Rita Moreno: A Memoir (10 page)

For all the overhyped ads, the film is actually very nicely shot in black-and-white, directed by Bernard Vorhaus, and has an impressive roster of young actresses playing wayward girls: Anne Francis, of the famous birthmark near her lip, is achingly young, tall, slim, and blond, and turns in a terrific performance as the seductive ringleader who tries to escape.
So Young, So Bad
was also the first film for Anne Jackson. She plays a tough cookie whose aggression is channeled into writing.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that the creative trio responsible for the film—Bernard Vorhaus; the screenwriter, Jean Rouverol; and Paul Henreid—were about to be blacklisted.
Vorhaus and Rouverol were members of the Communist party, and Paul Henreid was blacklisted as a “Communist sympathizer.” Henreid, born the son of an Austrian baron, became very left-wing, despite his aristocratic background. His political inclinations took a hard left turn when he was filming in Austria and his crew was attacked and pursued by Nazis.

There had been major studio interest in the film until the blacklist went into effect. After failing to get that financial backing, Paul Henreid put up fifty percent of the funding, and it was the best investment he ever made.
So Young, So Bad
turned out to be very profitable, and one of the first successful “independents.”

Over time, the picture has gained some respect as a Time Warner classic. It is well loved by viewers, and I can see it in a new light myself.

So Young, So Bad
—was it really that bad? Now that I am so old, so good, I think it is a fair film for its era and very watchable. It deserves the cult status it has earned. I’m so pleased that every notice of the movie mentions “Rita Moreno (appearing under her real name Rosita Moreno).” Perhaps in the tremulous Dolores, there was also more truth than I realized then. At that point, and even now, I was more vulnerable than “spitfire,” and as I discovered later, suicide would become an act with which I was all too familiar.

On review, I would give the film several stars, and I have no regrets.

HOLLYWOOD HEAVEN: LOUIS B. MAYER AND MGM

W
hen I was five, I reversed Dorothy’s enchanted journey and stepped out of Technicolor Oz when I left the vibrant-hued Puerto Rican rain forest for gray New York. Twelve years later, I recrossed that threshold into the brilliantly colored kingdom of Hollywood.

When I was sixteen, I would get the biggest opportunity of my young life. Right before I landed the role in
So Young, So Bad
, a talent agent spotted me at a dance recital and recommended me to the superwizard mogul Louis B. Mayer—the Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios, the huge studio that had produced
The Wizard of Oz
and hundreds of other major motion pictures. MGM and its rival studio, Universal, vied for preeminence in show business at the time, but it was MGM that claimed “more stars than there are in the heavens.”

My fateful meeting with Mr. Mayer was arranged not long after I finished filming
So Young
. Could little Rosita Dolores Alverio from Nowhere, Puerto Rico, possibly join the ranks of Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and my own personal teenage idol, Elizabeth Taylor? Although Rosa Maria Marcano extolled my looks—“Nonni, joo are the most beautiful girl I ever saw. No one is prettier than joo. No one!”—I took her words with more than a few grains of salt. I was a five-foot-tall, skin-one-shade-too-dark Hispanic girl whose feet still felt like leather soles from running barefoot on the rough roads of Juncos. I knew how much I relied on Maybelline and other Woolworth’s cosmetics to create my beauty. Could I possibly transform myself into a legendary beauty? In my mind, I never looked better than okay, but I knew I could “doll up” well and present a glamorous image if I worked on it.

I would try. This was my big chance, and Rosa Maria Marcano and I knew it. We flew into fast-forward to redo my entire appearance. Of all the MGM stars in my age category—which included Deanna Durbin, Debbie Reynolds, and Jane Powell—the one who reigned supreme, with her violet eyes and high-raised bosom and tiny waist, was British-born fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. I sat down and watched, along with the world, as this supernaturally gorgeous young girl starred in a series of animal-love movies, such as
National Velvet
and
Lassie Come Home
, and was propelled to superstardom. I studied her unique face with determined interest: What made her so impossibly beautiful? Was it the near-mutant genetics—violet eyes, double eyelashes, thick but uniquely slanted black eyebrows, the graceful Cupid’s bow of her full lips?

Violet eyes were impossible to replicate, but the rest could be mimicked. My mother and I set to work with lighter facial foundation,
eye pencils, shadow, and lip brushes. The hairstyle was the only part that was easy. But with work and artistry, Elizabeth Taylor’s eyebrows and lips were superimposed on my face. My mother and I worked as on a palette: Renoir and Modigliani with five-and-dime cosmetics. As makeup artists, we were world-class: In the mirror, a semblance of Elizabeth Taylor emerged. I looked back at “her” reflection in my mirror. I didn’t have violet eyes, and even I hesitated to add the finishing touch—her famous beauty mark—on my right cheek, but otherwise, it
was
Elizabeth Taylor who stared back at me.

But how to simulate the Elizabeth Taylor body? What of the impossible combination of high, creamy cleavage and a wasp waist? Face and body makeup, paler than my natural skin tone, gave me her English complexion; creative brassieres and a waist cincher lifted and squeezed. I felt my inner organs compress, but with a little help, I, too, had a hand-span waist. Breasts I never had were added. Creamy they could never be, but I could display the new cleavage and hope for the best.

We spent our savings on hair salon and nail salon appointments, and bought an entire new Elizabeth Taylor wardrobe. Rosa Maria Marcano stood back and sighed.
“Perfecto!”
I looked in the mirror and saw…a stranger. But gorgeous. With such alchemy and spendthrift daring, how could we miss?

We went on our way to my go-see with Louis B. Mayer, my head held high, breasts pushed up high, and hopes high. I winced as I walked on my new, painful spiked heels past the other look-alike little brick houses on our block on the border of the beet farm, to catch the bus to my future. I teetered onto the bus, then boarded the LIRR to the stunned stares of the other passengers. Rosa Maria Marcano beamed. She herself looked like she could be Elizabeth Taylor’s mother—Hispanic style.

The journey from Valley Stream to the Waldorf Astoria at 49th Street and Park Avenue did not measure very far in time or distance, but the Waldorf existed in another zone, a stratosphere away. My mother and I had never even gone to a hotel before. As I could not truly walk in my new high-heeled shoes, we splurged on a yellow Checker cab to take us from Penn Station on 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue to the famous hotel.

Louis B. Mayer, the Wizard Star Maker, was not exactly waiting for us in his castle tower, but we were “expected.” That alone was such a miracle, my heart pounded and my palms moistened. Under my Elizabeth Taylor–style low-cut, bosom-revealing blouse, beads of non–Elizabeth Taylor perspiration gathered. I willed my body not to sweat.

We passed through the guard stations of Oz—manned by doormen and a concierge who directed us to the Waldorf Towers penthouse. We had never heard the word “penthouse” and stared at the elevator buttons. Afraid to be late, we took a stab at “PH.” Rosa Maria Marcano and I ascended. I knew Louis B. Mayer was the star maker and the star acquirer. He had fought Darryl Zanuck at Universal Studios for Elizabeth herself, both men crying out, “Sign her, sign her! Don’t wait for a screen test!” Louis B. Mayer lost the first round, and Elizabeth Taylor went to Universal for the first year of her Hollywood career—until she was fired for “her prematurely adult face.”
Aha!
Mayer knew, as he always knew: She was a star, little old adult face and intense expression or not. From then on, Elizabeth Taylor was Mayer’s prize gem.

Could I be his next?

There he was, Louis B. Mayer, in a suite so luxurious I could not take it in. And the view!
¡Dios mío!
Seemingly all of Manhattan spread out below. I could imagine him staring out at the city like a king surveying his kingdom. But I could not look at skylines;
I had to focus on who was directly in front of me: the little man who would decide the course of my life.

The Wizard of the Waldorf was a squat little man, balding, with very little silver hair, who wore wire-rimmed glasses. I didn’t know it then, but Louis B. Mayer, born Lazar Meir and originally from Minsk, had traveled an immigrant journey parallel to my own. He landed first in Canada, where he was chased on the mean streets of Saint John, New Brunswick, by Canadian bullies screaming, “Kike! Kike!” before he arrived in the movie capital of the world to eventually become the king.

But we weren’t here to reminisce about our humble beginnings, and our meeting was short. I hardly had time to exhale—which was just as well, as that would have been difficult in my waist cincher. He held out his hand, which was the first manicured male hand I had ever seen, let alone held. His skin was soft as a baby’s. He checked me out for a matter of seconds before something in his eyes sparked and he said the equivalent of, “Sign her, sign her!”

“She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor!” the wizard decreed. “How does a seven-year contract sound to you, young lady?”

I levitated. My mother levitated. The Waldorf Towers spun around, and in my high-heeled slippers, I rematerialized on the studio lot in Culver City. It would be a long time before I wished to be back on the farm “in Kansas”—or its New York equivalent: a suburb next to a beet farm in Valley Stream. I did not have violet eyes, but I never looked back.

Rosa Maria Marcano and I were delirious with joy. We picked up and moved, with Dennis, to a charming cottage in Culver City, near the MGM lot, that the studio secured for us. At this point, Eddie Moreno decided to sign up for the army and was
sent to Japan. Mami didn’t seem fazed by this new arrangement. This is what we had fantasized about—the possibility of my being a young star and making it big, and our whole family living a more glamorous life in proximity to the stars. As for myself, I was thrilled that he was no longer around.

It all happened so quickly. We sold the house near the beet field and moved with everything we owned. I bought an old car and learned to drive. I imagined myself scooting around Hollywood, meeting the stars, actually working with them! No more buses and trains. I did not have the hubris to imagine limousines. And yet I never really doubted that I would act in movies. I had a sense of destiny. My dreams were coming true—in detail.

Hollywood was everything we had imagined and more. And there were palm trees and our own familiar warm, sunny climate. This was the best of Juncos plunked down in Hollywood. My mother was sure I would become famous: “Nonni,” she said, “joo are a star here.” I was making two hundred dollars a week! That was a lot of money at the time. We were rich! No one could have been more dazzled by this new world than I was—this might as well have been Bel Air and a million-dollar contract. I had moved to Hollywood heaven—to MGM, where there were “more stars than in the heavens” and they were everywhere to be seen. And now I walked among them.

*   *   *

On my first day at the studio lot, I went to meet the producer of the film I’d already been assigned to—
The Toast of New Orleans
—who invited me on a tour of the MGM lot. But first he took me to the Commissary for lunch. Wow! The scents, the mounds of steaming exotic foods—roast beef and gravy, pure white mounds of mashed potatoes, quivering molds of Jell-O trapping jewellike
fruit and everywhere I looked they were there. Crazily beautiful people, Ava Gardner, Jean Tiernary, oh gulp, Joan Crawford. All of them staggeringly beautiful. They were another race. Was I really a part of this?

And then on our way out, I met my first real movie star, who greeted me with a raffish grin and a know-it-all look in his eyes. A lock of dark hair hung over his forehead and left eye. Rhett Butler. Clark Gable. He touched my hand and gave me an even bigger smile than I had seen on Rhett. If you have never been close to a movie star in your life, the impact is surreal: On the one hand, most stars are shorter than they are on screen (except John Wayne, who was somehow bigger), but their faces loom larger than normal humans’, coming right at you into your own face.

There he was, with his thick eyebrows and big ears. It was impossible for me to even speak; I squeaked. Clark Gable did not seem aware of his effect. In my head I heard him say,
Rosita, I don’t give a damn.

In reality, Clark Gable said, “Rosita. Great name, kid.”

I did not have that name for long.

I was summoned to the office of the most famous and powerful casting agent in Hollywood, Bill Grady. My heart hammered within the confines of my waist cincher.

It won’t work out after all
, I thought as I climbed up the narrow stairs to his backlot aerie. The dark, unimpressive staircase gave me intimations: I was about to be fired. They had taken a closer look, under the glaring sun of Hollywood, and seen that I was no Latina Elizabeth Taylor. There was no such thing. I was a Puerto Rican kid without a prayer, and my nemesis alter ego, that voice, added,
A Puerto Rican kid with a bit of acne that all the pancake makeup in the world cannot quite conceal.
I was sure I
would be returned, like an impulse buy, to whatever bargain basement I came from.

Bill Grady’s gaze narrowed as he examined my face. He did nothing to reassure me. I felt my eyes, which I knew were the wrong color, widen. I was also aware that they had a tendency to “pop,” so I concentrated on getting them to calm down and settle back in their sockets. I braced myself for the worst: I would have to go home and go to secretarial school. I had tried secretarial school once and run, silent-screaming, back to my mother and another round of auditions, which I thought had paid off.