Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  But how to simulate the Elizabeth Taylor body? What of the impossible combination of high, creamy cleavage and a wasp waist? Face and body makeup, paler than my natural skin tone, gave me her English complexion; creative brassieres and a waist cincher lifted and squeezed. I felt my inner organs compress, but with a little help, I, too, had a hand-span waist. Breasts I never had were added. Creamy they could never be, but I could display the new cleavage and hope for the best.

  We spent our savings on hair salon and nail salon appointments, and bought an entire new Elizabeth Taylor wardrobe. Rosa Maria Marcano stood back and sighed. “Perfecto!” I looked in the mirror and saw…a stranger. But gorgeous. With such alchemy and spendthrift daring, how could we miss?

  We went on our way to my go-see with Louis B. Mayer, my head held high, breasts pushed up high, and hopes high. I winced as I walked on my new, painful spiked heels past the other look-alike little brick houses on our block on the border of the beet farm, to catch the bus to my future. I teetered onto the bus, then boarded the LIRR to the stunned stares of the other passengers. Rosa Maria Marcano beamed. She herself looked like she could be Elizabeth Taylor’s mother—Hispanic style.

  The journey from Valley Stream to the Waldorf Astoria at 49th Street and Park Avenue did not measure very far in time or distance, but the Waldorf existed in another zone, a stratosphere away. My mother and I had never even gone to a hotel before. As I could not truly walk in my new high-heeled shoes, we splurged on a yellow Checker cab to take us from Penn Station on 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue to the famous hotel.

  Louis B. Mayer, the Wizard Star Maker, was not exactly waiting for us in his castle tower, but we were “expected.” That alone was such a miracle, my heart pounded and my palms moistened. Under my Elizabeth Taylor–style low-cut, bosom-revealing blouse, beads of non–Elizabeth Taylor perspiration gathered. I willed my body not to sweat.

  We passed through the guard stations of Oz—manned by doormen and a concierge who directed us to the Waldorf Towers penthouse. We had never heard the word “penthouse” and stared at the elevator buttons. Afraid to be late, we took a stab at “PH.” Rosa Maria Marcano and I ascended. I knew Louis B. Mayer was the star maker and the star acquirer. He had fought Darryl Zanuck at Universal Studios for Elizabeth herself, both men crying out, “Sign her, sign her! Don’t wait for a screen test!” Louis B. Mayer lost the first round, and Elizabeth Taylor went to Universal for the first year of her Hollywood career—until she was fired for “her prematurely adult face.” Aha! Mayer knew, as he always knew: She was a star, little old adult face and intense expression or not. From then on, Elizabeth Taylor was Mayer’s prize gem.

  Could I be his next?

  There he was, Louis B. Mayer, in a suite so luxurious I could not take it in. And the view! ¡Dios mío! Seemingly all of Manhattan spread out below. I could imagine him staring out at the city like a king surveying his kingdom. But I could not look at skylines; I had to focus on who was directly in front of me: the little man who would decide the course of my life.

  The Wizard of the Waldorf was a squat little man, balding, with very little silver hair, who wore wire-rimmed glasses. I didn’t know it then, but Louis B. Mayer, born Lazar Meir and originally from Minsk, had traveled an immigrant journey parallel to my own. He landed first in Canada, where he was chased on the mean streets of Saint John, New Brunswick, by Canadian bullies screaming, “Kike! Kike!” before he arrived in the movie capital of the world to eventually become the king.

  But we weren’t here to reminisce about our humble beginnings, and our meeting was short. I hardly had time to exhale—which was just as well, as that would have been difficult in my waist cincher. He held out his hand, which was the first manicured male hand I had ever seen, let alone held. His skin was soft as a baby’s. He checked me out for a matter of seconds before something in his eyes sparked and he said the equivalent of, “Sign her, sign her!”

  “She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor!” the wizard decreed. “How does a seven-year contract sound to you, young lady?”

  I levitated. My mother levitated. The Waldorf Towers spun around, and in my high-heeled slippers, I rematerialized on the studio lot in Culver City. It would be a long time before I wished to be back on the farm “in Kansas”—or its New York equivalent: a suburb next to a beet farm in Valley Stream. I did not have violet eyes, but I never looked back.

  Rosa Maria Marcano and I were delirious with joy. We picked up and moved, with Dennis, to a charming cottage in Culver City, near the MGM lot, that the studio secured for us. At this point, Eddie Moreno decided to sign up for the army and was sent to Japan. Mami didn’t seem fazed by this new arrangement. This is what we had fantasized about—the possibility of my being a young star and making it big, and our whole family living a more glamorous life in proximity to the stars. As for myself, I was thrilled that he was no longer around.

  It all happened so quickly. We sold the house near the beet field and moved with everything we owned. I bought an old car and learned to drive. I imagined myself scooting around Hollywood, meeting the stars, actually working with them! No more buses and trains. I did not have the hubris to imagine limousines. And yet I never really doubted that I would act in movies. I had a sense of destiny. My dreams were coming true—in detail.

  Hollywood was everything we had imagined and more. And there were palm trees and our own familiar warm, sunny climate. This was the best of Juncos plunked down in Hollywood. My mother was sure I would become famous: “Nonni,” she said, “joo are a star here.” I was making two hundred dollars a week! That was a lot of money at the time. We were rich! No one could have been more dazzled by this new world than I was—this might as well have been Bel Air and a million-dollar contract. I had moved to Hollywood heaven—to MGM, where there were “more stars than in the heavens” and they were everywhere to be seen. And now I walked among them.

  * * *

  On my first day at the studio lot, I went to meet the producer of the film I’d already been assigned to—The Toast of New Orleans—who invited me on a tour of the MGM lot. But first he took me to the Commissary for lunch. Wow! The scents, the mounds of steaming exotic foods—roast beef and gravy, pure white mounds of mashed potatoes, quivering molds of Jell-O trapping jewellike fruit and everywhere I looked they were there. Crazily beautiful people, Ava Gardner, Jean Tiernary, oh gulp, Joan Crawford. All of them staggeringly beautiful. They were another race. Was I really a part of this?

  And then on our way out, I met my first real movie star, who greeted me with a raffish grin and a know-it-all look in his eyes. A lock of dark hair hung over his forehead and left eye. Rhett Butler. Clark Gable. He touched my hand and gave me an even bigger smile than I had seen on Rhett. If you have never been close to a movie star in your life, the impact is surreal: On the one hand, most stars are shorter than they are on screen (except John Wayne, who was somehow bigger), but their faces loom larger than normal humans’, coming right at you into your own face.

  There he was, with his thick eyebrows and big ears. It was impossible for me to even speak; I squeaked. Clark Gable did not seem aware of his effect. In my head I heard him say, Rosita, I don’t give a damn.

  In reality, Clark Gable said, “Rosita. Great name, kid.”

  I did not have that name for long.

  I was summoned to the office of the most famous and powerful casting agent in Hollywood, Bill Grady. My heart hammered within the confines of my waist cincher.

  It won’t work out after all, I thought as I climbed up the narrow stairs to his backlot aerie. The dark, unimpressive staircase gave me intimations: I was about to be fired. They had taken a closer look, under the glaring sun of Hollywood, and seen that I was no Latina Elizabeth Taylor. There was no such thing. I was a Puerto Rican kid without a prayer, and my nemesis alter ego, that voice, added, A Puerto Rican kid with a bit of acne that all the pancake makeup in the world cannot quite conceal. I was sure I would be returned, like an impulse buy, to whatever bar
gain basement I came from.

  Bill Grady’s gaze narrowed as he examined my face. He did nothing to reassure me. I felt my eyes, which I knew were the wrong color, widen. I was also aware that they had a tendency to “pop,” so I concentrated on getting them to calm down and settle back in their sockets. I braced myself for the worst: I would have to go home and go to secretarial school. I had tried secretarial school once and run, silent-screaming, back to my mother and another round of auditions, which I thought had paid off.

  I almost heard him say, We’re letting you go, but no, he was saying something different. He was saying, “Your name has to go.” He squinted again. “Too Italian.”

  In a trance, I heard him speculate on possible screen names: “Ruby Fontino? Marcy Miranda?”

  I didn’t even have time to flinch. The names got worse. “Orchid Montenegro!”

  I didn’t want to be Orchid Montenegro. Or any one of them. The truth was, I liked my name—Rosita Dolores Moreno. Hadn’t I already debuted as a vagrant reform-school girl in So Young, So Bad? Would I lose whatever following I might have picked up? (I did not even have the time or confidence to consider: Would I lose myself?)

  “I got it!” Bill Grady was saying. “How about Rita, after Rita Hayworth?” I trembled—at least there was recognition for me. Rita Hayworth/Margarita Cansino, my dance teacher Paco’s niece. She of the raised hairline and lengthened legs. A Spanish girl goddess with an English name.

  “Rita Moreno,” Bill Grady decreed. “That’s who you are and that’s who you will be.” In that moment my old life would officially end.

  STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS

  The first two films I made for MGM were The Toast of New Orleans and Pagan Love Song. Viewed today, in which even our movies are more cynical and realistic, their gaiety seems a demented delirium. Why is everyone so happy? Why are we leaping around, bursting into song without any excuse, with wild disregard for the actual musical traditions and culture of the native characters—Cajuns and Tahitians?

  In The Toast of New Orleans the Cajuns sound like Italians, and the semiunderwater musical Pagan Love Song might as well be Oklahoma! Esther Williams and handsome Howard Keel take soaring tower dives between crooning out odes to Tahiti. In both movies, the plots are thin to nonexistent: In The Toast of New Orleans, a simple Cajun fisherman, Pepe (played by Mario Lanza), woos and wins an aristocratic opera star (Kathryn Grayson). Pagan Love Song revolves around an even flimsier plot in which Esther Williams plans to leave Tahiti (but of course she won’t), and Howard Keel seems about to lose his entire stock of coconut oil (but of course he doesn’t). In the end, everyone kisses, sings, dances, swims…without an obvious pause for breath or attempt at credibility.

  There is a manic quality to both musicals—everyone is smiling and skipping and pretending to be ethnicities they are very obviously not. Esther Williams is supposed to be a Tahitian (okay, maybe a half Tahitian, but even with brown makeup slathered everywhere, she looks, at best, like a shapely Miami Beacher with a great tan). And in The Toast of New Orleans, the obviously Italian Mario Lanza is a Creole shrimp fisherman who bursts into operatic song. In both pictures, I play “cute” ethnics and employ my newly invented “universal ethnic accent,” which is a coy pidgin English of no discernible authentic origin.

  In Pagan Love Song, as the native girl Terru, I wear a two-piece sarong and continually stand on tippy-toes to look up adoringly at Howard Keel (I have no choice but to look up—he was six-foot-four). Our big scene—which admittedly was a huge break for a teenage girl from Juncos, via Washington Heights—is “The House of Singing Bamboo,” in which Howard Keel sings a song originally created and sung by Judy Garland as “Hayride.” The song is an odd transplant to Tahiti, and I don’t actually sing, but bang rhythmically on the bamboo alongside Howard Keel as he croons.

  In The Toast of New Orleans, as the Cajun girl Tina, I don’t really have a plotline, but I burst forth instantly—singing and dancing up a frenzy of swirling skirts and petticoats that presage my skirt-swirling turn in West Side Story. And I dance and sing with none other than the fantastic dancer James Mitchell. I had been terrified to dance with such a classically trained ballet dancer (he was Agnes de Mille’s protégé), but I showed him one of my Spanish dances and he was agreeable—I danced for him and he approved. I assume that if he had deemed me not worthy, my dance number would have been cut. We do a wild number called “Tina Lina”—swirling and spinning and affecting quite a bit of the mating dance in a ritualized Hispanic manner, so in a sense I was right at home. Behind us, trying to obscure his stocky legs while belting out lyrics, was Lanza.

  During my dance, I pass my breast within fractions of James Mitchell’s chest and then taunt him by spinning off…and spin off I do at the finale: smack at Mario Lanza, who releases his perilous glass-shattering high note…. After all that strenuous workout and the supple grace and strength demonstrated by James Mitchell, I, Tina, still prefer Mario Lanza (who doesn’t want me, of course). In that regard, the film came closer to being realistic than at any other moment.

  Mario Lanza (real name Alfred Arnold Cocozza—changed, of course, by Bill Grady at MGM) was thirty at the time, with a beautiful tenor voice that would later enable him to play his idol, Caruso. Offscreen, he was helpless to his addictions—food and alcohol. Whenever I went into his dressing room, I found him eating gargantuan amounts of food. Mario had an insatiable appetite—he was famous for eating two and a half chickens at one sitting, and I always wondered, Why two and a half—why not quit at two or go on for three?

  The very first time I walked in on him on his lunch break, Mario was polishing off his third full-size pizza pie and downing a full bottle of red wine. It was no mystery why his weight fluctuated between 250 pounds and the 160 pounds he needed to weigh to look good on film. Even when he was 160, as I danced around Mario, I noticed that the buttons on his vest were popping.

  Kathryn Grayson, his aristocratic costar, complained that he tried to French-kiss her on-screen; she said he pushed his garlic-laden tongue into her mouth when she could not get away. She had to sing despite gagging.

  One night, offscreen, drunken, he staggered under Kathryn Grayson’s window and serenaded her in his perfect tenor, “Be My Love”—until her boyfriend came out, bellowing. Mario, though young, was long married and a father of four. He was wild, woolly, and mischievous.

  I couldn’t help but like him, and only eight years later I was saddened to read of his death in Rome at age thirty-eight. He had been, as usual, trying to lose weight for a role, and subjected himself to a “twilight sleep” crash weight-loss treatment that kept the dieter under deep sedation. He’d also been taking drafts of the urine of pregnant women. These methods were controversial and were suspected in hastening his sudden death. There may have also been a genetic factor, though, as later two of his four children died at a young age. A few months after Mario’s death, his wife, only thirty-seven, died of “broken heart” syndrome. Within less than a year, their children were orphaned. So sad!

  Looking back at the movie now, so light and frothy, it is impossible to imagine what tragedy lay ahead. There was no shadowy premonition, but Mario Lanza did seem to be careening out of control in that all-too-familiar Hollywood way that seems to ensure an untimely end. He was a substance abuser, but his substance wasn’t heroin or cocaine; it was a triple order of family-size pizza with all the extra toppings—but maybe it was just as deadly as an overdose.

  Thanks to his recordings, Mario Lanza remains an icon in the opera world. But who can hear his rich tenor and not feel sorrow that he died so young? His movie persona lives on for me, as it does for his many fans. In my mind I see him still, jumping up at that banquet scene in The Toast of New Orleans and startling everyone when he announces, “When I feel happy, I have to sing!” And bursting forth with his trademark song, which will also echo forever in my memory: “Be My Love.”

  Filming Pagan Love Song was a wonderful experience. I will say that the joy that
suffused the film was also true off-camera. Such total euphoria offscreen on a shoot was unusual. Esther Williams, the competitive swimmer, appeared genuinely joyous as she tower-dived through cerulean clouds; she was ecstatic. Howard Keel too seemed endlessly affable, and willing to joyfully sing and simultaneously spring off tower diving boards as well. It turned out that Esther Williams was pregnant by her adored husband at that time, Ben Gage, and she was very happy about that. I have to say, she seemed a very contented person generally, and of unbelievable physical prowess and daring. Though pregnant, she did all her own stunts, and continued to do so through successive pregnancies and films. She was…well, buoyant.

  However, now when I reconsider the film, I am a bit embarrassed by the disrespect it shows to Tahitians. Nineteen fifty was a different time, and it was routine to show such blatant disregard for native people, who were treated in this film with a celebratory condescension. In Pagan Love Song, the natives are delighted to do heavy field labor and scale coconut trees without pay, in exchange for a chance to have a party and sing and dance. Right. Obese “Tahitian” women (really Samoans) are shown enjoying a game of skip-rope. Every single Polynesian person is depicted with an IQ of about seventy and the maturity of an agreeable three-year-old.

  I am afraid that I embodied every cliché of the coy, childlike Polynesian as Terru. I was never less than giddy—giggling and squealing and sulking in turn. If anything, my “brother” Tavae is more demented and downgraded, and together we sink our coconut canoe and sputter through our cute near-drowning. Poor Charles Mauu, who played my brother. He actually was Tahitian; it must have been painful for him to see his culture ridiculed. Or maybe, as is often the bottom line with actors, he was just glad to get the work.