Rita Moreno: A Memoir (30 page)

I remember an early high point at our Berkeley home soon after it was completed: We stood on the veranda for the first time, looking out over the bay. Filled with gratitude and amazement at our journey thus far I said, “Hey, Lenny, the Jew and the Puerto Rican, whaddya think?”

As the years passed, though, I was beginning to feel trapped, between the architecture and Lenny’s inflexibility. I needed a place of my own, a place that said “Rita”—imperfect, romantic, and eclectic. So I decided to carve out a sanctuary for myself and turn it into a little Victorian parlor. I claimed an unused bedroom downstairs that is now called “the Rita Room.” It’s a collage, packed with pretty paintings, pillows, embroidery, and an antique daybed. Everything that can have a curlicue does. And so I found my refuge, a private place where I could just be me.

Because our grandsons lived so close to the house, Lenny and I could have them for dinners and sleepovers. One of my favorite things to do was make up stories for them. I started doing this when the oldest, Justin, first began staying at our house. He would sometimes have a very difficult time going to sleep. So, in an effort to soothe him, I began making up stories just for him.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a little boy named Justin,
who, whenever he was worried about something, would go to this wonderful, wonderful meadow.”

I described the meadow in soft tones and in great detail, telling Justin about the apple trees with different-colored apples on them, and a swing that could swing from the sky. “Justin never saw the ends of the ropes, but he could swing on it way up and down and almost touch the clouds. There was a wonderful velvety hill, too, where he could roll down without hurting himself, because the grass was soft as a pillow.”

And sleep was soon close at hand. It was a pure joy to have found the answer.

Cammy, our youngest, came to visit one evening, and as usual, he went downstairs to the kids’ room to play with his toys. Dinner was ready, and after several invitations Lenny at last called down the stairs, “If you don’t come now, you won’t have any!” Instantly we heard a little voice approaching that said, “
Now
you have my attention.”

Today, I display my grandsons’ trophies, drawings, and writings with my acting awards. They belong there. I burn with pride and love.

*   *   *

It was a summer morning in 2004 when Lenny came back into our bedroom, where I was still in bed reading the morning paper. I suppose he heard the news on TV. At first, I could not absorb what Lenny was saying: “Marlon died.”

But it was true. Marlon Brando had died at the age of eighty on July 1, 2004, of pulmonary fibrosis that brought on respiratory failure. He had been at home until his final day, when he went to the hospital in distress and quickly died there. He had refused direct
oxygen tubes into his lungs, the single measure that would have prolonged a life that had become increasingly painful and useless to him.

Upon my hearing Lenny’s words, my long history with Marlon passed before my eyes like a broken reel: a half century of knowing Marlon, loving Marlon, fleeing Marlon.

In his last years, Marlon would call and whisper, “I miss you.” I had only one loving thing left that I could do for him: I could invite him to dinner. Marlon attended these dinners, but it was often awkward.

By the end of his life, Marlon was almost unrecognizable as the lithe, muscled lover I had known with such passion. At three hundred pounds, he was a bloated whale of a man, with a pallid, unhealthy complexion. He was so swollen that he often could not wear real shoes, but had to resort to open-back slippers. He sat for hours, spooning in ice cream by the gallon. I think that Marlon ate the way many morbidly obese women eat: to assuage all kinds of emotional pain. He had always been a yo-yo dieter, resorting to drastic methods to slim down before shooting a new picture.

The curious thing was that the man seemed to have no vanity about his lost physique. Marlon was mourning by the mouthful, and I suppose on some level this helped tranquilize him. At the very end, in his loose-flowing caftan and slippers, Marlon Brando looked like one of those huge mah-jongg-playing ladies back in the barrios in the Bronx where I’d lived as a child.

The last time I saw Marlon was the year before he died. I was a guest at his house on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. His house was notorious, partly because it shared a driveway with Jack Nicholson’s house. A lot of women went up that driveway!

Marlon had lived in the house long ago, sold it, repurchased it, and ended up spending forty years of his life in it. That house was the big shell that fit his big body, I suppose. It was the same house that had been the scene of much tragedy: the drowning death of Hisaka, his maid. Marlon’s first wife, Anna, had found Hisaka floating in the pool. And Marlon’s den was the death scene for Dag Drollet, shot by Christian Brando in a confrontation over Cheyenne, Christian’s sister.

He’d had at least three exotic wives while he lived there: the “East Indian” Anna Kashfi, Mexican Movita, and Tahitian Tarita. I had done my own time there as the Puerto Rican delegate.

The reason for my visit was that I was going out to shoot a pilot in LA, and Marlon invited me to stay at his house in a guest suite.

“Would that be all right?” I asked Lenny.

When he said it was fine, I flew out and shot the pilot, staying at Marlon’s house. I barely saw him at all, and our last moment was bittersweet as we said good-bye. I couldn’t have known that it was good-bye forever, but I experienced a sense of gravity in that last farewell, as Marlon, in his caftan, moved heavily toward me to kiss me good-bye. I tried to kiss him, but the sheer heft and thrust of his huge belly prevented me from reaching his cheek. My small arms could not reach around him.

I did meet Marlon’s last girlfriend, who was living there at the time. In an odd final reverse in romantic preference, she wasn’t a dusky-skinned ethnic, but a white-skinned redhead, an incandescent girl, a moonbeam.

She was a lovely person on the inside as well. When she heard that I was leaving to return to New York, she rushed out to say good-bye with warmth and respect. She told me how much I
meant to Marlon, and how it also meant a lot to her, meeting a person who had been so important in his life.

I thanked her for taking care of Marlon. I also thought to take her hand, to hold it for a moment and say, “You must take care of yourself.”

Then I walked to the car, got in, and drove away.

PERSEVERANCE

F
inding work was no easier as I passed from middle age into senior-citizen status, but I continued to persevere. Staying active and persevering is part and parcel of the character of a performer. You always have to be able to get up, dust yourself off, and move forward.

At sixty, I turned on my heel when I went in to audition for a part with a famous, well-known director. I won’t name him, but I will say that he was important in the business, a big name in directing.

I had prepared at great length for the one serious female role in the script that seemed right for me. It had been more than a year since I’d worked at all, and I was beginning to think I was being involuntarily retired.

I went into the specified office at the appointed time and Mr.
Director asked me to read the part. “I can’t wait to perform this for you; I think I have a real bead on this scene.”

And as I began to read and act the part, he stopped me abruptly and said, “Oh, no, no, dear, we brought you in to read the part for the whorehouse madam.”

The room went silent. I first felt the flush in my face; then it moved to my whole body. I mustered up every bit of my dignity, and as I closed the script I looked him directly in the eye and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t do whorehouse madams.” Then I gathered my things and slowly and deliberately walked to the door. I could sense every eye in the office following me as I went out.

I went to my car and sat there nonplussed for a moment before a waterfall of tears cascaded down my cheeks. I was profoundly embarrassed. My agent had steered me to the wrong part, and I was a victim of his carelessness.

I would accept his apology after he heard what happened, but I carried the hurt and humiliation for days—humiliated not that my agent made a mistake, but that such an important director would think of me for a whorehouse madam—a Mexican whorehouse madam who would speak only two lines, in Spanish—and then require me to audition for the part.

I went home and Lenny asked me how it went. I said, “Okay.” It was three days before I fell apart. I was that humiliated. I started to cry and Lenny took me in his arms. I told him what had happened, and he held me up—something he did very, very well.

So I pulled myself together, and sometime later my agent called and said that I had landed the part of the Oscar Madison character, the slob, in the female version of Neil Simon’s
The Odd Couple.
We toured from Texas to Broadway. The Felix Unger character, the neat freak, was played by Sally Struthers.

And then there was the TV series
Nine to Five
, produced by Jane Fonda, in which I played Violet Newstead (the Lily Tomlin role). I loved it because it showed women actually leading working lives that matter, and they aren’t just holding positions until they meet men to care for them. When the series was canceled I began marathon “guesting.” I was a guest star on dozens of shows. For instance, I returned three or four times to guest on
Rockford Files
with my old friend Jim Garner.

For
Rockford
, I had a juicy role as Rita Capkovic, an aging, reluctant hooker. Yes, a hooker role, but she was a middle-aged hooker and wanted to quit. I garnered two Emmy nominations for two separate episodes, and my second nomination turned into an Emmy.

For the next several years, there was a dearth of parts for women of my age. But the little tube was more welcoming than the big screen, and the ratings gurus must have acknowledged somewhere along the way that people who watch TV are happy to see older women.

And then, just when it looked like aging would end my career, I found sanctuary in a maximum-security prison:
Oz.

I can still remember that surprising dinner with the multitalented creator, writer, and producer Tom Fontana. I was just tucking into my dessert flan when Tom said, “I have a role for you on my new series. It’s set in a men’s maximum-security prison. All of the men are killers: confirmed sociopaths and psychopaths.”

I thought he was joking. “So what would I do there?”

If he wasn’t joking, I thought maybe Tom would offer me the role of the warden. But it was better than that.

“You’re a nun,” he said.

I dropped my spoon with a loud clatter, and I’m afraid my mouth
must have been hanging open with my astonishment. “What would I do there?”

“You try to reform them, or at least bring them spiritual comfort.”

“Okay. I’d love to play the nun,” I heard myself say, still in shock.

And there followed my career’s salvation, from 1997 to 2003, as Sister Peter Marie on
Oz.
It was a heavenly cast setup: I was surrounded by throngs of heavily muscled, hunky actors, led by Christopher Meloni as a bisexual prisoner. It was so great that I longed to be a lifer.

Of course, the stories were all grim, male rape was a constant, prisoners were regularly knifed, and a few died. Nonetheless, I injected moments of levity in the outtakes.

Oh, and I won another Emmy.

*   *   *

By now, I was over seventy years old, and a happy grandmother in my private life. I could have considered retiring after the series ended. After all, I had more than enough laurels to rest on. But retirement is just not in my DNA.

LOSING LENNY

A
fter almost half a century of fearing the “final heart attack,” Lenny landed in the hospital with an intestinal obstruction. Life, fate, and age had assaulted his gut. At ninety everything is serious.

We had flown to New York to participate in a benefit at Lincoln Center, and three days before the event a barrage of stomach pains drove Lenny to his knees. The doctor sent him by ambulance to the Upper East Side hospital where he had practiced medicine his entire career, and where our daughter, Fernanda, was born.

Good
, I thought.
He’ll be known and well cared-for here.

We arrived at the emergency room, where we were met by a wall of sound. People were pleading for help, wandering about as though they had been abandoned on a street in a war zone. I
expected to see nurses and attendants flying all over the place trying to help. Instead, I saw some nurses helping, as others stood by at the nurses’ station, laughing as raucously as though they were at a comedy club. My amazement soon turned to alarm when I realized that this was the modus operandi of the place.

Thank God for the few caring workers, because except for them, the laughers’ area was rife with a low-grade indifference that spun me around. My feelings did not lead me to scream for the authorities, but they did raise a steam of resentment, especially on behalf of those unwitting victims who had come for help, only to discover this hell.

Lenny, meanwhile, was writhing and twisting with unimaginable pain, sobbing uncontrollably, begging and clutching at me and pleading for morphine. I’d survived his having heart attacks; I had been there as he experienced excruciating chest pains brought on by angina. But I had never, ever seen Lenny behave this way. His helplessness tore at my heart, and I wept, too.

I approached a nurse with a kind demeanor. I trembled and sobbed as I begged her for pain relief for my devastated husband. “He practiced medicine here for forty years,” I told her. “Our little girl was born here. Please, please call his doctor and get permission to give him morphine.”

She did, but it took at least another twenty minutes for her to contact him. Not the doctor’s fault, I’m sure, but it felt like a lifetime.

Finally, Lenny was given a shot and he stopped crying. I sat on the gurney and took him in my arms as I waited for him to fall asleep. Then I wept again. It was two hours before they found a bed for him on the gastrointestinal floor, and another four hours to find an orderly to escort us to the room.