by Rita Moreno
That I felt wrong for this role didn’t stop me from fighting for it. I won the part and found myself kneeling, my hands pressed together, a towering templelike gold headdress atop my head, and showing a bare midriff. Deborah Kerr announces that she has come to Siam to teach English.
“I already speak English,” I murmur in my universal ethnic accent.
“And very well!” said Deborah Kerr, with her crisp enunciation.
It was a wonderful experience; the film was not shot on location but in a series of elaborate soundstages at the studio. They created gardens, the palace—it was truly an amazing production because it looked so authentic. Even though I believed I was wrong for the role and France Nuyen would have been a better choice, I loved the part. Tuptim is a pivotal character who brings on the denouement of the film: When she and her lover Lun Tha flee the king, he sends out a search party. They find the lovers and Lun Tha is killed. In the film, Tuptim reacts with hysterical grief; in the earlier versions, she was executed as well.
But in this retelling, the king is supposed to beat her; however, he cannot bear to do this. Failing to do his kingly, manly duty to punish an errant concubine sends the king around the bend and he begins to die.
* * *
The movie was hailed as a major hit, and I received good reviews. I looked just beautiful in the costume and headdress. Eventually I approved of my own performance, if not my phony accent.
Fortunately, I kept on working, but I must have been filed under the category of “general ethnic.” I guess they figured that if there was some sort of accent, darker skin, or an exotic look, a little Puerto Rican girl could play the role.
Indian maiden roles were popular in the era. The Indian maidens in Hollywood became a stereotype—insulting along both sexual and racial lines…. The maidens are all captured in some sexy way, and they either love the Indians who capture them (the majority of the time) or not…. But the race issue becomes complicated, because some of the Indian maidens are really white maidens captured as babies by Indians. Mostly the captured maidens, whatever their original race, want to stay in buckskin and braids and stay captured—think Natalie Wood, whose character was white, but prefers the Comanches in the film The Searchers. On the other hand, Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven was an Indian baby adopted by whites as an infant. When her Kiowa brother wants her to come back to the tribe, she kills him. Are you following all this? I was always rankled by that scene, because she kills her own flesh and blood! Just as I hate Pocahontas causing the death of her Indian fiancé to marry John Smith, whose head looks like a box of cereal in the Disney animation. I know this choice was probably done to make a Native American girl seem more acceptable—“She really prefers white men!”—which is such an insult.
The Yellow Tomahawk, with Rory Calhoun and Noah Beery Jr., seemed to break the mold. I play a different kind of maiden—a pure Cheyenne Indian, yet the role is comic. Honey Bear has a huge crush on Noah Beery Jr. and spends most of the movie chasing him. And as a surprise ending, she gets him. But Noah Beery Jr. is playing a Mexican, so I guess this doesn’t count as a mixed marriage.
Rory Calhoun was an hombre offscreen as well as on-screen, and no stranger to gunslinging in real life. He had been slinging guns and crossed state lines after a jewelry robbery—a federal crime that landed him in a penitentiary. Rory was also a legendary womanizer, and when his wife divorced him, she named seventy-nine adulterous lovers, and his retort was, “She ain’t named a third of them!”
The leading lady, Peggie Castle, was also no angel. She was a real femme fatale—racking up four husbands and countless lovers, and downing a river of alcohol. She lived up to her motto, “No one ever found a nice girl interesting,” and perished in mid-drink of cirrhosis at age forty-two, sitting on her second husband’s sofa, weeks after the death of the third husband.
Yes, it was a real shoot-’em-up time. This was the era in which I was exiled to that arid ranch out in Monument Valley, Utah, where they filmed all the Westerns. For years I wore those Indian maiden costumes and played parts that involved being captured by braves or the whites who were retaliating against the braves. I was sexily swinging my fringes and once again speaking in my generic ethnic accent.
The Indian maiden roles had their challenges. For starters, buckskin is one of the most uncomfortable materials to wear; it is stiff and freezing cold during those dawn shoots in the desert. Any close-up of me in The Yellow Tomahawk or the The Deerslayer or any of the buckskin-and-braid epics I filmed would show my skin stippled from the cold. All my maidens had goose bumps.
As I look back on my Indian maiden period, I can see that the films also all had a barely veiled sexist slant: that girls should be captured, writhing, and either enjoy submitting or kick till the bitter end. The Arab maidens did the same thing. All maidens ultimately spoke in sibilant subservient whispers when they “caved” to warrior chieftains, super cowboys, sheikhs, or white liberators of captured maidens.
I see now that any movie in which I ended up saying the equivalent of, “Yes, sire…” or, “He is my chief…” was undeniably sexist at its core. I suppose the blame should be laid at the well-shod feet of the movie moguls, and in part on the male screenwriters who catered to or shared these slave maiden fantasies.
I did not get into the “Bible soft-porn epics,” many of which starred Susan Hayward or Jean Simmons; the Bible pictures also had slave girls submitting all the time, but they became devout Christians. Instead, I served my time in leather-thonged bondage; I never got to murmur to Moses or dance around the golden calf, or even strip on a rooftop, knowing Gregory Peck was watching me. I don’t know why not! I kept playing maidens, but the closest I came to biblical was a desert Arab maiden in El Alaméin. I played an Arab maiden who wore a turban, which I later learned was forbidden—Arab maidens are not allowed to wear turbans; only Arab men are allowed to wear them. El Alaméin was a hilarious shoot done in Malibu, where we filmed among the beach dunes to simulate the North African Sahara. This meant the cast had to constantly crouch to hide the horizon line, which included the Pacific Ocean. The occasional surfer was edited out.
Perhaps The Deerslayer was the most emblematic of my maiden roles. I played Hetty Hutter, the “strange, untamed” daughter of a nasty Indian-killer settler who propelled me and my calmer blond sister (Cathy O’Donnell) up “Indian-infested” rivers on his handmade floating fort. My nasty father kept looking for “Injuns” to kill, to add to his scalp collection. Hutter was a mean son of a gun, and it was good to discover that I wasn’t really his daughter. The reason I was so wild and untamed and wore leather and never combed my hair was that I was one of those captured-as-a-baby Mohican maidens, and, of course, a hellion (Mohican spitfire) like me was going to be subdued—somehow! The movie poster shows me in a triple armlock, being restrained by no fewer than three warriors—one of whom has prominent underarm hair, a dead giveaway he was not a “real” Huron, as many Native Americans are known to be descended from the Mongolian race and have little to no body hair. The hirsute, swarthy “Indians” in the movie were most likely not Native Americans. “Do the Huron have underarm hair?” That question could be the subtitle to the stories of all the unlikely casting of ethnics in films of that period.
To the rescue came the Deerslayer, a white man reared by Mohicans who had to save the life of a Mohican raised by a white bigot. The Deerslayer was played by Lex Barker, the “tenth Tarzan,” but one of the most popular Tarzans of all time. This incredible drool-worthy hunk had an Indian blood brother, Chingachgook, who was played by a Hispanic actor whom I worked with on two movies: Carlos Rivas, a six-foot-tall Mexican, had also played my “Siamese” lover, Lun Tha, in The King and I. I rarely worked with a Hispanic leading-man type. This handsome Latino actor was an exception to the rule—but like me, he was working as a disguised all-purpose “ethnic.” As I rarely got to work with a Latino actor, even disguised, working with Carlos twice was like winning the lottery against high odds.
Car
los was also droolingly attractive, talented, and committed to ending racial discrimination. In retrospect, maybe The Deerslayer wasn’t all that bad!
If I want to point to a racist, sexist film, I think The Yellow Tomahawk fit that bill “best”; i.e., it was the worst offender. If ever I felt like a spitfire in real life, it was having to play these stereotypical roles, which were just as demeaning as the cutesy ethnics I had played in musicals. I longed to be cast as a genuine person, without racist or sexist overtones. Where was a good, honest dramatic or comic role for me? I knew I would give that my best, and I bet I would be good, if I ever got my chance. My fury would simmer for years, as I was offered degrading roles right through my sixties.
I should note that a lot of white ingenues—not just ethnic Puerto Ricans—played Indian maidens and other slave girl roles. Which goes to show you that often it is hard to distinguish what wrong is being done to you because you’re ethnic or just because you’re female.
PART III
Men, Love, and Romance
EYE CANDY AND LEGGY LADIES
I arrived in Hollywood during an era when you couldn’t just be a singer or a dancer. You did it all or you had trouble finding work. I could do it all, but Hollywood still didn’t quite know what to do with me. For publicity purposes, I was stereotyped as a hot Latina with smoldering eyes and hips that wouldn’t quit. But the truth is that I’d had far less sex than you might imagine. I was still in my teens and, in reality, quite prudent and conservative when I first arrived in Los Angeles.
Who I really was didn’t matter to the Hollywood publicity machine. Hollywood relied on its young actresses to be eye candy, to decorate its opening events and parties like so many bright, sweetly scented flowers. We were even expected to date publicly. I played along—sometimes with hilarious or disastrous results—while trying, at the same time, to resolve who I was as a woman, a lover, and—eventually—a wife and mother.
Along the way, I had to learn the difference between lust, true love, and obsession—the kind that can prove to be fatal.
* * *
When I was a young starlet at MGM, part of my job was to attend social events. At the behest of the publicity department I was asked to do a number of things, among them to be taken by the publicity people to veterans’ hospitals to visit “the boys.”
I wasn’t the only one to do this. MGM lore tells us that Ann Miller once told a veteran amputee, in her most thoughtful and gentlest voice, “Well, honey, better luck next time!”
Perhaps Ann Miller was insensitive to his legs because so much focus had been paid to her own. Ann was a dancer, singer, and actress, a native Texan who had been discovered as a nightclub dancer in San Francisco when she was only thirteen years old. She began doing musicals with RKO and Columbia Pictures until signing with MGM, where she rose to stardom in musicals like Easter Parade, On the Town, and Kiss Me Kate.
Ann’s long, shapely legs were famous around the world not only because she could tap-dance faster than any other woman in the business, but simply because they were gorgeous to look at. We forget that, in that bygone era, legs mattered more than they do now. The publicity department asked starlets to display their endless legs in a variety of poses: legs kicking, legs extended, legs shown from the rear, as starlets bent over or peeked backward over their shoulders. Everywhere you saw glam shots, there were legs.
No one was leggier than Ann Miller. Her legs were so long that they were the reason panty hose were invented. Previously, long stockings had been stitched to panties, but Ann had the wardrobe department design continuous underpants that extended into hose.
Ann died several years ago, but I love to imagine her legs in a Busby Berkeley–ish heaven—still kicking. I find it hard to believe that they ever stopped. She certainly displayed them (and they looked good) long after the rest of her had aged.
I was weak in my own knees when I was told that I would fly out with Ann Miller on a four-day publicity trip to Palm Beach, Florida. Flights were different then. They took a lot longer, for one thing, and on the early Pan Am planes, the front-row seats faced one another. I found myself eye-to-eye, knee-to-knee with Ann Miller, one of my idols. She was then about twenty-five, and not only were her legs as lovely and long as advertised, but her face had a preternatural glow.
So there I was, Rosita Dolores Alverio, sitting opposite the great Ann Miller and hopelessly, totally tongue-tied. What do you say to your personal icon? You say:
Rita: I’m a dancer, too, and I’ve admired your dancing all my life.
Ann: Oh, that’s nice, honey. What kinda dance?
Rita: It’s Spanish dance.
Ann: (glazed eyes)
Rita: Yeah, it’s uh, you know, uh, it’s flamenco, the sevillanas, pronounced “sevi-yah-nas.”
Ann: Sevi-what? Sevi-what-nas? I see! Like rumbas and tangos? Spanish stuff!
Rita: (with a barely discernible sigh). Yesss…Yes, that’s kind of it…. So, I want you to know that I just love it soooo much when I’ve seen you dance on all those platforms and steps and stuff! I mean, it’s really scary, and boy, I just don’t know how you did it! (Pause.) How do you do it?
Ann: Listen, honey, what’s your name?
Rita: Rita.
Ann: Well, lemme tell ya somethin’, honey, if I have to do one more fuckin’ dance on one more fuckin’ platform, I will strangle that fuckin’ choreographer!
Every time my idol dropped the old F-bomb my head literally snapped back with each utterance. I gasped but did not wish to appear critical. On this mission, Ann Miller was the headliner; I was only eye candy.
The reason we were assigned to fly from LA to Palm Beach was to open the famous Casablanca-style luxury hotel the Colony, known for its art deco palms and white leather Polo bar. For this occasion, I was outfitted with a gorgeous wardrobe borrowed from the MGM costume department. Just packing had been a heady experience. All of my dresses had been worn by stars and were stored with labels like, “Ava Gardner, screen test,” or “Bette Davis, party dress.”
At that time, Palm Beach was a seriously big-time society place with very wealthy “gentlemen,” mostly scions, and bejeweled, coiffed Babe Paley types. (I believe that Palm Beach is still in that time, having been placed in suspended animation around 1953.) “Coiffed,” in this case, meant a very smooth, jaw-length, “barely there” pageboy with a side part. Even then, Palm Beach women were skeleton-thin (what author Tom Wolfe would later dub in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities “the X-rays”). This made me question the Duchess of Windsor’s old saying, “One can never be too rich or too thin.” Palm Beach women seemed to be both.
The Palm Beach women fell into two categories: the old-style heiresses who resembled the horses they rode, and younger trophy wives. The prettiest and youngest of the trophy wives I met on that weekend jaunt was an instant favorite of mine, Gregg Dodge, otherwise known as Mrs. Horace Dodge Jr. She was an expensive bottle blonde whom I had last seen performing at the Copacabana as a showgirl.
Gregg had become the fifth wife of the Dodge auto heir at the first moment that she noticed a breast droop. Smart move, as the wealth seemed limitless. (As it turned out, Gregg would hit that limit, but it did take her some time to achieve bankruptcy.) When I met her that weekend, she was in her glory— gorgeous and rich, so very rich, and still a happy-go-lucky Texan gal who wanted to show it off and share her good fortune.
When Gregg invited me to her mansion on the main mansion drag, Ocean Drive, it was obvious that she had scored wealth beyond anything I had ever even glimpsed. As she led me up to her bedroom, I noted that Gregg was even leggier than Ann Miller. I would have loved to see them in a kickoff.
We were already deep in girl talk. I gushed, “I just thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life when I saw you strike a pose.” I meant it! I also complimented Gregg on her gleaming skin.
She couldn’t wait to pass along her secret: “Vaseline! But you apply it very, very thin, sweetie.” This was an old sh
owgirl trick.
We walked through what seemed to be a series of walk-in closets. (If memory serves, an entire floor of the mansion was a walk-in closet.) Finally, Gregg said, “Come ovah to my fuh closet and I’ll lend you one of my stoles.”
Oh, my God! I thought, as we walked into a vast cooler. Is this what heaven is like? Heaven in the Arctic! The closet was filled with forlorn dead creatures, which didn’t bother me in the least back then. Gregg chose a silvery blue mink stole and stooped to drape it over my shoulders. I felt like kneeling, as if this were a coronation.
I walked on air for the rest of the week, feeling very complete, thank you very much.
Gregg Dodge went on to live a long, expensive life. I suppose you could say that she “misspent” her later years, since she spent every cent of Dodge’s money. Dodge decided to divorce her at one point, crying, “I can’t afford this woman anymore!”
He dropped dead before the divorce was final, but Horace had cut her out of his will—and besides, he didn’t have any money left, thanks to Gregg’s talent for spending. But, ever resourceful, Gregg sued her mother-in-law, claiming she interfered in their marriage and turned Horace against her. They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but it was rumored to be in excess of nine million dollars.