Rita Moreno: A Memoir

by Rita Moreno

  And sleep was soon close at hand. It was a pure joy to have found the answer.

  Cammy, our youngest, came to visit one evening, and as usual, he went downstairs to the kids’ room to play with his toys. Dinner was ready, and after several invitations Lenny at last called down the stairs, “If you don’t come now, you won’t have any!” Instantly we heard a little voice approaching that said, “Now you have my attention.”

  Today, I display my grandsons’ trophies, drawings, and writings with my acting awards. They belong there. I burn with pride and love.

  * * *

  It was a summer morning in 2004 when Lenny came back into our bedroom, where I was still in bed reading the morning paper. I suppose he heard the news on TV. At first, I could not absorb what Lenny was saying: “Marlon died.”

  But it was true. Marlon Brando had died at the age of eighty on July 1, 2004, of pulmonary fibrosis that brought on respiratory failure. He had been at home until his final day, when he went to the hospital in distress and quickly died there. He had refused direct oxygen tubes into his lungs, the single measure that would have prolonged a life that had become increasingly painful and useless to him.

  Upon my hearing Lenny’s words, my long history with Marlon passed before my eyes like a broken reel: a half century of knowing Marlon, loving Marlon, fleeing Marlon.

  In his last years, Marlon would call and whisper, “I miss you.” I had only one loving thing left that I could do for him: I could invite him to dinner. Marlon attended these dinners, but it was often awkward.

  By the end of his life, Marlon was almost unrecognizable as the lithe, muscled lover I had known with such passion. At three hundred pounds, he was a bloated whale of a man, with a pallid, unhealthy complexion. He was so swollen that he often could not wear real shoes, but had to resort to open-back slippers. He sat for hours, spooning in ice cream by the gallon. I think that Marlon ate the way many morbidly obese women eat: to assuage all kinds of emotional pain. He had always been a yo-yo dieter, resorting to drastic methods to slim down before shooting a new picture.

  The curious thing was that the man seemed to have no vanity about his lost physique. Marlon was mourning by the mouthful, and I suppose on some level this helped tranquilize him. At the very end, in his loose-flowing caftan and slippers, Marlon Brando looked like one of those huge mah-jongg-playing ladies back in the barrios in the Bronx where I’d lived as a child.

  The last time I saw Marlon was the year before he died. I was a guest at his house on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. His house was notorious, partly because it shared a driveway with Jack Nicholson’s house. A lot of women went up that driveway!

  Marlon had lived in the house long ago, sold it, repurchased it, and ended up spending forty years of his life in it. That house was the big shell that fit his big body, I suppose. It was the same house that had been the scene of much tragedy: the drowning death of Hisaka, his maid. Marlon’s first wife, Anna, had found Hisaka floating in the pool. And Marlon’s den was the death scene for Dag Drollet, shot by Christian Brando in a confrontation over Cheyenne, Christian’s sister.

  He’d had at least three exotic wives while he lived there: the “East Indian” Anna Kashfi, Mexican Movita, and Tahitian Tarita. I had done my own time there as the Puerto Rican delegate.

  The reason for my visit was that I was going out to shoot a pilot in LA, and Marlon invited me to stay at his house in a guest suite.

  “Would that be all right?” I asked Lenny.

  When he said it was fine, I flew out and shot the pilot, staying at Marlon’s house. I barely saw him at all, and our last moment was bittersweet as we said good-bye. I couldn’t have known that it was good-bye forever, but I experienced a sense of gravity in that last farewell, as Marlon, in his caftan, moved heavily toward me to kiss me good-bye. I tried to kiss him, but the sheer heft and thrust of his huge belly prevented me from reaching his cheek. My small arms could not reach around him.

  I did meet Marlon’s last girlfriend, who was living there at the time. In an odd final reverse in romantic preference, she wasn’t a dusky-skinned ethnic, but a white-skinned redhead, an incandescent girl, a moonbeam.

  She was a lovely person on the inside as well. When she heard that I was leaving to return to New York, she rushed out to say good-bye with warmth and respect. She told me how much I meant to Marlon, and how it also meant a lot to her, meeting a person who had been so important in his life.

  I thanked her for taking care of Marlon. I also thought to take her hand, to hold it for a moment and say, “You must take care of yourself.”

  Then I walked to the car, got in, and drove away.

  PERSEVERANCE

  Finding work was no easier as I passed from middle age into senior-citizen status, but I continued to persevere. Staying active and persevering is part and parcel of the character of a performer. You always have to be able to get up, dust yourself off, and move forward.

  At sixty, I turned on my heel when I went in to audition for a part with a famous, well-known director. I won’t name him, but I will say that he was important in the business, a big name in directing.

  I had prepared at great length for the one serious female role in the script that seemed right for me. It had been more than a year since I’d worked at all, and I was beginning to think I was being involuntarily retired.

  I went into the specified office at the appointed time and Mr. Director asked me to read the part. “I can’t wait to perform this for you; I think I have a real bead on this scene.”

  And as I began to read and act the part, he stopped me abruptly and said, “Oh, no, no, dear, we brought you in to read the part for the whorehouse madam.”

  The room went silent. I first felt the flush in my face; then it moved to my whole body. I mustered up every bit of my dignity, and as I closed the script I looked him directly in the eye and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t do whorehouse madams.” Then I gathered my things and slowly and deliberately walked to the door. I could sense every eye in the office following me as I went out.

  I went to my car and sat there nonplussed for a moment before a waterfall of tears cascaded down my cheeks. I was profoundly embarrassed. My agent had steered me to the wrong part, and I was a victim of his carelessness.

  I would accept his apology after he heard what happened, but I carried the hurt and humiliation for days—humiliated not that my agent made a mistake, but that such an important director would think of me for a whorehouse madam—a Mexican whorehouse madam who would speak only two lines, in Spanish—and then require me to audition for the part.

  I went home and Lenny asked me how it went. I said, “Okay.” It was three days before I fell apart. I was that humiliated. I started to cry and Lenny took me in his arms. I told him what had happened, and he held me up—something he did very, very well.

  So I pulled myself together, and sometime later my agent called and said that I had landed the part of the Oscar Madison character, the slob, in the female version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. We toured from Texas to Broadway. The Felix Unger character, the neat freak, was played by Sally Struthers.

  And then there was the TV series Nine to Five, produced by Jane Fonda, in which I played Violet Newstead (the Lily Tomlin role). I loved it because it showed women actually leading working lives that matter, and they aren’t just holding positions until they meet men to care for them. When the series was canceled I began marathon “guesting.” I was a guest star on dozens of shows. For instance, I returned three or four times to guest on Rockford Files with my old friend Jim Garner.

  For Rockford, I had a juicy role as Rita Capkovic, an aging, reluctant hooker. Yes, a hooker role, but she was a middle-aged hooker and wanted to quit. I garnered two Emmy nominations for two separate episodes, and my second nomination turned into an Emmy.

  For the next several years, there was a dearth of parts for women of my age. But the little tube was more welcoming than the big screen, and the ratings gurus must hav
e acknowledged somewhere along the way that people who watch TV are happy to see older women.

  And then, just when it looked like aging would end my career, I found sanctuary in a maximum-security prison: Oz.

  I can still remember that surprising dinner with the multitalented creator, writer, and producer Tom Fontana. I was just tucking into my dessert flan when Tom said, “I have a role for you on my new series. It’s set in a men’s maximum-security prison. All of the men are killers: confirmed sociopaths and psychopaths.”

  I thought he was joking. “So what would I do there?”

  If he wasn’t joking, I thought maybe Tom would offer me the role of the warden. But it was better than that.

  “You’re a nun,” he said.

  I dropped my spoon with a loud clatter, and I’m afraid my mouth must have been hanging open with my astonishment. “What would I do there?”

  “You try to reform them, or at least bring them spiritual comfort.”

  “Okay. I’d love to play the nun,” I heard myself say, still in shock.

  And there followed my career’s salvation, from 1997 to 2003, as Sister Peter Marie on Oz. It was a heavenly cast setup: I was surrounded by throngs of heavily muscled, hunky actors, led by Christopher Meloni as a bisexual prisoner. It was so great that I longed to be a lifer.

  Of course, the stories were all grim, male rape was a constant, prisoners were regularly knifed, and a few died. Nonetheless, I injected moments of levity in the outtakes.

  Oh, and I won another Emmy.

  * * *

  By now, I was over seventy years old, and a happy grandmother in my private life. I could have considered retiring after the series ended. After all, I had more than enough laurels to rest on. But retirement is just not in my DNA.

  LOSING LENNY

  After almost half a century of fearing the “final heart attack,” Lenny landed in the hospital with an intestinal obstruction. Life, fate, and age had assaulted his gut. At ninety everything is serious.

  We had flown to New York to participate in a benefit at Lincoln Center, and three days before the event a barrage of stomach pains drove Lenny to his knees. The doctor sent him by ambulance to the Upper East Side hospital where he had practiced medicine his entire career, and where our daughter, Fernanda, was born.

  Good, I thought. He’ll be known and well cared-for here.

  We arrived at the emergency room, where we were met by a wall of sound. People were pleading for help, wandering about as though they had been abandoned on a street in a war zone. I expected to see nurses and attendants flying all over the place trying to help. Instead, I saw some nurses helping, as others stood by at the nurses’ station, laughing as raucously as though they were at a comedy club. My amazement soon turned to alarm when I realized that this was the modus operandi of the place.

  Thank God for the few caring workers, because except for them, the laughers’ area was rife with a low-grade indifference that spun me around. My feelings did not lead me to scream for the authorities, but they did raise a steam of resentment, especially on behalf of those unwitting victims who had come for help, only to discover this hell.

  Lenny, meanwhile, was writhing and twisting with unimaginable pain, sobbing uncontrollably, begging and clutching at me and pleading for morphine. I’d survived his having heart attacks; I had been there as he experienced excruciating chest pains brought on by angina. But I had never, ever seen Lenny behave this way. His helplessness tore at my heart, and I wept, too.

  I approached a nurse with a kind demeanor. I trembled and sobbed as I begged her for pain relief for my devastated husband. “He practiced medicine here for forty years,” I told her. “Our little girl was born here. Please, please call his doctor and get permission to give him morphine.”

  She did, but it took at least another twenty minutes for her to contact him. Not the doctor’s fault, I’m sure, but it felt like a lifetime.

  Finally, Lenny was given a shot and he stopped crying. I sat on the gurney and took him in my arms as I waited for him to fall asleep. Then I wept again. It was two hours before they found a bed for him on the gastrointestinal floor, and another four hours to find an orderly to escort us to the room.

  I pleaded with the supervisor to let me wheel Lenny to the room, but of course the answer was no. “That will create an insurance nightmare,” they explained. “It’s against hospital policy.”

  My patience was worn out. We must have passed at least six people on the way upstairs, still lying on their gurneys and waiting for rooms.

  It was nearly midnight when we finally arrived at the room after a ten-hour ordeal. Lenny woke up and began to writhe and twist again as an army of doctors and nurses came in to ask him questions. It was so painful to watch. They needed answers, and Lenny needed morphine.

  “No morphine until the workup is done,” they said.

  His agony was only intensified by the puncture of needles and the prods of the examination. It was not easy for the doctors, as their patient was doubled over with pain, yet they asked more questions and then even more. Eventually he was given an injection of morphine. Mercifully, he went still again.

  But it wasn’t over. Now I had to decide whether, after this ordeal, we wanted to transfer him to a “better” hospital a few blocks away and possibly go through this den of pain again, or stay put. I opted for staying. I was now in that space between a rock and a hard place. I’ll never know whether it was the right decision.

  I asked for a cot and got a wooden chair that tilted, with leather pads for your bottom and back that made me sweat all night. For the rest of the night, my husband had occasional respites from pain, thanks to small doses of morphine, but whenever the drug wore off, he would start moaning and whimpering.

  Let me say that no matter how exhausted you are, you can’t sleep through that. So I’d get up and try to soothe him and wait for the shot. I couldn’t sleep; I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for hours. I felt my stomach trying to consume itself for lack of food. About two o’clock in the morning, a nurse came to give him a shot. I asked her whether I could have a cup of tea, and she returned, bless her, with the tea and two packets of graham crackers. It was a banquet! I had to hug her and ask her name: Mali.

  I looked up Mali’s schedule so that I could call on her for help during the night shifts. And that is how you do it: You slowly find the schedules of the nurses who are kind and helpful, and, if at all possible, you wait for their shifts to ask for small favors or assistance. Small favors sometimes consisted of requesting broth, because Lenny’s stomach was now rejecting certain foods on his dinner tray; or I asked for extra towels to place under Lenny’s knees, or to use to wipe up his vomit when he unexpectedly projectile-vomited all over the bed and I couldn’t find a nurse to help me. She was probably helping someone else get through the night.

  I really struggled to find a way to understand the failings of this overcrowded and understaffed ward, and concluded that it wasn’t in Lenny’s best interests if I flew off the handle with temper tantrums over endless oversights. The only solution was to swallow my anger and distress, and instead make friends with those among the staff who were amenable. My primary objective was to see to it that my husband got what he needed, when he needed it, and to be his ally and advocate.

  At the end of the first week—actually on that weekend—a cot was delivered to my room. Oh, glory! That I could feel the floor with my back was almost immaterial. I simply put some towels and folded sheets under the bed and voilà! I had a real bed.

  Lenny was worsening. He was routinely wheeled from floor to floor for test after test. He was delivered to what I call the “machine rooms,” for MRIs, CAT scans, and X-rays, where he had to wait in the freezing-cold hallways as he slowly moved up the line to be seen. On one occasion, he returned shivering after waiting for three hours. That did it! I squirreled around, found the laundry closet, and grabbed three blankets for future journeys to other floors.

  On one occasion while
Lenny was away, I spilled my cup of cocoa on the floor of his room. I soaked it up with Kleenex and discovered the floor was filthy, even after the daily mopping. It made me wonder what was in that water and on that mop. So I went to a neighborhood grocery and purchased two spray bottles of Lysol. With paper towels from the bathroom, I wiped that floor clean on hands and knees and cleaned the sooty windowsill, too. Never mind, I thought: It gave me something to do while I was waiting.

  Each evening, for the sake of my mental equilibrium, I would go out for dinner and, depending on the severity of the day, have a glass or two of wine. I did this after I had accompanied Lenny for his evening meal, where he was eating less and less. I ate alone, but it remained my one daily treat.

  One afternoon as Lenny was napping, I went to my hotel room and showered. It was pure bliss. I hadn’t been there in days. I packed several pairs of pajamas, then purchased a bag of fashion magazines and the New York Times for Lenny.

  “Your hair smells like a bouquet of flowers,” he told me as I handed him the paper.

  I was on top of the world that day.

  * * *

  After all of his torments, the test results revealed that Lenny’s intestine had twisted and he needed surgery immediately. The diagnosis had taken a week. I called Fernanda and she came right away. She wanted to be there when her father woke from surgery.

  The procedure went very well, and Fernanda and I were hopeful that all of us would be home soon. It was so good to see our girl again. Is there anything more moving than to look into your child’s face as she tries to be brave? I wanted to smother her with kisses.

  Fernanda was concerned about her dad, but she was also considerably worried about me. Lenny, of course, was in Papa heaven just to gaze on her sweet little face when he awoke from the anesthesia. Believing all would be well, Fernanda flew home to California. In three days we could celebrate our forty-sixth wedding anniversary with Lenny on the mend. What a gift, I thought.