Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  I suppose this was living the American dream for Eddie and my mother. It hurts to say this, as I hated him so, but Eddie Moreno seemed to delight Mami. And even for me, living with him on Long Island gets mixed reviews. Eddie Moreno made that real, honest-to-God house possible. For a while, this made it easier to tolerate him.

  For the first time I felt that being Judy Garland was within my pigtailed reach. I might have even been wearing a gingham pinafore or a pair of overalls. I was just your neighborly all-American girl, whose name happened to be Rosita!

  The beet farm that started next to our little brick house at the very end of South Hommel Street seemed to me the epitome of Americana. I only wished that I liked beets! I would tiptoe between the deep scarlet-and-green-leafed rows to steal a few. I’d pull up a cluster of those fat-bottomed beets and let the real American dirt fall in clods at my feet, and I’d say, “Yup. That’s our farm, there, heh, heh, heh.” I became little Miss America! I really was Dorothy in my Long Island suburban version of Kansas.

  The kids who lived in my area were so friendly and outgoing, I just couldn’t believe it! So different from the city. Nobody was swinging a bat or hissing, “Spics!” I was invited to parties and danced with nonethnic boys to “String of Pearls,” one of the great swing tunes of the time.

  And, of course, I was a good dancer, so all the boys wanted to dance with me. I even had my first real crush. I met Bobby Laparcierie, the boy of my dreams—all-American, lanky, very witty (not funny, witty), whose intelligence and way with words just melted my heart. He was literally the boy next door, and I would crouch on the grass beside his house to peek in at him in the basement. Many years later, he appeared at my cabaret show, and I had him stand, lanky as ever, at the end of the evening as I introduced him to the audience. My heart still skipped a beat when I saw him.

  Yet, that dark, niggling presence kept whispering that familiar chant. Like when I prepared for my first school dance: You’re not good enough.

  The three boys that came to escort me waited at the door while I wept into the medicine cabinet mirror. I wouldn’t leave the bathroom. I was still no good, not right. In the mirror my skin was a sallow brown, a shade that would never be accepted, no matter what I tried to believe. Mami was loath to be the messenger, but in the end had to send them away without me.

  And my tolerance of Eddie soured into chronic hostility. I always felt he would be like the tornado that descended on Dorothy’s Oz, turning everything upside down, then blowing out of our lives. And eventually I was proven right.

  But as long as I was performing I was okay, and I took every opportunity, every job, to get out of the house and stay up on the stage.

  Mami let me travel far and wide to work in nightclubs. I had an old suitcase jammed with my mami-made costumes that I lugged all over the place. The venues were not very glamorous, but to a girl my age, they meant I was making some real money for the first time. That money went to Mami for our combined expenses, but no question—at sixteen I had become a teenage breadwinner, heavily supplementing Mami and Edward’s earnings. I hit the road—alone—traveling by train and bus to distant cities to dance and sing.

  Now, looking back, I think, How dangerous. How could she let me go? At that time, though, I was pleased to be working. But there were circumstances that were a little shady. I remember a show at one nightclub in Pennsylvania in particular. I entered the run-down establishment to discover that it was really a secret gambling club. The men couldn’t care less about seeing me and the other girls dance. They were gangsters, and in retrospect I shiver in relief that I was not raped, robbed, or worse.

  Not that I didn’t have close calls. Some jobs were so far away that sometimes I had a six-hour commute by a relay of buses and trains, all the while lugging that suitcase. Even a teenager gets tired! Late one night, I made a mistake and accepted an older man’s seemingly kind offer to drive me home. Instead, as I slept soundly in the passenger seat, he drove me to a deserted, wooded dead end. I awoke with a start to the feel of his wandering hands on my body.

  “What!” A chill went through me—this was New York, and I had heard plenty of tales; the tabloids screamed of young girls being found raped or dead in “secluded wooded areas.” How could I have been so foolish?

  I thought fast and gasped, “I’m only sixteen!” Underage carried some weight in those days. His hands paused.

  “You look older,” he said, and I could see he was still debating whether to force me or not.

  “I am underage!” I gasped.

  He sighed, disappointed, and drove me home. I tiptoed into the little brick house by the beet farm, and listened, without any awareness then of the irony, to the pants and sighs coming from my mother’s bedroom. I never accepted a ride again. I seized hold of those subway straps and hung on—for dear life and virtue.

  Then, when I was seventeen, Mami’s belly began to swell. My mother didn’t say a word, but it was apparent: Another baby was on his way, a baby brother—buttery skinned, with a downy head and bright round brown eyes like Francisco’s. But he wasn’t Francisco. He was Dennis Moreno.

  However, I absolutely adored my new little brother. He was so cute, and I reveled in being a big sister again. I played with him, tickling him, biting his toes, singing sweet songs to him—anything to make him smile. I didn’t even mind changing his diapers. I delighted in my dimpled roly-poly brother, despite my scorn for his father. But the truth was, I was already halfway out of the house, running toward my own future on very shaky high heels.

  PART II

  Hyperbolic Hollywood

  MAKING MOVIES: MY LEAP TO THE SILVER SCREEN

  Of course, every actress and dancer cherished a dream: to leap to the silver screen. The bar mitzvahs, Ave Maria Hour, and movie dubbing were the warm-up—the next great step would be on to film, and toward that goal, Mami and I left my eight-by-ten glossies and résumés at every casting office in town, and attended as many open calls and auditions as possible. It was at this point that I started using the name Rosita Moreno. Nobody could pronounce Alverio correctly, and I suspected if they couldn’t pronounce it they wouldn’t remember it. Why would I take the name of a man I despised? Honestly, it had nothing to do with him. The name was handy; it was convenient. And I actually thought it was a pretty name. So Rosita Moreno I became.

  Mami and I went to the open calls and auditions on foot and by subway and bus—wearing out shoe leather and heels, spending what earnings I had on bus and train fare. And it wasn’t long before these efforts paid off: I was called back after a screen test. I auditioned for a large, juicy role in an indie film, which turned out to be the launchpad for three young actresses who would have major movie careers: Anne Jackson (a young woman married to Eli Wallach), Anne Francis (a young blond beauty soon to become very famous)—and me.

  I must have been born to this: I made a quick adjustment from in-person performances, which are “large” in comparison to film, to the nuances of expression that are suited to the big screen.

  * * *

  SO YOUNG, SO BAD: WHAT MADE THEM THAT WAY? screamed the movie poster. The 1950 poster shows three slutty-looking women who look more like adult prostitutes loitering for johns than the juvenile delinquents we were alleged to be. The poster image is so caricatured that it is as distorted as a cartoon; it is hard to tell, but I think the slouching brunette is supposed to be me. The pretty blonde with the Veronica Lake–style hairdo and the distinctive beauty mark near her lip is Anne Francis (later of Forbidden Planet and Honey West fame). I don’t know which actress the other blonde, the one with the cigarette dangling from her lip, is supposed to represent, as she didn’t really look like anyone in the film, but it was probably a cartoon version of Anne Jackson. This was one of those posters that had nothing much to do with the nature of the movie.

  Look closely at that poster, and as a backdrop motif you can see the villainous matron of the reform school spraying me and the other girl inmates with a huge fire hose.


  On the surface, my first released movie looks like a prime specimen of the Hollywood B so-terrible-it’s-funny film. And for most of my life, that is how I viewed So Young, So Bad. You just don’t go around saying, “I’m so proud I was in So Young, So Bad.”

  But was it that bad? Was it bad at all? Was I bad in it? Now, more than sixty years later, the movie is worth a second look.

  Seen through the lens of time, and focused with more knowledge regarding the cast, writer, and director, So Young, So Bad offers some surprises. Maybe the picture is not what it sounds like; maybe the title and the poster were someone’s overwrought inspiration to promote the film, which was released within a day of the highly successful Caged!, a women-in-prison movie that received three Academy Award nominations. Caged!—“The Story of a Women’s Prison Today!”—was a similar story, with Eleanor Parker as the young girl in prison, and Agnes Moorehead as the witchy prison official.

  Later in my life, the movie may have sounded laughable, but to the teenage me, Rosita Alverio Moreno, commuting from Valley Stream, Long Island, to the theater district, So Young, So Bad was a big break. It is also the only movie in which I’m credited under my real name, Rosita.

  The picture was produced by and starred a very famous actor, Paul Henreid. Henreid had two iconic screen characters to his credit: Victor Laszlo, the noble leader of the Nazi resistance, in Casablanca, and he was Bette Davis’s married lover in Now, Voyager. It is in Now, Voyager that Paul Henreid, in one of film history’s most famous scenes, lights two cigarettes in his mouth at the same time, before proffering one to Bette Davis.

  My part as “Dolores Guerrero, vagrant” is my first big-screen Hispanic role, but Dolores is no spitfire. She is the softest and sweetest of the inmates, given to welling up in tears and strumming sad, solitary songs on her guitar. She doesn’t seem especially vagrant-y. She suffers some breaks with reality and quivers in a corner from time to time. Dolores is shy, and has episodes of total hallucination and withdrawal. My ethnicity is, if anything, exaggerated in a positive way: On visiting day, my screen family—so generically ethnic they seem to be of every nationality—arrives in a joyful throng, carting a picnic basket and chianti bottles, and they soon launch into a family singalong.

  Dolores Guerrero is one of the few roles that I played in which I was called upon to be “plaintive.” My first line is a wan, “I’m the only one who didn’t get to take a shower.” Mostly, I shuffle along with the other girls through a series of mistreatments.

  I do get to sing and play guitar to the other inmates, however, and that is my favorite scene. The girls discover me, alone and crying yet again, but singing in Spanish through my tears. The girls all respond in wonder, and gradually I begin to smile again.

  That is a rare happy moment for me as Dolores Guerrero, however; too soon, the vicious matron whacks off my hair (really my wig) and leaves me with a pixie cut that is actually quite cute and close to the way I style my hair now.

  Henreid plays the sensitive, enlightened new institution psychiatrist who tries to make reforms, such as ending torturous punishments like fire hosing and solitary confinement in a black hole. It is his tender, regretful voice-over that narrates the saga of how he arrives at the reformatory in good faith, discovers the sadism, and fights to get rid of the evil of matron and her cohort.

  The big scene occurs when the reformatory matron, who gives Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a run for her money, turns the fire hose on the girls in the basement and almost drowns a few. So Young, So Bad was low-budget, so we didn’t shoot at a studio. Our set was an old nursing home made to replicate a reform school. It was very authentic. Even the water in the hose gushed with real force, knocking us to the basement floor. And unlike “movie water,” which is usually at least tepid for the actors’ comfort, the reformatory school hose was spouting freezing-cold water. Where was the Screen Actors Guild when we needed our union?

  The mean matron (played by Grace Coppin) also kills a pet bunny. Delicate Dolores (whose name means sorrows) can’t take the abuse; in the film’s climactic scene, she is found dead by hanging—a suicide. Cut down by Paul Henreid with what was supposed to be noble regret, I am sorry to report that the great actor used the scenes of cutting down my dead body as an excuse to run his hands over my breasts. We did many takes, and, of course, being dead, I could not even flinch, let alone protest. The subtext was funny: Paul Henreid never seemed to realize I was wearing falsies, and he was sneaking feels of foam rubber. An undercurrent of unwholesome desire runs—unintentionally, I am sure—through Paul Henreid’s performance. Sometimes the camera reveals more truth than the actors intend: There is a close-up of him looking down at Anne Francis that definitely borders on lechery.

  For all the overhyped ads, the film is actually very nicely shot in black-and-white, directed by Bernard Vorhaus, and has an impressive roster of young actresses playing wayward girls: Anne Francis, of the famous birthmark near her lip, is achingly young, tall, slim, and blond, and turns in a terrific performance as the seductive ringleader who tries to escape. So Young, So Bad was also the first film for Anne Jackson. She plays a tough cookie whose aggression is channeled into writing.

  What I didn’t realize at the time is that the creative trio responsible for the film—Bernard Vorhaus; the screenwriter, Jean Rouverol; and Paul Henreid—were about to be blacklisted. Vorhaus and Rouverol were members of the Communist party, and Paul Henreid was blacklisted as a “Communist sympathizer.” Henreid, born the son of an Austrian baron, became very left-wing, despite his aristocratic background. His political inclinations took a hard left turn when he was filming in Austria and his crew was attacked and pursued by Nazis.

  There had been major studio interest in the film until the blacklist went into effect. After failing to get that financial backing, Paul Henreid put up fifty percent of the funding, and it was the best investment he ever made. So Young, So Bad turned out to be very profitable, and one of the first successful “independents.”

  Over time, the picture has gained some respect as a Time Warner classic. It is well loved by viewers, and I can see it in a new light myself.

  So Young, So Bad—was it really that bad? Now that I am so old, so good, I think it is a fair film for its era and very watchable. It deserves the cult status it has earned. I’m so pleased that every notice of the movie mentions “Rita Moreno (appearing under her real name Rosita Moreno).” Perhaps in the tremulous Dolores, there was also more truth than I realized then. At that point, and even now, I was more vulnerable than “spitfire,” and as I discovered later, suicide would become an act with which I was all too familiar.

  On review, I would give the film several stars, and I have no regrets.

  HOLLYWOOD HEAVEN: LOUIS B. MAYER AND MGM

  When I was five, I reversed Dorothy’s enchanted journey and stepped out of Technicolor Oz when I left the vibrant-hued Puerto Rican rain forest for gray New York. Twelve years later, I recrossed that threshold into the brilliantly colored kingdom of Hollywood.

  When I was sixteen, I would get the biggest opportunity of my young life. Right before I landed the role in So Young, So Bad, a talent agent spotted me at a dance recital and recommended me to the superwizard mogul Louis B. Mayer—the Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios, the huge studio that had produced The Wizard of Oz and hundreds of other major motion pictures. MGM and its rival studio, Universal, vied for preeminence in show business at the time, but it was MGM that claimed “more stars than there are in the heavens.”

  My fateful meeting with Mr. Mayer was arranged not long after I finished filming So Young. Could little Rosita Dolores Alverio from Nowhere, Puerto Rico, possibly join the ranks of Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and my own personal teenage idol, Elizabeth Taylor? Although Rosa Maria Marcano extolled my looks—“Nonni, joo are the most beautiful girl I ever saw. No one is prettier than joo. No one!”—I took her words with more than a few grains of salt. I was a fiv
e-foot-tall, skin-one-shade-too-dark Hispanic girl whose feet still felt like leather soles from running barefoot on the rough roads of Juncos. I knew how much I relied on Maybelline and other Woolworth’s cosmetics to create my beauty. Could I possibly transform myself into a legendary beauty? In my mind, I never looked better than okay, but I knew I could “doll up” well and present a glamorous image if I worked on it.

  I would try. This was my big chance, and Rosa Maria Marcano and I knew it. We flew into fast-forward to redo my entire appearance. Of all the MGM stars in my age category—which included Deanna Durbin, Debbie Reynolds, and Jane Powell—the one who reigned supreme, with her violet eyes and high-raised bosom and tiny waist, was British-born fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. I sat down and watched, along with the world, as this supernaturally gorgeous young girl starred in a series of animal-love movies, such as National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, and was propelled to superstardom. I studied her unique face with determined interest: What made her so impossibly beautiful? Was it the near-mutant genetics—violet eyes, double eyelashes, thick but uniquely slanted black eyebrows, the graceful Cupid’s bow of her full lips?

  Violet eyes were impossible to replicate, but the rest could be mimicked. My mother and I set to work with lighter facial foundation, eye pencils, shadow, and lip brushes. The hairstyle was the only part that was easy. But with work and artistry, Elizabeth Taylor’s eyebrows and lips were superimposed on my face. My mother and I worked as on a palette: Renoir and Modigliani with five-and-dime cosmetics. As makeup artists, we were world-class: In the mirror, a semblance of Elizabeth Taylor emerged. I looked back at “her” reflection in my mirror. I didn’t have violet eyes, and even I hesitated to add the finishing touch—her famous beauty mark—on my right cheek, but otherwise, it was Elizabeth Taylor who stared back at me.