Rita Moreno: A Memoir Read online

  RITA MORENO

  RITA MORENO

  A MEMOIR

  RITA MORENO

  Celebra

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

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  First published by Celebra,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March 2013

  Copyright © Rita Moreno Gordon, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Celebra and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Moreno, Rita.

  Rita Moreno : a memoir/Rita Moreno.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61522-5

  1. Moreno, Rita. 2. Actors—United States—Biography.

  3. Dancers—United States—Biography. 4. Singers—

  United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.M6996A3 2013

  791.43’028’092—dc23 2012046030

  [B]

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For Fernanda, child o’ my heart—my story, my life,

  my love, the most precious gifts I have to offer.

  I love you.

  CONTENTS

  Part I: Paradise Lost

  “HEY, BOY”

  PUERTO RICO

  THE GREAT CHANGE

  FRIGID CITY

  THAWING OUT

  AMERICAN DREAM

  PAPO

  THE LOSS OF PAPO

  Part II: Hyperbolic Hollywood

  MAKING MOVIES: MY LEAP TO THE SILVER SCREEN

  HOLLYWOOD HEAVEN: LOUIS B. MAYER AND MGM

  STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS

  STILL ROSITA

  RITA RISING

  Part III: Men, Love, and Romance

  EYE CANDY AND LEGGY LADIES

  THE COCKTAIL PARTY: PIMPED?

  DATING, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

  MEETING MARLON

  LOVE, OBSESSION, AND MIND GAMES

  HOW TO SURVIVE SUICIDE

  SAVED BY WEST SIDE STORY

  FINDING MYSELF IN POLITICS

  FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

  Part IV: Reinventing Myself

  MARRIAGE AND MAMI-HOOD

  MARLON AND I MAKE A MOVIE

  BIG BIRD, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, AND ME

  THE ACCUSATORY BANANA

  LOSSES AND BLESSINGS

  PERSEVERANCE

  LOSING LENNY

  THE ATTIC

  PART I

  Paradise Lost

  “HEY, BOY”

  New York City, 1936

  “Hey, boy,” I scream. “Heeey, boooooy.”

  I don’t know what I am saying—I speak only Spanish, just off the boat from San Juan. I am five years old in a hospital ward and I know there is another Spanish kid here, because I can hear him a few beds away from me. The orderlies are yelling at him, and I parrot what they say—“Hey, boy.”

  Crying and feverish, I learn my first words in English from that boy: “Shut up.”

  “Hey, boy,” I shout back. “Hey, boy, shut up.”

  I have always been a quick study. Fast learner. Anything to survive.

  * * *

  Start back there—New York, 1936. I am not yet named Rita Moreno. I am still Rosita. Rosita Dolores Alverio. I am five years old.

  When we leave Puerto Rico, it is as if we are caught in a reverse Wizard of Oz scene. We go from brilliant Technicolor to grit-gray, black-and-white. The world that was lush and hot with life, sunshine, bright flowers, birds, and whistling frogs, turns to lifeless cold ash.

  After my island, New York City seems a freezing hell. Later, people ask, “Why didn’t you and your mother turn back?”

  We couldn’t afford return passage. Many of us spent all the money we had saved to sail to America to start a new life with new opportunities. Others had hopes to settle, make a fortune, and then later return to the island; meanwhile, they worked in New York to send money back to their families in Puerto Rico.

  When you are five years old, what is money? What is “opportunity”? My mother and I arrived in winter, and I thought, This is crazy. What have we done? But my twenty-two-year-old pretty, full-lipped, full-hipped mother had had enough of Juncos, Puerto Rico, her unfaithful husband, and her old life, which did not look like paradise to her. My mami, Rosa Maria Marcano Alverio, was looking for a new start, a new husband. She was seeking love and fortune, and she would walk toward it on her homemade sandals and in her hand-sewn dress, carrying her one suitcase and the rest in shopping bags. When you have almost nothing, you can travel light.

  My mami was escaping something—at five, I didn’t know what she would want to escape. But she did not want to live with Paco, my father, anymore—that much I knew—and I never saw her standing close to him or even alone in a room with him. She was in a hurry to get away from him—and is it my imagination, or do I see his arm reaching out, grabbing her to pull her back to him? And her twisting away and saying something to him, something sharp but scared too, like, “Keep away from me; don’t you touch me…”?

  The first thing that happened when I came to America was that I got sick. Terribly sick—burning-up, shaking-cold, itching-like-crazy sick all over my body. What am I doing, five years old, alone, can’t speak English, in some awful ward in some bad New York hospital? No one can understand what I am saying, except the boy who teaches me the words “shut up.”

  What is the place? The hospital is named Misericordia, just to tell you right away how miserable it is….

  How’d I get here? I’m dying from terror almost, like the baby bird I once picked up that died in my hand. That little bird gazed up at me and gave me a look—a look I could never forget—and it was like the little bird was so scared, he just stopped breathing; his little eyes glazed. Maybe I am dying of fear too, before the sickness can get me. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. Later, I would find out it was chicken pox, a common but, at that time, very serious childhoo
d disease. But in the moment, I thought the same mysterious force that killed the bird was attacking me.

  This could not happen in my worst nightmare. Only life can be this terrible. They come for me in the dead of night—masked men who grab me, wrap me in a sheet, tie me in all the way, and do not even let my head stick out. They twist the ends of the body sack, like a Tootsie Roll wrapper. Blind in that sack, I squirm and yell for my mother. And my mother screams and cries, like only a mother can scream, for them to let her go with her baby girl. “Don’t take my baby. Let me go with her. Madre de Dios. Mother of God.” My mami, Rosa Maria, she is just twenty-two years old. She runs down the five flights of stairs alongside the ambulance attendants; we hit every corner of every banister at every landing. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

  “Mama! Mami! Mama!” But no one can go with me. I am crying from inside the sack and invent a desperate ploy: “I feel better. I’m not sick anymore. Let me out,” I cry in Spanish.

  They don’t. Bagged, I am thrown in the back of the ambulance. Did they have to turn on that wailing noise? (I had never heard a siren before.) Oh, Madre de Dios, that makes it so much scarier. My heart is popping out of my chest. Maybe I am dead already, wrapped in the sheet like a corpse in a shroud? Blind in the bag, racing through the screaming city night to who knows where? The men are laughing and joking to each other in a language I don’t understand, but you don’t need to translate indifference. These guys don’t care; so what if they’ve got a five-year-old girl in a sack crying for her mami? They don’t care about me.

  How can they not care? Everybody has always cared for me. I am la niña Rosita Dolores; my mami calls me Coookeee, Monkeee, Nonni, and covers me with kisses. My abuelo, Justino, he claps and smiles when I dance. “So pretty, so sweet…” Everybody loves me, Rosita Dolores…. Only now—here in New York City, in the big America—they don’t.

  I don’t know the rules: that contagious people must be removed from the tenements—no exceptions. Otherwise the whole city can be infected. These are the days of epidemics, but I haven’t seen the evidence yet: the kids with withered polio legs, braces, scars from chicken pox. You never see some kids, the ones with the fever-melted brains who have to be taken care of till they are old people still in diapers. I haven’t heard about Sister Kenny yet and how she invented physical therapy for withered polio legs. I don’t know about iron lungs, or the many diseases that can spread so fast and kill everybody.

  I want to go back to the one lousy room, even just to die from chicken pox on my bedbug-infested mattress with my mami, who’ll kiss me and scream she wants to die with me. That would be better. Or maybe, if I can’t do that, maybe it is better to escape from this, like the little bird that died of fright in my hand? Escape to heaven and know no more pain, no more crazy itching, and get away from these guys who are laughing and joking over my body.

  So there I am at age five; I am up to, “To be or not to be?” and that is the question I don’t answer for almost thirty years—and then I get the wrong answer. You’ll see.

  Burning-hot hundred-and-three-degree temperature. I itch like crazy, but I am still alive when they unbag me, and I look around their miserable Misericordia ward, with all the other dead-looking bodies, or the ones like me, all the moaning, infectious-disease people, and my one Spanish-speaking little boy: “Hey, boy.”

  “Hey, boy.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Shut up, boy.”

  And there, in one instant, in a bed of the infectious-disease ward, are the themes of my life: scared to death, fighting to survive, forever a foreigner in more ways than you can imagine. Right then, at age five, right there in the hospital ward, I get it. I’m on my own; I’m alone. How am I supposed to take care of myself?

  This is me, the shivery little Puerto Rican girl—feeling lost in the world. Make like I am tough! Maybe, “Hey, boy,” is my first line as a make-believe “spitfire.” At that moment I get that role right: I’ve got to pretend to be somebody I’m not. Inside I am shaking so hard—is it fever or is it fear? Do the symptoms fit the feelings that are already there?

  Is that when she—that dark presence that hisses only doubt and fear in my ear—first accosted me? You won’t fool anybody, the voice whispers in my ear. Who do you think you are?

  I just don’t let my feelings show. Pretend to be someone I’m not.

  This idea lasts through my whole life: I always play a part. For so many years, I have to be a “smoldering sexy spitfire.” Rita Moreno—funny and bold and golden as all her statuettes. The Hispanic heroine with all four gleaming prizes—Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy—big money, hot lovers, “perfect” forty-five-year marriage, with a gold medal hanging around my neck and shelves filled with award statuettes but still, inside, who is she? Who am I? Rosita Dolores Alverio? Or Rita Moreno? Rita or Rosita? Who am I?

  This book is my real story. The record of my journey. The story of how I found myself. The story of who I am…

  PUERTO RICO

  My journey begins on December 11, 1931, in Juncos, Puerto Rico. Humacao “claims” me now because I became famous…but sorry, Humacao, I am not from you—I was only born in a hospital there. From Humacao, swaddled, I was carried by my mother—my pretty dark-haired mother, Rosa Maria, who was then only seventeen—back to her village, back to Juncos.

  Juncos blooms like a flower in my memory; Juncos is color, scent. And Juncos is music: my mother and the other women singing, laughing. No one was ever alone in Juncos.

  Why did we ever leave Juncos?

  “Because we had nothing there,” my mother said.

  Of course, to a five-year-old, we had everything in Juncos. What would the unknown America offer that I did not already have? I was running and laughing; all life was warm, sweet—a dance, a game. I had a baby chick, just popped from the egg: Puchito. Puchito knew me because I was the first thing he saw in his whole little chicken life. He was already following me around and chirping to me. I had my own mami and Paco and my grandfather, my abuelo.

  Everybody loves me then and gives me treats. Everything I taste is delicious: the ripe guavas that burst to the bite, mangoes and papayas that slide down like cool velvet on my tongue. Mami’s silken flan with the glazed caramelized sugar crust, brown and glistening like glass: oh, crunch. So sweet—Mami always makes extra syrup for me. Oh, all my life is sweet. I am allowed to suck on stalks of sugarcane hacked straight from the field. There could be no better candy.

  I live in one of the “ice-cream houses,” as I thought of the Juncos village cottages that clustered, friendly as the people, in different shades of pastel colors—pink, yellow, pale blue, creamy white. In most of my memories I live in the prettiest house of all, the little pink house draped in rose hibiscus and scarlet bougainvillea.

  In every yard, spiky green plants, maguey, wear inverted eggshells, white caps speared on every green sharp-pronged leaf, which could cut you so badly. They were also called bagoneta. I thought we placed the eggshells there just as decoration—so pretty. Now I think maybe the eggshells were to protect us from getting cut on the thorny spikes.

  The maguey are a kind of aloe yucca, a species of the century plant—so named because every hundred years the plant blooms with a flower, which gives off an unbearable stink. I never smelled it, but I believed my grandparents, who remembered it well. Before it blooms, the maguey, decked in eggshells, are beautiful.

  Even the low fences and gates are pretty: metal, curlicued like the spit curls on the painted maidens who appear on every printed advertisement.

  On the side of our pink cottage, there is one dazzling white patch of pure sand, kept separate for a special purpose. In the rest of the yard chickens scatter or nestle in their own deepening dust beds to lay their warm white eggs. Their contented chorus of clucks and crows harmonizes with the wild birdsong that begins at dawn and quiets at night. But even the night is still alive with sound; the tiniest frog in the world, the coquí, whistles his high notes. None of these noises alarm me; they were long ag
o absorbed into my memory as background sound.

  The ice-cream houses sit near the center of a fragrant jungle, into which we children run barefoot, our little soles and heels toughened like shoe leather. We run behind the more stately procession of our mothers, who wear towering headdresses of laundry, as they walk the path. The women are all pretty, all with the same waist-long hair. In Puerto Rico women do not cut their hair. It is a sign of femininity, how long it will grow. As they walk, their hair and hips sway. I see all the women as beautiful, but my mother is the prettiest; surely she is the youngest.