Rita Moreno: A Memoir (18 page)

“Sometimes I put on an act and people think I’m insensitive,” he said once. “Really, it’s just a kind of armor, because I’m too sensitive.”

I understood at once what he meant. I was the same way, expected to play the role of a hot Latin spitfire (or even “Satirist of Sex”), when in reality I was a determined, reliable, hardworking actor always in search of a better part.

At age twenty, Marlon had followed his sisters to New York, where he was fortunate enough to stumble into Stella Adler’s acting classes. Adler based her acting approach on the Stanislavsky Method—something most actors simply call “Method acting”—a technique based on intellectual honesty and gut instincts. Marlon embraced it, mind, body, and soul.

Even starting out in theater, he was a kind, giving boy. When Marlon met Tennessee Williams for the first time, up in Cape Cod at a cottage that the playwright was renting, “Bud” slept on the floor and fixed the electricity, the plumbing, and just about everything else (and won the part of Stanley Kowalski in the process). He was shy and unassuming.

Marlon’s stage role as Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, directed by Elia Kazan in 1947, was such a standout that he decided to try Hollywood, intending to make a movie or two before heading back to do live theater in New York City. Marlon despised the bogus glad-handing of Hollywood and made a point of thumbing his nose at all of the usual publicity machinery, especially the gossip columnists. He wasn’t going to pander to anyone.

Things didn’t turn out quite the way he planned. Marlon made several movies in quick succession, each better than the last. He was nominated for Best Actor for his role in Kazan’s film adaptation of
A Streetcar Named Desire.
He lost out that year to Humphrey Bogart for his role in
African Queen
. However, in rapid succession Marlon was nominated for Best Actor three more times: for
Viva Zapata!
in 1952, for
Julius Caesar
in 1953, and again for
On the Waterfront
in 1954, which finally earned
him that statue. Marlon had proved to Hollywood that he was bankable and believable for any role, from a Mexican to a Shakespearean leader to a longshoreman who “coulda been a contender.”

Hollywood was in awe of him. So was I.

On our very first date, Marlon took me to an amazing party where the other guests included James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jack Palance, and Eli Wallach…. It was an all-star, all-Method-actor party. I felt awed and out of my league, but thrilled to be there, especially with him.

We grew intimate quickly, and I began spending a lot of time at Marlon’s house. To say that he was a great lover—sensual, generous, delightfully inventive—would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul. Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.

He introduced me to so many new ideas and really educated me about the world. Marlon made me politically conscious. I saw him doing things, getting involved in events to raise awareness about Native Americans and other causes, and I would realize there was a lot going on in the world that I’d never thought about. I was really very ignorant and unaware; I was mostly absorbed by “me.” And it was Marlon who awakened me to things beyond myself.

He gave me books to read, like
The Art of Loving
by philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a marvelous book that I still treasure to this day. Marlon told me to read books on history, especially about the Civil War, slavery, and Native Americans. He gave me books that weren’t necessarily popular titles, but were interesting and informative about the world.

And he actually taught me about manners. I talked too loudly;
Marlon made a great effort to help me understand that everybody in the restaurant did not have to hear what I was saying to him. He taught me where spoons and forks go when you set a table.

Marlon even taught me about grooming. Yes, that was important. Until meeting him, I had been dressing in the way that I thought I “should” dress, which was in that sexy Latina way. I wore very tight dresses with tight belts, so that I had a real curve around my hips. I also wore way too much makeup, because I thought I needed to; I did not believe that I was very pretty.

Slowly, slowly Marlon helped me grow up. This unexpected tutor became my caring mentor.

I didn’t ask Marlon much about acting, because I knew he didn’t like to talk about it, and bemoaned people who made it the topic when they were with him. He just hated it! But one day I finally had the confidence that he wasn’t going to throw me out the window or something, and I asked him how he could play a bad guy, like he did in
The Young Lions.
Marlon gave me the best advice about acting I ever got.

“Don’t play it like a bad person,” he said. “Be absolutely justified in whatever you do, because your character believes she’s right to do that thing.”

That’s the kind of skill you learn over years with an acting teacher, and that’s what Marlon taught me. I would have a chance to practice that method much later, in the only movie we’d ever do together.

As I fell ever more deeply in love with Marlon, that romantic expression “in his arms” took on an entirely unique meaning for me. Marlon’s arms embraced me in a way I had never known. It wasn’t just his muscles holding me, loving me, but his very being.

Even though we never said the words “I love you,” as much as Marlon could love any woman, I know that he loved me.

LOVE, OBSESSION, AND MIND GAMES

T
here is a thin, razor-sharp line between love and obsession. When it came to our relationship, Marlon and I both balanced precariously along that line, our intense passions inevitably causing us to not only crush and cut and burn each other’s souls. He may have been one of the smartest, most contemplative men I ever knew, but there were two sides to him: Marlon the sensitive and kind, and Marlon the heedless and hurtful.

Fame did not improve Marlon during the years following his success in
On the Waterfront
. He was becoming sullen and insolent with directors, and would deliberately irritate everyone by appearing with his pet wild raccoon, Russell. Sometimes he’d pull crazy pranks, like going to professional meetings with a fried egg in his hand.

The wilder and more rebellious he seemed, the more women
wanted to tame him, I suppose. This was a dangerous combination: Having so many women offer themselves to him, even stalk him, made Marlon careless and disrespectful of his lovers—including me.

I don’t believe that he ever meant to be deliberately cruel to me. Marlon was in the throes of his own compulsion, which left him with insatiable sexual needs. Because he was perhaps the most desirable man in the world back then, he was like a lethal sexual weapon. He could seduce any woman he wanted, and that made him a walking A-bomb. He broke my heart and came close to crushing my very spirit with his physical infidelities and, worse, with his emotional betrayals.

I suppose that today’s experts would label Marlon as a sex addict. He was, like his father and like my own father, fiercely, ferociously jealous of any other man who paid attention to any of his women of the moment. Yet, no matter whom he was with, Marlon was unable to control his own desires for other women, unable to control his passion.

Marlon had his own explanation for his need to conquer so many women. In his memoir,
Songs My Mother Taught Me
, he attributes his compulsive conquests to being deserted by the first two important females in his life: his mother and his nanny, Ermi.

His mother “left” him emotionally through her alcoholism, while his first love—a teenage Danish nanny named Ermi, who, according to Marlon, slept naked with him while he was a child of seven—eventually left as well. When Ermi got married and deserted the family without offering him even a good-bye or an explanation, Marlon’s sexual feelings for her became entangled with his fear of abandonment.

Marlon effused about Ermi’s “sweet breath,” like “fermented fruit,”
as he had about his mother’s. Marlon himself had sweet breath, and he seemed chemically sensitive to others who also had this trait, since his mother had “a sweetness that came from fermented alcohol.” He said that my breath was sweet as well.

Ermi, who was part Indonesian, was almost certainly the inspiration for Marlon’s obsessive desire for women with dusky skin like mine. All his life, Marlon preferred women of color. I was an early and lasting example, but Marlon compulsively bedded Tahitians, East Indians, Native American Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Asians, Jamaicans…just name an ethnicity with a tint. All of his children are of mixed race.

The first desire a young boy experiences for a beautiful babysitter must be a very strong force, because Marlon was never cured of his endless quest to find a desire that matched it. He was helpless in his passions and wanted sex constantly, no matter how inappropriate. His compulsions made him miserable, and his actions led to a legion of angry or demolished women, and, most seriously, a disturbed extended family of children. Whatever damage was done to Marlon in his childhood was compounded by the hurt he inflicted on others.

How and why did I keep taking him back? I wonder that now. After all, I had seen my mother hurt by unfaithful men, starting with my very own father. I had always sworn that I would not allow myself to be treated that way under any circumstances.

Yet month after month, year after year, into my mid-twenties and beyond, I was unable to refuse Marlon when he came around—no matter what he did or what I heard. Our on-again, off-again affair continued despite the fact that, in 1957, Marlon married Anna Kashfi at her insistence because she was pregnant with his first child. That marriage lasted for only two years; in 1960, Marlon married Mexican actress Movita Castaneda, an old
flame of many years. That marriage again lasted just two years. He had children with both of these women: Christian, his oldest son, with Anna, and Miko and Rebecca with Movita.

None of these hard truths lessened my obsession. Marlon was that irresistible to me, and I was that determined to conquer him. I couldn’t stay away. In fact, I was becoming addicted to the challenge of winning him over and over again, seduced by the roller-coaster emotional and physical thrill ride of being with Marlon.

Why didn’t I leave him? Because there were periods of absolute happiness when I was with Marlon unmatched by anything I’d ever experienced. Despite everything, Marlon was very kind to me, particularly at times when it didn’t involve his masculinity or our relationship. He was kind to me in the sense that he tried to make me understand that I had worth and value.

Really, it’s a wonder that I didn’t succeed in just doing away with myself during that time. I had such a low opinion of myself. But this man who was killing me was, at the same time, saving me. It was so bizarre. Marlon took care of me and protected me in certain ways—even against myself.

He’s the fellow who sent me into therapy. One day Marlon saw me on a television talk show, and the next day we went out and he said, “You really need to see somebody, Rita. You have a lot of problems.”

In a way, I think this proves how much Marlon cared about me, because he had to know that at some point—if I stayed in therapy with a good doctor and tried to help myself—our relationship was going to end. He had to know that. He was a very, very smart guy.

Even I had to know that. Still, the games continued. Whenever Marlon was off with another woman, married or not—or with many other women, as sometimes happened—I would do whatever it
took to bring him back to me. This sometimes meant dating other men to make him jealous, because the one thing Marlon could not stand was the idea of my being with someone else.

*   *   *

It was because of Marlon, really, that I became involved with Dennis Hopper. Dennis was five years younger than I was, a cocky man who took himself oh, so seriously, even though I knew him before his biggest career success: cowriting, directing, and acting in
Easy Rider
.

Both Marlon and Dennis towered over me. As a petite woman—five-foot-two—I am always acutely aware of height. I know who is taller than I am, and by how much. Dennis listed his height as five-foot-nine, but Marlon is also listed as five-foot-nine, and I just know that Marlon was taller than Dennis. I didn’t have as far to reach on tiptoe to kiss Dennis!

An aside: Male actors fool around a lot with their height; they wear lifts in their boots, that kind of thing. And a curious fact: Both Marlon and Dennis played the male lead in Napoleon movies, and Napoleon was way shorter than either of them, only five-foot-six.

Of the two men, Marlon and Dennis, who had the bigger ego? That was easier than measuring their actual height: No one had a bigger ego than Marlon.

In other words, Dennis didn’t make as much of an impression on me as he might have liked. He was such a baby when I knew him, and didn’t yet have the string of wives and girlfriends that he later acquired. He was notorious for being unable to sustain a relationship. He was, like Anthony Quinn, a serial marrier—Dennis married five times and divorced everyone. His marriage to Michelle Phillips was the shortest, lasting only two
weeks. Even at his tragic end in 2010 at age seventy, dying of prostate cancer and weighing only a hundred pounds, Dennis was still summoning what strength he had left to divorce his last wife.

Dennis also had a long, feverish history of drug use and violence. He stabbed Rip Torn and lied about it on a television talk show—a fib that cost him $1 million in lawsuits launched by an enraged Torn. (It was never a good thing to enrage Rip Torn, who famously bit Norman Mailer’s ear and was more recently arrested after breaking into a bank with a loaded gun.)

Dennis hadn’t become that stormy when I knew him; he was more egotistical than stoned. I probably wouldn’t have even dated him but for one compelling reason: Being with Dennis was like offering an hors d’oeuvre to Marlon—to make him jealous.