Rita Moreno: A Memoir (28 page)

We had so many arguments that sometimes it seemed like that was all our relationship was. I made Lenny very unhappy with my calls for a more equal relationship. I was bearing the consequences of not maintaining personal privacy in our relationship
from the beginning. I had let the line blur too many times without protest. I needed some freedom for this to work—freedom
with
Lenny, not freedom
from
Lenny. I can’t tell you how often I envied someone who’d say, “John is going off for the weekend with friends, so I’m on my own,” or, “Mary is going to France with her sister.”

From the start of our marriage, Lenny had stalked me. I don’t know where he found the phone numbers sometimes of where I was, but he would locate me in restaurants and call to ask to speak to me. He would find me in beauty shops; he would find me anywhere. It was eerie. Wherever I went, Lenny would always call me to say things like, “What are you doing? Why are you delayed so much? Didn’t you tell me you’d be home at four?”

I remember getting so angry and upset by this at one point that I stopped wearing a watch. Why did he do this? I kept wondering. Was he jealous? Of what?

Ultimately, I came to believe that Lenny did it because he was afraid of losing me, in some very disturbed way. Looking back, I think Lenny was very troubled, in fact, but I didn’t see things that way at the time. Never having been married, and having had only one other serious relationship, with Marlon—a relationship that was so wacky, so crazy, and so disturbing—I didn’t know how to compare what Lenny was doing, or what we were doing with each other, with anything else. I had no frame of reference.

It never occurred to me that I could just go off on my own. I probably could have, but it would have cost me, because Lenny would have said, “What’s wrong with being with me?”

I could never seem to be with Lenny enough. It could have been because I felt so stifled with him that I wasn’t with Lenny in spirit enough, but one thing exacerbated the other, and he stifled me so much that I sometimes felt like a prisoner in a fancy jail.

One day, I sensed the slamming of a large metal door and then a feeling of claustrophobia of being shut in with no way out. That was when I said to myself,
That’s it. I don’t like him anymore.
I really stopped liking my husband for a long time after that, right up until he went into the hospital the last time and allowed me to be his true mate.

*   *   *

When I look back on our marriage now, I think that I was attempting to grow up, but that didn’t fit in with Lenny’s plans—nor with mine, for that matter, because I honestly didn’t know how to do it.

I was clumsy in my attempts to spread my wings, and the mistakes I made served as fodder for Lenny’s need to keep Rita in little Rosita’s place. “See, darling, I told you this wouldn’t work,” he would say whenever I tried to fix something around the house myself, make travel arrangements, or negotiate the purchase of a new appliance—anything, really.

“You should have let me do it in the first place,” Lenny would say. “See what I mean, how much easier and better that would be?”

When I considered why Lenny was so rigid and controlling, I could begin to understand: His mother had died when he was only six years old. The loss of love and control, of all security, was total. We are all more complicated than one tragedy can explain, but that first terrible loss may have left Lenny feeling deeply helpless inside. He treated his neuroses the way I treated mine: by doing what he did best—giving and giving and giving, especially in his profession.

Our disagreements went on and on through the years, growing worse instead of better with time. I even went to see a psychotherapist, a wonderful, wise woman whom I had to leave after
only a month of therapy, because I foresaw the possible dissolution of my marriage if I were to allow her to help me “grow up.”

Eventually, at my daughter Fernanda’s behest, I took a weekend course with an organization that specialized in “tough love.” Some of their work with clients was practical, but some of it was irresponsibly hazardous when it came to dealing with very fragile egos. This group had invented a vocabulary that, for all intents and purposes, sounded like self-conscious gibberish to me, but apparently made the groups feel special.

Even knowing all of this, I went with the objective of culling what I could use from this program. I did, and for about three weeks I bravely confronted Lenny with things I needed to express and things that he needed to hear.

And you know what? Lenny tried very hard to accommodate me in our marriage after that. He was so impressed by my ability to express my needs directly, without hysteria, that he allowed Fernanda and me to talk him into doing a weekend on his own.

I thought for sure that Lenny, being a champ dissembler, would get an earful of invective in that tough-love program. I could easily imagine the counselors shouting at him, saying things like, “Stop blaming everybody else, asshole! Change starts with you, you ‘please love me’ junkie!”

That had been the most useful part of the weekend self-empowerment course for me, although in my case I wasn’t actually called any bad names—the male participants usually got the four-letter appellations.

So when Lenny returned after his weekend looking none the worse for wear, I was puzzled. He thought it was tough, but helpful, and couldn’t wait to tell Fernanda and me how some of the younger people in the group just loved his avuncular self. Well! I could only stare at him in bewilderment.

All I could think about when Lenny related this was how I had returned home from my weekend feeling stronger, but weary and battered from all of the crying I’d done. I had to conclude that Lenny must not have participated fully, and instead hung out with his new young friends while on breaks, giving them support and warmth—which, God knows, everyone needed in that hell room.

As our relationship continued to decline through the years, I pleaded with Lenny on many occasions to see a therapist with me, just a couples counselor who could provide a third ear to our arguments with no vested interest. He rejected every plea. Why? For two reasons, I think.

First of all, Lenny couldn’t bear the idea of exposing his feelings to a stranger; he wouldn’t expose them to me. Second, I believe that Lenny was convinced that he would be blamed for our difficulties. I assured him over and over that I was complicit in all of this unhappiness, but he chose to interpret that as an accusation on my part that, indeed, he was behaving terribly to me and I was putting up with him.

You know, sometimes you just can’t win for losing.

That unspoken, unsigned, contract, “You will be my good daddy and take care of me, take care of everything,” had one drawback: I grew up. As a grown woman, I wanted to do things my way, to spread my wings and explore my passions. Make my own mistakes.

He loved me, yes. I knew that. And we both adored Fernanda. The love in our marriage, our home, was huge. But for me it was also confining. To Lenny, I was some sort of tropical bird to be loved—and caged for my own safety. We argued, we bickered, we sulked, and we discussed separation for many years. So much for “perfect.”

Maybe “perfect” doesn’t exist in marriage.

Sometimes all I did was dream of being free of him. We were opposites in so many ways. I loved to entertain, but Lenny wanted to stay home alone with me. If we did take a vacation, it was under the most controlled circumstances, on a cruise ship or a bus tour. Lenny liked it that way, and I chafed. As a traveler, I loved the freedom to explore, to find surprising places and take impromptu detours. For me, going through Europe was all about freedom from daily routines, but Lenny needed things to be safe and predictable.

To throw a dinner party, I had to mastermind a plot. I would break the plan to him in stages and scheme to have an acceptable guest list. When the dinner was served, yes, he enjoyed it. But my spirit was constrained and my energy was drained. We had everything to celebrate and a house made for entertaining—but he couldn’t allow me to be what I was: an expansive Latina who loves a party, loves to feed people, laugh, talk, play music and dance. Lenny liked and needed control.

For all of those issues in our marriage, though, I loved Lenny deeply. I was still able to see his innate goodness, his deep and loving care for our beautiful Fernanda, and the thoughtful kindness he showed not only to us, but to everyone around him. The very idea that he could be hurting me or Fernanda was unthinkable to him.

On occasion, when I would just break down in tears over something he did or failed to do, Lenny would feel mystified or, worse, blackmailed. I was living between a rock and a hard place, as was he. Yet, as Lenny saw things, our marriage wasn’t disintegrating. He was still convinced that he could solve all of our problems by himself.

*   *   *

Throughout much of our marriage, I continued weighing the pros and cons, and the pros always came out on top. Why didn’t I leave him? I couldn’t do it, because I am who I am, and that person doesn’t leave, maybe because my mother left so many men. I was always the darling, “please like me” kid. Maybe that comes from being Puerto Rican, from being on the outside and not wanting to make waves.

Also, our daughter meant the world to us, and I couldn’t hurt Fernanda, who adored her daddy. And I was really afraid to be on my own. Finally, I was afraid that Lenny might die if I left him. He wasn’t a well man—he told me about his weak heart the day I met him and had a heart attack two days before we were married—and I always thought he might drop dead at any time because of his heart condition.

It didn’t occur to me until very, very late in the day that Lenny could have been using that weak heart to keep me. But it’s a sign of how helpless he felt that he would do such a thing.

It is becoming difficult to weave together all these disparate stories. I saw his great affection, humor, and generosity, but his control was slowly being substituted for toxic love.

Lenny brought such love into the house for me and Fernanda. His warm extended family had always taken me into their arms. Yes, I hated the finger wagging and his need for stability and control at times, but Lenny always gave more than he took.

I would sometimes have to defy my husband to do what I wanted. But in the end, I would do whatever was most important.

In frustration, I fought with him openly—and also subversively, by becoming a black-belt shopper. I earned my money and I spent it, but Lenny controlled the checkbooks. (It is embarrassing to admit how old I was when I finally got my own checkbook.)

Financially, I was Mrs. Lenny Gordon.

The counterpoint to all of the acknowledged anger I felt and my guerrilla shopping tactics was that I knew Lenny would never leave me the way so many people had. He was the husband and father who wouldn’t leave, and in that way, he always kept his part of the unspoken pact: He wanted to take care of me.

And Lenny still knew how to make me laugh. During one of our cozier periods, we bought a weekend country house and, for Fernanda, a puppy to go with it. Everything was wonderful in the country except the puppy, a wriggly dotted doggy we named Domino.

The pet store owner instructed us to take the puppy home and give him a hot-water bottle and a ticking clock to make him feel calm and secure enough to sleep through the night. If the puppy did wake up and bark, we were supposed to go down to the kitchen, where we kept him at night. Just outside the door, I would bang on pie pans louder than the pup could bark, and say “No!” to startle the poor puppy into silence.

It all transpired just as the pet store owner predicted. Early in the morning, I was awakened by howling. I rose from bed and went down to the kitchen door, where I started banging on pie tins and shouting, “
No! No! No!
”

Just as the puppy stopped howling, Lenny called out, “Jeez! When you Puerto Ricans have parties…”

*   *   *

Kindness and love still flickered in my house like a pilot light, but my own joy had dampened. My best self, the one with the desire to give and fling open the doors to friends, to light the lanterns on the patio and play music, to laugh and dance, to cook up the spicy stews and serve wine, lots of wine, was muted.

Instead, after Fernanda had grown older and was busy with high school and then college, silence often reigned in my house, with neither Lenny nor I getting what we wished from each other much of the time. We had come to a truce—a loving truce, for many reasons, but our marriage was not a celebration.

To ward off any perceptions of myself as “heroic,” or some kind of marital martyr, I want to say that it was also true that I still needed to be coddled and looked after.

How curious, these twists in our marriage. Outwardly, we always remained “Lenny and Rita, the perfect couple” for half a century. Our forty-five-year marriage played itself out as half farce, half tragedy, part truth and part fiction. Backstage during our long run together, I, too, had wanted to believe in happy endings.

The mythology of Rita Moreno and Dr. Lenny Gordon would, if put into a movie trailer, go something like this: “After a stormy love affair with a movie star, a tempestuous Latina actress finds stability in the sensible embrace of a Jewish doctor. They have a baby and live happily ever after.”

And maybe that’s not so wrong, that version. At the end of it all, after a long, long time together, our love would triumph. Lenny and I were both self-made people with big hearts. My secret self, the best of little Rosita Alverio, would rise up to embrace Lenny Gordon. Her niggling critical voice would finally shut up.

Meanwhile, every time he passed behind me in the kitchen, no matter how old we were, Lenny would reach out and brush his hand over my tush, that funny little caress that was more than a pat. It was a cupping, a compliment, a way to say:
I love your tush, and I love you.

Writing this, I miss him. I miss Lenny.

*   *   *

At the same time, I was afraid that I would have to be unemployed forever. But I must perform. For them—and for me.