Rita Moreno: A Memoir Read online

  Marga Linekin was a magnet for men, and I sensed that potential mates for my mother were drawn into her orbit, then skewered by my mother’s coy ways. No one could flirt like Rosa Maria: She would actually bat her eyes, tilt her head, and drop her voice to a sexual hush. When men appeared, she was all wonderment and whispered compliments. Of course, with this beguiling style, generous servings of homemade highly spiced food, and her own deep cleavage, she had many admirers. Not to mention the possible impact of love potions.

  Soon enough, my new stepfather appeared—strawberry blond, blue-eyed, displaced Cuban Enrique. At this point, my mental time lapse takes effect and I have no memory of his arrival, only his presence for about seven years. “Papo,” as I called him, was a watchmaker. With a loupe to his eye and a steady hand, he repaired the intricate, delicate inner workings of precious timepieces. By necessity, he had developed infinite patience and a gentle touch. This made him an ideal stepfather.

  One night, soon after his arrival, I walked into his and Mami’s bedroom and saw a project that he was working on in secret. It was big and covered with a cloth—I think so that I would not see it. I knew I was not supposed to be in the room, not supposed to see what was underneath. Of course I peeked—and I could not believe my eyes.

  It was a perfect, beautiful Victorian dollhouse. I had never had such a happy shock. I almost fainted in my delirium. Could he have built this for me? He must have, bless Enrique. It was his gift to me, this perfect dollhouse, complete with tiny Christmas lights that would flare on and illuminate the miniature rooms and their lavish little furnishings.

  My mom walked into the room and caught me. “Aha!”

  I turned the color of a tomato, and even now I can still feel that heat scald my face. It was my joy, my shock at the gift, and the embarrassment at being caught. I don’t think I ever blushed again; I used up my entire lifetime supply of blush in that one moment. I vowed never to be caught with a guilty face again.

  For the rest of my childhood, I would gaze into the dollhouse, transfixed. In a way, I moved into Enrique’s dollhouse. It was so magical and safe inside. And I could control the tiny family who lived in the house: Mami, Papo, and Little Girl. This new life was beyond what I ever imagined, and for this time interval I believed in Mami again: She had found me a good Papo. She had done the right thing and she had found him—a protector. Once again Mami made me happy, and I could dance and sing and enjoy the miniature perfect world of the dollhouse and the watches Enrique repaired.

  A happy home has its own music. The house hummed with Mami’s Singer sewing machine as she worked the foot treadle. This machine was so old, it was not an electric model. All the energy came from Mami, from her foot tapping and rising and falling. It sounded like the roll of a Spanish rrrrrr! As if in accompaniment, I danced in time with its pulsing, while Mami was creating headdresses and costumes for me. All the apprehension that had been in me since we left Juncos began to settle down and at last vanish. In its place came a contentment that was long-running enough to take for granted. All the time, there was so much happy music—not only Mami’s sewing machine, but we also had a windup phonograph that sounded so much like a cat in heat when we wound it that we named it “La Gatita”—The Little Cat. Mami would sing along to the songs on the phonograph. She was singing and sewing; I was spinning and dancing. We bought fancier appliances, and Mami dressed them in her handmade slipcovers. Oh, I tell you it was a party again. It even smelled like Juncos—garlic, tomatoes, peppers, cilantro. Those were years filled with flavor and song. In his quiet, gentle way, Enrique had fixed everything.

  Even our neighborhood was alive with happy sounds. The streets were filled with peddlers: “I cash clothes!” cried out the rag seller. Only it all ran together like a chant: “Icashclothes.” This call—“Icashclothes”—translated as, “I will buy your old clothes to resell.” Other men offered knife sharpening. A hunched little man yelled up, “Umbrellas! Got any umbrellas to fix today?” Even better was, “Ice! Ice! Ice!” in summer. And best of all was a trip to the corner soda fountain for my addictive favorite: a strawberry shake. Mami was relaxed and amiable in supplying necessary dimes and Indian-head nickels, sometimes even shining quarters (big money) to purchase treats.

  On the city street, I played the sidewalk games—potsy, stickball, ring-a-levio, red light/green light, punchball, hopscotch. I made friends with other little girls who liked to dance; we put on costumes and spun through our living room. We even “entertained” on the rooftop; there are photos that demonstrate our high-flying kicks and deep pliés. We wore slave-girl costumes that proved prophetic of the roles I would play later in films.

  Eventually I started doing a Carmen Miranda act at bar mitzvahs and wedding halls. My mother sewed me the costume and varnished the fake fruit for my headdress. I danced and sang “Tico Tico” like a miniature Carmen. Those were happy days. So content! So alive!

  Even World War II was not perceived by me as the threat it was. As long as I could be cocooned in my apartment with Mami and Papo and mentally enter the magic world of my dollhouse, I felt safe. The war, to me, meant blackout drapes, radio broadcasts, and duck-and-cover drills in school. At the sound of a test siren, we would all fall to the classroom floor and crawl under our desks. As nothing ever happened, I perceived this more as a dramatic recess from the ongoing quizzes—which I dreaded more than the unknown war. The war meant opportunity—more jobs through the USO, the private, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission was to support the troops by providing entertainment “until everyone comes home.”

  I would dance on the docks to entertain the troops waiting to ship out overseas. Sometimes, a gong rang to summon the sailors or the marines, and they had to get up and leave midnumber to board their ships and prepare to sail. I would be twirling around in a banana headdress and singing “Rum and Coca-Cola” for a packed house and suddenly the uniformed audience would bolt, leaving me clicking my castanets for only a few strays. The last bit of American entertainment many of those boys saw was little Rosita, with her varnished banana-and-pineapple towering temple of a headdress, a little girl who danced and sang as a miniature Carmen Miranda. I hope this helped. Now, it is poignant to realize many of those boys never did come home and I danced for kids who would die. At ten, I was oblivious to the true meaning of war and what tragedy would follow.

  My show business career continued, undaunted by Hitler overseas. If anything, I took a flying leap forward—onto the stage and screen….

  Soon Mami and I had secured booking agents of various types—agents who booked me to sing in clubs; agents who booked me to speak the roles in radio plays. I started with The Ave Maria Hour, which was in English on radio. My mother seemed to make friends quickly at the stations, and that probably helped get me some callbacks. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she also started a romance with one of the radio announcers, Edward Moreno. I was intent on the new career opportunities.

  Soon I branched out. When popular movies played in Spanish-speaking neighborhood theaters, they needed a Spanish-language dubbing, just as if they played in a foreign country. I was the Spanish-dubbed voice to many great English-speaking films, which probably planted the seed: Why not me? Why couldn’t a little Latina be a leading lady, too?

  Maybe the seed that sprouted later was planted then: Why couldn’t I play child star parts like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz for real? Movie dubbing and radio were my first acting schools, and I must have shown promise, for one opportunity led to another. Mami was elated—I was her pride but also her pocketbook. My earnings helped a great deal to support our little household.

  Later in my life, I played Mama Rose in Gypsy. Of course my past as the breadwinning dancing daughter of a mother with great dreams for her child raised comparisons. Even the names were almost the same: Rosa Maria/Mama Rose. But on this count, I let Rosa Maria off the hook of being an overly aggressive stage mother. She did not need to prod or push me. I leaped to the stage. “This is all I want
to do! This is what I love! This is what makes me happy!”

  Being onstage, moving to music—performing! It made me deliriously happy. I could escape any worries and past grief when I performed. I felt I was free, flying, above everyday concerns (and I still do feel that way when I perform). Work that you love is the purist escape; it is also salvation.

  While on the surface it may have looked like child labor, it was child labor by a very willing and happy child. Nothing gave me more pleasure than working. And my mami was part of it; I could not have done it without her. Not only had my mother designed and sewn my fanciful costumes, but she paid for all my lessons—which went beyond Spanish dancing to modern dance, ballet, tap. My feet were never still, and she was working night and day, sewing for others, cooking, doing whatever she could—and she did this joyfully also.

  I was not exploited; we were a team. She was in it with me in a way no one else in my life ever did share my career and dream. Both of us would scour the trade papers, and I’d say, “I’d like to try out for this,” and she would support me.

  She encouraged and clapped and cried out how wonderful I was, and I danced, sang, acted.

  Mami began to dream of the “Great White Way,” and I was delighted to go there. The Great White Way was also a personal transformation. By age ten, I wanted to ditch the Carmen Miranda act and go big-time: Betty Grable was my new role model. I tried to transform myself—paler makeup, straight hair. I went to the Rose Meta House of Beauty in Harlem and asked them to get rid of my Puerto Rican kinks, my pelo malo. The Rose Meta House of Beauty torture-technicians poured lye on my hair and combed it straight, while my scalp felt as if it had caught fire. The treatment wore off in about a month, and the Hispanic kink reasserted itself. Nonetheless, I soldiered on, wearing little Judy Garland outfits, jumpers and hair tamed by pigtails. Cute, cute, all-American girl.

  At thirteen I auditioned for and won my first part on Broadway. The play was Skydrift, starring Eli Wallach. The plot concerned a planeload of soldiers who were killed in the war but flew in as ghosts to revisit their loved ones one last time. I played a loved one.

  My big scene was at a dinner table with the leading lady. On opening night, my innate theatrical sense told me things were not going over with the audience, so I tried to enliven the scene by slurping a spaghetti strand slowly, holding it high on a fork and sucking the noodle so it slithered into my mouth like a snake. It did seem to attract audience attention.

  After the show, backstage, the leading lady, Lily Valenty, almost throttled me into becoming a real ghost. She actually took me by my little neck and shook me and, with a dramatic tremolo in her voice, said, “If you evah, evah do that again, no matter where I am, I will hear about it and I will find you and I will kill you.”

  I nearly peed my pants.

  But there was no need for her to kill me, as the show itself died—closed after that one performance. I couldn’t believe it; neither could my mother. But Rosa Maria Marcano had sat there in an orchestra seat, proud to see her child on Broadway—and to see her very first play ever.

  Regardless of my very quick Broadway debut, I was incredibly happy. I felt such joy when I was on the stage and wanted to do nothing else. School became an unbearable distraction. I ducked out of classes whenever possible, and quite completely at the first opportunity. For a time I attended the Professional Children’s School, and then I stopped going and dropped out of school. My mother did not seem to care, and I was more happily involved in my show business career.

  Oh, life in Nueva York could be good. Of course, in the very sunlit instant I had that thought, my stomach squeezed and I also believed, This will be taken away from me…. A shadow followed me like a backup dancer, making me worry that it would be only a matter of time before I would lose everything. This dark presence would pursue me for much of my life; she was an evil spirit, but also my alter ego. She followed me wherever I went and hissed, Your happiness won’t last….

  THE LOSS OF PAPO

  It seemed to me inevitable that as soon as life was happy and hopeful, it would all melt away quickly.

  The person who brought joy and security back into my life, who brought light into my dark world, disappeared. Enrique lasted for about six years—the single stretch of my life in which I had a kindly “father.” My Papo. He kept the lights on, not only in the dollhouse, but in our apartment. He had a clever trick to stop the electric meter from working, so in essence we got our electricity for free. He would insert a hairpin in the light meter box in the hallway. When the meter reader came into the building, a cry went up—“¡El pillo!”—and someone in my apartment would fly at the box and withdraw the pin, and for a brief time the meter would spin, recording our kilowatts.

  In truth, this “trick” made me anxious; whenever there was some unexpected knock on our door, I waited to be apprehended, to lose what happiness I had restored. And that dark presence was heard again; that little voice inside whispered, It can’t last. If only Enrique could have stayed. I might have been spared the agonies of my youth and turned into a different woman. My feelings for men would have been forever altered, and I am sure the impression would have been more favorable, for Enrique was unlike any other man in my mother’s orbit—consistent, gentle, loyal.

  Of course she left him; she left him for another man.

  Perhaps it was my fault. It was my show business career that ended her marriage to Enrique. Had I not occasionally sung on Spanish radio, she would not have met her next husband, Edward Moreno, whose name I bear along with my eternal distaste for the man himself. I never forgave Edward Moreno for breaking up my mother’s marriage to my beloved Papo, Enrique. That kind man, my Papo, had been the only man who gave me loving paternal care. My biological father, Paco, had disappeared so early, I had no good memory of him. And now another hurt—Papo had to leave, and in his place was the Latin lover, Edward Moreno, who seemed sleazy and false to me. I think I suffered the classic stepchild mistrust and dislike of a new stepparent. At the radio station, it was painful for me to watch my mother bat her eyes and speak in a coy, phony flirtatious way to Edward Moreno. She worshiped the man, and I could not understand why.

  Enrique must have suspected he was to be replaced; he changed. Whereas once he had always been occupied in fruitful endeavor—fixing watches, enhancing the dollhouse, and generally being a pleasant, contented presence—he metamorphosed into a man hanging over a bottle of rum, pouring himself straight shots. I could feel the bitterness emanate from him like toxic cologne. I still think it was sad; he deserved much better treatment. And I would forever miss him—the only man I remember as a father, the one I called Papo. One day Enrique was gone and my mother was all eyes and coy whispers for his replacement—Eddie Moreno.

  Edward Moreno, with his good looks, thick hair, and suave baritone voice, was the most cultivated-sounding man my mother had ever met. She widened her eyes when she saw him at the radio station, and although he was Mexican, he spoke to her in elegant Spanish. I had never heard a Hispanic man speak so articulately. And he had a beautiful, deep “radio” voice.

  She wanted him and she got him. And the seething, mostly silent battle began: my cold war with my mother’s “hot” Latin lover. I avoided him as much as possible, which was easy, as I was out at work most of the time. I hated observing their passion. I had lost Papo and a good deal of Mami’s attention. It was because of Edward Moreno that I regarded Latin men with mistrust for a long time. When I finally had a Latino boyfriend, he was very cavalier, and I never had another. But now I understand that prejudice was unfair and there are many faithful, kind Latin men who make wonderful fathers and husbands. Yet “Latin lover” was a cliché that held true for Edward Moreno. I could see he was a flirt and I doubted he could be true to my mother. Later, he left his only child, his son, Dennis, which confirmed my low opinion of him. But nothing could dissuade my mother from desiring Edward Moreno. Too often I heard the bedsprings squeak and I wanted to scream. What became of Papo, kind
Enrique? He did a dissolve, vanishing forevermore.

  I turned out the lights in the dollhouse. Never again would I look for a real father. Or look to my mami for permanence.

  Mami had let me down in other serious ways: Francisco had yet to appear; she could not be trusted. “Mami, ¿cuándo viene Francisco?” “Ay hija, ¡pronto! ¡Pronto!” Soon…but my baby brother never reappeared. Ever.

  * * *

  During this time, my life divided—a sharp boundary between my career and my home life. Increasingly my career took precedence, and my life at home, with Mami and the man I always loathed, Eddie Moreno, became merely a backdrop.

  But that backdrop changed: We moved out of the city to a house in a Long Island town called Valley Stream. Even though my life was moving elsewhere, I could not help but feel the surge in my mother’s and my own spirit when we crossed the threshold into that first modest little brick house. A house! A real house in the real America, not one of the ethnic “ghettos.”

  We were out of any version of el barrio. This was a white Wonder-bread American suburb on Long Island. We were only twenty miles outside of the city, but it felt like we were a world away. It was a small tract house, but to me it was like we were living in the wide-open country. In fact, our little house was beside the last remaining stretch of agriculture in the area: a beet farm. There was a big sky, deepest blue, with puffed clouds that rolled by. And at night we could hear little birds and animals call out to one another. At dawn, the sky was the same pink that suffused Juncos. Although we had no El Yunque mountain or rain forest, there were the fertile fields, the same green scent perfumed the air, and some nearby chickens could even be heard crowing. At dawn the birds screamed, and for some deep reason, their screams called forth contentment in me. I loved the call of the morning crows. No parrots or macaws. But suburban American birds tweeted—as did the nightingales and chickadees. Not coquí, but at night American bullfrogs who croaked basso profundo most of the time, but could also really harmonize their peeps in the night chorus. And we smelled the earth again, the loamy soil and the wild onion in the grass. Mami would get excited when she saw a monarch butterfly, and I did too.