Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  Marlon even taught me about grooming. Yes, that was important. Until meeting him, I had been dressing in the way that I thought I “should” dress, which was in that sexy Latina way. I wore very tight dresses with tight belts, so that I had a real curve around my hips. I also wore way too much makeup, because I thought I needed to; I did not believe that I was very pretty.

  Slowly, slowly Marlon helped me grow up. This unexpected tutor became my caring mentor.

  I didn’t ask Marlon much about acting, because I knew he didn’t like to talk about it, and bemoaned people who made it the topic when they were with him. He just hated it! But one day I finally had the confidence that he wasn’t going to throw me out the window or something, and I asked him how he could play a bad guy, like he did in The Young Lions. Marlon gave me the best advice about acting I ever got.

  “Don’t play it like a bad person,” he said. “Be absolutely justified in whatever you do, because your character believes she’s right to do that thing.”

  That’s the kind of skill you learn over years with an acting teacher, and that’s what Marlon taught me. I would have a chance to practice that method much later, in the only movie we’d ever do together.

  As I fell ever more deeply in love with Marlon, that romantic expression “in his arms” took on an entirely unique meaning for me. Marlon’s arms embraced me in a way I had never known. It wasn’t just his muscles holding me, loving me, but his very being.

  Even though we never said the words “I love you,” as much as Marlon could love any woman, I know that he loved me.

  LOVE, OBSESSION, AND MIND GAMES

  There is a thin, razor-sharp line between love and obsession. When it came to our relationship, Marlon and I both balanced precariously along that line, our intense passions inevitably causing us to not only crush and cut and burn each other’s souls. He may have been one of the smartest, most contemplative men I ever knew, but there were two sides to him: Marlon the sensitive and kind, and Marlon the heedless and hurtful.

  Fame did not improve Marlon during the years following his success in On the Waterfront. He was becoming sullen and insolent with directors, and would deliberately irritate everyone by appearing with his pet wild raccoon, Russell. Sometimes he’d pull crazy pranks, like going to professional meetings with a fried egg in his hand.

  The wilder and more rebellious he seemed, the more women wanted to tame him, I suppose. This was a dangerous combination: Having so many women offer themselves to him, even stalk him, made Marlon careless and disrespectful of his lovers—including me.

  I don’t believe that he ever meant to be deliberately cruel to me. Marlon was in the throes of his own compulsion, which left him with insatiable sexual needs. Because he was perhaps the most desirable man in the world back then, he was like a lethal sexual weapon. He could seduce any woman he wanted, and that made him a walking A-bomb. He broke my heart and came close to crushing my very spirit with his physical infidelities and, worse, with his emotional betrayals.

  I suppose that today’s experts would label Marlon as a sex addict. He was, like his father and like my own father, fiercely, ferociously jealous of any other man who paid attention to any of his women of the moment. Yet, no matter whom he was with, Marlon was unable to control his own desires for other women, unable to control his passion.

  Marlon had his own explanation for his need to conquer so many women. In his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, he attributes his compulsive conquests to being deserted by the first two important females in his life: his mother and his nanny, Ermi.

  His mother “left” him emotionally through her alcoholism, while his first love—a teenage Danish nanny named Ermi, who, according to Marlon, slept naked with him while he was a child of seven—eventually left as well. When Ermi got married and deserted the family without offering him even a good-bye or an explanation, Marlon’s sexual feelings for her became entangled with his fear of abandonment.

  Marlon effused about Ermi’s “sweet breath,” like “fermented fruit,” as he had about his mother’s. Marlon himself had sweet breath, and he seemed chemically sensitive to others who also had this trait, since his mother had “a sweetness that came from fermented alcohol.” He said that my breath was sweet as well.

  Ermi, who was part Indonesian, was almost certainly the inspiration for Marlon’s obsessive desire for women with dusky skin like mine. All his life, Marlon preferred women of color. I was an early and lasting example, but Marlon compulsively bedded Tahitians, East Indians, Native American Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Asians, Jamaicans…just name an ethnicity with a tint. All of his children are of mixed race.

  The first desire a young boy experiences for a beautiful babysitter must be a very strong force, because Marlon was never cured of his endless quest to find a desire that matched it. He was helpless in his passions and wanted sex constantly, no matter how inappropriate. His compulsions made him miserable, and his actions led to a legion of angry or demolished women, and, most seriously, a disturbed extended family of children. Whatever damage was done to Marlon in his childhood was compounded by the hurt he inflicted on others.

  How and why did I keep taking him back? I wonder that now. After all, I had seen my mother hurt by unfaithful men, starting with my very own father. I had always sworn that I would not allow myself to be treated that way under any circumstances.

  Yet month after month, year after year, into my mid-twenties and beyond, I was unable to refuse Marlon when he came around—no matter what he did or what I heard. Our on-again, off-again affair continued despite the fact that, in 1957, Marlon married Anna Kashfi at her insistence because she was pregnant with his first child. That marriage lasted for only two years; in 1960, Marlon married Mexican actress Movita Castaneda, an old flame of many years. That marriage again lasted just two years. He had children with both of these women: Christian, his oldest son, with Anna, and Miko and Rebecca with Movita.

  None of these hard truths lessened my obsession. Marlon was that irresistible to me, and I was that determined to conquer him. I couldn’t stay away. In fact, I was becoming addicted to the challenge of winning him over and over again, seduced by the roller-coaster emotional and physical thrill ride of being with Marlon.

  Why didn’t I leave him? Because there were periods of absolute happiness when I was with Marlon unmatched by anything I’d ever experienced. Despite everything, Marlon was very kind to me, particularly at times when it didn’t involve his masculinity or our relationship. He was kind to me in the sense that he tried to make me understand that I had worth and value.

  Really, it’s a wonder that I didn’t succeed in just doing away with myself during that time. I had such a low opinion of myself. But this man who was killing me was, at the same time, saving me. It was so bizarre. Marlon took care of me and protected me in certain ways—even against myself.

  He’s the fellow who sent me into therapy. One day Marlon saw me on a television talk show, and the next day we went out and he said, “You really need to see somebody, Rita. You have a lot of problems.”

  In a way, I think this proves how much Marlon cared about me, because he had to know that at some point—if I stayed in therapy with a good doctor and tried to help myself—our relationship was going to end. He had to know that. He was a very, very smart guy.

  Even I had to know that. Still, the games continued. Whenever Marlon was off with another woman, married or not—or with many other women, as sometimes happened—I would do whatever it took to bring him back to me. This sometimes meant dating other men to make him jealous, because the one thing Marlon could not stand was the idea of my being with someone else.

  * * *

  It was because of Marlon, really, that I became involved with Dennis Hopper. Dennis was five years younger than I was, a cocky man who took himself oh, so seriously, even though I knew him before his biggest career success: cowriting, directing, and acting in Easy Rider.

  Both Marlon and Dennis towered over me. As a petit
e woman—five-foot-two—I am always acutely aware of height. I know who is taller than I am, and by how much. Dennis listed his height as five-foot-nine, but Marlon is also listed as five-foot-nine, and I just know that Marlon was taller than Dennis. I didn’t have as far to reach on tiptoe to kiss Dennis!

  An aside: Male actors fool around a lot with their height; they wear lifts in their boots, that kind of thing. And a curious fact: Both Marlon and Dennis played the male lead in Napoleon movies, and Napoleon was way shorter than either of them, only five-foot-six.

  Of the two men, Marlon and Dennis, who had the bigger ego? That was easier than measuring their actual height: No one had a bigger ego than Marlon.

  In other words, Dennis didn’t make as much of an impression on me as he might have liked. He was such a baby when I knew him, and didn’t yet have the string of wives and girlfriends that he later acquired. He was notorious for being unable to sustain a relationship. He was, like Anthony Quinn, a serial marrier—Dennis married five times and divorced everyone. His marriage to Michelle Phillips was the shortest, lasting only two weeks. Even at his tragic end in 2010 at age seventy, dying of prostate cancer and weighing only a hundred pounds, Dennis was still summoning what strength he had left to divorce his last wife.

  Dennis also had a long, feverish history of drug use and violence. He stabbed Rip Torn and lied about it on a television talk show—a fib that cost him $1 million in lawsuits launched by an enraged Torn. (It was never a good thing to enrage Rip Torn, who famously bit Norman Mailer’s ear and was more recently arrested after breaking into a bank with a loaded gun.)

  Dennis hadn’t become that stormy when I knew him; he was more egotistical than stoned. I probably wouldn’t have even dated him but for one compelling reason: Being with Dennis was like offering an hors d’oeuvre to Marlon—to make him jealous.

  And Marlon actually wanted to be made jealous. It was one of the mind games he played. Whenever he had to be away for a while to shoot on location, or during the times we were apart because of one of our fights, he would return to me and demand to know, “Did you sleep with anyone else?”

  I couldn’t wait to tell Marlon about Dennis, to watch him go mad and redevote himself to me.

  In retrospect, I see how disturbed this maneuver was. But back then, it was one of my few ploys in our war between the sexes.

  Dennis Hopper had an effect on Marlon, but didn’t drive Marlon nearly as mad with jealousy as I was over his affairs. I had to up my game. My next weapon was a human missile groomed with Brilliantine and encased in taut leather pants: Elvis. The King.

  * * *

  Today, it’s almost impossible to conjure how scandalous, sexy, and flat-out hot Elvis was when I dated him in 1957. He was the first white gospel/rock/country/rockabilly/pop/rhythm-and-blues singer, mixing all of these ingredients with pelvic action that was faster than a high-speed blender. He spontaneously combusted when he cut his first record. Wherever he went, teenage girls mobbed the King of Swoon, and mass hysteria resulted at the merest twitch of the famous pelvis.

  Ed Sullivan resisted booking Elvis, calling him “unfit for family viewing,” and the first newspaper reviews decried his “grunt and groin antics.” Sullivan is famously quoted as saying, “Presley has some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants—so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. I think it’s a Coke bottle. We just can’t have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!”

  But everyone caved as the Elvis quake shook the nation. The rival variety shows, The Steve Allen Show and The Milton Berle Show, booked Elvis and scored high ratings. Even Ed Sullivan gave in after being swamped by the tidal wave of ratings Steve Allen earned by showing Elvis crooning “Hound Dog” to a basset hound. That show triumphed in the ratings against the rival Sullivan show for the first time.

  Almost against his will, Ed Sullivan booked Elvis but he allowed Elvis to be viewed only from the waist up. It was that begrudging booking on Ed Sullivan, however, that did the most to launch Elvis into superstardom.

  Behind all the fame and gyrations, Elvis was a shy young man from Tupelo, Mississippi, who had come up from poverty (which worked in his favor, as he grew up in black neighborhoods, where he picked up his strongest musical influence). He had stumbled into the top black recording studio, Sun Records, where boss Sam Phillips had been looking for a “white man who had the Negro sound and Negro feel.”

  If he did find such a singer, Phillips said, “I could make a billion dollars.” He heard a few chords by Elvis and knew that he had finally found him: a white-skinned boy singer with a black man’s soul. He released Elvis’s first hit, “That’s All Right,” and it was a lot more than “all right.”

  Elvis’s gyrations were originally caused by uncontrolled stage fright that made his body shake, a symptom he disguised by trying to make it appear deliberate. That ploy became an out-of-control success. By the time I met Elvis in Hollywood, he was the most famous singer in the world, and about to be a movie star, too. He was already a notorious sex symbol, with his tightly fitting clothes and sensuous face. Those pouty lips, with what appeared to be a sexual sneer, were actually an accident of lip physiognomy—just as much of an accident as his pelvic and hip action.

  At age twenty-two, Elvis was four years younger than I was. That later came to matter more than you would think. At the time we met, though, my delight in dating Elvis hinged entirely on one fact: I knew that no one could possibly make Marlon Brando more jealous.

  I was sick of the torturous limbo of being Marlon’s on-again, off-again lover. He seemed to have placed me in his sexual rotation of partners, and though I was a favorite stopover, I was deeply devastated by every one of his betrayals, and entering a dangerous emotional spin cycle that would ultimately lead me to try to end my life.

  Into this emotional whirlpool entered the King, with his famous phallic strut. I knew at once that the strut was a feint. Because I was always posing as a sexy Latina, I could spot another pretender from forty paces.

  So there we were, the shy, ignorant Southern boy playing his role as international sex star, and I, the heartsick Puerto Rican girl misrepresented as “Rita the Cheetah, Latin spitfire.” It was inevitable that we would meet.

  * * *

  Elvis had spotted me at the Fox commissary and let it be known through a well-known gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, that he wanted to meet me. She printed this in her column.

  When I read that item, I was having a particularly bad time with Marlon: I had just found another woman’s clothing in his house. At the moment I found her nightgown and underpants in his closet, I felt as if I had been seared from the inside out. A scalding rage rose through my whole body. I stood there staring at those clothes and shaking.

  “How could he treat me this way?” I shouted. “How could I let him?” I threw out the other woman’s clothes and swore to myself on the spot that I would “show him.”

  Show him what? That other men desired me and that Marlon was a fool to ever wander, that’s what! Why not meet Elvis? If Dennis Hopper could make Marlon jealous, what effect would Elvis have on Marlon?

  That was the way I thought in those troubled days. Where was my pride? My sense of self? Was I carrying over the humiliation of the abject female characters I played on-screen into my real life?

  Never mind. I was livid, so furious at Marlon that I had to act now. So when Colonel Parker, Elvis’s larger-than-life manager, called to ask whether I wanted to meet Elvis, I instantly agreed.

  The Colonel invited me to see Elvis on the set of his film King Creole, at Paramount. This seemed like the right thing to do no matter what the outcome, I soon realized, because Colonel Parker was so delighted by my acceptance that he immediately sent news of my appearance to the wire services! Again, the Hollywood publicity machine was doing its behind-the-scenes work for my very public date with the King.

  * * *

  Ironically, Elvis worshiped Marlon Brando. Marlon was
one of his favorite actors. In fact, Elvis had patterned his black leather and swaggering attitude on Marlon’s “iconic” antisocial biker Johnny Strabler, gang leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, a group of bikers that terrorizes a small town in his iconic film The Wild One. In the vortex of this crisscross admiration, I was therefore a desirable date.

  Elvis was, too. My pulse definitely quickened as I stepped onto the set of King Creole. How could it not? Elvis was so good-looking, so famous. And there was something disingenuous about him in person, a gangly charm. He was tall—over six feet—and sincerely bashful.

  Elvis had beautiful blue eyes, and his hair shone a gleaming black. His hair color has long been in dispute, with many saying that it was naturally blond and dyed black. But I never saw dyed hair shine like his. Elvis’s hair was mirror-bright and probably reflected his partial Cherokee ancestry.

  I was standing at my assigned place on the set when Elvis strode out, guitar firmly in hand, pompadour suitably puffed. He crooned on command of the director, none other than Michael Curtiz, famous for directing Casablanca. I had lucked into this date with Elvis in the middle of shooting his finest film, the last of his black-and-white movies and a classic film noir.

  In those first moments, my heart pounded like a teenager’s as Elvis sang “As Long as I Have You.” The song was a ballad, and he was young, slender, and tender-looking. He was playing a boy auditioning at a nightclub and did very well in the scene. I could see the exact second that the boy, Danny, gained confidence. It was a touching moment and I was impressed. He was not the hyped-up gyrating Elvis I had expected, and I was intrigued.

  The director was impressed as well. Curtiz praised Elvis for the sensitivity he brought to the moment, and used a word seldom associated with Elvis before or since: “elegant.”