Rita Moreno: A Memoir (19 page)

And Marlon actually
wanted
to be made jealous. It was one of the mind games he played. Whenever he had to be away for a while to shoot on location, or during the times we were apart because of one of our fights, he would return to me and demand to know, “Did you sleep with anyone else?”

I couldn’t wait to tell Marlon about Dennis, to watch him go mad and redevote himself to me.

In retrospect, I see how disturbed this maneuver was. But back then, it was one of my few ploys in our war between the sexes.

Dennis Hopper had an effect on Marlon, but didn’t drive Marlon nearly as mad with jealousy as I was over his affairs. I had to up my game. My next weapon was a human missile groomed with Brilliantine and encased in taut leather pants: Elvis. The King.

*   *   *

Today, it’s almost impossible to conjure how scandalous, sexy, and flat-out hot Elvis was when I dated him in 1957. He was the first white gospel/rock/country/rockabilly/pop/rhythm-and-blues singer, mixing all of these ingredients with pelvic action that was faster than a high-speed blender. He spontaneously combusted when he cut his first record. Wherever he went, teenage girls mobbed the King of Swoon, and mass hysteria resulted at the merest twitch of the famous pelvis.

Ed Sullivan resisted booking Elvis, calling him “unfit for family viewing,” and the first newspaper reviews decried his “grunt and groin antics.” Sullivan is famously quoted as saying, “Presley has some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants—so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. I think it’s a Coke bottle. We just can’t have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!”

But everyone caved as the Elvis quake shook the nation. The rival variety shows,
The Steve Allen Show
and
The Milton Berle Show
, booked Elvis and scored high ratings. Even Ed Sullivan gave in after being swamped by the tidal wave of ratings Steve Allen earned by showing Elvis crooning “Hound Dog” to a basset hound. That show triumphed in the ratings against the rival Sullivan show for the first time.

Almost against his will, Ed Sullivan booked Elvis but he allowed Elvis to be viewed only from the waist up. It was that begrudging booking on Ed Sullivan, however, that did the most to launch Elvis into superstardom.

Behind all the fame and gyrations, Elvis was a shy young man from Tupelo, Mississippi, who had come up from poverty (which worked in his favor, as he grew up in black neighborhoods, where he picked up his strongest musical influence). He had stumbled into the top black recording studio, Sun Records, where boss
Sam Phillips had been looking for a “white man who had the Negro sound and Negro feel.”

If he did find such a singer, Phillips said, “I could make a billion dollars.” He heard a few chords by Elvis and knew that he had finally found him: a white-skinned boy singer with a black man’s soul. He released Elvis’s first hit, “That’s All Right,” and it was a lot more than “all right.”

Elvis’s gyrations were originally caused by uncontrolled stage fright that made his body shake, a symptom he disguised by trying to make it appear deliberate. That ploy became an out-of-control success. By the time I met Elvis in Hollywood, he was the most famous singer in the world, and about to be a movie star, too. He was already a notorious sex symbol, with his tightly fitting clothes and sensuous face. Those pouty lips, with what appeared to be a sexual sneer, were actually an accident of lip physiognomy—just as much of an accident as his pelvic and hip action.

At age twenty-two, Elvis was four years younger than I was. That later came to matter more than you would think. At the time we met, though, my delight in dating Elvis hinged entirely on one fact: I knew that no one could possibly make Marlon Brando more jealous.

I was sick of the torturous limbo of being Marlon’s on-again, off-again lover. He seemed to have placed me in his sexual rotation of partners, and though I was a favorite stopover, I was deeply devastated by every one of his betrayals, and entering a dangerous emotional spin cycle that would ultimately lead me to try to end my life.

Into this emotional whirlpool entered the King, with his famous phallic strut. I knew at once that the strut was a feint. Because I was always posing as a sexy Latina, I could spot another pretender from forty paces.

So there we were, the shy, ignorant Southern boy playing his role as international sex star, and I, the heartsick Puerto Rican girl misrepresented as “Rita the Cheetah, Latin spitfire.” It was inevitable that we would meet.

*   *   *

Elvis had spotted me at the Fox commissary and let it be known through a well-known gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, that he wanted to meet me. She printed this in her column.

When I read that item, I was having a particularly bad time with Marlon: I had just found another woman’s clothing in his house. At the moment I found her nightgown and underpants in his closet, I felt as if I had been seared from the inside out. A scalding rage rose through my whole body. I stood there staring at those clothes and shaking.

“How could he treat me this way?” I shouted. “How could I let him?” I threw out the other woman’s clothes and swore to myself on the spot that I would “show him.”

Show him what? That other men desired me and that Marlon was a fool to ever wander, that’s what! Why
not
meet Elvis? If Dennis Hopper could make Marlon jealous, what effect would Elvis have on Marlon?

That was the way I thought in those troubled days. Where was my pride? My sense of self? Was I carrying over the humiliation of the abject female characters I played on-screen into my real life?

Never mind. I was livid, so furious at Marlon that I had to act
now
. So when Colonel Parker, Elvis’s larger-than-life manager, called to ask whether I wanted to meet Elvis, I instantly agreed.

The Colonel invited me to see Elvis on the set of his film
King Creole
, at Paramount. This seemed like the right thing to do
no matter what the outcome, I soon realized, because Colonel Parker was so delighted by my acceptance that he immediately sent news of my appearance to the wire services! Again, the Hollywood publicity machine was doing its behind-the-scenes work for my very public date with the King.

*   *   *

Ironically, Elvis worshiped Marlon Brando. Marlon was one of his favorite actors. In fact, Elvis had patterned his black leather and swaggering attitude on Marlon’s “iconic” antisocial biker Johnny Strabler, gang leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, a group of bikers that terrorizes a small town in his iconic film
The Wild One
. In the vortex of this crisscross admiration, I was therefore a desirable date.

Elvis was, too. My pulse definitely quickened as I stepped onto the set of
King Creole.
How could it not? Elvis was so good-looking, so famous. And there was something disingenuous about him in person, a gangly charm. He was tall—over six feet—and sincerely bashful.

Elvis had beautiful blue eyes, and his hair shone a gleaming black. His hair color has long been in dispute, with many saying that it was naturally blond and dyed black. But I never saw dyed hair shine like his. Elvis’s hair was mirror-bright and probably reflected his partial Cherokee ancestry.

I was standing at my assigned place on the set when Elvis strode out, guitar firmly in hand, pompadour suitably puffed. He crooned on command of the director, none other than Michael Curtiz, famous for directing
Casablanca.
I had lucked into this date with Elvis in the middle of shooting his finest film, the last of his black-and-white movies and a classic film noir.

In those first moments, my heart pounded like a teenager’s as Elvis
sang “As Long as I Have You.” The song was a ballad, and he was young, slender, and tender-looking. He was playing a boy auditioning at a nightclub and did very well in the scene. I could see the exact second that the boy, Danny, gained confidence. It was a touching moment and I was impressed. He was not the hyped-up gyrating Elvis I had expected, and I was intrigued.

The director was impressed as well. Curtiz praised Elvis for the sensitivity he brought to the moment, and used a word seldom associated with Elvis before or since: “elegant.”

In person, Elvis had a face that was pretty rather than handsome. His features echoed those of his mother, Gladys, to whom he was famously attached. Gladys was obsessed with Elvis from the time he was a baby, since he was a twin but she lost the other baby at birth. Consequently, she overwhelmed her only surviving son, Elvis, with love, food, and possibly her own genetic predisposition to addiction and depression.

In 1958, a year after I dated Elvis, Gladys died from hepatitis after decades of drinking hard. She was still a young woman, and Elvis threw himself into her grave at the funeral. This intense mother-son bond was explored in a book,
Elvis and Gladys
, by a writer, Elaine Dundy, whose path would cross mine several years later—when she and I tangled over another lover.

Elvis asked me out several times, and things always went the same way between us. He was his “real self,” a shy, bumbling kid from Tupelo whose favorite book was the Bible. He was also what some of his detractors accused: a mama’s boy. Our “sex” activity fell far short of my expectations and needs, typically ending up in my Sunset Boulevard apartment with the roar of traffic as our accompaniment. The red glare of the traffic lights lent a carnal glow to our activities.

More specifically, my dates with the King nearly always concluded
in a tender tussle on my living room floor, with Elvis’s pelvis in that famous gyration straining against his taut trousers. I could feel him thrust against my clothed body, and expecting the next move, I knew I would have to confront my own conflicted motives when the time came, but it never did.

“We can just do this,” he’d whisper in my ear as we moved around on the floor. “We can just do this, okay?”

“This” was called “grinding,” and it was all he really wanted to do. Maybe Elvis was inhibited by inbred religious prohibitions or an oedipal complex, or maybe he simply preferred the thrill of denied release. Whatever put the brakes on the famous pelvis, it ground to a halt at a certain point and that was
it
.

Later, I discovered that my experience with Elvis was typical. Natalie Wood stormed out on him when he refused to “do it,” and many others claimed that all he liked to do was cuddle with teenage girls or watch them cavort girl-upon-girl. He was a fine match for his teen fans, arrested, apparently, at their level of development. I was already a fully grown woman with adult desires—and I had been with Marlon.

In a way, Elvis’s ambivalence suited my own. I was still so deeply in love with Marlon Brando that I truly didn’t want anyone else. Elvis and I were in perfect sync. We rolled around several times, and I don’t believe either of us ever found release, only that
hunk-a hunk-a burnin’ love
, which, when I heard the song afterward, did sound more like a hymn to sexual frustration than satisfaction.

Eventually, though, I realized that I couldn’t fake it anymore. There were only so many times that I could be in a clutch with a kid whose pouty lips could hardly express an idea or recount an experience. After Marlon’s intellectual curiosity, sexual appetite, and chameleon-like changes, the truth is that Elvis bored me. He was
more like a baby brother who couldn’t make interesting conversation.

One night, as I watched Elvis wolf down a bacon, mashed banana, and peanut butter sandwich that had been home-fried in bacon fat, I realized that he probably desired that sandwich more than he desired me. I liked Elvis well enough, but there was just nothing left to say or do.

When Marlon, in a fury of passion and jealousy, reeled me in again, I sprang back into that man’s boat, hooked once more. I kissed Elvis’s Cupid’s-bow lips good-bye and never turned back.

Still, my heart ached when, twenty years later, I heard the news with everyone else that the King had been found dead in his bathroom of a prescription drug overdose. He was sad and bloated during those last years, and I was told he had to be buckled into a girdle before he could don a costume. Elvis staggered toward his tragic end at forty-two, and I could not help thinking, “Poor boy.”

HOW TO SURVIVE SUICIDE

M
arlon did not practice birth control; he believed it was the woman’s responsibility. He was obviously very fertile; he ended up having fifteen children. For reasons so deep that I have not yet unearthed them, I allowed myself to get pregnant by Marlon.

Maybe subconsciously, I thought he would offer me marriage, since during the course of our affair he had married two other women and fathered children with both. But that wasn’t what occurred. To my shock and horror, Marlon immediately arranged for an abortion.

Abortion was illegal then, but I had seen abortion scenes—usually botched procedures—in many movies. I couldn’t believe this would happen to me, but it did: I had a creepy, unqualified doctor, despite the fact that his office was in Beverly Hills!

Later, I’d have to ask myself whether he even
was
a doctor. If he’d
had any medical training at all, how could he have bungled my procedure so badly?

I went to his office alone and disliked the doctor on sight. He seemed typecast as an abortion doctor: a shifty, ferretlike man who skittered sideways like a crab. In my nightmares I can still see his small eyes, too close together, darting around. He seemed to have only peripheral vision.

The doctor put me out on sodium pentothal for the procedure. “What did you take from me?” I asked when I woke up. “I want to see it.”

He showed me some bloody tissue.

“That was it?” I asked, shivering.

“Yes,” he said, “that was it.”

A friend of Marlon’s picked me up. I was shaken, but I imagined that my ordeal was over and that Marlon and I could go back to being together the way we had been. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The abortionist was so disreputable that he hadn’t really performed an abortion at all. He had only interrupted my pregnancy. Marlon called a doctor when I began cramping and running a fever and bleeding. I was rushed to the hospital, where the rest of our baby was then removed from me.