Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  I was full-out Googie, and my Rosita also popped out of the clock like a cuckoo, crowing, “Rita Moreno is thrilled, but Rosita Dolores Alverio of Humacao, Puerto Rico, is undone!”

  And then she, Googie Gomez/Rosita, couldn’t resist saying, “I am not the supporting actress of The Ritz. I am the leading actress! Listen, honey, honey—the honly thing I support in tat cho is my beads” (pronounced beeets).

  I was forty-four years old, still in my prime. But now I can say it: I went too far on that stage. No wonder the Tonys’ producer was displeased with me. He had a right to be.

  In 1981, I was fortunate enough to be cast with Carol Burnett in an Alan Alda movie, The Four Seasons, a romp of a film featuring an endangered species: middle-aged couples and aging actresses. I became fast friends with Carol Burnett during the shoot. The movie worked even better offscreen than on-screen, because we all laughed nonstop as we were making it. But the sad truth is that finding work in Hollywood—or anywhere as an actress—was now very difficult. I was no longer a “hot chick.” Nobody remembered, much less cherished, my Oscar turn in that violet dress, and my kiddie-show fame did not translate into grown-up prestige.

  I had battled racism and sexism all my life. Now I had to battle the worst enemy of all: ageism.

  Growing old in Hollywood is a serious deficit. If you can’t pose in a bikini and run a seven-minute mile without your thighs trembling, you are done. Frankly speaking, m’dear, I think we are expected to either kill ourselves by age thirty-six—as so many actresses have done—or shrink quietly away into the shadows, clutching our cardigans and wearing sensible shoes.

  I wanted none of that. But I also refused to compromise and make myself look younger than my age. For one thing, I already looked younger than my age. Blame heredity. I was actually rejected for the few roles that existed for women over fifty. In 1990, I went to see the great television producer Norman Lear to discuss the part of Charles Durning’s wife in a pilot Norman was producing. He took one look at me and said, “Durning’s wife? Are you kidding? You look like a kid!”

  “But, Norman, I’m sixty.”

  “Getoutta here!” he said with a twinkle.

  But I went to my car and cried—I looked too good for my age. Yet another problem.

  On top of that, these roles were limited to small, unimportant mom or nana parts. Meanwhile, I continued turning down gang roles and the usual stereotypes.

  I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever find steady work again.

  THE ACCUSATORY BANANA

  Very early in our marriage, while discussing hopes and dreams for the future, Lenny offered without missing a beat, “And we can travel, have a little getaway in the country, you’ll quit show business, I’ll retire from practice….”

  “Wait a minute. Uh, what—what about show business?” I interjected.

  And in the most casual tone he continued. “Oh, we can talk about that later, not important right now….”

  There had always been a certain amount of power push-pull in my marriage, as Lenny and I tried to balance my desire to work and be independent with his desire to be the family provider and protector. While these roles had satisfied both of us during Fernanda’s early childhood, I was growing increasingly restless as Lenny continued to try to control everything in my life.

  I let the first warning bell go off without comment, but now I heard a gong. I call this “the Infamous Banana Incident.”

  One morning, Lenny walked into the kitchen while I was peeling a banana. He watched me pull on the stem for a second, then snatched the fruit out of my hand and said, “That’s not the right way to peel a banana.” Then he opened the drawer, took out a paring knife, and began to cut the stem. For whatever reason, this was the one time out of many when I was being shown the Lenny way, the “right way,” as opposed to the Rita way, the wrong way, that I chose to plant a flag, declare it my territory, and demand, “Off!”

  There ensued a twenty-minute argument in which Lenny continued to insist that there were right and wrong ways to do things. Flummoxed by the sheer absurdity of this heated argument, I asked him whether he was listening to himself, only to have him restate his position once again.

  A flash of heat went through my body—the same primal reaction I’ve always had when frightened or cornered. The inherent stupidity of our argument left me, an otherwise articulate person, sputtering in rage and frustration.

  The banana argument continued, and then he did it for the first time: Lenny pointed his finger at me and wagged it. I have always perceived this gesture as judgmental, accusatory, and self-righteous. Now the alarms were blaring. This was not about peeling fruit, how to adjust the thermostat, or what lights to turn off; this was about our marriage, give-and-take, cutting some slack. If I couldn’t carve out some space for myself, it did not portend well for our future together.

  I had to leave the room. “We’ll finish this discussion later, when we both calm down,” I said.

  * * *

  “He’s a finger wagger!” I reported on the phone later that day to the most unlikely of marriage counselors: Marlon.

  There was a big pause. Then Marlon said, “He actually did that? He wagged his finger at you?”

  “Yes! And it just made me crazy!”

  “Huh. Anybody did that to me, I’d take him by the neck and throw them down the stairs!” Marlon said. “You’ve got to make him stop.”

  “How, for God’s sake?”

  “Tell him! Just tell him him how it makes you feel.”

  At the time, the irony was lost on me that Marlon had done more than wag his finger at me, and more than once. I did what Marlon suggested and told Lenny that I felt belittled, accused, and angry when he behaved self-righteously. He took it well, I thought, but went on to substitute the finger with a closed fist and the knuckle from the pointing finger sticking up, unmistakably conspicuous.

  I had to laugh. In one of my dreams I took the ultimate revenge: I bit it off. His finger, that is.

  * * *

  In our seventh year of marriage, Lenny and I discussed divorce for the very issues that had begun to be entrenched during in the Banana Accusation. Lenny adored me and I adored him, most of the time, but Lenny had the “Lenny way” to do most things and was not tolerant of the Rita way of doing things—nor, for that matter, of anyone else’s way.

  We had so many arguments that sometimes it seemed like that was all our relationship was. I made Lenny very unhappy with my calls for a more equal relationship. I was bearing the consequences of not maintaining personal privacy in our relationship from the beginning. I had let the line blur too many times without protest. I needed some freedom for this to work—freedom with Lenny, not freedom from Lenny. I can’t tell you how often I envied someone who’d say, “John is going off for the weekend with friends, so I’m on my own,” or, “Mary is going to France with her sister.”

  From the start of our marriage, Lenny had stalked me. I don’t know where he found the phone numbers sometimes of where I was, but he would locate me in restaurants and call to ask to speak to me. He would find me in beauty shops; he would find me anywhere. It was eerie. Wherever I went, Lenny would always call me to say things like, “What are you doing? Why are you delayed so much? Didn’t you tell me you’d be home at four?”

  I remember getting so angry and upset by this at one point that I stopped wearing a watch. Why did he do this? I kept wondering. Was he jealous? Of what?

  Ultimately, I came to believe that Lenny did it because he was afraid of losing me, in some very disturbed way. Looking back, I think Lenny was very troubled, in fact, but I didn’t see things that way at the time. Never having been married, and having had only one other serious relationship, with Marlon—a relationship that was so wacky, so crazy, and so disturbing—I didn’t know how to compare what Lenny was doing, or what we were doing with each other, with anything else. I had no frame of reference.

  It never occurred to me that I could just go off on my own. I p
robably could have, but it would have cost me, because Lenny would have said, “What’s wrong with being with me?”

  I could never seem to be with Lenny enough. It could have been because I felt so stifled with him that I wasn’t with Lenny in spirit enough, but one thing exacerbated the other, and he stifled me so much that I sometimes felt like a prisoner in a fancy jail.

  One day, I sensed the slamming of a large metal door and then a feeling of claustrophobia of being shut in with no way out. That was when I said to myself, That’s it. I don’t like him anymore. I really stopped liking my husband for a long time after that, right up until he went into the hospital the last time and allowed me to be his true mate.

  * * *

  When I look back on our marriage now, I think that I was attempting to grow up, but that didn’t fit in with Lenny’s plans—nor with mine, for that matter, because I honestly didn’t know how to do it.

  I was clumsy in my attempts to spread my wings, and the mistakes I made served as fodder for Lenny’s need to keep Rita in little Rosita’s place. “See, darling, I told you this wouldn’t work,” he would say whenever I tried to fix something around the house myself, make travel arrangements, or negotiate the purchase of a new appliance—anything, really.

  “You should have let me do it in the first place,” Lenny would say. “See what I mean, how much easier and better that would be?”

  When I considered why Lenny was so rigid and controlling, I could begin to understand: His mother had died when he was only six years old. The loss of love and control, of all security, was total. We are all more complicated than one tragedy can explain, but that first terrible loss may have left Lenny feeling deeply helpless inside. He treated his neuroses the way I treated mine: by doing what he did best—giving and giving and giving, especially in his profession.

  Our disagreements went on and on through the years, growing worse instead of better with time. I even went to see a psychotherapist, a wonderful, wise woman whom I had to leave after only a month of therapy, because I foresaw the possible dissolution of my marriage if I were to allow her to help me “grow up.”

  Eventually, at my daughter Fernanda’s behest, I took a weekend course with an organization that specialized in “tough love.” Some of their work with clients was practical, but some of it was irresponsibly hazardous when it came to dealing with very fragile egos. This group had invented a vocabulary that, for all intents and purposes, sounded like self-conscious gibberish to me, but apparently made the groups feel special.

  Even knowing all of this, I went with the objective of culling what I could use from this program. I did, and for about three weeks I bravely confronted Lenny with things I needed to express and things that he needed to hear.

  And you know what? Lenny tried very hard to accommodate me in our marriage after that. He was so impressed by my ability to express my needs directly, without hysteria, that he allowed Fernanda and me to talk him into doing a weekend on his own.

  I thought for sure that Lenny, being a champ dissembler, would get an earful of invective in that tough-love program. I could easily imagine the counselors shouting at him, saying things like, “Stop blaming everybody else, asshole! Change starts with you, you ‘please love me’ junkie!”

  That had been the most useful part of the weekend self-empowerment course for me, although in my case I wasn’t actually called any bad names—the male participants usually got the four-letter appellations.

  So when Lenny returned after his weekend looking none the worse for wear, I was puzzled. He thought it was tough, but helpful, and couldn’t wait to tell Fernanda and me how some of the younger people in the group just loved his avuncular self. Well! I could only stare at him in bewilderment.

  All I could think about when Lenny related this was how I had returned home from my weekend feeling stronger, but weary and battered from all of the crying I’d done. I had to conclude that Lenny must not have participated fully, and instead hung out with his new young friends while on breaks, giving them support and warmth—which, God knows, everyone needed in that hell room.

  As our relationship continued to decline through the years, I pleaded with Lenny on many occasions to see a therapist with me, just a couples counselor who could provide a third ear to our arguments with no vested interest. He rejected every plea. Why? For two reasons, I think.

  First of all, Lenny couldn’t bear the idea of exposing his feelings to a stranger; he wouldn’t expose them to me. Second, I believe that Lenny was convinced that he would be blamed for our difficulties. I assured him over and over that I was complicit in all of this unhappiness, but he chose to interpret that as an accusation on my part that, indeed, he was behaving terribly to me and I was putting up with him.

  You know, sometimes you just can’t win for losing.

  That unspoken, unsigned, contract, “You will be my good daddy and take care of me, take care of everything,” had one drawback: I grew up. As a grown woman, I wanted to do things my way, to spread my wings and explore my passions. Make my own mistakes.

  He loved me, yes. I knew that. And we both adored Fernanda. The love in our marriage, our home, was huge. But for me it was also confining. To Lenny, I was some sort of tropical bird to be loved—and caged for my own safety. We argued, we bickered, we sulked, and we discussed separation for many years. So much for “perfect.”

  Maybe “perfect” doesn’t exist in marriage.

  Sometimes all I did was dream of being free of him. We were opposites in so many ways. I loved to entertain, but Lenny wanted to stay home alone with me. If we did take a vacation, it was under the most controlled circumstances, on a cruise ship or a bus tour. Lenny liked it that way, and I chafed. As a traveler, I loved the freedom to explore, to find surprising places and take impromptu detours. For me, going through Europe was all about freedom from daily routines, but Lenny needed things to be safe and predictable.

  To throw a dinner party, I had to mastermind a plot. I would break the plan to him in stages and scheme to have an acceptable guest list. When the dinner was served, yes, he enjoyed it. But my spirit was constrained and my energy was drained. We had everything to celebrate and a house made for entertaining—but he couldn’t allow me to be what I was: an expansive Latina who loves a party, loves to feed people, laugh, talk, play music and dance. Lenny liked and needed control.

  For all of those issues in our marriage, though, I loved Lenny deeply. I was still able to see his innate goodness, his deep and loving care for our beautiful Fernanda, and the thoughtful kindness he showed not only to us, but to everyone around him. The very idea that he could be hurting me or Fernanda was unthinkable to him.

  On occasion, when I would just break down in tears over something he did or failed to do, Lenny would feel mystified or, worse, blackmailed. I was living between a rock and a hard place, as was he. Yet, as Lenny saw things, our marriage wasn’t disintegrating. He was still convinced that he could solve all of our problems by himself.

  * * *

  Throughout much of our marriage, I continued weighing the pros and cons, and the pros always came out on top. Why didn’t I leave him? I couldn’t do it, because I am who I am, and that person doesn’t leave, maybe because my mother left so many men. I was always the darling, “please like me” kid. Maybe that comes from being Puerto Rican, from being on the outside and not wanting to make waves.

  Also, our daughter meant the world to us, and I couldn’t hurt Fernanda, who adored her daddy. And I was really afraid to be on my own. Finally, I was afraid that Lenny might die if I left him. He wasn’t a well man—he told me about his weak heart the day I met him and had a heart attack two days before we were married—and I always thought he might drop dead at any time because of his heart condition.

  It didn’t occur to me until very, very late in the day that Lenny could have been using that weak heart to keep me. But it’s a sign of how helpless he felt that he would do such a thing.

  It is becoming difficult to weave toge
ther all these disparate stories. I saw his great affection, humor, and generosity, but his control was slowly being substituted for toxic love.

  Lenny brought such love into the house for me and Fernanda. His warm extended family had always taken me into their arms. Yes, I hated the finger wagging and his need for stability and control at times, but Lenny always gave more than he took.

  I would sometimes have to defy my husband to do what I wanted. But in the end, I would do whatever was most important.

  In frustration, I fought with him openly—and also subversively, by becoming a black-belt shopper. I earned my money and I spent it, but Lenny controlled the checkbooks. (It is embarrassing to admit how old I was when I finally got my own checkbook.)

  Financially, I was Mrs. Lenny Gordon.

  The counterpoint to all of the acknowledged anger I felt and my guerrilla shopping tactics was that I knew Lenny would never leave me the way so many people had. He was the husband and father who wouldn’t leave, and in that way, he always kept his part of the unspoken pact: He wanted to take care of me.

  And Lenny still knew how to make me laugh. During one of our cozier periods, we bought a weekend country house and, for Fernanda, a puppy to go with it. Everything was wonderful in the country except the puppy, a wriggly dotted doggy we named Domino.

  The pet store owner instructed us to take the puppy home and give him a hot-water bottle and a ticking clock to make him feel calm and secure enough to sleep through the night. If the puppy did wake up and bark, we were supposed to go down to the kitchen, where we kept him at night. Just outside the door, I would bang on pie pans louder than the pup could bark, and say “No!” to startle the poor puppy into silence.

  It all transpired just as the pet store owner predicted. Early in the morning, I was awakened by howling. I rose from bed and went down to the kitchen door, where I started banging on pie tins and shouting, “No! No! No!”