Rita Moreno: A Memoir (23 page)

“Why don’t we go to my people?” he said. “They always have food.”

Because I had been reflecting lately on the importance of family, there was something about that answer that made me want to be with Jim forever.
How wonderful
, I thought,
to be with someone who always has a support system
. It was so clear to me that people had Jim’s back—people whose passion for something more meaningful than themselves bonded them in a profound way.

As we spoke at length, Jim and I discovered that we shared common ground. He, too, had undergone a disorienting early childhood, starting with being left by his mother to be raised by a grandmother in South Carolina.

Then, at age six—just a little older than I was when my mother uprooted me to New York—Jim underwent another drastic life change when his mother brought him to live with her and her new husband. Jim used his stepfather’s surname, Rufus, until his teens, when he finally learned his real name and met his birth father, Jackson Forman, a cabdriver in Chicago.

Jim and I fell in love and had a surprisingly uneventful summer romance. I never saw a wedding ring on Jim’s finger, but I found out years later that he was separated from his second wife, Mildred, and was soon to move in with a woman who would become his “hidden” wife, Dinky Romilly, the daughter of author and political campaigner Jessica Mitford. Dinky became the mother of Jim’s only children, and he lived with her on and off throughout the remainder of the 1960s and into the 1970s.

According to Jessica Mitford, Jim and Dinky never did legalize their relationship, because at the time it would have been awkward for Jim to have a white wife. When Dinky and Jim broke up, however, he remained a conscientious father to their two boys. I always admired him for that.

Jim and I eventually drifted apart for practical reasons. He had his work, which took him everywhere, and I had mine, which kept me in Los Angeles. But I have nothing but warm memories of my time with this exceptional man. He was always warm and tender with me. What a rarity: a true gentleman who knows how to love—and how to part—without animosity.

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

D
espite this wonderfully healthy love affair with Jim Forman, some of my dating life was no less bizarre than it had been during my earliest days in Hollywood. Probably the standout example of that was my relationship with Kenneth Tynan, a legendary English theater critic and journalist.

Ironically, winning the Oscar brought me no juicy new roles in Hollywood. You would think that producers would be calling nonstop, right? But, oh, my, there wasn’t one little grain of interest. Everybody loved me. Everyone in the business thought I was spectacular. Yet I wasn’t offered one job, other than a couple of grade-B gang movies. I said no to most of those. Even if I never made another film, I vowed that I wasn’t going to take those sorts of roles again.

It was so bizarre. It was almost as though I had never won the
Oscar. It might have been because I had played a definitive Hispanic role that I was being offered only parts in gang movies and B movies, but whatever the reason, I wasn’t just disappointed by this; I was depressed and sad, because I had worked so hard and been recognized for it, yet I was still being asked to play the same demeaning character parts I’d always played.

I took some of those parts because I needed the work. To stay financially afloat, I guest-starred in various television series, often in Westerns, where once again I had to be the señorita.

In 1964, when it became clear that nothing much was happening for me in Los Angeles, I moved to London for a year with my girlfriend Phyllis, who was a real Anglophile. That was just about the time that the Bay of Pigs was taking place, and both Phyllis and I were ready for a change of pace. Our motivation was not fear of a bomb. We just wanted to flee the crazies with their self-serving behavior. Hoarding became a norm and fairly soon the market shelves became empty.

Phyllis and I booked passage on a ship, the
France
, and moved to London with only a couple of trunks filled with our belongings. We had enough money to get along for perhaps six months, so we found a little maisonette, a duplex apartment, and started calling friends of Phyllis’s friends.

I have since learned—just in my seventies and eighties—the real value of women friends, but back then I never trusted many women and was not willing to be vulnerable with them. I don’t know why. Perhaps that has to do with not fully trusting my mother. Anyway, Phyllis was the only woman friend I cherished and trusted, and I’m so grateful that I had the experience of living with her in England, among the few women friends I really cherished and trusted.

Soon after arriving in London, I was lucky enough to land a
part in Harold Prince’s musical
She Loves Me
, in the West End. The woman who was going to play the featured role had fallen ill and they couldn’t find anyone who could sing and act to fill the part. Tony Walton, Julie Andrews’s husband then, was producing and designing sets for the production. He told the director that he’d heard I was in town, and wondered whether I was available. When they approached me, of course I said I’d love to do it.

This was a wonderful time in my life. The West End is like Broadway in New York, and it was a fantastic place to get away from the glitter of Hollywood.
She Loves Me
is a play with such charm that performing in it was a delight. It was marvelous to wake up every day and go to work. As a bonus, I was not cast as a stereotype.

I was starring in the play when I met Kenneth Tynan at a party. He was already both famous and infamous. I didn’t know much about him when we began to go out. For instance, I had no idea that his divorcing wife, the American novelist Elaine Dundy, author of the bestselling book
The Dud Avocado
, had announced, “To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction…. I married the Marquis de Sade.”

To me, Kenneth appeared to be the exotic epitome of the London man in his designer tweeds, giving off the steam and smoke of the best salons. He was funny, exciting, and attractive in an English way, tall and bony. He knew everyone who was famous—or, to be more accurate, everyone he knew was famous.

Kenneth hovered over the West End uttering witticisms as constantly as he chain-smoked cigarettes, one after another, the words coming so fast that they stumbled over one another in his rapid, recurring stammer. He was widely known for his quotes, such as, “A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping,” and,
“A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.” I was fascinated.

For years, Kenneth had been the top theater critic for the
Observer.
He was credited for being the first to praise the new wave of English playwrights, beginning with John Osborne and
Look Back in Anger
, and changed the future of British theater with his reviews. When I met him, he had just segued to London’s Royal National Theatre as its literary manager under Sir Laurence Olivier.

During the time I knew him, Kenneth took part in a live TV debate, broadcast as part of the BBC’s late-night show BBC-3. When asked whether he would allow a play to be staged in which sexual intercourse was represented on the stage, he answered, “Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be printed or said can also be seen.”

This was the first time the word “fuck” had been spoken on British television. The BBC was forced by the public outcry to issue a formal apology. Mary Whitehouse, an English social activist known for her criticism of mainstream British media, wrote a letter to the queen suggesting that Kenneth should be reprimanded by having “his bottom spanked.” (She didn’t know what wish fulfillment that would have been!)

Sadly for my leftist, liberal friend Kenneth, his freedom of speech boomeranged. Her protest helped Whitehouse in her campaign against the BBC; it also shortened Kenneth’s television career. That was a shame, since he was a great interviewer; his interview with Laurence Olivier is a classic all by itself.

If I had known the confusions of Kenneth’s childhood, I might have been more prepared for what happened between us. He
was the child of a bigamist, believing for twenty years that his father was Peter Tynan, only to learn when his father died that Peter Tynan was really Sir Peter Peacock, a royal bigamist. Kenneth’s mother had to return his body to his legitimate first wife.

That turned Kenneth’s life and identity around, and perhaps that’s why he became a sexual spanker. Or maybe it was simply “the English vice” reputedly picked up at the British public schools (which were in reverse of our public school in the States—they are the private schools). Either way, soon into our relationship, I learned that Kenneth had advanced beyond a playful spank. He was the perfect example of how a public persona was undone by a private perversion.

I will say right here that I do not want, nor have I ever wanted, to include spanking in my lovemaking, playful or otherwise. Kenneth and I had dated quite a few times when he introduced the idea. We were having a rather sweet love affair until one evening when he produced a photograph album and invited me to sit on his lap and look at the pictures.

The album turned out to be his spanking scrapbook. The photos were scenes of women being spanked in various positions by men. The pictures did not look cruel—just staged and, to me, odd. The women and girls did not appear to be in pain; they seemed rather neutral, patiently waiting for the next deserved whack.

Accompanying the pictures were little stories written in white ink. These described the various scenarios: “The headmaster said, ‘You have been a bad little girl.’” “The doctor said, ‘Now I have to examine you. Stop squirming and lie still!’” The pictures were certainly united by a common theme: “Naughty girls need to be taught a lesson.”

One pass through the scrapbook was enough for me, though
these pictures weren’t as nasty as the activities that Kenneth later admitted practicing. When I politely declined to participate in Kenneth’s favorite pastime, he looked wistful. I knew that he really wished that we could continue seeing each other, but since this was such an essential turn-on ingredient for his sexual pleasure, we had to part politely.

Or we might have, had I not already been caught up in the riptide of Kenneth’s divorce. His estranged wife, Ms. Dundy, found the backstage phone number while I was appearing in
She Loves Me
and would call to vent her fury about the divorce and to harass me. She had been spanked for years and then rebelled at the more advanced sadomasochistic dramas Kenneth had incited, but they had been tangled up in each other for too many years to easily let go.

Elaine would shriek at me on the phone until I finally had to tell her off. “I’m not the reason for your divorce!” I’d yell. “Leave me alone!”

The insanity of their relationship gave me flashbacks to my own obsessive, tormented affair with Marlon. For instance, during one well-documented marital fight, Kenneth had stood on a window ledge, threatening to leap if Elaine didn’t take him back. He tossed her manuscript out the window instead of himself. The next day, he reappeared with the book leather-bound (as she had also been) and begged for her love and forgiveness.

Elaine and Kenneth, like Marlon and me, came together and splintered apart over and over again. And Kenneth, like Marlon, wanted total sexual freedom, but was driven to jealousy if Elaine was unfaithful to him. When he came home from an adulterous affair to find Elaine with a naked man in the kitchen, he threw the man’s clothes down the garbage chute.

When Elaine finally divorced Kenneth, coming to court with
two black eyes and a broken nose, she went on to write more books, including a famous biography of another man I knew well: Elvis Presley. Her book,
Elvis and Gladys
, chronicled the unnaturally close relationship Elvis had with his mother. Meanwhile, Kenneth Tynan repeated his pattern with his second wife, another successful woman writer, Kathleen Halton, whom he had already met when he was dating me. (Unbeknownst to me, he turned out to be a busy fellow.)

As with his wife, Kenneth didn’t let go of me easily or quickly. For quite a while after our breakup, he stalked me and phoned me everywhere I went. One night I was enjoying dinner with friends in a pub when Kenneth called the restaurant and asked to speak with me. I looked out the window and saw him outside, his lanky frame wedged into one of those red London street phone booths as he gestured wildly in my direction.

Our eyes met for a single agonized moment, and then I deliberately looked away.

*   *   *

After leaving London in 1964, I was cast as the female lead in the Broadway world premiere of the new Lorraine Hansberry play,
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.
I couldn’t have been happier to land this role. Lorraine was a brilliant young playwright who had managed to defy stereotyping and overcome prejudice. She became the first black woman playwright to write a celebrated Tony Award–winning play,
A Raisin in the Sun.
She was also the first African-American to ever direct a play on Broadway.

The production of
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
was fraught with problems, however, and ended in tragedy. The play was still so new, so raw, that many of us in the cast felt that Lorraine would have made many changes throughout that first production
if she had been able to do so. However, at age thirty-four, she was seriously ill with pancreatic cancer.

During rehearsals, Lorraine appeared a few times. She made quite an impression on me, with that raucous laugh that was such a surprise coming from such a fragile, thin-boned woman. Too soon, however, she vanished to her sickbed, hoping to recover her strength in time for opening night.

The play depicted life among a group of urban Bohemians in Greenwich Village and teemed with the issues of the day—too many issues—highlighting hot-button topics like racism, a dysfunctional marriage, politics, prostitution, suicide, and homosexuality. If there had been time, Lorraine may well have streamlined and refined the play, but with so little time to prepare the production, and little input from her, we could only hurtle from one emergency to the next.