When Rita Moreno swallowed a handful of sleeping pills in the fall of 1961, she wasn’t trying to punish the man who had devastated her. She was trying to destroy the woman who kept returning to him. Moreno had loved Marlon Brando for nearly eight years by then. She had recently survived an unwanted pregnancy and a botched abortion so horrific that she bled for days, the effects still inside her.
Yet the strangest part, the part that took decades and a fortune in therapy to understand, was that she didn’t blame him entirely. She blamed herself. She was born Rosa Dolores Alverío Marcano on December 11, 1931, in a hospital in Humacao, on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. Her family lived in the small town of Juncos, on the green edge of the El Yunque rainforest.
Her father, Francisco José Alverío, known as Paco, was a farmer. Her mother, Rosa María Marcano, was an 18-year-old seamstress. The marriage didn’t last past the first year of Rosita’s life. What Moreno remembered about the island wasn’t the divorce, but the light.
In her memoir, published late in life, she described leaving Puerto Rico like a reverse “Wizard of Oz,” passing from a world of vivid color into a world of grim gray and black and white. She was five years old in 1936, aboard the SS Cariboo. Her mother made a decision that would leave a permanent scar. She took her daughter to New York and left behind her infant son, Rosita’s younger brother, Francisco.
Money was the reason or the excuse. They only had enough for two tickets. “When you’re five years old, what is money? ” Moreno later wrote.
Years passed before she saw her brother again. New York tried to kill her almost immediately. She contracted chickenpox and was taken to a city hospital, alone, contagious, barely able to speak the language, stunned that the doctors and nurses didn’t seem to love her the way everyone in Juncos had loved little Rosita Dolores. That discovery, that she wasn’t everyone’s beloved here, was deeper than the cold or the poverty.
“I learned quickly that it wasn’t good to be from another country,” she said. The family moved through tenement rooms, and her mother, whom Moreno adored and never entirely forgave, married several men. Playwrights who wrote about her counted five husbands. Moreno’s assessment of her mother mixed tenderness and cruelty.
She called her selfish and self-absorbed, even narcissistic. Still, she defended her with a daughter’s loyalty. She believed marrying five times merely meant: “Don’t sleep with anybody unless you’re married to him. She was a lady from the islands.
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The child’s body was her only refuge. She danced before she argued, and her mother, whatever her flaws, had the intelligence to notice. Rosita studied with a Spanish dancer named Paco Cansino, the uncle of a girl the world would soon know as Rita Hayworth. At nine, she was dancing for money in a Greenwich Village nightclub.
Through her early teens, she worked weddings and bar mitzvahs around the city. She became a little professional dancer in frills, often traveling alone. “I was a little Carmen Miranda who didn’t know the difference,” she said. The joke pointed to the dilemma of her early life: a Puerto Rican girl who understood that the best way to be desirable in America was to perform a cartoonish version of any ethnicity, whenever asked.
Her career began on a Catholic radio serial called “Maria Hour. ” At eleven, she found steadier work dubbing Hollywood pictures into Spanish. On November 22, 1945, at thirteen, she made her Broadway debut in a short-lived play called “Skydrift” at the Belasco Theatre, sharing the stage with a young actor named Eli Wallach. The show vanished, but the talent scouts didn’t.
Around that time, she became Rita Moreno. The name itself was a tragicomedy. “Moreno” came from her stepfather, Edward Moreno, a man her mother revered and Rita never liked. The surname she would carry for the rest of her life, the name under which she would one day win an Oscar and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, belonged to a man she couldn’t stand.
“Rita” was borrowed from Hayworth, the niece of her dance teacher, the archetype of the ethnic girl remade for mass consumption. Even her name, in other words, was a costume assembled from other people’s scraps. Her first film, in 1950, was a modest independent picture called “So Young, So Bad,” where she played a troubled girl in a reform school and, for the only time in her life, appeared as Rosita Moreno. Then came the call that every girl in America was supposedly dreaming of.
Louis B. Mayer of MGM saw her and issued his verdict in the only language the studio system knew, the language of resemblance: She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor. He signed her, moved her and her mother to a bungalow in Culver City a short walk from the lot, and then, having acquired her, had no idea what to do with her. MGM dropped her option after about a year.
The only bright spot in the contract was a small, charming role in “Singin’ in the Rain” in 1952, where she played the flapper star Zelda Zanders. Gene Kelly wanted her for it, and she loved it because, for once, she wasn’t asked to be a foreigner. She was just a dancer. What Hollywood wanted from Rita Moreno in the 1950s was what they called, and what she herself bitterly called, “the ethnic utility.
” A versatile kind of brunette who could be hired for whatever nationality the script required. She played a Hawaiian woman, a Native American, an Egyptian, a Filipino, an Indian exchange student on “Father Knows Best,” the enslaved Burmese girl Tuptim in the lavish “The King and I” in 1956. Whatever the role, she was forced to speak a single accent, a generic accent that bore no relation to any place on earth. “When I got into movies, all I did was speak with an accent.
It was driving me crazy,” she said. The culmination of that era came on March 1, 1954, when Life magazine put her on its cover, shot over her left shoulder, with a caption that read, in effect, “Today, Rita Moreno, a catalog of an actress combining excitement and innocence. ” She was twenty-two years old and had been reduced to a catalog. What the studio sold as sex was seized by the men around her.
Some of it was simply absurd. At a Hollywood party, a married senator named John F. Kennedy flirted with her so brazenly, with his wife right there, that she remembered it all her life. Some of it was not absurd at all.
Years later, on “60 Minutes,” an old woman with nothing left to lose told the truth as it was. She told Bill Whitaker: “I was raped by my agent. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I was sitting on the couch next to him, and he said, what a pretty girl! ” He put his hand on her cheek and mounted her.
She resisted, but he did everything. She was her mother’s sole breadwinner, and this man was the only one she knew who worked for what she called her “so-called career. ” So, despite the horror, she kept him. “That’s what amazes me, that I could have such a low opinion of myself,” she said.
In a documentary about her life, she described a publicity party at a studio where she was sent for a photoshoot. The host, a liquor magnate, pulled her to the ground and began rubbing against her, sweat dripping from his lips until he whispered in her ear: “You’re a sexy little thing, aren’t you? ” She fled to the garden and found the Mexican gardeners working there. She asked them, in tears, to help her get home.
They asked no questions. They already knew. This was the world into which Marlon Brando walked, or rather, the world Rita Moreno entered in 1954 on the set of a period drama about the Napoleonic era called “Désirée. ” He was the most attractive actor of his generation, and he knew it.
She was twenty-two and recently declared a model. She described their first meeting with overwhelming passion, like a woman recalling a fever. He was, as she put it, “irresistibly attractive, with features fit for a Roman coin,” and she needed him. She wrote that her body temperature rose as if she had fallen into a bath too hot, and her face flushed with shame.
What followed was the most important relationship of her life, and almost the end of it. It lasted, on and off, for about eight years. He took her on their first date to a party full of Method actors—Newman, Dean, Joanne. In that crowd, she felt alien and unable to reach him, yet ecstatic to be beside him.
She always insisted he was an extraordinary person. She wrote that calling him a great lover, sensual, generous, and extraordinarily creative, would be an understatement for what he did not only to her body but to her soul. He was, she said, more engaged with the world than anyone she had ever known. He was also, in her words, terrible with women.
The eight years were a cruel lesson in just how bad. Brando married twice during their relationship. His infidelity was a habit, constant and impersonal. “He broke my heart, and almost crushed my soul with his physical betrayals, and worse, his emotional betrayals,” she wrote.
She understood him better than anyone. That understanding was a trap in itself. She admitted she wasn’t his lover so much as, she said, his “slave. ” “I could read him like a book,” she said.
“That’s why he loved me. That’s why he treated me badly in many ways. ” When she caught him in a lie, which happened often, she would look at him and tell him he was lying, and he would grin, delighted, as if knowing the truth about himself. It was a terrible cruelty.
He loved her for the clarity of vision that let her see how little he intended to change. Naturally, she tried to make him jealous. The instrument she chose was Elvis Presley. She had found another woman’s underwear in Brando’s house and returned home crying, hurt and angry, determined never to see him again, knowing she didn’t mean it.
The very next day, the phone rang. It was Colonel Tom Parker’s office. The caller said that his client had seen Miss Moreno at the Fox lot, liked what he saw, and very much wanted to meet her. This is Rita’s account of her decision-making process: “I saw the underwear,” she said, “and I said yes.
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The romance didn’t spark. She found Elvis handsome and virile, but in the bedroom, strangely inert, “all hips and tight pants and no follow-through. ” “Nice,” was her verdict, “but boring. ” She shrugged and called him a country boy.
What mattered was the effect on Brando, which was everything she could have wanted and more. “He started throwing chairs,” she remembered, glowing. “He was furious. It was wonderful.
” He, who had betrayed her without a pang, couldn’t stand that she had dinner once with the King of Rock and Roll. Then she became pregnant. The child was Brando’s. His reaction to the news was not the marriage proposal she allowed herself to imagine.
“I think I hoped he would say, well, in that case, let’s get married,” she said. “But that’s not the way it happened. ” Instead, he arranged and paid for an abortion. It was illegal in the early sixties, and it was botched so badly that the pregnancy didn’t actually end.
She went home and bled for days with the dead fetus still inside her before being rushed to the hospital for surgery to remove it. Brando’s reaction to the near-fatal disaster was anger, not at the danger to her, but because the man he had paid had wronged him, she said. Then he left for Tahiti to make “Mutiny on the Bounty,” where he fell in love with his co-star Tarita, whom he would later marry. Moreno, who had just finished filming the movie that was about to make her famous, was left alone in his house to absorb the full shock.
She asked herself how she could keep accepting him again. He didn’t have just one woman; he had many, and it would never stop. She swallowed his sleeping pills, all of them, at once, and lay down. “I went to bed to die,” she wrote.
It wasn’t a revenge suicide, but a comfort, an escape from the pain of dying. His assistant found her in time. They pumped her stomach. She survived.
She was careful to explain what she was really doing, because it wasn’t what it seemed. “What I was really trying to do,” she told Whitaker, “was kill that bad part of me that kept going back to him. That bad woman who didn’t respect me, who was me, another side of me. ”
Ironically, it was Brando who urged her into therapy that would eventually allow her to leave him.
The therapy worked slowly over the years until she thought she had gotten rid of him. When Whitaker expressed obvious relief—“Thank God you failed”—she agreed sincerely. Six months after she went to bed to die, audiences around the world watched her dance on a rooftop in a purple dress, radiant, defiant, vibrant, and utterly alive. The film was “West Side Story,” and the role was Anita.
Rita Moreno wanted it more than anything else. “I gave my all in the audition. I wanted this part so badly,” she said. Chita Rivera had created the role on Broadway.
Directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins were preparing the film and needed an Anita who could sing, dance, and act, preferably Puerto Rican. It was such a rare requirement in Hollywood that most of the cast around her were white actors in brown makeup, including Natalie Wood and George Chakiris. Moreno said the acting was the easy part. She knew this girl.
She was herself. What frightened her was the dancing, which she had barely practiced for a decade and now had to perform under Jerome Robbins’s rigorous choreography. But making “West Side Story” was also, for Moreno, a constant argument about race in the makeup room. Everyone around her, whether playing Puerto Rican characters or white actors in makeup, was painted the same shade of brown.
A uniform, faded color applied like paint, and it angered her. She knew it was a lie. “Why do we all have to be the same color? ” she remembered asking the makeup artist.
Puerto Ricans are French and Spanish, and whatever your origins, we are indigenous. We are Black. Puerto Rico, she tried to explain, is full of many colors. Reducing it to a single color erased the truth of people in favor of a Hollywood image of them.
The makeup artist absorbed this passionate lesson about the complexity of Caribbean race from the only real Puerto Rican in the room and gave a historic answer. He said: “Are you a racist? ” She was so stunned she said she couldn’t respond. She fought a similar battle, and won it, over the lyrics of “America,” which she found insulting to Puerto Ricans.
The accent she was forced to use, she hated, because most of the people she was supposed to represent didn’t speak it. Then there was the scene near the end of “West Side Story. ” Anita goes to Doc’s drugstore, and the Jets attack her, taunting her, groping her, nearly raping her in a scene that remains one of the most brutal and necessary in American musical theater. For most actors, it might have been an exercise in standing in the right spots.
For Moreno, who had been sexually assaulted in her life, it was a shock. “When they were pawing me, I pushed them away and started crying, and I couldn’t stop. All those scars I thought had healed opened up again,” she said. She was, in her words, like a wounded animal.
The other actors saw what was happening, stopped, and gathered around her. Somehow, she found her way back into the scene and to the final line, spitting through her teeth at the boys who had humiliated her. It was Brando, of all people, who helped. She thought about how Marlon, as an actor, would say the line.
The answer came low and deadly. “Don’t touch me. ” That scene, Moreno said, is the one she knows won her the Oscar. She was right.
On the night of April 9, 1962, Rita Moreno won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first Latina and the first Hispanic woman to ever win it. She delivered what remains one of the shortest and most famous acceptance speeches in Oscar history. She said: “I can’t believe it,” then paused in shock and said: “Oh, God. ” Then, groping for anything, finding nothing, she said: “I leave you with that,” and ran off.
Years later, the comedian Liz Torres told her what that night was like in Spanish Harlem, where the windows were open against the heat and one of their own was on the television. Torres said the entire neighborhood, noisy, full of the sounds of bottles and loud music, fell silent, then erupted. When her star was later placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she fell to her knees over it and cried uncontrollably. What the Oscar didn’t do, for some reason, was call her.
This is the cruellest joke in a life full of them, and Moreno tells it with bitterness turned into comedy: “I showed them. I didn’t make another film for seven years after I won the Oscar. ” The reason was simple. The only roles offered were the ones she had just proven she could transcend: gang girls, brazen women, films less worthy than the one that had crowned her.
So the first Latina to win an Oscar stopped at the height of her fame and glory, and turned to theater, then to London. She quietly withdrew. She made only one film during that period, a jungle war picture called “Battle Cry,” shot almost immediately after her win, and it stayed as it was. She never hinted that it was the wrong decision, but it cost her nearly a decade of film work.
The Oscar changed something less visible than her career. It gave her, she said, a sense of dignity, and it came at a time when the country was shaking with the civil rights movement. Moreno, influenced partly by an older, politically aware roommate who taught her that the world contained people other than herself, engaged with full passion. She marched.
She was in Washington on August 28, 1963, in the vast crowd that heard Martin Luther King Jr. describe his dream. She had already participated in demonstrations to ban the bomb, and she would march against segregated schools. “All my life, I faced sexism and racism, and then when I hit forty, I faced ageism,” she would say.
Meanwhile, her private life was about to be saved and then imprisoned in a single moment. In 1964, after a performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” where she played a wife named Iris, Moreno was set up on a blind date with a cardiologist named Leonard Gordon, who didn’t initially realize he was meeting Rita Moreno. They married on June 18, 1965. He was the anchor where Brando had been chaos.
She always insisted he was a wonderful man, a devoted father, a man of humor, a loving grandfather. Their marriage lasted 45 years, until his death on June 30, 2010, which by Hollywood standards is almost three lifetimes. But if this seemed like a rare example of Hollywood happiness, it wasn’t. Almost no one knew it until Moreno herself, a widow in her nineties, said that the marriage was, in her painful words, just a performance.
Gordon eventually retired from medicine to manage her career. Managing her career turned out to be managing her. He was, she said, a controlling man who couldn’t stand the loud, rebellious, unrestrained Rita. She stayed with him for decades, largely for the sake of their daughter, Fernanda, born in 1966.
She said she thought about separating, that her therapist had advised it explicitly, but she didn’t take the advice. She said that when he died, she cut a lock of his silver hair to keep, and then felt something she hadn’t expected and didn’t want to fully admit: liberation. “I didn’t realize how desperately I needed to be alone,” she said. When asked if she would remarry, she gave an answer fit to be carved on a tombstone: “I’d rather eat glass.
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She kept a photo of Brando in her bedroom until the end, and one of her husband too. Pointing to the Brando photo, she said: “Brando was the lust of my life. ” Pointing to her husband’s photo, she said: “He is the love of my life. ” They were never the same, and never would be.
There was a professional disagreement with Brando in 1968. After forgiving him completely, she was cast opposite him in a thriller called “The Night of the Following Day. ” She had to play a fight scene with the man who had almost destroyed her. She realized he wanted to start over.
She was now married and a mother, so she refused. He never completely let her go. In the years before his death in 2004, he would occasionally call her, an old man now, and whisper over the phone that he loved her. If the sixties represented education and how little Hollywood offered her, the seventies were the decade she stopped waiting for Hollywood’s generosity and simply took what she wanted.
One of her rarest combinations of artistry and public presence began in an unexpected place. In 1971, she joined the cast of the wonderful children’s program “The Electric Company” on PBS, teaching a generation of American children to read. Her voice rang out the show’s opening line, “Hello, everybody,” in millions of homes. The recording of the show won a Grammy in 1972.
Around the same time, to her delighted audacity, she appeared in Mike Nichols’s “Carnal Knowledge,” a bold film about male lust, written by Jules Feiffer. She played Louise, opposite Jack Nicholson, for $100. Thus, the same woman who shouted at children on TV during the day became one of the most memorable presences in one of the boldest and most provocative films of the decade. One critic wrote that Miss Moreno’s short appearance was stunning.
Then came Googie Gomez. And Googie Gomez was pure Rita Moreno, because Rita created her. For years, Moreno had performed a party routine: a Puerto Rican showgirl, desperate, utterly without musical sense, magnificently clueless, convinced of her impending stardom against all evidence. She said of the character’s birth: “I coughed, I burped, and then this crazy Puerto Rican came out.
” Playwright Terrence McNally saw the routine and wrote a play around it. “The Ritz” was set in a gay steam bath, where Googie performed as a gloriously talentless singer. Moreno played the role on Broadway and won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1975. She reprised Googie in the 1976 film and received a BAFTA nomination.
Only an Emmy was missing. She won two, in consecutive years: 1977 for her guest appearance on “The Muppet Show,” and 1978 for her role on “The Rockford Files. ” The 1977 win completed her career, making Rita Moreno only the third person in history, after Richard Rodgers and Helen Hayes earlier that same year, to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. The girl once marketed as a symbol of excitement and innocence had become one of the most celebrated performers alive, and she had done it by refusing to stay trapped in any one mold for long.
The decades that followed were a victory tour on her own terms. She appeared everywhere, as a regular on the TV version of “9 to 5,” on “The Love Boat,” and “The Golden Girls,” on “The Cosby Show,” and as the voice of the title character in the children’s series “Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? ” In 1997, at an age when most actresses were grandmothers and little else, she took one of her most astonishing roles: Sister Peter Marie Reimondo, a nun and psychiatrist in the brutal HBO drama “Oz,” delivering a standout performance over six seasons amid one of the most unforgiving casts on television. In 1999, her mother, Rosa María, died.
The narcissistic, self-absorbed seamstress who had married five times, who had carried her from Puerto Rico and pushed her onto every stage in New York, was gone. In 2013, Moreno published her memoir, a bestseller, revealing everything at last: the abortion, the suicide attempt, the assaults, and the costume that years of studio discipline had drilled into her. The real subject of the book, beneath the Hollywood names, was the question that had haunted her since she chose a stranger’s surname from a marquee. Was she Rita, the radiant, brilliant persona, or Rosita, the frightened girl from Juncos?
And could one person be both without falling apart? Two years earlier, she had already begun to answer that question on stage, in a solo autobiographical show at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre perfectly titled “Life Without Makeup,” performed at age 79 despite a sudden, baffling attack of stage fright. “We’re so fragile,” she said in wonder. “It’s ridiculous.
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Then, in her eighties, Rita Moreno experienced a full renaissance, something that isn’t supposed to happen at that age. In 2017, she joined the Netflix reboot of Norman Lear’s “One Day at a Time. ” She played Lydia, the Cuban-American grandmother of the household, accepting the role on one non-negotiable condition. She told the producers: “I know she’s a grandmother, but she has to be sexual, otherwise I’m not interested.
” So, Lydia wore full makeup even to bed, kept a weapon in her purse, and flirted shamelessly into her nineties, swaying through Moreno’s performance. Moreno said: “I was born wearing high heels. ”
Then, in 2021, Steven Spielberg remade the film that made her. Rather than politely consigning her to the past, he gave her a place in the present.
She served as executive producer and played Valentina, a character created specifically for her. She sang, playing an old woman, in a role that corrected the film’s own history. She stated that one of the things that bothered her was the way her character intervened to prevent Anita’s attempted rape, now played by Ariana DeBose, because she was actually traveling back in time 60 years to save her younger self. It didn’t feel real, and she wasn’t sure she had succeeded.
There was a beautiful symmetry at the end when DeBose won the Oscar for her portrayal of Anita, making DeBose and Moreno the third pair of actors in Oscar history to win for the same role. The girl in the purple dress and the girl who inherited it both carried the same golden statue. At the time of this writing, she is 94 years old and hasn’t slowed a step. She says she’d rather eat glass than remarry, and also rather eat glass than retire.
You have to believe her, because for Rita Moreno the alternative to work was never rest, it was disappearance. The black-and-white world she was placed in at age five, the hospital where no one loved her, seven years of silence after the highest honor of her life—she decided at some point to lean into life and never stopped. Her career has spanned nearly 90 years.