S*x, Elvis and West Side Story – Who Destroyed Rita Moreno? | Hollywood Mysteries #133 

Back in the autumn of 1961, in a house that didn’t belong to her, Rita Moreno swallowed a fistful of something that did not belong to her either. Then she lay down on the bed of a man who owned both and waited. She had loved him for almost 8 years. This man who collected women the way others collected butterflies, and she had recently survived a pregnancy he hadn’t wanted, and an abortion so horribly boxed that she had bled for days with the evidence of it still inside her.

 And yet the weirdest part, the part it would take decades and a small fortune in therapy to figure out was that she was not trying to punish him. Instead, she was trying to destroy the woman who kept coming back. Welcome to Hollywood Mysteries.   She was born as Rosa Dolores Alvio Marano on December 11th, 1931 in a hospital in Humacao on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico.

 Though the family lived in the smaller town of Hungos, which had no hospital of its own at the green edge of the El Yun rainforest. Her father, Francisco Jose Alvio, known as Paco, was a farmer. Her mother, Rosa Maria Marano, was a seamstress of 18, and the marriage did not make it through Rosita’s first year. What Moreno remembered of the island was not the divorce, but the light.

 In the memoir she published as an old woman, she described leaving Puerto Rico as a kind of reverse Wizard of Oz, a passage out of Technicolor and into a world of grit gray, black and white, the lush and whistling green of the tropics dissipating into lifeless cold ash. She was 5 years old when that happened. The year was 1936.

 The ship was the SS Carabo and her mother made a decision that would leave a permanent scar. She brought her daughter to New York and left behind her infant son, Rosita’s baby brother, Francisco. Money was the reason or the excuse for it. There was only enough for two tickets. When you are 5 years old, Moreno later wrote, “What is money?” It would be almost a lifetime before she saw her brother again.

New York, when they arrived, tried to kill her almost immediately. She caught chickenpox and was carried off to a city hospital, alone, contagious, barely able to speak the language, and bewildered that the doctors and nurses did not seem to love her the way everyone in Hukos had loved Lan Ninia Rosita Dolores.

This was the great shock of her American childhood, and it was deeper than the cold or the poverty. the discovery that here she was nobody’s darling. I found out soon enough, she said that it wasn’t a good thing to be from another country. The family moved through a series of tenement rooms in the bario and her mother, whom Moreno adored and also never fully forgave, began running through a series of husbands.

 The man who wrote her stage show put the number of husbands at five. Moreno’s own assessment of her mother was affectionate and merciless. She was very self-involved and self-absorbed. She said she was a narcissistic young woman. And yet she defended her too with the loyalty of a daughter. To marry five times, Moreno reasoned meant only that quote, “You don’t go to bed with somebody unless you marry them.

 She was a lady from the islands.” The child’s escape hatch was her body. She could dance almost before she could argue, and her mother, whatever her failings, had the wit to notice it. Rosita was enrolled with a Spanish dancer named Paco Canino, who happened to be the uncle of a girl the world would shortly get to know as Rita Hayworth.

 By nine, she was dancing for money in a Greenwich Village nightclub. Through her early teens, she worked the circuit of weddings and bar mitzvah across the city. Suddenly a tiny professional in ruffles, and she was often traveling alone. “I was an equal opportunity little Carmen Miranda,” she said. And the joke says something about the predicament of her early life.

 a Puerto Rican girl learning that the shest way to be wanted in America wants to perform a cartoon of ethnicity, any ethnicity, on demand. I’d like to take a moment to show you the shirts currently on offer over at the Hollywood Mystery Store, where we have an exclusively designed range featuring stars of old Hollywood.

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 Now, let’s get back to Rita’s rise. On a Catholic radio serial called the A Maria Hour, and this was one more stage for a child who would work any of them. At 11, she found steadier work giving her voice to the Spanish language jobs of Hollywood Pictures. So now she was speaking English films into Spanish for the audiences her own family had left behind.

 At 13 on November 22nd, 1945, she made her Broadway debut in a quick toclose play called Sky Drift at the Bolasco Theater and she shared the stage with a young Eli Wallik. The show vanished, but the talent scouts did not. Somewhere around this time she became Rita Moreno and the creation of the name was a tragedy comedy in itself. The Moreno came from a stepfather Edward Moreno, a man her mother worshiped and Rita never liked.

 So that the surname she would carry to the end of her days, the name under which she would one day receive an Oscar and a presidential medal of freedom, belonged to a man she could not stand. The Rita she borrowed outright from Hworth, the niece of her dancing teacher, the very model of the ethnic girl remade for mass consumption.

 Even her name, in other words, was a costume assembled from other people’s castoffs. And the question of who was underneath it, Rita or Rosita, would run through her life like a crack through a porcelain vase. Her first film in 1950 was a modest independent picture called So Young So Bad in which she played a troubled girl in a reform school and was build for the only time in her life as Rosita Moreno.

Then came the summons every girl in America was supposed to dream of. Louis B. Mayor of MGM saw her and pronounced judgment in the only idiom the studio system knew, which is to say the idiom of resemblance. She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor. He signed her, moved her and her mother into a cottage in Culver City within walking distance of the lot, and then having acquired her, had pretty much no idea what to do with her.

 So MGM dropped her option after about a year. The one bright spot of the contract was a small delicious part in Singing in the Rain in 1952 as the flapper starlet Zelda Xanders, a role Jean Kelly wanted her for and one she loved because for once she was not asked to be foreign. She was just a dancing girl because everywhere else foreign was the entire job.

 What Hollywood wanted from Rita Moreno in the 1950s was what it called and what she came bitterly to call the utility ethnic. A kind of all-purpose dusky maiden who could be dialed up to whatever nationality a script required. She was cast as Hawaiian, as a Native American, as Egyptian, as Filipino, as an exchange student from India on Father Knows Best, as the Burmese slave girl Tuptim and the sumptuous 1956 King and I.

 Whatever the assignment, she was made to speak in an accent, always the same accent, a generic sing song that corresponded to no real place on Earth. When I went into movies, she said, I did nothing but speak with an accent. It used to just drive me crazy. The perfect summary of the era arrived on March 1st, 1954 when Life magazine put her on its cover, photographed over her left shoulder beneath a caption that reads, “Today like a documentary of everything she was up against, Rita Moreno, an actress’s catalog of sex and innocence.” She was

22 years old and had been reduced to a catalog. What the studio sold as sex, the men around her took his license, and the bill for the life cover, for the parties, and the publicity, and the swank was paid in a currency nobody dared discuss. Some of it was merely absurd. At one Hollywood party, a married senator named John F.

 Kennedy flirted with her so brazenly, his wife on his arm, that she remembered it for the rest of her life. And she learned to dogs the studio bosses, too. the Harry Cones and Howard Hughes, whose interest in a young contract player was rarely paternal, and some of it was not absurd in the least.

 Many years later, on 60 Minutes, an old woman with nothing left to lose told it how it really was. I was raped by my agent, Rita told Bill Whitaker, “When I was I was either 16 or 17, I was sitting on the couch next to him, and he said, “Such a pretty girl.” And he put his hand on my cheek and mounted me. I struggled, but he did it all.

 She was at the time the sole support of her mother, and the man was the only person she knew doing anything for what she Riley called her so-called career. And so, against the horror, she kept him. That’s what astonishes me, she said, that I thought so little of myself. In the documentary of her life, she described a studio publicity party sent there to be photographed where the host, a liquor magnate, pulled her onto the floor and began to grind against her, sweat beating on his lip until he breathed into her ear. “You’re a sexy

little aren’t you?” She bolted into the garden, found the Mexican gardeners working the grounds, and asked them in tears to help her get home. They asked no questions. They already knew. This was the world into which Marlon Brando walked or more like into which Rita Moreno walked in 1954 on the set of a Napoleonic costume drama called Desiree.

 He was the most electric actor of his generation and he knew it. She was 22 and had lately been declared a catalog. She has described the first sight of him with the helpless passion of a woman recalling a fever. He was quote swaggeringly irresistible with a profile that should be on a Roman coin and merely needing him, she wrote sent her body temperature climbing as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath so that she went into a full body blush.

What followed was the most important relationship of her life and also very nearly the end of it. It lasted on and off for roughly 8 years. He took her on their first date to a party thick with method actors, Newman and Dean and Joanne Woodward, where she felt quote odd and out of my league and thrilled to be on his arm.

 And he was, she has always insisted extraordinary. To say that he was a great lover, sensual, generous, delightfully inventive, she wrote, would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul. He was, she said, more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.

 He was also, in her words, a bad guy when it came to women, and the 8 years were a slow lesson in exactly how bad. Brando married twice during their affair and was unfaithful as a kind of habit, constant and impersonal. He broke my heart, she wrote, and came close to crushing my very spirit with his physical infidelities and worse, with his emotional betrayals.

She understood him better than anyone. And understanding was its own trap. She was, she admitted, less his girlfriend than quote, his slave. “I could read him like a book,” she said. “And that’s why he loved me. And that’s why he mistreated me in so many ways.” When she caught him in a lie, which was often, she would look at him and tell him he was lying, and he would produce what she called a poop eating grin, delighted, apparently to be so thoroughly known.

 It was the most sophisticated cruelty imaginable. He loved her for the very clarity of vision that let her see exactly how little he intended to change. Naturally, she tried to make him jealous, and the instrument she reached for was Elvis Presley, America’s other nuclear weapon of masculinity. She had found another woman’s lingerie in Brando’s house, and gone home weeping and crying and so hurt and furious, resolving never to see him again, and also knowing she did not mean it.

 The very next day, the phone rang. It was Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, calling to report that his client had spotted Miss Moreno at the 20th Century Fox commissary, and in the colonel’s decorous words, liked what he saw and would like very much to meet you. Rita’s account of her own decision-making in that instant is one of the great oneliners of celebrity memoirs.

 “I saw the underwear,” she said, and I said, “Yes.” The romance did not ignite. Elvis, she discovered, was gallant and gorgeous, but in the bedroom, strangely inert. All famous pelvis and straining trousers and no follow-through. Sweet was her verdict, but boring. He was, she shrugged, a country boy. What mattered was the effect on Brando, which was everything she could have wished and more.

 He started to throw chairs, she remembered, glowing. He was so angry. It was wonderful. He who had betrayed her without a flicker of conscience could not bear that she had dined out once with the king of rock and roll and then she became pregnant. The child was Brando’s and Brando’s response to the news was not the marriage proposal she had allowed herself to imagine.

 I think I had some hopes that he would say, “Oh, well, in that case, let’s get married,” she said. But it didn’t happen that way. What happened instead was that he arranged and paid for an abortion, a process that was illegal in Clandiststein in the early 1960s, and it was boxed so grotesqually that the pregnancy was not in fact ended.

 She went home and bled for days with the dead fetus still inside her before she had to be rushed to a hospital to have it surgically removed. Brando’s reaction to this near catastrophe was fury, not at the danger to her, but that the man he had paid had, as she put it, wronged him.

 He then departed for Tahiti to make mutiny on the Bounty where he fell in love with his co-star Terita Terry Paya whom he would marry. Moreno who had just finished the film that was about to make her famous was left alone in his house to absorb the full shock of it. “How can you keep taking him back?” she asked herself.

 “He hasn’t just had one woman, he’s had legions. It will never stop.” She swallowed his sleeping pills, all of them, in a single gulp, and lay down. I went to bed to die, she wrote. This wasn’t a revenge suicide, but a consolation, an escape from pain death. His assistant found her in time. They pumped her stomach. She lived. “She has been careful to explain what she was actually doing because it was not what it looked like.

 What I was really trying to do,” she told Whitaker, was kill me that kept going back to him. that bad woman who didn’t respect me, who was me, another side of me. It was Brando, with an irony almost too tidy to bear, who urged her into the therapy that would eventually let her leave him. And it worked slowly over years until she believed she had, in her word, exercised him.

 When Whitaker offered the obvious sentiment of, “Thank God you failed,” she agreed with feeling, “You’re not kidding.” 6 months after she went to bed to die, audiences around the world would watch her dance across a rooftop in a purple dress, radiant, defiant, utterly alive, and busy casting her own ballot for immortality. The film was Westside Story, and the part was Anita, and Rita Moreno wanted it more than anything.

 “I auditioned my ass off,” she said. “I wanted that part so badly.” The role had been created on Broadway by Cheetah Rivera. Now, Robert Weise and Jerome Robbins were putting the show on film, and they needed an Anita who could sing, dance, and act, and who could ideally actually be Puerto Rican.

 This was a qualification so rare in Hollywood that most of the sharks around her were white performers and brown makeup. Natalie Wood and George Shakiris among them. The acting, Moreno said, was the easy part, the part she could do with her eyes closed, because I knew this girl. She had been this girl. What frightened her was the dancing, which she had barely done in a decade and now had to perform at the pitch of Jerome Robbins merciless choreography.

But the making of Westside Story was also for Moreno a running argument about race conducted in the makeup trailer. The sharks, every one of them Puerto Rican character and white actor alike, were slathered in the same shade of dark brown, a uniform muddy tone applied like paint, and it enraged her because she knew it was a lie.

 My god, she remembered saying to the makeup man, why do we all have to be the same color? Puerto Ricans are French and Spanish and whatever you have it. We are tyino Indian. We are black. Puerto Rico, she was trying to explain, is many colors, and to flatten it into one was to erase the actual people in favor of a Hollywood idea of them.

 The makeup man absorbed this impassioned tutorial on Caribbean racial complexity from the one genuine Puerto Rican in the room and delivered a reply for the ages. “What?” he said. “Are you a racist?” She was so flabbergasted, she said, that she could not come back with an answer. She fought and won a similar battle over the lyrics of the song America, some of which she found demeaning to Puerto Ricans.

 The accent she was forced to use, she simply loathed on the grounds that most of the people she was meant to represent didn’t have one. And then there is the scene near the end of Westside Story. Anita goes to Doc’s drugstore and is set upon by the Jets who taunt, grope, and nearly rape her in a sequence that remains one of the ugliest and yet most necessary in the American musical.

 For most actors, it would have been a matter of blocking. for Moreno, who had been sexually assaulted in life. It tore the floor out. When they were mauling me, she said, I pushed them away and started to cry, and I could not stop. All of those scars that I thought were healed just opened up. She was, in her own words, like a wounded animal.

 When the other actors saw what was happening, they stopped and gathered around her, and somehow she found her way back into the scene and into the line that closes it. Spat through her teeth at the boys who have degraded her. And here Brando of all people was useful. I thought she said, “How would Marlin say that as an actor?” The answer came out low and lethal. Don’t you touch me.

 That Moreno has said is the scene that I know got me the Oscar. She was right. On the night of April 9th, 1962, Rita Moreno won the Academy Award for best supporting actress, becoming the first Latina and the first Hispanic woman ever to do so. and she delivered what remains one of the shortest and most beloved acceptance speeches in the history of the ceremony.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, and then a stunned pause. And then, “Good Lord.” And then, groping for anything at all and finding nothing, “I leave you with that.” and fled. Years later, the comedian Liz Torres told her what the night had been like uptown in Spanish Harlem, where the windows stood open against the heat, and one of their own was on the television.

The whole noisy, bottle-dropping, music blaring block, Tora said, fell silent and then roared. When her star was later set into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she dropped to her knees on top of it and wept uncontrollably. What the Oscar did not do for some reason was ring the phone. This is the crulest joke in a life not short of them.

 And Moreno tells it with a bitterness sharpened into comedy. Haha, she has said, I showed them. I didn’t make another movie for seven years after winning the Oscar. The reason was numbingly simple. The only parts on offer were the parts she had just proven she could transcend. Gang Girls and Spitfires and pictures lesser than the one that had crowned her.

 So, the first Latina to win an Academy Award at the very peak of her fame and her powers pretty much stopped and went to the theater and then to London. She slipped out. In fact, just one picture during the drought, a jungle war movie called Cry of Battle shot around the very week of her win and otherwise held the line.

 It is one of the slimmest acts of self-respect in the history of Hollywood. It cost her almost a decade of screenwork and she has never once suggested it was the wrong call. The Oscar changed something less visible than her career. It gave her, she has said, a sense of dignity, and it arrived just as the country convulsed over civil rights.

 Rita Moreno, radicalized in part by a politically sharp older roommate who taught her that the world contained other people besides herself, threw herself in. She marched. She was there in Washington on August 28th, 1963, and the vast crowd that heard Martin Luther King Jr. describe his dream. She had already been demonstrating to ban the bomb.

 And she would march against school segregation in Los Angeles. All my life, she would say, I faced sexism and racism. And then when I hit 40, agism. Her private life, meanwhile, was about to be rescued and then imprisoned in a single stroke. In 1964, after a performance of Lorraine Hanssbury’s The Sign in Sydney Brewstein’s window, in which she played a wife named Iris, Moreno was set up on a blind date with a cardiologist named Leonard Gordon, who did not at first even realize he was meeting the Rita Moreno.

 They married on June 18th, 1965. He was rock where Brando had been chaos. He was, she would always insist, a wonderful person, a devoted father, funny, a doting grandfather, and their marriage lasted 45 years until his death on June 30th, 2010, which by the standards of Hollywood marriages is roughly three lifetimes. But if this sounds like a rare slice of Hollywood happiness, it wasn’t.

 But almost no one knew until Moreno herself said it as a widow in her ninth decade was that the marriage had been in her own devastating word a charade. Gordon eventually retired from medicine to manage her career. And managing her career turned out to be another way of managing her. He was she has said a controller, a man with little appetite for the loud, rockous, unruly Rita.

 And she stayed for decades largely for the sake of their daughter Fernanda. born in 1966. She has said that she considered leaving, that her own therapist told her outright she should, and that she did not take the advice. She has said that when he finally died, she cut a lock of his silver hair to keep and then felt something she had not expected and did not entirely want to admit. Liberated.

 I didn’t realize, she said, how desperately I needed to be on my own. Asked whether she might ever marry again, she gave an answer that belongs on a headstone. I’d rather eat glass. She kept a photograph of Brando in her bedroom to the end and a photograph of her husband as well and she explained the arrangement without any embarrassment.

 Brando, she said gesturing at his picture was the lust of my life. Her husband gesturing at his is the love of my life. The two were never the same thing and were never going to be. There was a koda with Brando too in 1968. Having believed him thoroughly exercised, she was cast opposite him in a thriller called The Night of the Following Day and had to act out a fight scene with the man who had driven her to near death.

 He wanted, she realized, to start again. She was married now and a mother, and she declined. He never entirely let go. In the years before his death in 2004, he would telephone her from time to time, an old man now, and whisper down the line that he loved her. If the 1960s had been in education and how little Hollywood would give her, the 1970s were the decade she stopped waiting for it to be generous and simply took what she wanted and put together, almost as an afterthought.

 One of the rarest collections of hardware and show business. It began in the unlikeliest of places. In 1971, she joined the cast of a brilliant PBS children’s program called The Electric Company, teaching a generation of American kids to read. and it is her voice that screamed the show’s opening line, “Hey you guys,” into millions of living rooms.

 The cast recording won a Grammy in 1972. Around the very same time, with an audacity that delighted her, she turned up in Mike Nichols Carnal Knowledge, a scorchingly adult dissection of male appetite written by Jules Feifer. She played Louise, a $100 prostitute opposite Jack Nicholson. So that the same woman hollering at children on public television by day was by night one of the most devastating presences in one of the decad’s rawest and most sexual films.

 Miss Moreno’s brief appearance, wrote one reviewer, is smashing. There’s some understatement in that. Then came googie Gomez. And Googie Gomez was pure Rita Moreno because Rita had invented her. For years at parties, Moreno had done a skit. A pining, tonedeaf, magnificently diluted Puerto Rican showgirl convinced of her own imminent stardom against all evidence.

“I coughed, I burped,” she said of the character’s birth, and out came this crazy Puerto Rican. The playwright Terrence McN saw the routine and built a play around it. The Ritz set in a gay bath house with Googie as its gloriously untalented diva and Moreno took the part to Broadway and won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a play in 1975.

She reprised GooGi in the 1976 film and earned a BAFTA nomination for it. All that remained was an Emmy and she collected not one but two in consecutive years. In 1977 for a guest turn on the Muppet Show and in 1978 for the Rockford Files. The 1977 award completed the set and with it Rita Moreno became only the third person in history after Richard Rogers and earlier that same year Helen Hayes to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.

 The girl once sold as a catalog of sex and innocence had become one of the most decorated entertainers alive, and she had done it by refusing to stay in any one box long enough to be trapped in it. The decades that followed were a victory lap conducted on her own terms. She turned up everywhere as a regular on the television version of 9 to5 on the Loveboat and the Golden Girls in the Cosby Show as the voice of the title character in the children’s series where on earth is Carmen San Diego.

 And in 1997, at an age when most actresses are grandmothers and little else, she took one of her most startling roles, Sister Peter Marie Rayondo, a non-imprisoned psychologist on the pitiles HBO drama Oz, and held her own for six seasons amid one of the most brutal ensembles on television. In 1999, her mother, Rosa Maria, the narcissistic, self-absorbed, five times married seamstress who had carried her out of Puerto Rico and then pushed her onto every stage in New York, died.

 In 2013, Moreno published her memoir, a genuine bestseller in which she finally said aloud all the things, the abortion, the suicide attempt, the assaults, the charade that a lifetime of studio decorum had trained her to swallow. The book’s real subject, underneath the Hollywood names, is the question that had shadowed her since she picked a stranger’s surname off a marquee.

 Was she Rita, the golden, gleaming invented one, or Rosita, the frightened girl from Yukos? And could a person be both without coming apart? Two years earlier, she had already begun answering it on stage in a solo autobiographical show at Berkeley Reparatory Theater with the perfect title, Life Without Makeup, which she performed at 79 despite a sudden and bewildering attack of stage fright.

 We are so fragile, she marveled. It’s ridiculous. And then in her 80s, Rita Moreno had a full renaissance, which is not something that is supposed to happen at that age. In 2017, she joined the Netflix revival of Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time as Lydia, the Cuban-American grandmother of the house, and she accepted the part on a single non-negotiable condition.

 “I know she’s a grandmother,” she told the producers, “but she has to be sexual, otherwise I’m not interested.” So Lydia wore full makeup to bed and kept a weapon in her handbag and flirted shamelessly into her ninth decade purring in Moreno’s delivery. I came out of the womb wearing stilettos. Then in 2021, Steven Spielberg remade the film that made her.

 And instead of politely consigning her to the past, he built her a place in the present. She served as an executive producer and played Valentina, a character invented for her. And she sang somewhere as an old woman in a role that corrected the movie’s own history. She has said that one thing that unsettled her was filming the scene in which her character intervenes to stop the near rape of Anita, now played by Ariana Deose, because she was in effect reaching back across 60 years to save her own younger self. and it did not feel real and she

is not sure she ever managed it. There was a lovely symmetry at the finish when Dose won the Academy Award for playing Anita. She and Moreno became the only third pair of performers ever to win Oscars for the same role. The girl in the purple dress and the girl who inherited it, both holding the same gold idol.

She is, as of this writing, 94 years old, and she has not yet slowed so much as a step. She says she would rather eat glass not only than remarry but also than retire. And you have to believe her because for Rita Moreno, the alternative to working was never rest. It was disappearance.

 The black and white world she was dropped into at 5, the hospital where nobody loved her. The 7 years of silence after the highest honor of her life. She decided somewhere along the way to go for it and then simply never stopped. The going, it turns out, has lasted almost 90 years. That’s about all for this one. Let me know what your favorite Rita Moreno role is down in the comments.

 I’d love to hear about that. I’ve been Ava. Thanks for listening and until next time, sweet dreams. >>