RITA MORENO GOES FOR IT

BY: Michael Arkin

Ask someone what’s the most exclusive club in Hollywood and they’ll probably rattle off a list of places where bouncers stand behind velvet ropes and the paparazzi scramble to snap photos of industry heavyweights; places like The Soho House and The San Vicente Bungalows. But those really in the know will tell you that the most exclusive club in Hollywood is EGOT, and unlike those others, you can’t gain entry by slipping the maître d’ a Benjamin. In fact, it’s so elite that there are only 16 members and entry must be earned. You see, EGOT is an acronym for the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards and its members include only those select few who have won all four awards in competitive categories (no honorary award-winning interlopers here).

Only four of its members are women and just one of them was born into poverty on a Puerto Rican farm. Her name is Rita Moreno and she’s Just A Girl Who Decided to Go for It, an apt title for a new documentary about her passion-filled life and seven decade-long career that recently debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

 

Depending on your age, you may know the 89-year-old actress from movies like West Side Story for which she won an Oscar, or from her Tony Award-winning turn as Googie Gomez in The Ritz on Broadway. If you’re a Generation Xer, you probably grew up watching her as Carmela on The Electric Company and listening to her on its Grammy-winning Children’s Album, or from her Emmy-winning appearances on The Muppet Show. Twenty-five years later, you may have worshipped her as Sister Peter Marie Reimondo on HBO’s ground-breaking prison series, Oz. Since her star-power and energy seems to know no bounds, chances are you might have watched her more recently on Netflix’s revamped sitcom, One Day at a Time, produced by Norman Lear.

Mr. Lear also serves as executive producer of the new documentary and joins a cadre of familiar faces discussing Ms. Moreno’s legacy. “I can’t think of anyone who lived the American dream more than Rita,” he noted. Indeed, Moreno (née Rosa Dolores Alverio Marcano), grew up barefoot in Puerto Rico where her mother had to wash dishes in a creek. The pair emigrated to New York City when Rita was just 5 years old. Dropping out of school, she made her Broadway debut at 15 and by 16 was the sole breadwinner. 

She dreamed of making it in Hollywood and modeled her appearance on another young actress, Elizabeth Taylor. When a talent scout arranged for her to meet MGM honcho Louis B. Mayer, she dressed like her idol. Her plan worked, at their meeting, Mayer commented that she looked like a Hispanic Elizabeth Taylor and offered her a contract without her ever having to audition. 

Her dream was realized, but Hollywood didn’t know what to do with an ethnic girl, so she was offered stereotypical parts: the gypsy girl, the Polynesian girl, the Indian squaw, and the Latin spitfire. Although she was happy to be working and appeared in major releases including Singing in the Rain (in a non-ethnic role) and The King and I, in which she played a Burmese servant girl, it was not the career she aspired to.  

Marginalized onscreen, offscreen she was objectified by the male executives that ran Hollywood. In the film she tells the chilling story of meeting Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, at a party and within minutes of their meeting he told her, “I’d like to fuck you.” Not exactly the way to make friends and influence people, but Ms. Moreno admits that she didn’t confront him on his inappropriate behavior, “I giggled like an idiot and just backed away.” In pre- #MeToo Hollywood, unseemly behavior like that was often glossed over. She admits that her agent raped her, “Here’s what’s terrible – I still let him be my agent because he was the only one I knew who was helping me in my so-called career. That’s what astonished me, that I thought so little of myself.”

 

Well, how’s this for an ego booster? After seeing her photo on the cover of Life magazine, Marlon Brando asked to meet her. Writing about their first encounter in her book, Rita Moreno: A Memoir, she said, “From the moment we met, I felt that a web had been spun between us. He awakened me to things beyond myself.” Brando, who she described as “the lust of my life” made her feel “as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath.” She went on to say, “He’s the king of everything…everything,” including being one of the most sexual men on earth with “insatiable” needs. A man so possessed could not be contained, and during their eight year-long affair he continued to date other women, eventually marrying two and fathering their children. 

When Moreno found another woman’s lingerie in his house, she was devastated. Once again, the ego-boosting gods came to her rescue. This time in the form of Elvis Presley, who had spotted her at the 20th Century Fox commissary and had his manager, Colonel Parker, call her to arrange a date.  She knew that no one would make Brando as jealous as ‘The King’. But Elvis was no Brando. Their dates “nearly always concluded in a tender tussle on my living room floor, with Elvis’ pelvis in that famous gyration straining against his taut trousers. I could feel him thrust against my clothed body, and expecting the next move…but it never came,” she wrote. 

According to The New York Post, “One day while watching him devour a peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich, she realized that he might have been more attracted to the snack than her” and she ran back to Brando.

 

She became pregnant with his child and hoped that he would suggest that they get married, but he didn’t. Instead, he arranged for her to have an abortion, which was botched and nearly killed her. Shortly thereafter, he left for the South Pacific to make Mutiny on the Bounty where he fell in love with his co-star, Tarita Teriipia, whom he eventually married.

Brando was a hard habit to break and one morning, shortly after wrapping production on West Side Story, Moreno found a bottle of his sleeping pills and downed the entire bottle. “This wasn’t a revenge suicide, but a consolation, an escape from pain death,” she later wrote. At the urging of her therapist, both she and Brando agreed not to see each other. But he left her a changed woman: more socially conscious and politically-minded. She became an advocate for women’s and civil rights and protested the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Rising from the ashes of their tempestuous relationship, Ms. Moreno became the first Hispanic actress to win the Academy Award for her performance as Anita in West Side Story. The brevity of her acceptance speech, just a mere four words, “I don’t believe it!”, did not diminish the role’s impact on her.  She maintains that the character, a strong woman who spoke her mind, had dignity, wasn’t subservient and did not cower, was her role model and in many ways paralleled her own story. But she also had issues with the film: she “disdained” the makeup that the actors playing Puerto Ricans had to use to make all the Sharks have the same complexion, and that her big number, America, denigrated her homeland. Not surprisingly, the rape scene opened some old, personal wounds. The iconic role cemented her position in the industry, but it also shackled her to the stereotypical roles that she had fought so hard to escape.

 

She returned to Broadway, appearing in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. During the run she met Leonard Gordon, whom she describes as a nice Jewish doctor. For their first date she asked him to meet her on New Year’s Eve at the Longacre Theatre, after the show. Not knowing that Moreno was an actress and the star of the show, he waited in front as the theatre emptied, presuming she was in the audience. Meanwhile, waiting in her dressing room, she assumed she had been stood up. It wasn’t until he looked up at the marquee and saw her name above title that he put two and two together. That ill-fated date was the start of a relationship that endured for forty-eight years and produced one daughter, Fernanda Luisa.

Following her Oscar-winning turn, Ms. Moreno was once again typecast as the fearless Latina. Pigeonholed and frustrated, after not speaking to Brando for six years, she reached out to him for help. He immediately cast her as his lover in his next film, The Night of the Following Day. Although he desperately wanted to sleep with her, she resisted. But their pent-up emotions surfaced when, with the cameras running, the script called for her to slap him. Being the quintessential method actor, he told her to hit him hard, which she did. She later wrote, “With a ‘you don’t do this to me’ look in his eyes, he hauled off and slammed me with the full force of his powerful arm and open hand.” She “went ballistic” and beat him with her fists, shrieking wildly. The cathartic scene gave her closure but didn’t diminish her feelings for him. In fact, she has been wearing his favorite cologne for fifty years. 

The enormously entertaining documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It was produced and directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, who describes the film as “not just a biographical documentary of Rita’s life, but a story about all the women who feel alone as they struggle to assert themselves in a patriarchal society rooted in white supremacy.”

Featuring interviews with friends, co-stars and admirers including George Chakiris, Héctor Elizondo, Gloria Estefan, Tom Fontana, Morgan Freeman, Mitzi Gaynor, Whoopi Goldberg, Norman Lear, Eva Longoria, Justina Machado, Terrence McNally, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Karen Olivo, the film will make you appreciate Ms. Moreno’s career in a new light. Her body of work is so vast that until viewed from the 50,000 feet level the documentary provides, one can’t grasp the enormity of it. 

At 89, she’s still at it. Bringing her career full circle, Ms. Moreno will appear in Steven Spielberg’s long-anticipated remake of West Side Story due in theatres later this year. This time, she will play the role of Valentina, a new character. Mr. Spielberg made her an executive producer on the film and encouraged her input. She told Vanity Fair that she was eager to do the film so that she could join Spielberg in righting some wrongs from the 1961 film, not the least of which is the inclusion of Puerto Rican actors. That may be her greatest ego boost of all.

 

Copyright 2021 by Michael Arkin. All Rights Reserved.