Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  “Get up, Sleeping Beauty!” they yelled at me, and grabbed my purse to start rifling through it. When they went for my overnight bag, I just went crazy. I was going to die of embarrassment. In those days you didn’t sleep with men, and in that bag were personal things that you bring when you’re sleeping with a man, like underwear and a negligee. Sex was a normal enough activity, but it would have been a scandal in those hypocritical times.

  I fought very hard with them not to open the bag, but the cops pushed me down on the sofa and said if I didn’t let them open it, they’d charge me with obstructing justice. I just started to cry and cry, I was so humiliated, as they upended my bag and everything in it fell on the floor.

  I tussled with one officer and was threatened that I’d be taken to jail if I didn’t cooperate. Somehow I talked myself out of that! Still, it was bad enough. The media had a field day with headlines like, “Ham Heir and Sexy Pixie.”

  Geordie denied that the marijuana was his, and I believed him. His defense lawyer contended that Geordie had been framed. At the time, Geordie was playing piano in a trio, with a bassist and a drummer, and they had gotten a gig at the Captain’s Table, a popular jazz joint on La Cienega Boulevard. I had heard that the bass player, Robert Shevak, smoked a lot of grass, but as far as I knew, Geordie never touched it. I didn’t, either; in fact, I hardly even drank alcohol, just taking a few sips now and then to appear social.

  Geordie’s defense team contended that the cops came to Shevak one night and said that they wanted him to plant some grass on the visor of a big old Packard that Geordie drove, so that they could make some news and some money, and Shevak agreed.

  I testified for Geordie as a character witness at his trial and he was eventually acquitted. I’m embarrassed to admit that I felt frightened and pressured into breaking off the relationship, something I regretted, because Geordie was a nice young man and I truly believed he had done nothing wrong.

  * * *

  I first met Anthony Quinn in my early twenties. He was a manly, much-married forty-year-old. He wasn’t a big star yet—except at seduction. But his role in that performance didn’t get a good review from me. Tony wasn’t nice to women. I suffered whiplash from his sudden uncourtly and uncouth departure.

  But I was attracted to him because we had many things in common despite being years apart in age. He was ruggedly handsome and sensual. Women found him difficult to resist, and many men wanted to be him. He was more than six feet tall, loomed over me, and had a huge head and a sonorous voice.

  Tony was one of the few Hispanic men in my life, and what we shared was the experience of Hollywood’s ethnic stereotyping mangle, which had Tony playing ethnic roles such as Indian and Hawaiian chiefs, Chinese guerrillas, Filipino freedom fighters, and Arab sheikhs. Underneath, he and I both simmered with resentment over our stereotypical casting.

  Tony was a real mentor for me in one important way: As an actor, he always did what he could within the roles he was given. His Crazy Horse portrayal in They Died with Their Boots On had real dignity, for example, and it did a lot for Crazy Horse’s reputation.

  Mostly Mexican, Tony had an Aztec Indian mother and a paternal Irish grandfather from County Cork, Frank Quinn, who rode with Pancho Villa. Tony would get furious when the Irish part was mentioned, but he kept that Irish last name despite being born in Chihuahua, Mexico, with six out of eight Mexican grandparents. He felt pure Mexican and started out Catholic. At one point, he even wanted to be a priest! He was long past that phase when I met him. He had become, for the record, a Pentecostal follower of the faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson.

  Tony was a womanizer and a serial marrier. He racked up three legal marriages and one common-law relationship, using the same marriage MO each time: He would seduce his future wife while married to the present one. Save for his first wife, Katherine DeMille, a daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, Tony’s second and third wives were both in his employ while he seduced them. He often announced, “I want to impregnate every woman in the world!”

  He died trying, too. Tony fathered more than a dozen children whom he acknowledged and, whenever he wasn’t married, bedded hundreds of girls.

  When I reflect on my relationship with Tony, I can’t help but see how closely we were connected in ways that went away beyond our brief time together. When the first great love of my life, Marlon Brando, triumphed as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tony was one of the first to replace Marlon for Broadway and on tour. He received the best reviews of all the Stanleys who followed.

  And it was when Tony and Marlon filmed Viva Zapata! in 1952 that Anthony Quinn truly became a star. As Zapata’s brother, Eufemio, Tony played not a condescending joke of a Mexican, but a real Mexican. (It would be another decade before I would be lucky enough to play the true-life, nonclichéd Puerto Rican Anita in West Side Story—Puerto Rican, but real Puerto Rican.)

  Ironically, Tony always resented Marlon for getting the starring role in Viva Zapata! He rebuffed Marlon’s attempts at friendship while they were shooting, despite the fact that Marlon respected him so much as an actor and tried hard to keep things equal between them.

  Tony actually bested Marlon at the Academy Awards, though: Marlon Brando didn’t win for Best Actor that year, but Anthony Quinn did win in his category. He was the first Mexican-American to ever win an Oscar (Best Supporting), earning it as Zapata’s brother against Marlon Brando’s Emiliano. Brando lost the Best Actor Oscar that year to Gary Cooper in High Noon.

  MEETING MARLON

  I am wearing a scent, Vent Vert by Balmain, as I write these words. It is a scent that Marlon Brando often wore. It’s a woman’s perfume, but Marlon often used women’s perfumes, and this was his favorite.

  For more than fifty years now, I have been wearing Vent Vert (Green Wind). It is a fresh scent, clean and natural. When I inhale it, I inhale the memory of Marlon, and I can almost feel his smooth, polished skin and taste his sweet breath. I remember how he spoke to me, how he played the drums, how he made love…and how I almost died from loving him.

  Not every woman has known a great love, but I have been lucky enough to have had two.

  My first, Marlon Brando, almost proved fatal.

  * * *

  Marlon had initially spotted me on the cover of the March 1, 1954, issue of Life magazine, taken when I was twenty-two years old. It’s that famous head shot in which I am looking back over my shoulder. My teeth are bared and my eyes are widened in a classic come-hither expression that is both sweetly innocent and tantalizingly sexual. This was my Gypsy persona, complete with dangling earrings. After I knew Marlon, I understood why my image, as captured in that photograph, made me perfect Marlon bait, ripe for the taking.

  I ended up in Life magazine completely by chance. Around that time, they were starting to do television pilots in Hollywood, and I had been cast in 1953 to do a television pilot with Ray Bolger. Ray, who is still probably best-known for his role as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, was a Broadway personality—not classically trained as a dancer, but what they called an “eccentric” dancer: He hoofed and he entertained people. When I did the pilot with Ray at Desilu studios for his variety show, Where’s Raymond? (later called The Ray Bolger Show), Life was covering it, and their photographer took some pictures of me as well as Ray.

  Apparently, as the pictures were being shown around the Life office, one of the editors asked, “Who’s that girl?” when he spotted me. And when someone said he didn’t know my name, but that I had a part with Ray Bolger, he said, “Find her! She looks interesting.”

  The people from Life came to me then and asked whether they could do a photo layout of me, and possibly a cover. Well, I happily agreed, and a photographer came to take me all kinds of places, where he photographed me in different outfits and various poses, from an innocent girl in a lacy blouse to a lipsticked wildcat in a plunging Indian dress.

  The magazine’s editorial board loved the pictures and made up a whole story line about “An
Actress’s Catalog of Sex and Innocence.” The article itself described me as a “Satirist of Sex,” and began this way: “Rita Moreno is a 22-year-old starlet who can sing, dance and even, to the extent this ever becomes necessary in Hollywood, act.”

  Did I mind being portrayed as a “Satirist of Sex”? Absolutely not! Are you kidding? Every actress, big star and little star and no star, would have killed at that time to land on the cover of Life magazine. My God, that was a huge deal! Life rarely put a lot of actors and actresses on their covers, because it was essentially a newsmagazine, so this was major.

  Besides, during much of my young screen life in Hollywood, there was no other way for me to go than for those sexy, ethnic roles. If I didn’t want to do that, if I wanted to concentrate on principles rather than on getting work, I would never have made another film, and I never would have been on television. You played the game however you could.

  In fact, that article led to my being signed with 20th Century Fox, because Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of the studio, saw my picture on the cover of Life and said, “Who is this girl? Can she speak English? Find me that girl!”

  They found my agent and signed me on the spot. Things happened like that sometimes in Hollywood, and it was so bizarre. Meanwhile, I did whatever I had to do, because I always felt I was talented. I was going to persevere, convinced that someday, someone of importance would discover me. Insecurities and all, that belief drove me most of my life.

  * * *

  Marlon was instantly so intrigued by my photograph on the cover that he tried to locate me. He couldn’t, for whatever reasons. It wasn’t until much later, after we had started seeing each other, that Marlon and his lifelong makeup man, Phil Rhodes, discussed who I was and why I looked so familiar. That was when Marlon finally recalled first seeing me on that magazine cover.

  We first met in the makeup room on the set of Désirée, the 1954 film in which Marlon played Napoleon opposite Jean Simmons as Désirée Clary. I’d like to say that Marlon had the Napoleonic comb-over pasted to his forehead at that very moment, and perhaps was wearing epaulets and the snug white Napoleonic emperor’s breeches. In reality, Marlon was wearing his signature white T-shirt and white cotton jeans.

  Marlon was beyond handsome. With his muscular physique, hooded eyes, full lips, and quick mind, he was swaggeringly irresistible, with a profile that should be on a Roman coin. Just meeting him that first day sent my body temperature skyrocketing, as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath, and I went into a full-body blush.

  It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs, novels and Wagnerian operas. From the moment we met, I felt that a web had been spun between us, drawing me to Marlon. Amazingly, he felt the same way, and made no secret about it. From that day forward, Marlon Brando and I were locked in the ultimate folie à deux, a crazy love that lasted for years, until one day I quite literally was forced out of a coma and had to choose life over him.

  I was living at the Hollywood Studio Club when Marlon and I first started seeing each other. HSC was a well-known home for young women in show business, providing single and double furnished rooms for a nominal rent, plus breakfast and dinner. It was run by the Y, and had a midnight curfew and stringent rules about social behavior. Probably the most famous actress living there at the time was Kim Novak.

  Marlon began to pursue me by telephone after that first meeting. The phone was in the hall, and the other girls were electrified by his calls: “Marlon Brando is on the phone for you!” one or another would shriek when they heard his voice.

  And, boy, was he on the phone—for hours at a time. We would talk—well, he did most of the talking, interspersed with periods of silence that might last as long as a half hour. Anyone who was close to him had the same experience with Marlon’s phone calls; the great writer Toni Morrison, a good friend of his, also remarked on those long periods of silence that took place whenever Marlon was thinking.

  Most people wouldn’t dare do this on the phone, because they’d know the person on the other end would say, “Hello? Hello, are you there?” But Marlon’s friends all got used to it, and so did I. I got to the point that I understood he was there, and that it was worth waiting for him to talk. Clinging to the receiver as I waited for him to speak again, I could almost hear Marlon’s busy mind ticking like a clock. On one occasion, I gave myself a complete mani/pedi while planted on the hallway floor, tethered by the cord stretch of the house phone, cradling the receiver on my shoulder and waiting for him to speak again.

  The girls of HSC soon counted on me for their vicarious connection to this star who, at thirty years old, had achieved a meteoric rise to fame. Once, during one of my phone marathons with Marlon, two girls laid hands on the phone box, pretending to channel him.

  During our phone calls and dates, I managed to piece together some of his history and to understand why he was so determined to rebel against almost everyone and everything.

  Marlon was the child of two alcoholic parents. His father was a salesman who would check into a hotel and give the bellboy money for a bottle and a hooker. His mother, Dorothy Pennebaker, drank and found escape in theater. It was from her that his talent sprang. She headed a theater company in Nebraska, where Henry Fonda was one of her protégés.

  As a young boy, Marlon was always caring for wounded and abandoned animals. He was the kindest of boys, and his lyrical descriptions of his boyhood showed his keen eye and fine instincts. Despite a difficult childhood, when he was older and on the road he always wrote affectionate letters to his family and signed them, “Bud.”

  Like me, he’d had a sketchy education; Marlon was such a prankster during his school years that he was expelled from several, including a military academy, for things like throwing lighted firecrackers into a theater audience. But he was one of the smartest men I have ever met. He had a keen curiosity and a sharp intelligence, and was never boring.

  Marlon could seem like a bully, flying off the handle at times, but he was also one of the most sensitive men I knew, always standing up for anyone he perceived as an underdog, like those suffering at the hands of class or racial discrimination. Maybe that was why he played those roles so brilliantly onstage and in film: He appeared a brute force of nature with a poet’s soul. A sensitive colossus.

  “Sometimes I put on an act and people think I’m insensitive,” he said once. “Really, it’s just a kind of armor, because I’m too sensitive.”

  I understood at once what he meant. I was the same way, expected to play the role of a hot Latin spitfire (or even “Satirist of Sex”), when in reality I was a determined, reliable, hardworking actor always in search of a better part.

  At age twenty, Marlon had followed his sisters to New York, where he was fortunate enough to stumble into Stella Adler’s acting classes. Adler based her acting approach on the Stanislavsky Method—something most actors simply call “Method acting”—a technique based on intellectual honesty and gut instincts. Marlon embraced it, mind, body, and soul.

  Even starting out in theater, he was a kind, giving boy. When Marlon met Tennessee Williams for the first time, up in Cape Cod at a cottage that the playwright was renting, “Bud” slept on the floor and fixed the electricity, the plumbing, and just about everything else (and won the part of Stanley Kowalski in the process). He was shy and unassuming.

  Marlon’s stage role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan in 1947, was such a standout that he decided to try Hollywood, intending to make a movie or two before heading back to do live theater in New York City. Marlon despised the bogus glad-handing of Hollywood and made a point of thumbing his nose at all of the usual publicity machinery, especially the gossip columnists. He wasn’t going to pander to anyone.

  Things didn’t turn out quite the way he planned. Marlon made several movies in quick succession, each better than the last. He was nominated for Best Actor for his role in Kazan’s film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. He lost out that year to Humphr
ey Bogart for his role in African Queen. However, in rapid succession Marlon was nominated for Best Actor three more times: for Viva Zapata! in 1952, for Julius Caesar in 1953, and again for On the Waterfront in 1954, which finally earned him that statue. Marlon had proved to Hollywood that he was bankable and believable for any role, from a Mexican to a Shakespearean leader to a longshoreman who “coulda been a contender.”

  Hollywood was in awe of him. So was I.

  On our very first date, Marlon took me to an amazing party where the other guests included James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jack Palance, and Eli Wallach…. It was an all-star, all-Method-actor party. I felt awed and out of my league, but thrilled to be there, especially with him.

  We grew intimate quickly, and I began spending a lot of time at Marlon’s house. To say that he was a great lover—sensual, generous, delightfully inventive—would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul. Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.

  He introduced me to so many new ideas and really educated me about the world. Marlon made me politically conscious. I saw him doing things, getting involved in events to raise awareness about Native Americans and other causes, and I would realize there was a lot going on in the world that I’d never thought about. I was really very ignorant and unaware; I was mostly absorbed by “me.” And it was Marlon who awakened me to things beyond myself.

  He gave me books to read, like The Art of Loving by philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a marvelous book that I still treasure to this day. Marlon told me to read books on history, especially about the Civil War, slavery, and Native Americans. He gave me books that weren’t necessarily popular titles, but were interesting and informative about the world.

  And he actually taught me about manners. I talked too loudly; Marlon made a great effort to help me understand that everybody in the restaurant did not have to hear what I was saying to him. He taught me where spoons and forks go when you set a table.