 1954, and it was at the time when Desilu, the Lucille Ball company, was beginning to branch out to do four-camera shows, comedy shows. They were doing a pilot with Ray Bolger, and they had me do a dance number with him. He wasn’t really a dancer. He was a hoofer. There’s a big difference. And he kept stepping on my feet and just killing me.
Life magazine was doing a layout on these new shows. The editors at Life said, “Who’s that girl? Take some pictures of her.” They were thinking of doing a layout on young Hollywood.
Life magazine never had actors or actresses on their covers. They had political figures, they had presidents, they had people like that, but rarely show-business people. They said, “You’re going to make the cover in two weeks, unless President Eisenhower gets a cold.”
DR: He didn’t, and you got on the cover and everybody saw it. Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox said, “Can she speak English? Let’s line her up.”
RM: I got a contract with 20th Century Fox.
DR: Did they produce the movie Singin’ in the Rain?
RM: That was MGM. That was the other picture that I made at MGM. That’s one of my favorite movies ever, ever. It’s a classic.
Gene Kelly put me in a nontraditional part. I had a red wig and I could actually use makeup of my color for a change instead of that brown stuff they always used to put on me. I thought, “Oh, my career is made. I don’t have to speak with an accent anymore, blah, blah, blah.” Didn’t happen. Rita Moreno was a Hispanic name, and that’s what they saw.
DR: You developed a relationship with a lot of people in Hollywood. You wrote about that in your book, and we’ll talk about a few of them. One of them was Marlon Brando, who was the love of your life at that period of time.
RM: Well, he was the lust of my life. Big difference.
DR: He seemed to have an insatiable appetite. He had a lot of different women, and wasn’t monogamous exactly. That produced some depression.
RM: One time I found some lingerie that obviously was not mine. We had an eight-year relationship. I went home that day just weeping and distraught and devastated and wounded and angry and hurt, and didn’t know what I was going to do because I thought, “I cannot live without him.” It was one of those dreadful, tumultuous relationships.
The very next day I get a phone call. “This is Colonel Parker. I handle Elvis Presley. Elvis spotted you in the commissary at Fox the other day and he liked what he saw. He would like very much to meet you. Would you like to meet him?”
I thought of that rotten underwear, and I said, “Yes, I would.” So I went out with Elvis, who was darling. The best part is that despite the fact that there was no social media then, it got out immediately. He took me to this very famous nightclub called the Moulin Rouge, and it was everywhere. It was in [the Hollywood] Reporter, it was in Variety, it was in the gossip columns. Rita Moreno, Elvis Presley.
And of course Marlon heard about it and he got furious. He threw chairs. Which was wonderful. That’s the kind of relationship that one was.
DR: Because of your relationship with Marlon Brando, at one point you tried to commit suicide.
RM: It was one of those relationships where one person fed the other. It was just a nightmare. I really wanted to end it and didn’t know how. I ended it five, six different times, and I’d go back, and I’d go back. The last time I went back, I felt so awful about myself—how could you treat anyone so badly, how could I treat myself so badly?—that I tried to end my life. I almost succeeded too. I took sleeping pills. His assistant came in, and she couldn’t wake me up. That’s when she called the police and an ambulance.
DR: You came to the famous March on Washington in 1963, the civil rights march. What was that like?
RM: Harry Belafonte felt it was important that there be a Hollywood contingent. He wanted Dr. King to know that there were people in Hollywood in films who thought a great deal of him. So Harry invited a number of us. Sammy Davis, Diahann Carroll, James Garner, myself—I don’t remember who else, but there were some pretty fabulous people.
We sat no more than fifteen feet from Dr. King where he was speaking. I get such goose bumps just talking about it still. There was a moment when Mahalia Jackson said, because he was reading from a text, she said to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin, tell them about the dream!” I mean, I could just cry. That’s when he started to say, “I have a dream.” I was there! I was there. Ah!
DR: So as you look back on your extraordinary career, what would you say is the legacy that you would like people to think about you?
RM: I would like people to think of me only in one way: she never gave up. Perseverance.