Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  We had the best, most wonderful time, and for years after, Lenny and I celebrated real Christmases with his family.

  * * *

  One night while we were still dating, Lenny had taken me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and asked, “So if we get married, do you want kids?”

  I had answered, “You bet.”

  We didn’t wait long. After our wedding, Lenny, ever the helpful doctor, charted my ovulation every month and took my temperature to make our dream come true as fast as possible. It worked like a charm! One day I took my temperature, and it seemed like the very next day I felt six months pregnant, I conceived so fast. My breasts were immediately tender, and my belly and wardrobe soon disagreed. Boy, was I ready to be a mother, and boy, was this baby meant to be!

  My pregnancy went well, but I had two secret concerns. The first was that I wouldn’t be a good mother. I’d had therapy for years, long enough to know my character weaknesses. I knew that what mattered most to me was me, and worried that I might be too self-absorbed and narcissistic (not uncommon traits among actors) to love a baby. In fact, I found myself becoming a little more self-absorbed, worrying about whether or not I would be self-absorbed!

  I also fretted about the baby’s skin color. I’m ashamed as I recall this now, but I couldn’t help thinking, My grandfather had dark skin. What if the baby is dark? How will Lenny feel? How will his family feel? How will my child feel if she has to deal with prejudice? How would everyone feel about my child if she were black? How would I feel?

  Skin. It still mattered. I knew it shouldn’t, but until I had my daughter and realized I would have loved her just as passionately no matter the color, I worried about it. Such is the insidious nature of prejudice that even I had absorbed some fear of my own heredity, as I wondered what African genes might lurk under my own skin.

  My mother had endured a hard labor to produce tiny little me, and I expected to have to endure the same for my own child. I got it. After twenty-four hours of contractions without making much progress, my obstetrician opted for a C-section. Our daughter, Fernanda, was born sitting up, as if she’d been patiently sitting on a chair inside me, waiting to make her grand appearance in the world.

  The moment Lenny put our daughter in my arms, I forgot everything but how much love I felt for this diminutive creature who had my big plump baby cheeks. She was lying on my chest with her little unseeing eyes, and when I looked at her, I had an epiphany.

  I thought, Dear God, I will have to be responsible for this gift until the day I die. I couldn’t believe that fate would grant me such a gift. Fernanda and my grandsons are now my soul, my life, my heart, my everything.

  Fernanda was the image of me as a baby, and as olive-skinned as her mami and my own mother. Everyone in the family loved her. Lenny’s aunt squeezed her baby cheeks and said, “Oooooh, I luff her so much, I vant to moider her!”

  As for my other fear—that I might be unable to let go of my own ego to love a baby—that, too, evaporated in about two seconds the first time I held Fernanda in my arms. If anyone tries to harm this baby, I will kill them! I thought.

  I stared at my little one so intently as I nursed her that I got a pinched nerve in my neck. I had not known before Fernanda came into our lives that motherhood is a romance, too. Whether I was with her or not, I thought about her all day and anytime I woke at night. If she was napping, I’d have to check on her about every twelve seconds, just to make sure she was still breathing.

  And Lenny? Before we met he had resigned himself to a life alone—now he had a family. It is impossible to describe the love that washed over him as he gazed down at the baby he thought he’d never have.

  Those first few months of motherhood were among the happiest of my life. All I did was eat, sleep, and care for my child. I had never known such contentment. The birth had left me encapsulated in a blissful bubble of time with Fernanda. I was bathed in the pearly incandescence that motherhood can often bestow, so joyous that I didn’t notice—or care—that I was completely dependent on Lenny, who ran the show and took over our finances.

  At first, and actually for many years, it felt terrific to let Lenny be in charge. Number one, I am no good at figures. And number two, I am no good at figures! Math was the worst subject for me in school. I admit this: I still count on my fingers. I think this has to do with not knowing English when I was learning arithmetic as a child.

  Before I met Lenny, my financial situation wasn’t good—I think I had about five thousand dollars in the bank. So when Lenny took over not just the finances, but everything, at first this was a godsend to me, especially because Lenny was so supportive of me as an actress. Friends told me he would just glow whenever he saw me perform.

  Soon after Fernanda was born, I went back to work, with Lenny’s encouragement. In 1969, I was lucky enough to find a role that helped me grow as an actress. In The Miracle Worker, a play produced by Philadelphia’s Playhouse in the Park, I played the part of Annie Sullivan, the Irish schoolteacher who teaches Helen Keller how to sign. This was the first regional play I’d ever done, and what made it really special for me was that I was doing live theater, I played the part of an Irishwoman, and the director, George Keathley, inspired me to give my best as an actor.

  Up until that time, I had played mostly the same roles in films or on television: sexy little bombshells or Indian maidens, or a little girl from India or Arabia. I had never had a chance to play a non-Hispanic person with urgent needs who could change things, a person of great character.

  And this was a director who said, “I don’t want you to start counting on your looks. You’re going to wear no makeup, a dress that’s all black, no adornments, nothing. I want you to learn how to walk like Annie Sullivan.”

  “How am I going to do that?” I asked, a little panicked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Find out.”

  I did, and that was one of the most wonderful experiences I ever had as an actress.

  I loved being a doctor’s wife, too. Like all doctors’ wives, I got to be a good diagnostician; I really did. I would sometimes diagnose our friends before Lenny could find time to see them, and I’d tell him what was wrong before he even had a chance to think about it. I’d say, “Oh, I think she has pleurisy, don’t you?” Or, “Oh, she’s going to get an infection in her foot if she doesn’t put something on that!”

  Lenny worked at a hospital, the same one where Fernanda was born, and had a very interesting private practice as well. He saw ordinary people, of course, but he also saw gangsters, chorus girls, and gay men. He was absolutely a nondiscriminatory person who never had any doubts about the goodness of people.

  Many gay men mentioned Lenny’s name to others in the gay community, because he was one of the very few doctors at that time who didn’t judge them. He would just treat them and take care of them as he did anyone else. Lenny never rushed his patients through their examination. He would always have them sit for a while and talk to him about what was wrong—or just ask about their lives. He even made house calls. Do doctors even do that anymore?

  One gangster patient of Lenny’s brought in another gangster to see him, a very famous one. Lenny saw him, talked to the man for a whole hour, and gave him a checkup. The whole examination must have taken more than two hours.

  Afterward, the gangster said to him, “So whadda I owe ya, Doc?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lenny said. “Fifty dollars?”

  The gangster gave him a strange look and tucked a hundred-dollar bill into Lenny’s lab coat.

  The friend who’d brought that man to Lenny called about three days later. “Ya asked fa fifty clams?” he asked incredulously. “Now he tinks yer a shitty doctor and he’ll never come back!”

  * * *

  I was thirty-four years old when Fernanda was born, certainly old enough to know that people don’t change overnight. Yet I fantasized that my motherhood would bring me closer to my own much-married mami. I also imagined that, in giving birth, I h
ad simultaneously shed all of the neuroses of my previous life.

  I was wrong on both counts.

  When my mother flew to New York to see Fernanda for the first time, I pictured her running into the house at a fever pitch and grabbing the baby, doing the Puerto Rican version of kvelling. Instead, when Rosa Maria arrived at our apartment, she entered kvetching. “My plane was late,” she complained, “and it was so crowded I could hardly breathe.”

  Her complaints went on for several more minutes as she described in detail how tired she felt, how her baggage had arrived late, and how heavy it was. Meanwhile, I was standing in front of her holding Fernanda and waiting for her to notice the baby.

  It never happened. All my mother could talk about was what had inconvenienced her! She seemed not to see her beautiful grandchild at all, until I actually lifted Fernanda up and held her right under my mom’s nose.

  “Mom, meet Fernanda!” I demanded.

  And then Mami responded in the most unexpected and perfunctory way. She touched her fingers under Fernanda’s chin, chucked it lightly, and said, “Well, look at joo. Qué cosa linda.” She didn’t even ask to hold the baby, but turned quickly back to her bags and pulled out a baby wardrobe she had knitted and tatted. She told of all her effort and the time it took to make them, but she never reached out to pull her first and only grandchild into her arms.

  She had sewn dozens of little baby dresses, booties, and caps. Upon seeing those tiny, perfect items, I was astounded, but not for the reason you might think. It was lovely of my mother to make this wardrobe, of course, but I was thrown back to Juncos, to being dressed in my mother’s creations as I became her “living doll.” Not for the first time, I wondered about my mother and the focus of her feelings. Why was everything, in the end, all about her?

  The heartache caused by remembering this scene arises not only from seeing my mom’s misplaced attention in that moment, but because it may shine too bright a light on my own life. I never reconnected with my Puerto Rican family, and if you ask me why, I will answer honestly, “I don’t know.” It remains a black hole of mystery. I can reason that, like my mami, I somehow allowed my preoccupation with myself and what I had done or what I was doing at the time to distract me.

  As for the notion that my neuroses had evaporated, yeah, right! I felt as though I had it all: the perfect husband, my Gerber baby, a luxurious apartment in the city, a cottage in the country. This Puerto Rican girl was living the quintessential American dream.

  Breaking news: reality check! It took me a decade to wake up to the subtext of my relationship to Lenny, to realize that the unspoken contract between us stated that Lenny would be my “good daddy” and I would be his “little girl forever and ever.” A deal always has its price, and in our case the terms were clear. We both accepted them for many years, but, before the end of our marriage, we’d have to find a way to renegotiate our relationship.

  MARLON AND I MAKE A MOVIE

  After all that we had been through, I had salvaged a friendship with Marlon Brando. I was in love with Lenny and entranced by my new life as a wife and mother, but Marlon was still one of the smartest, most reflective men in my life. We had shared so much pain, but so much happiness, too, and we stayed in touch as friends.

  I believed, and I think Marlon did also, that we had made a civilized segue into a friendship that preserved our better instincts toward each other. I think we both trusted that our passion was permanently on a back burner. But we were destined to have one more tumultuous encounter—a very public one, as it turned out, that was captured on film for eternity.

  Marlon had cordially reached out to both me and Lenny in friendship. He had always loved talking on the phone and still did, and he was still capable of those twenty-minute pauses, which drove Lenny mad. I’d hear him say, “Marlon, are you still there?” I’d chuckle—I had grown accustomed to those chasms of silence long ago in the boardinghouse hallway. So, when I was worried about never working again in Hollywood because of the precipitous fall in movie offers since my Oscar win for West Side Story, I called Marlon and told him that I was looking for work. Fernanda was only a toddler, but I was already realizing that I was never meant to be only a housewife and mother.

  Instead of brushing aside my comment, as so many actors would have, Marlon—who had just made Reflections in a Golden Eye, a box-office flop despite his skilled performance—immediately responded to me in the most positive way imaginable. “I think you’d be wonderful for the female lead in my next picture,” he said. “I’ll try to get you the role.”

  And he did. Marlon didn’t just get me the role; he fought for me, and shamed the producers into giving me a decent salary instead of the peanuts they initially offered.

  The movie, called The Night of the Following Day, was based on the novel The Snatchers, which in turn was inspired by a real-life kidnapping of a young heiress. The story was shocking for its sexual torture of a little girl by the kidnappers. There was a long history of failed scripts, until the writer/director, Hubert Cornfield, who was then a young man, solved the problem by raising the age of the girl to late teens so that it avoided the charges of being prurient and attractive to predators.

  It was a good cast. Marlon played the kidnapper, along with Richard Boone as “second-banana” kidnapper. I played a drug-addicted stewardess who was part of the kidnap plot, and Marlon’s lover.

  I had arranged for Lenny and Fernanda to join me in France a few weeks into the shoot. Lenny couldn’t leave his medical practice any sooner, which left me “alone” in a remote village in Brittany during a chill in the off-season. Marlon was already there when I arrived, and greeted me with perhaps more warmth than I expected.

  He suggested that we have dinner, which we did in his suite. After dinner, I sat on the chaise and he at the table as we remembered old friends, shared stories, and caught up on the details of our lives.

  Marlon then excused himself to go to the bathroom and, in the time he was gone, I fell asleep. I’d had several glasses of wine during the course of our storytelling. I don’t know the amount of time that passed, but I woke with a start to discover Marlon lying close behind me. I could feel his firm belly against my back and his breath on my neck.

  “Marlon,” I said, “we can’t do this. You know we can’t.”

  “Just let me sleep with you,” he pleaded. “That’s all I want, to sleep with you.”

  I wasn’t having any part of that. I gathered my wits and myself and left.

  The shooting continued, but it was a troubled set. Marlon held the director in contempt; to be honest, the director was inexperienced and in over his head. But Marlon could be childlike and impossible under such circumstances. He was refusing to follow direction and wouldn’t speak to Hubert. Hubert soon hated Marlon, because he feared that his movie, upon which he’d staked so much, might suffer the same dismal box office reception as Reflections in a Golden Eye.

  In the moody atmosphere of that chilly seacoast village, we continued as best we could. The entire cast and crew soon became disconsolate in the isolated beach-cottage set, where we were being fed an endless diet of Dover sole at the hotel. I tried to hold cozy dinners for the cast to alleviate the tension, but something always seemed to go wrong. One night, I asked the hotel to have an Italian pasta dinner for a change. They presented us all with huge bowls of spaghetti—and a giant bottle of ketchup. It was back to Dover sole after that.

  Matters improved when my husband and Fernanda arrived, but the worst was yet to come: the love/fight scene that I had to play with Marlon. The scene is quite graphic. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of doing nude scenes. I’ve never performed in the buff, but this particular scene required me to appear naked from the back. So beneath my robe I taped a tea towel to the front of my body.

  As the scene begins, my character—who is high on heroin—is seething with anger. She believes her lover has cheated on her, so she slaps him. Now, I personally detest violence, even in make-believe. I
am loath to hit or harm anyone. In rehearsal, Marlon insisted that we improvise the scene, as he disliked the script. He also coached me to hit him hard enough to make the slap believable. The director called, “Action!” and I drew back and slapped Marlon with resolve. What followed was not improvisation, but revelation, as his pure, primal instincts transformed Marlon into a wounded, vengeful animal. And as if in suspended animation, I saw his face change; his eyebrows pulled up, and his usually narrow eyes opened fully. It was a look of incredulity. I had hit him. Rita Moreno challenged the Marlon Brando. With a you-don’t-do-this-to-me look in his eyes, he hauled off and slammed me with the full force of his powerful arm and open hand. I saw sparkles of light from the force of the blow, and the energy knocked me backward. I felt stunned, then enraged. As the synapses of my brain reconnected, old wounds, hurts, resentment, and disrespect coursed through my body. The festering decay rose like pond scum to the surface, and Rita Moreno emerged as the offended lover. I went ballistic, insane, crazy, and I unleashed both shrieks and punches fueled by the accelerant of rage stored somewhere deep within me. Marlon, with raised forearms, defended himself in the boxer’s defensive pose. The camera kept rolling, and the entire uncut, unaltered scene remains intact. There is much commentary online about how this one scene is the most authentic.

  The director always allowed us to review the dailies, the scenes shot the previous day. That evening, I related to Lenny what happened on the set. I did not want to see myself displaying such raw emotion, so I asked Lenny to check out the dailies for me. When he returned, he said, “Wow, you two were very, very good.” My sweet husband!

  * * *

  The sphere of privacy that Marlon inhabited was quickly invaded after his death by a frenzied press. To their surprise, only one photograph hung in his home, and it was in his bedroom. The photo portrays two lovers embracing: she with naked back to the camera, he caressing her while looking longingly into her eyes. It was the picture taken of us following our volcanic confrontation on film. How could I have known that the feeling expressed in those eyes would linger to the end of his life?