Rita Moreno: A Memoir

RITA MORENO

RITA MORENO

A MEMOIR

RITA MORENO

Celebra

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Celebra,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, March 2013

Copyright © Rita Moreno Gordon, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Celebra and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Moreno, Rita.

Rita Moreno : a memoir/Rita Moreno.

pages cm

ISBN: 978-1-101-61522-5

1. Moreno, Rita. 2. Actors—United States—Biography.

3. Dancers—United States—Biography. 4. Singers—

United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN2287.M6996A3 2013

791.43’028’092—dc23            2012046030

[B]

Designed by Alissa Amell

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.

   The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

For Fernanda, child o’ my heart—my story, my life,
my love, the most precious gifts I have to offer.
I love you.

CONTENTS

Part I: Paradise Lost

“HEY, BOY”

PUERTO RICO

THE GREAT CHANGE

FRIGID CITY

THAWING OUT

AMERICAN DREAM

PAPO

THE LOSS OF PAPO

Part II: Hyperbolic Hollywood

MAKING MOVIES: MY LEAP TO THE SILVER SCREEN

HOLLYWOOD HEAVEN: LOUIS B. MAYER AND MGM

STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS

STILL ROSITA

RITA RISING

Part III: Men, Love, and Romance

EYE CANDY AND LEGGY LADIES

THE COCKTAIL PARTY: PIMPED?

DATING, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

MEETING MARLON

LOVE, OBSESSION, AND MIND GAMES

HOW TO SURVIVE SUICIDE

SAVED BY
WEST SIDE STORY

FINDING MYSELF IN POLITICS

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

Part IV: Reinventing Myself

MARRIAGE AND MAMI-HOOD

MARLON AND I MAKE A MOVIE

BIG BIRD,
THE ELECTRIC COMPANY
, AND ME

THE ACCUSATORY BANANA

LOSSES AND BLESSINGS

PERSEVERANCE

LOSING LENNY

THE ATTIC

PART I

Paradise Lost

“HEY, BOY”

New York City, 1936

“H
ey, boy,” I scream. “Heeey, boooooy.”

I don’t know what I am saying—I speak only Spanish, just off the boat from San Juan. I am five years old in a hospital ward and I know there is another Spanish kid here, because I can hear him a few beds away from me. The orderlies are yelling at him, and I parrot what they say—“Hey, boy.”

Crying and feverish, I learn my first words in English from that boy: “
Shut up.
”

“Hey, boy,” I shout back. “Hey, boy, shut up.”

I have always been a quick study. Fast learner. Anything to survive.

*   *   *

Start back there—New York, 1936. I am not yet named Rita Moreno. I am still Rosita. Rosita Dolores Alverio. I am five years old.

When we leave Puerto Rico, it is as if we are caught in a reverse
Wizard of Oz
scene. We go from brilliant Technicolor to grit-gray, black-and-white. The world that was lush and hot with life, sunshine, bright flowers, birds, and whistling frogs, turns to lifeless cold ash.

After my island, New York City seems a freezing hell. Later, people ask, “Why didn’t you and your mother turn back?”

We couldn’t afford return passage. Many of us spent all the money we had saved to sail to America to start a new life with new opportunities. Others had hopes to settle, make a fortune, and then later return to the island; meanwhile, they worked in New York to send money back to their families in Puerto Rico.

When you are five years old, what is money? What is “opportunity”? My mother and I arrived in winter, and I thought,
This is crazy. What have we done?
But my twenty-two-year-old pretty, full-lipped, full-hipped mother had had enough of Juncos, Puerto Rico, her unfaithful husband, and her old life, which did not look like paradise to her. My mami, Rosa Maria Marcano Alverio, was looking for a new start, a new husband. She was seeking love and fortune, and she would walk toward it on her homemade sandals and in her hand-sewn dress, carrying her one suitcase and the rest in shopping bags. When you have almost nothing, you can travel light.

My mami was escaping something—at five, I didn’t know what she would want to escape. But she did not want to live with Paco, my father, anymore—that much I knew—and I never saw her standing close to him or even alone in a room with him. She was in a hurry to get away from him—and is it my imagination,
or do I see his arm reaching out, grabbing her to pull her back to him? And her twisting away and saying something to him, something sharp but scared too, like, “Keep away from me; don’t you touch me…”?

The first thing that happened when I came to America was that I got sick. Terribly sick—burning-up, shaking-cold, itching-like-crazy sick all over my body. What am I doing, five years old, alone, can’t speak English, in some awful ward in some bad New York hospital? No one can understand what I am saying, except the boy who teaches me the words “shut up.”

What is the place? The hospital is named Misericordia, just to tell you right away how miserable it is….

How’d I get here? I’m dying from terror almost, like the baby bird I once picked up that died in my hand. That little bird gazed up at me and gave me a look—a look I could never forget—and it was like the little bird was so scared, he just stopped breathing; his little eyes glazed. Maybe I am dying of fear too, before the sickness can get me. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. Later, I would find out it was chicken pox, a common but, at that time, very serious childhood disease. But in the moment, I thought the same mysterious force that killed the bird was attacking me.

This could not happen in my worst nightmare. Only life can be this terrible. They come for me in the dead of night—masked men who grab me, wrap me in a sheet, tie me in all the way, and do not even let my head stick out. They twist the ends of the body sack, like a Tootsie Roll wrapper. Blind in that sack, I squirm and yell for my mother. And my mother screams and cries, like only a mother can scream, for them to let her go with her baby girl. “Don’t take my baby. Let me go with her.
Madre de Dios
. Mother of God.” My mami, Rosa Maria, she is just twenty-two years old.
She runs down the five flights of stairs alongside the ambulance attendants; we hit every corner of every banister at every landing.
Ouch, ouch, ouch.

“Mama! Mami! Mama!” But no one can go with me. I am crying from inside the sack and invent a desperate ploy: “I feel better. I’m not sick anymore. Let me out,” I cry in Spanish.

They don’t. Bagged, I am thrown in the back of the ambulance. Did they have to turn on that wailing noise? (I had never heard a siren before.) Oh,
Madre de Dios
, that makes it so much scarier. My heart is popping out of my chest. Maybe I am dead already, wrapped in the sheet like a corpse in a shroud? Blind in the bag, racing through the screaming city night to who knows where? The men are laughing and joking to each other in a language I don’t understand, but you don’t need to translate indifference. These guys don’t care; so what if they’ve got a five-year-old girl in a sack crying for her mami? They don’t care about me.

How can they not care? Everybody has always cared for me. I am
la niña
Rosita Dolores; my mami calls me Coookeee, Monkeee, Nonni, and covers me with kisses. My
abuelo
, Justino, he claps and smiles when I dance. “So pretty, so sweet…” Everybody loves me, Rosita Dolores…. Only now—here in New York City, in the big America—they don’t.