RITA MORENO

RITA MORENO

A MEMOIR

RITA MORENO

Celebra

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First published by Celebra,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, March 2013

Copyright © Rita Moreno Gordon, 2013

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Moreno, Rita.

Rita Moreno : a memoir/Rita Moreno.

pages cm

ISBN: 978-1-101-61522-5

1. Moreno, Rita. 2. Actors—United States—Biography.

3. Dancers—United States—Biography. 4. Singers—

United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN2287.M6996A3 2013

791.43’028’092—dc23            2012046030

[B]

Designed by Alissa Amell

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

For Fernanda, child o’ my heart—my story, my life,

my love, the most precious gifts I have to offer.

I love you.

CONTENTS

Part I: Paradise Lost

“HEY, BOY”

PUERTO RICO

THE GREAT CHANGE

FRIGID CITY

THAWING OUT

AMERICAN DREAM

PAPO

THE LOSS OF PAPO

Part II: Hyperbolic Hollywood

MAKING MOVIES: MY LEAP TO THE SILVER SCREEN

HOLLYWOOD HEAVEN: LOUIS B. MAYER AND MGM

STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS

STILL ROSITA

RITA RISING

Part III: Men, Love, and Romance

EYE CANDY AND LEGGY LADIES

THE COCKTAIL PARTY: PIMPED?

DATING, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

MEETING MARLON

LOVE, OBSESSION, AND MIND GAMES

HOW TO SURVIVE SUICIDE

SAVED BY WEST SIDE STORY

FINDING MYSELF IN POLITICS

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN

Part IV: Reinventing Myself

MARRIAGE AND MAMI-HOOD

MARLON AND I MAKE A MOVIE

BIG BIRD, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, AND ME

THE ACCUSATORY BANANA

LOSSES AND BLESSINGS

PERSEVERANCE

LOSING LENNY

THE ATTIC

PART I

Paradise Lost

“HEY, BOY”

New York City, 1936

“Hey, boy,” I scream. “Heeey, boooooy.”

I don’t know what I am saying—I speak only Spanish, just off the boat from San Juan. I am five years old in a hospital ward and I know there is another Spanish kid here, because I can hear him a few beds away from me. The orderlies are yelling at him, and I parrot what they say—“Hey, boy.”

Crying and feverish, I learn my first words in English from that boy: “Shut up.”

“Hey, boy,” I shout back. “Hey, boy, shut up.”

I have always been a quick study. Fast learner. Anything to survive.

*   *   *

Start back there—New York, 1936. I am not yet named Rita Moreno. I am still Rosita. Rosita Dolores Alverio. I am five years old.

When we leave Puerto Rico, it is as if we are caught in a reverse Wizard of Oz scene. We go from brilliant Technicolor to grit-gray, black-and-white. The world that was lush and hot with life, sunshine, bright flowers, birds, and whistling frogs, turns to lifeless cold ash.

After my island, New York City seems a freezing hell. Later, people ask, “Why didn’t you and your mother turn back?”

We couldn’t afford return passage. Many of us spent all the money we had saved to sail to America to start a new life with new opportunities. Others had hopes to settle, make a fortune, and then later return to the island; meanwhile, they worked in New York to send money back to their families in Puerto Rico.

When you are five years old, what is money? What is “opportunity”? My mother and I arrived in winter, and I thought, This is crazy. What have we done? But my twenty-two-year-old pretty, full-lipped, full-hipped mother had had enough of Juncos, Puerto Rico, her unfaithful husband, and her old life, which did not look like paradise to her. My mami, Rosa Maria Marcano Alverio, was looking for a new start, a new husband. She was seeking love and fortune, and she would walk toward it on her homemade sandals and in her hand-sewn dress, carrying her one suitcase and the rest in shopping bags. When you have almost nothing, you can travel light.

My mami was escaping something—at five, I didn’t know what she would want to escape. But she did not want to live with Paco, my father, anymore—that much I knew—and I never saw her standing close to him or even alone in a room with him. She was in a hurry to get away from him—and is it my imagination, or do I see his arm reaching out, grabbing her to pull her back to him? And her twisting away and saying something to him, something sharp but scared too, like, “Keep away from me; don’t you touch me…”?

The first thing that happened when I came to America was that I got sick. Terribly sick—burning-up, shaking-cold, itching-like-crazy sick all over my body. What am I doing, five years old, alone, can’t speak English, in some awful ward in some bad New York hospital? No one can understand what I am saying, except the boy who teaches me the words “shut up.”

What is the place? The hospital is named Misericordia, just to tell you right away how miserable it is….

How’d I get here? I’m dying from terror almost, like the baby bird I once picked up that died in my hand. That little bird gazed up at me and gave me a look—a look I could never forget—and it was like the little bird was so scared, he just stopped breathing; his little eyes glazed. Maybe I am dying of fear too, before the sickness can get me. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. Later, I would find out it was chicken pox, a common but, at that time, very serious childhood disease. But in the moment, I thought the same mysterious force that killed the bird was attacking me.

This could not happen in my worst nightmare. Only life can be this terrible. They come for me in the dead of night—masked men who grab me, wrap me in a sheet, tie me in all the way, and do not even let my head stick out. They twist the ends of the body sack, like a Tootsie Roll wrapper. Blind in that sack, I squirm and yell for my mother. And my mother screams and cries, like only a mother can scream, for them to let her go with her baby girl. “Don’t take my baby. Let me go with her. Madre de Dios. Mother of God.” My mami, Rosa Maria, she is just twenty-two years old. She runs down the five flights of stairs alongside the ambulance attendants; we hit every corner of every banister at every landing. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

“Mama! Mami! Mama!” But no one can go with me. I am crying from inside the sack and invent a desperate ploy: “I feel better. I’m not sick anymore. Let me out,” I cry in Spanish.

They don’t. Bagged, I am thrown in the back of the ambulance. Did they have to turn on that wailing noise? (I had never heard a siren before.) Oh, Madre de Dios, that makes it so much scarier. My heart is popping out of my chest. Maybe I am dead already, wrapped in the sheet like a corpse in a shroud? Blind in the bag, racing through the screaming city night to who knows where? The men are laughing and joking to each other in a language I don’t understand, but you don’t need to translate indifference. These guys don’t care; so what if they’ve got a five-year-old girl in a sack crying for her mami? They don’t care about me.

How can they not care? Everybody has always cared for me. I am la niña Rosita Dolores; my mami calls me Coookeee, Monkeee, Nonni, and covers me with kisses. My abuelo, Justino, he claps and smiles when I dance. “So pretty, so sweet…” Everybody loves me, Rosita Dolores…. Only now—here in New York City, in the big America—they don’t.

I don’t know the rules: that contagious people must be removed from the tenements—no exceptions. Otherwise the whole city can be infected. These are the days of epidemics, but I haven’t seen the evidence yet: the kids with withered polio legs, braces, scars from chicken pox. You never see some kids, the ones with the fever-melted brains who have to be taken care of till they are old people still in diapers. I haven’t heard about Sister Kenny yet and how she invented physical therapy for withered polio legs. I don’t know about iron lungs, or the many diseases that can spread so fast and kill everybody.

I want to go back to the one lousy room, even just to die from chicken pox on my bedbug-infested mattress with my mami, who’ll kiss me and scream she wants to die with me. That would be better. Or maybe, if I can’t do that, maybe it is better to escape from this, like the little bird that died of fright in my hand? Escape to heaven and know no more pain, no more crazy itching, and get away from these guys who are laughing and joking over my body.

So there I am at age five; I am up to, “To be or not to be?” and that is the question I don’t answer for almost thirty years—and then I get the wrong answer. You’ll see.

Burning-hot hundred-and-three-degree temperature. I itch like crazy, but I am still alive when they unbag me, and I look around their miserable Misericordia ward, with all the other dead-looking bodies, or the ones like me, all the moaning, infectious-disease people, and my one Spanish-speaking little boy: “Hey, boy.”

“Hey, boy.”

“Shut up.”

“Shut up, boy.”

And there, in one instant, in a bed of the infectious-disease ward, are the themes of my life: scared to death, fighting to survive, forever a foreigner in more ways than you can imagine. Right then, at age five, right there in the hospital ward, I get it. I’m on my own; I’m alone. How am I supposed to take care of myself?

This is me, the shivery little Puerto Rican girl—feeling lost in the world. Make like I am tough! Maybe, “Hey, boy,” is my first line as a make-believe “spitfire.” At that moment I get that role right: I’ve got to pretend to be somebody I’m not. Inside I am shaking so hard—is it fever or is it fear? Do the symptoms fit the feelings that are already there?

Is that when she—that dark presence that hisses only doubt and fear in my ear—first accosted me? You won’t fool anybody, the voice whispers in my ear. Who do you think you are?

I just don’t let my feelings show. Pretend to be someone I’m not.

This idea lasts through my whole life: I always play a part. For so many years, I have to be a “smoldering sexy spitfire.” Rita Moreno—funny and bold and golden as all her statuettes. The Hispanic heroine with all four gleaming prizes—Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy—big money, hot lovers, “perfect” forty-five-year marriage, with a gold medal hanging around my neck and shelves filled with award statuettes but still, inside, who is she? Who am I? Rosita Dolores Alverio? Or Rita Moreno? Rita or Rosita? Who am I?

This book is my real story. The record of my journey. The story of how I found myself. The story of who I am…

PUERTO RICO

My journey begins on December 11, 1931, in Juncos, Puerto Rico. Humacao “claims” me now because I became famous…but sorry, Humacao, I am not from you—I was only born in a hospital there. From Humacao, swaddled, I was carried by my mother—my pretty dark-haired mother, Rosa Maria, who was then only seventeen—back to her village, back to Juncos.

Juncos blooms like a flower in my memory; Juncos is color, scent. And Juncos is music: my mother and the other women singing, laughing. No one was ever alone in Juncos.

Why did we ever leave Juncos?

“Because we had nothing there,” my mother said.

Of course, to a five-year-old, we had everything in Juncos. What would the unknown America offer that I did not already have? I was running and laughing; all life was warm, sweet—a dance, a game. I had a baby chick, just popped from the egg: Puchito. Puchito knew me because I was the first thing he saw in his whole little chicken life. He was already following me around and chirping to me. I had my own mami and Paco and my grandfather, my abuelo.

Everybody loves me then and gives me treats. Everything I taste is delicious: the ripe guavas that burst to the bite, mangoes and papayas that slide down like cool velvet on my tongue. Mami’s silken flan with the glazed caramelized sugar crust, brown and glistening like glass: oh, crunch. So sweet—Mami always makes extra syrup for me. Oh, all my life is sweet. I am allowed to suck on stalks of sugarcane hacked straight from the field. There could be no better candy.

I live in one of the “ice-cream houses,” as I thought of the Juncos village cottages that clustered, friendly as the people, in different shades of pastel colors—pink, yellow, pale blue, creamy white. In most of my memories I live in the prettiest house of all, the little pink house draped in rose hibiscus and scarlet bougainvillea.

In every yard, spiky green plants, maguey, wear inverted eggshells, white caps speared on every green sharp-pronged leaf, which could cut you so badly. They were also called bagoneta. I thought we placed the eggshells there just as decoration—so pretty. Now I think maybe the eggshells were to protect us from getting cut on the thorny spikes.

The maguey are a kind of aloe yucca, a species of the century plant—so named because every hundred years the plant blooms with a flower, which gives off an unbearable stink. I never smelled it, but I believed my grandparents, who remembered it well. Before it blooms, the maguey, decked in eggshells, are beautiful.

Even the low fences and gates are pretty: metal, curlicued like the spit curls on the painted maidens who appear on every printed advertisement.

On the side of our pink cottage, there is one dazzling white patch of pure sand, kept separate for a special purpose. In the rest of the yard chickens scatter or nestle in their own deepening dust beds to lay their warm white eggs. Their contented chorus of clucks and crows harmonizes with the wild birdsong that begins at dawn and quiets at night. But even the night is still alive with sound; the tiniest frog in the world, the coquí, whistles his high notes. None of these noises alarm me; they were long ago absorbed into my memory as background sound.

The ice-cream houses sit near the center of a fragrant jungle, into which we children run barefoot, our little soles and heels toughened like shoe leather. We run behind the more stately procession of our mothers, who wear towering headdresses of laundry, as they walk the path. The women are all pretty, all with the same waist-long hair. In Puerto Rico women do not cut their hair. It is a sign of femininity, how long it will grow. As they walk, their hair and hips sway. I see all the women as beautiful, but my mother is the prettiest; surely she is the youngest.

Later I will wonder, What did my father want? Who would want someone else? Why cheat on young Rosa Maria, with her full lips and deeply curved waist? Surely he could find no one more desirable. Other men would want her; we would find out soon enough. Looking back, it was desire more than destitution that evicted me from Juncos, the most sensual place in the world….

All around us are the ferns, breadfruit and palms of El Yunque rain forest. Even the insects seem beautiful, unthreatening. One of my first memories is of lying on my bed, watching a large, hairy, hot-red-orange spider climb the wall. I am absently fondling myself. My awareness of being alive is near sexual. Every day I awaken aquiver to a world of pleasures.

El Yunque mountain rises in the mist, and the lush jungle sings to me. According to ancient Indian legend, the spirit Yuquiyu ruled from the mountaintop, protecting Puerto Rico. When we enter the rain forest, I can inhale the perfume of the earth. Often we find orchids—purple and white, or a deep yellow spotted with magenta—curled and twining up the vines…or hanging down in long, graceful tendrils. We do not touch these orchids, but allow them their long lives.

Elsewhere in the jungle, my mother delights in picking the special jungle plants—medicinal herbs, edible leaves. Part of her delight is that somehow, even at five, I can identify them, all the plants, common and obscure. I have a “nose,” and taste buds to discern the most subtle differences. Somehow I retain their names. This makes me something of a prodigy in Juncos. Mami shows off my special talent for her friends. She holds up exotic leaves for me to identify.

“Sniff, Rosita…and what is this leaf?”

“Recao,” I cry out, and everyone laughs and claps.

“Oh, Rosita, she is so clever. She is so pretty. She is so charming, what an adorable little girl. ¡Muñequita! Little doll!” my mothers’ friends say.

My mother smiles, so pleased. “¡Qué delirio!”

Every chore seems part of a delightful game—even kneeling at the stream and scrubbing clothes clean against the flat rocks. While the mothers scrub the wet clothes, they laugh and gossip; sometimes they sing, not low but loud, at the top of their young lungs. They are bellowing love songs.

There are tribes of mothers; another group of women calls across from the opposite shore; they sing their own songs.

How wide was that fast-running body of water? In my memory it is a river, too far to cross. We balance and jump from the hot rocks. The children wade and splash in the dazzle of sunshine on water.

We don’t think to swim; no one swims in Juncos. Only later do I learn about swimming, that in Puerto Rico, swimming is something tourists do and we don’t. I hear the mothers chatter about how hard the return walk to the village is—they carry the now heavy wet wash bundles on their heads. Then they walk single file on the dusty road, on the edge of the jungle. Maybe it is harder for the mothers, but they still laugh and sing; the birds fly above and call good news to one another, and warble declarations of love.

At home, in their ice-cream houses, if it gets very hot, the women snap open large handheld fans; the pleats become the magic skirts of dancers—the señoritas we will someday become. Our mothers, who were once like the painted beauties on the fans, hang their laundry on lines strung across the yard. Then, before the wash is fully dried, my mother runs out with her heavy flatiron, to the special white sand patch. That sand will burn your feet. She runs on sandals, and—quick—sets the iron down to superheat, then even quicker runs back inside to iron our clothes, to press out any wrinkles. This is a relay—she has more than one iron. As she irons with the first hot iron, the second iron absorbs the fierce heat of sun on sand. Somehow this works to perfection. My dresses are crisp. Everything smells of sunshine and an indefinable sweetness that must be the magic scent of Juncos.

It is more of a challenge to clean us children than our clothes. We are dusty; my tough little feet seem permanently browned by running barefoot. Sometimes, if we get dirty by the creek, our mothers wash us right there, soaping us up in the ice-cold rushing water while we screech. If we get filthy at home, into a galvanized bathtub in the yard we go, to sit solemn as our mothers wash us with rags and sponges, until they can smile and admonish, “Stay that way. Don’t get dirty,” which of course we do.

Then the children get smacked, sometimes with a strap—me too. My mami—who always calls me so sweetly her “Monkey” or “Cooookie,” drawn out like a coo—“Coooookie”—and cuddles me so close that I feel the heat of her warm body, her full breasts—is no exception. Slap, slap, smack, smack. Behave yourself or the belt. Back then in Juncos, no one calls these smacks abuse. Slaps are light; hitting is not serious; it is called raising children. And we know we are loved like crazy and will get whacked, smacked, slapped again next time we are bad, which we will….

At first we live in a little vanilla-cream-colored house, and I sleep in my own room, a tiny white stucco chamber, cool like the alcove of a church. Very soon, though, there is my dimpled look-alike baby brother, Francisco, and we move to the pink house, to another room, with bunk beds, and I sleep above baby Francisco, sleep my happy, untroubled sleep in the top bunk, until the roosters’ crows wake me better than any alarm clock.

I love having a baby brother. Before long, Francisco is toddling and can be my playmate and partner in mischief. Francisco and I love chasing little coquí frogs and catching them so we can race them. The tiny frogs are elusive little creatures because of their diminutive size—not even as big as my thumb—and they can hop as if they have springs in their legs. All this to the accompaniment of the coquí’s piercing cries. The coquí frog makes the loudest sound for its tiny size; it gets its name from that shrill whistle: co-keeeee, co-keeee.

Needless to say, sometimes it takes us hours to catch them. We place them in a small plastic bucket with a bit of water and leaves so they won’t get too frightened; then we cover the top of the bucket with a torn banana leaf to prevent their escape. After catching eight coquí, Francisco and I go to a flat, dry area where the sand makes almost a racetrack. We create “racing lanes” on the ground and race two at a time. Usually we find big pieces of wood and half bury the wood in the soft earth to hold them up—high enough to make the coquís think they can’t hurtle over these hurdles. We put fine chicken wire over the top of the construction to keep our racers from escaping. What follows is a cacophony of shrieks, admonitions, and raucous declarations of victory. “¡Yo gané! ¡Yo gané!” I won! I won!

We play so many creek games: We go with our friends to the rockiest section of the creek and see who can jump the farthest from rock to rock. My grandfather, Abuelo, fashions little sailboats out of banana leaves. Other times he uses the whole bananas and add sails made of rose leaves held up by slivers of bamboo. Those banana boats are the best, because they last the longest and also serve as lunch. Abuelo tried small melons as well, but you have to scrape them down to the skin or they sink from the weight. The best boat he ever made was from a hollowed-out papaya; we saved the seeds and used them to be our make-believe little sailors. We play at that creek an entire day, to the point where some family member has to come fetch us, or the jungle dark will overtake us.

My mother saves up eggshells all year long so that at Christmastime Francisco and I, little baskets in hand, can go to all those low, spiky bushes in the vecindad (neighborhood) and decorate the bushes with more half eggshells, which look like little white scalloped bells. The eggshells are so pretty. During Holy Week, we use colored eggshells, to match the houses.

Oh, there is a lot for us to do! There are the hunks of sugarcane stalk to suck on; we can scout for sticks to steer our little boats.

Life is delicious, spooned from the start of the day: morning meals such as funche, cornmeal porridge, sometimes made even richer with heavy, thick sweet cream; I never taste such cream anymore. Oatmeal custard, avena; fresh-baked bread, the crusts dunked for me in cafe con leche, sweet. I don’t drink the coffee, but I savor the soaked crusts. Later there is a rich paste of beans and spiced rice. On special days, a feast of roast pig, glazed and succulent with juices. The flavor of this pork I never taste in America. It is Puerto Rican, Juncos pork, and fresh, so juicy, served with melt-in-my-mouth plantains. Sometimes the sticky rice is cut into squares, refried till it is crusted. The rice is mixed with gandules (pigeon peas) and dressed with sofrito hot with red pepper and spices, which burns my tongue but burns it just right. The air is spiced—garlic, pepper, tomatoes, oregano, cilantro. Just to inhale is to taste….

I start kindergarten in a small sun-washed room filled with other children, scrubbed for class to make “a nice impression” on the teacher. I wear big pretty bows in my hair—Mami’s extra touch. I line up with the other children and learn to sing—phonetically, without comprehension—to the tune of “Happy Birthday”: “Good morning to you…. Good morning to you…. Goo moh’ning to joo.”

I sing in all joy and innocence, never knowing then what an ominous language this is, how I will suffer in inglés. I do not even understand the words I sing or why we learn them. Later, I will understand better that I am a citizen of Puerto Rico, which is part of the commonwealth of the United States. There is a bridge across the turquoise waters from my island to the place I soon enough learn is “the big America.” We are part of America too—but not quite; the big America is another island, huge and far away, and I regard it as mythical, not a place where I will someday live.

We move again. Our new pink “strawberry” cottage is filled with people. By then, when I start school, we are living with my mother’s parents, my grandfather Justino and his second wife, Fela. His first wife, my real grandmother, whose name is always spoken in a solemn, sacred tone—“Trinidad Lopez, she was a Spaniard”—died many years ago. Maybe because Trinidad Lopez was so revered as the first great love of my grandfather, and also as my “blood” grandmother, I have a faint memory of my stepgrandmother, Fela. Like the negative of a photo, I see her shadow in her kitchen, cooking without electricity or gas on a wooden stove with deep-set metal braziers; there is a sink that must be emptied by pails. From as early as I can remember, I am near her, playing with my miniature pots and pans, my caserolitas, imitating her—stirring my imaginary guigado stew with a spoon.

My grandfather Justino appears in my mind as he looks in the fast-fading sepia photos of my album, the snapshots held at the corners by black stars. Justino is tall, darker skinned, and handsome, with straight, regular features and a shock of white hair, and a few gold teeth that shine when he smiles. His dark skin is beautiful—deep-colored carob, brown as the coffee he drinks.

Grandfather Justino is a somewhat controversial figure in Juncos politics; he champions the “wrong side,” and there are intermittent mysterious times when we are told he is somehow “wanted” and we must hide. Outside, men with guns storm the pink cottage. Inside, we duck under the beds and table. “Hide. Hide.”

“He’s not here…” my mami and Fela yell. The men yell back bad names; they curse my abuelo. My grandfather’s espresso black eyes meet mine under the table.

Most of the time, however, Grandfather Justino is a benign figure. He financially supports our household with his hands, which are expert; he rolls expensive cigars. When I am near him, when he lifts me to his lap, I always inhale the sweet scent of tobacco. Justino is crisp and clean, but that tobacco scent never leaves him. Tobacco has become part of him, as if his dark brown–stained smooth hands are now extensions of the leaves that he rolls.

My mami is scrupulous about our appearance. She does those arduous river laundry runs, then uses the hot leaden irons to be sure we always look fresh and neat. Especially every Sunday, when, after Mass, we join everyone else in Juncos to promenade in the great bleached-white square. I always appear adorable and immaculate, in my best embroidered dress with the special pulled-thread cutwork, hand-sewn and designed by my mother. On these ritual Sundays I am aware of being shown off, and the prayers and praise mingle in my memory; I feel sacred.

To promenade, the families move in alternating counterclockwise and clockwise directions, as in a waltz. Each family acknowledges the others as they pass. They nod in formal approval. The Alverios. The Marcanos. The Rivieras. The widow Gonzalez…There is a sweet silence that hangs over the town: almost no vehicles, no sound of engines.

The village birds tweet, and from the green margins of the forest come the distant cries of the jungle parrots and macaws. On these Sundays I am very aware of myself, so coiffed and bedecked. For a photo, I hold out my skirt wide, with both hands, like a little dancer about to plié. In the snapshots of me in Puerto Rico, I look untroubled but eager, ready to complete my dance, ready for applause and the continued wonder of all who see me.

*   *   *

Too soon, the gauze curtain drops. Suddenly my mami disappears. Now I know that vague curtained time was when my mother made her preliminary expedition to New York, in preparation for the later, permanent migration. My adult guess is that she was gone for more than two months, given that she had to earn enough money for our future double passage to New York. But as a child I thought my mother disappeared for a very long time, and almost don’t recognize her when she returns.

At Christmastime, I have a very clear picture of her, at a different ice-cream house—the yellow “pineapple” house. It is my father, Paco’s home. Mami has returned, in strange new clothes, with a new scent upon her: sweeter but cold, as if it carries with it the temperature of its origins.

“Evening in Paris,” she whispers. This is her new perfume.

“Evening in Paris comes from Europe, from Paris, France,” she says with cautious pride, as she lifts the stopper, oh, so careful not to spill a precious drop from the cobalt blue glass bottle. She dabs a droplet behind my earlobe—

“Oh,” I cry, “it is freezing.” I don’t realize it yet, but that intense cold scent is my first big warning of what is to come.

Next, Mami is opening what appears to me to be a very large steamer trunk, from which she pulls out an endless stream of gifts—glittery beaded necklaces, silken scarves, a baby doll. All these gifts? Are they to make me feel more comfortable? I haven’t seen her in quite a while and feel somewhat shy. Or are they to bribe me? Mami rummages through this trunk for even more wonderful and colorful things, such as handmade dresses, as well as toys for me and Francisco. Among other things, she also gives me with the baby doll the most beautiful baby doll wardrobe—tiny articles of clothing: dresses, underwear, little socks. She always dressed my dolls as she dressed me. Did I guess then that I was her “living baby doll”?

The detailed embroidery work on those frocks is truly exquisite. I think my mami was most likely trying very hard to make friends with me before our journey to New York City. The idea, I would guess, was to invite me and Francisco to let down our guard. Why did she need to make friends anew with us? Her own children?

The gauze curtain parts, and at some point we moved back in with Fela and Justino. I’m guessing that my mami stayed in Puerto Rico for at least a month. Now I suspect she returned for Christmas because it was unthinkable for her not to be home in Juncos for the great holiday with her two small children.

Christmas in Puerto Rico is a different season than it is in the rest of the world; certainly it is different from the Christmas holiday in mainland America. In Juncos, Christmas seems to last half the year—if it is not actually the thirteen official days of Christmas, it is the time preparing for the thirteen official days of Christmas.

All of Puerto Rico rejoices over what happened on the other side of the earth so long ago in Bethlehem. We have more mangers, more Christ child statues, more saints, more donkeys than any other Nativity in the world.

The whole town is decorated and there are so many processions. The saints are marching everywhere, their statues painted bold, crazy colors that would be too loud anywhere else in the world. But in a town where everything is painted bright, where even the jungle is colored by nature in fire red, shocking pink, lime green, wild yellow, the colors of the saints are just right. The brightly painted saints wear exquisite robes—deep turquoise blue, cadmium gold, hot fuchsia. They shout out, “Worship us!”

There is singing, chanting, endless parties, and prayers and visits, and then more prayers, parties, and then the gifts.

That Christmas, my mami produced more gifts than ever before. The steamer trunk was magic, bottomless like a treasure chest in a fairy tale, and more sparkly gifts kept coming out of it for me and Francisco.

There was more, more, more. And all the friends, relatives, and neighbors visited us for the Puerto Rican version of Christmas caroling. People showed up, always after midnight, usually at two a.m. “¡Parranda!” It was the custom. ¡Parranda! “Surprise!” “¡Asalto!” Surprise holiday drop-in visits—but, of course, we were never surprised. Oh, no, we were always ready for the barranda. For the “asalto.” The arrival of the singers/guests began with a barrage of sound: tin pans banging outside our door. “¡Asalto! ¡Parranda!” The men played music—they beat a hard bongo and strummed four-string guitars, and, of course, everybody rattled the maracas. Our little house was filled with food and the scent of more food cooking—there was a heavy table laden with roast pork, all kinds of pollo, rice, spiced plantains. The men drank bottles of rum, smoked the fancy cigars they saved all year. My abuelo presented his private stash, the best cigars he rolled. The air was full of smoke and song, laughter and wonderful smells.

Even then, I knew 1935 was my best Christmas—but until now, I didn’t realize why.

It was the best because she knew—my mother knew, everyone in Juncos knew, everyone but me knew—it was our last Christmas in Juncos, our last Christmas in Puerto Rico.

How could I not know that this wasn’t really Christmas, that it was the last celebration of a way of life? The end of our family, my final holiday with Francisco? I see him still with my mind’s eye, his dimpled fingers opening his little-boy presents—tiny cars and puppets, a bouncy ball. He ran around the tree squealing for joy. How sad I would have been if I had known that this was the last Christmas my brother and I would share. But I knew none of this. I knew only bliss.

I am dazed with joy: Everyone loves me; my gifts form a small mountain. I dance around everyone in my new ruffled dress, and point my toe in my silken slipper. It is a delirium of delight. How can I know it is the end of my life as I know it?

THE GREAT CHANGE

When did my mami decide to favor me over Francisco? Was her decision—which seems so cold, even cruel—made then, at Christmas, or did she decide later? Or was there another reason for what happened?

I had very little warning of the end, the Great Change. One morning my mother woke me earlier than usual, in the predawn darkness when the birds of Juncos were still silent and presumably asleep on their jungle perches. A disturbed rooster gave an angry squawk; even he felt the Great Change. Something very big, something fateful was about to happen. My mother dressed me in an unusual number of layers. She buttoned on an unaccustomed sweater.

Then, in the dimness, after I spooned up my special oatmeal custard, my mother presented me with a small suitcase and three shopping bags packed with my dresses, my dolls, and their miniature wardrobe. Then Mami gave me a surprise “new” wardrobe—a heavy sweater, a woolen coat, some long knee socks, and a pair of new thick shoes, all closed up—no place for my toes to poke out, as they do from my sandals. Then she announces in a breathless voice, new as the morning shadows, “We are leaving Juncos. We are moving…to America.”

I am very excited at the thought of taking a trip on a ship. The puzzlement is that Francisco isn’t going with us—not yet. “But he will come too, later. I am taking you first because you are a big girl and you won’t cry.”

The magic trunk, repacked with all the treasure, will also take the trip back to New York City, along with several shopping bags, as is the tradition with poor people because they don’t have the money to pay for suitcases. The trunk is to be delivered to someone named Titi within a week or so.

Titi means “aunt,” but my mami explains, “She is my titi, but in America, she will be your titi too, because we will stay with her until we find our own place for you and me and Francisco, when he comes…later.”

When she said “later,” was she already lying about Francisco? Was she deciding to abandon him then? Was this a deception on Mami’s part?

The disturbed rooster does not stop squawking. The hens cluck, ruffled in their nests. My special chick, Puchito, the one Francisco and I keep in our room, squawks too, and my mother tells me to return the chick to his mother hen. The little yellow fluff-ball chick always followed me and Francisco; he would sit in our hand and lie hypnotized if we turned him upside down. I don’t want to leave my little Puchito; I do so with reluctance. The hen stretches out her wing and tucks him under, beside the warmth of her feathered body.

*   *   *

What about Paco? Even then, at five, I sense that my father, Paco, is history—that we are leaving not just Puerto Rico, but also Paco. Paco seemed to be already fading in my memory, as if I always knew somehow that he was not a permanent papi. He disappears almost before my eyes—a thin man with an even thinner “gigolo” mustache. He is growing fainter.

*   *   *

Now, I can conjure only two images of my father, Paco José Alverio: In the first he is standing, leaning back, his thumbs hooked through the belt loops at his waist. He wore his pants high, almost under his armpits, which had the effect of making him look even shorter. Yet, in this permanent mental snapshot in my mind, my father assumes a pose of confidence for such a slight man who was about to be left behind.

The second image is more specific and extraordinary. It is a true glimpse through the chink of memory: a crack below the outhouse door. Behind the ice-cream house is the outhouse, once also painted in ice-cream colors but by that time weathered clapboard with only hints of pink and a previous paint color, blue. There are boards missing, and one major crack on the bottom of the door where the wood doesn’t meet the earth.

I am peering through this space to stare up at my father. I want to see what makes a man different from me. I lie on the ground and peek into the outhouse shadows. I see Paco—he is standing in that patient pose men assume to pee. My papi has something between his legs—a confusing dark apparatus, a mystery mass that dangles there.

There is only so long I can lie like this, gazing at this, while I inhale the odors of the outhouse. I bolt upright to catch my breath and carry away only this murky memory of the dangling shadow and the bulging mass. It is more confusing than anything else, and I know it is forbidden. This glimpse does little to satisfy my curiosity; it only adds to it.

It seems that Paco José Alverio’s main role in my life was to disappear and be forgotten.

Thirteen years later, my father would make one last startling comeback appearance, but his surprise return occurred when I was already far removed from my life in Puerto Rico, already an ingenue in movies. The meeting was so unexpected that I reacted reflexively. I will forever regret what occurred between us at that time. When I left Puerto Rico, such a future reunion was unimaginable; my mother and I had emigrated not just from Puerto Rico, but from the past and from so many people I loved.

Leaving Paco seemed acceptable under the circumstances, but my brother? “What about Francisco? We can’t leave Francisco!”

I cried as Mami kept repeating, “Francisco can’t come to America this trip,” in answer to my pleas that my baby brother come too. “Francisco, Francisco…” became my chant. “Francisco too.” I could not imagine my life without him, my soft butter-skinned baby brother; I had been the big sister, holding him when Mami was sewing and Fela was cooking. I showed him how to dig in the yard with his small shovel, and chase the chickens. Together, we watched the eggs hatch, and had been raising the fluff-ball yellow chick Puchito. What will happen to our coquís? Who will race them with Francisco? He needs me…the chicken and the frogs need me. And I need him.

“Francisco too,” I repeat. “Francisco must come too.”

“Later, later,” my mami tells me. “He is too small now and he would cry…. When we are settled in our own place and he is a little bigger, then Francisco will come….”

The impact of leaving my grandparents, my baby brother, my father, my home, my birthplace, my chicken, did not strike me until much later. At our predawn departure, I remember standing on a dusty road with Justino, and Fela, who was holding Francisco. Justino and Fela would see us off on the journey, and care for Francisco for what I imagined would be a brief interval.

While we stood there, waiting for a hired jalopy truck to San Juan, dawn broke over the jungle, over the ice-cream houses. All the forest awakened. A sudden tropical rain fell like a theatrical scrim—all silver shimmer, no real impact. We were barely dampened.

Then an old truck rattled to a stop, and we all climbed on. I looked back as long as I could, back at Juncos through the shimmer of rain. The colors softened like pastels, and that final image of home became less than a memory, more a half-remembered dream.

How do you know when you truly say good-bye? The answer I was to discover, too late, is that you may not know at all. How was I to know that I would never see Francisco again? Or Abuelo or Fela? All I have left of my grandparents are a few memories, faint as their sepia snapshots. And of my smooth-skinned baby brother? The scent of cocoa butter and the feel of his downy head under my hand as I caressed him, the softness of his cheek as I kissed him. But I never kissed him a real good-bye. I still feel I will be reunited with little Francisco, though now I know that is impossible.

We wave to them from the ship’s deck—wait, Paco’s there too. Does he know what’s going on? I stretch my neck to get a good look at him, at Francisco and my grandparents, but the crowd of migrants on board is so thick, Mami and I cannot reach the railing. We stand two rows back. I hope they can see us better than we can see them—maybe they recognize my small hand, raised up high by Mami, waving, waving goodbye. Within hours, I wonder: What was “good” about “goodbye”?

*   *   *

I could not invent the horror of our voyage to New York; such is the stuff of fiction, of perilous shipwrecks and near death at sea. Clutching my mother’s hand, I boarded the SS Carabobo. I could not invent a name like that; carabobo translates from Spanish as “stupid face.”

The boat was so packed with Puerto Ricans, now I wonder whether it was even legal. Surely the hold, which was our accommodation, could not have passed any country’s health standards. Later I would read descriptions of slave ships, of people crammed together, of toilet effluent running down the deck, and it would be all too familiar.

No sooner do we leave the see-through turquoise waters off San Juan than the water and the sky darken. A storm appears like a dark knotted fist above us; a black, hard rain begins to fall. It seems to fall only upon the SS Carabobo. It does not take long for the motion of the ship to become alarming; it slides down the waves and rolls in the dips between them. On the deck, as the ship moves into an increasingly roiling open sea, I sway too. “Let’s not go,” I suggest. “Let’s turn back….”

My mother holds my hand and says, “It will not take long. The boat ride will be fun. It is only for a few days….”

The stench begins almost immediately. Belowdecks, the smell of the bodies and the toilets becomes unbearable, unbreathable, and my mother and I risk the unsteadier upper deck, to stay outside and breathe salt air. Of course, we take one breath and a heavy rain begins to fall even harder than before, propelled soon by a gale-force wind. Somewhere in the history books of weather at sea, I expect there is an account of the hurricane that almost sank the SS Carabobo.

Above the wailing of the wind rise the howls of the passengers. Puerto Ricans are not known to suffer in silence; panic is operatic. Soon the entire boat rings with the screams and moans of seasick, scared Puerto Ricans who, like me, wish they had never left home. Calls to Madre de Dios are heard from every deck. Rosaries come out and final prayers are uttered. The creak of the boat harmonizes with the human chorus of fear. On the top deck a young mother paces, singing to the baby in her arms. As if in backup, the hurricane escalates and the wind drives the old SS Carabobo up and down the deep swells of the storm-tossed sea.

Belowdecks, another sea flows from the toilets, which had gone over capacity within minutes. Every known fluid pours from every end of every passenger. The decks run with a fetid mixture of vomit, urine, and feces. At times the roiling sea looks inviting, cleansing. Maybe it would be worth a fatal dive to feel that cool seawater wash over me. My mother walks me, sideways, to the toilet whenever it is absolutely necessary, and whenever we do, my mother retches too, in reaction. I am too scared to vomit, and retain everything, concentrating on survival.

This lasts for five effluent-flowing days and nights. When at last the SS Carabobo lists into New York Harbor, I look up to see this large green statue wearing what appears to be a crown on her head and holding a huge ice cream cone. My mami tells me she is welcoming us to America.

Now that we have almost arrived, my mother divides up some of our clothing and puts her choices in the center of large scarves and knots the corners. These makeshift carriers will hold our essential clothing until the trunk arrives. We carry our things like hoboes.

Curiously, though I had held my stomach down throughout the voyage of the SS Carabobo, it is only when I alight and my inner body maintains the sickening rhythm of the sea that I heave.

FRIGID CITY

My first response upon entering the port of New York was to feel more nauseated and chilled than I had ever felt in my life. After disembarking, I was struck by a kind of cold that shocked me, knocked me back a few feet. I didn’t want to enter this new gray, cold world. Though my mami had brought me a coat and hat, knee socks, and wool gloves, I wasn’t anywhere near prepared for the onslaught of a very icy wind that slashed at every exposed place—my face, the back of my neck, the space where my winter coat sleeves did not quite reach my gloves.

There followed endless lineup after lineup at the dock as a small staff of officials tried to process thousands of panicked, ill migrants. Few of the admitting officials spoke or understood Spanish, and my trial by language began at once. “¿Habla español?” “¿Habla español?” “¡Por favor, español!” Everywhere people were calling out in Spanish, crying for help, or just crying.

The first impression I had of being a newly emigrated Puerto Rican to the mainland was to feel frightened and unwanted. If I could have reboarded the rancid ship, SS Carabobo, and made my way back to San Juan on a tide of nausea, I would have done so gladly. Instead, Mami and I trudged into America, hanging on to our knotted scarves, single suitcases, and shopping bags.

My mother had made arrangements, and once processed we boarded a bus. The trip by city bus to what I later learned was the Bronx was as dreary as our destination. We had stepped out of Oz into the gray, gritty world, and there was no turning back to Technicolor.

I peered out the grimy bus window and saw only more gray—gray concrete and sad trees that had been stripped of leaves and bent by winter. Some trees wore metal braces, as if they were crippled. Everything looked dirty. I saw some overturned garbage cans and one ashy-looking cat. I asked my mother, “Where are the palm trees and flowers? Where is the bougainvillea?”

“In summer they will all come back….” She explained that here, it was not “summer” all the time like at home; here there were four different seasons, and this one, February, was called “winter.” And winter was why the icy wind sliced at my tropical skin.

Too soon we were back on the street, that unyielding cold concrete, and the bitter wind of the city struck me in the face. We carried our suitcases, scarves, and bags to Mohegan Avenue in the southwest Bronx.

Today, this section of the Bronx is rebuilding after being destroyed by arson and vandalism in the seventies. In 1936, the neighborhood had a drab stolidity. There were a few buildings that overreached for some faint grandeur, with names like the Luxembourg Houses or even Clarington Mansion. Most had only numbers—high numbers that suggested the reality: hundreds of look-alike stained facades that hid identical boxed apartments, which offered only narrow views of the outside.

The dark brown-bricked apartment buildings, many built defensively around cement courtyards with defunct fountains, would never rise to be luxury buildings, but neither were they true slums. They were lower-class accommodations that were, in the 1930s, owned by landlords who would look the other way as to the number of tenants that constituted legal occupancy, and they would rent to immigrant Irish, Jewish refugees, and Puerto Ricans, who needed any place they could call home.

There on Mohegan Avenue in the Bronx awaited one room in a four-room apartment. The apartment was, as all our apartments would be, a walk-up, this one five flights up. That first place in America, the promised land where life would be so much better, offered no charm, and it was already occupied beyond capacity. Aunt Titi’s apartment was crammed with relatives and people she knew from the island. Three other families—twelve people in all—slept on cots and foldout sofas. These accommodations seemed just slightly better than the hold of the SS Carabobo.

We climbed up the five dark flights of stairs to find Aunt Titi, stocky enough to block the doorframe to her inner sanctum. Titi gave us an embrace. I don’t know how truly glad she was to welcome two more to the small apartment that was already overfull, but Aunt Titi was Puerto Rican, and hugged and kissed us on both cheeks and cried out over my beauty (“A-dor-a-ble!”). Titi may once have been pretty herself—dark lipstick outlined her Cupid’s-bow mouth as it once must have appeared, and a dyed spit curl looked pasted to her forehead. She wore clothes she imagined still fit and “showed off” her ample figure; Titi’s memorable ass was probably her best asset—Latino men liked “something more back there, something a man can grab onto!” She gave me a very raucous and warm welcome. She spoke at a roar, and I learned later that Titi never learned the meaning of the words “keep your voice down.”

Behind Titi, I could see my new “cousins,” now apartment mates, who looked up with little curiosity from their positions on faded slipcovered sofa beds aimed at a Motorola radio in the living room that was playing a loud Spanish station. A lone two-toned snake plant poked its spiky leaves from the windowsill, where it sat in a hot-pink ceramic art deco dish. In a clear glass bowl, an orange goldfish swam in constricted circles. A heavy drape printed with split green banana leaves hung on the window, secured by tiebacks to allow the weak winter city sun to streak through the dust-opaque glass. These colorful objects were all that remained as reminders of our shared tropical origins.

My mother whispered to me, “Don’t worry, Rosita; it is just for a little while,” a consolation I had already, at five, learned not to heed. My first priority was to adjust to my new climate. My barefoot days were over; I had to wear the unaccustomed heavy shoes and, on rainy days, new rubber contraptions called galoshes that buckled over the regular footwear. A new, even heavier woolen “overcoat” was given to me, along with sweaters, woolen skirts, “woolly” underwear, and a flesh-colored stocking made of a cloth called lisle. My tender skin could not be exposed. To top it off, knit hats with chin straps appeared and trapped my face. Soon my nose turned from pale tan to red; my lips, so soft at home, hardened and chapped. I could not even offer a cracked smile.

Replacing the scent of hibiscus wafting from the jungle was the too-sweet chemical stench of Flit roach spray. We applied the Flit with a pump; it poisoned the atmosphere but didn’t seem to kill that many roaches, only enough to leave some upturned putrid corpses in the kitchen.

Birdsong was supplanted by the screech of the aboveground subway—the el—and the honk and hum of car traffic. The air itself looked gray, sooty. The few birds that I saw looked dirtied by the polluted air—they were bony little house sparrows and pigeons whose gray chests offered the single tint of color—a faint iridescence, shades of violet and green that must once have been brighter. The birds seldom flew; they hopped to retrieve stale bread crumbs from the gutter.

We had crossed one frame, in full color, to step across the threshold into the grimmest of cinema verité. My memories of what followed are blurry and jumpy, as if filmed by a handheld camera. Even as I lived my new life, I didn’t want to remember it.

Why did we leave Juncos? It was crazy to say this was better.

Now I understand that my twenty-two-year-old mother had to leave Juncos to get away from her unfaithful but still domineering husband, my father, to find a new husband (she would find a total of five). She was young and needed to change her fortunes, to find her own work and a new way. For my mother, Rosa Maria, Juncos had offered more problems than charms. I would always miss Juncos; maybe she would not.

Now I can see my mother as a heroine, a true pioneer, striking out to a new country to create a new life. She arrived on the mainland very early in the history of Puerto Ricans in New York City; 1936 was long before the major migration of the Puerto Ricans in the fifties. In 1936, there were only a few outposts for our kind in New York City—and we were in one of them, the Bronx.

Rosa Maria (now known by her maiden name, Marcano) was in the forefront, a heroine. But then? She was only Mami. And I thought she had led us astray, that this was a terrible mistake. Now I see how I misjudged her.

That first night, exhausted, we climbed into the narrow iron bed we would share for many nights to come…and were immediately bitten by bugs. What were these strange ugly black insects? American mosquitoes?

They were bedbugs. Welcome to America.

*   *   *

The cold was so severe that I still trembled under the covers in bed. All night, my mother had to hold me close; the heat of her body helped me sleep. I dreamed I was back home at Abuelo’s house playing with my caserolitas, my adored tiny toy cooking pots and saucepans; I was pretending that I was cooking for the family, and talking to myself…. “This is for Mami; this is for Francisco….”

And then a fierce windstorm swept away my pots and pans and I woke up crying. When my mom asked what happened, all I could say through the sobs was, “Caserolitas.”

My image of myself as adored and protected shattered like the eggshells that decorated the garden of my true home, the pink cottage. All that was bright and beautiful vanished.

I awoke to the metallic clang of the radiator. Bang-bang, clang-clang. The steam heat hissed and made the metal expand and contract; our heat source sounded like weapons fired at dawn. I woke up, crying, to my new life in America. In my day and night dreams, I still lived in paradise—my imaginary life in Puerto Rico. Here, by day on Mohegan Avenue, I lived a nightmare. There were Irish and Anglo gangs who roamed the Bronx streets armed with pipes and insults. The cold wind blew, and it carried with it the hiss of the ultimate insult: “Spics!”

Our existence was excuse enough for a chase. “¡Madre de Dios! Help us!”—the dreaded ambush in an alley and then a fist punch or pipe swing. There was a race war in the tenements, and the new arrivals, the Puerto Ricans, were the new targets. We were referred to by the more benevolent “Jews,” Italians, and occasional Swedes as “the PRs.” These other minority immigrants favored us above the “schvartzes”—the blacks. But the Irish hated our darker skin, our loud radio songs, our apparent frivolity in the light of the Irish premonition of doom. To the Irish, perhaps we seemed too happy, too eager to celebrate and continually party, while they gathered, glum, in their somber green-lit bars and at constant wakes. This philosophical difference extended to children as young as five, who might chase a Hispanic girl and whack her with a baseball bat.

“Spics,” was the war cry, the insult, and I don’t even know whether I understood that it had to do with my skin color, or that it meant Hispanic. Slowly, through conscious and unconscious absorption of the culture—blond movie stars, billboard goddesses, and popular blondes at school—I learned that I was the wrong race, that light skin was better than dark skin. Back home in Juncos, people came in all colors and shades—it didn’t matter that Mami and I were on the light side, that my abuelo Justino was dark. But here it mattered, and my “light” skin was not light enough. I was a running dark girl on the street, an object of ridicule later in the school. And in the apartment I was for the first time critical of my reflection in the mirror. I would stare down at my small hands and wonder whether they looked dirty even when they were clean.

I didn’t understand it then, but later the threat of rape also loomed, with Puerto Rican beauties in pastel dresses displaying their golden-tan cleavage and giving rise to both desire and hatred. I remember as a child knowing, “They can spot us.” They knew Puerto Ricans on sight—by our color, our style of dress. I was always on the alert for danger…. I would stiffen with fear when I saw a group of boys loitering on the corner or, worse, slinking down the alley. They often wore leather jackets and reminded me of snakes. They smoked and shouted; they seemed to speak in a constant jeer. They could spot me easily in my bright colors, my shining shoes. I would look “too fancy.” In summer, my dresses had ruffles no American girl would wear. I crisscrossed the streets to avoid the gangs, but I could not avoid their taunts: “Spic!” “Garlic mouth!”

I ran through the streets of the Bronx faster than I ever thought my legs could carry me, the fear of being caught propelling me forward, not knowing what they would do to me if I ever got caught. Would they use their bats? Clubs? A gun? Or, worst of all, would they use the switchblade and plunge it into me? Or reach back in their hair and produce a razor? The notorious Fordham Baldies were rumored to have those razors, and I always feared for my own scalp. There were other gangs to fear, like the Ducky Boys. The gangs at that time were mostly Irish, fair-haired and angry. One time, one boy got close enough to me that I could see his eyes, and they were blank. I thought, He could kill me.

How fast I ran, my footsteps and my heart keeping time, holding my apartment key in my pocket, ready to turn the lock as soon as I reached the door…or cut someone’s face if I had to. Hurry, hurry, run, run.…Get in the door; slam it shut in their faces.…They are right behind me, right behind me! There, in the alley, someone is waiting to pounce….

Run, run, catch your breath…no, don’t stop. Stitch in my side. Heart hammering in alarm. Faster, faster, slam the door.…Made it!

Within Titi’s apartment, at least everyone spoke Spanish, and although they all said we were lucky to be in America, we shared a lifestyle so much worse than in Juncos that I could not understand how we were “lucky.”

Comforts were few. At night, our new home was freezing cold, more frigid for those of us with “tropical blood” than for the pale immigrant Irish, who looked accustomed to cold and chapping. At the time, during the Depression, it was legal for landlords to shut off heat at night, all night, no matter what the outside temperature. In cold, damp New York, this felt like a punishment for leaving warm, fragrant Puerto Rico. At night I lay awake shivering, trying to stay close to my mother for the warmth of her scorching skin. She was like a human space heater. She was like a stove.

My mother often kept a hot-water bottle tucked under her feet to keep them from going numb. Soon Rosa Maria found other ways to keep herself warm, but that was later…. When we walked around the apartment, we often wore our coats and hats; on bad mornings we draped extra blankets, like serapes, over our shoulders. I shuddered in the unfamiliar cold; my teeth would clack like a novelty-store gimmick.

At night, in the cold, I could sense the roaches on their raids to the kitchenette, where they must have, with their disgusting tentacle-like feelers, seized upon a stray grain of our arroz con pollo or a crumb of bread, or even a hard red bean. If I woke early and flipped the switch, there was a mass roach migration as the roach regiments retreated into invisible cracks. The occasional triumphant attack with a shoe or swat of the Puerto Rican newspaper would leave a crunched roach corpse, his shellac-back shell crushed and oozing his brown-gold roach blood. It was hard for me to decide at age five whether they disgusted me more dead than alive. I remembered even the bugs of Juncos with affection—they were better bugs, colorful, tropical bugs; the red spiders were attractive, and they left you alone.

At night I would also often feel the sharp bite of the bedbugs; every few months my mother would remove the bug-infested mattress and with my help, drag it up to the roof. We’d go bedbug hunting and kill every one we found. Afterward, we’d wash the metal springs with kerosene and get inadvertantly high off the fumes.

My mother could hardly wait to move out of Aunt Titi’s domain. Titi herself was overwhelming; her voice filled all four rooms. If we did go out for a rare treat at the movie house, going along with Titi was torture. She was always being shushed, and on a couple of occasions there were rather loud words between her noisy self and another patron: “Shaddup, you noisy old hag!” To which she’d respond, “Guade ju min, ju estúpido? Songsin rong wid ju ears? Go to a doctor and ju ears feex, ju dommi! Chathope juself!” (Translation: “Whaddya mean, stupid? Something wrong with your ears? Go to a doctor and get your ears fixed, you dummy! Shaddup yourself!”)

With Aunt Titi on the scene—outdoors or inside the apartment—my mother could never do what she thought needed to be done: find a new husband. For that she would need privacy and a better apartment, one that would be a place of our own.

As always, my mother had a plan: She began to work—in a near-feverish obsession—not only sewing in a factory in the garment district, but also cleaning apartments. At home—in her “free” time—she was making tissue flowers to sell to Woolworths, and in this she enlisted me: I folded the paper and learned the Bronx origami technique that resulted in large, carnationlike creations. I took pride in my fluffed tissue flowers and worked at Mami’s side—each flower would bring us closer to a nicer life, to Rosa Maria’s next move, to a better place, to a better man.

During the day, when Mami worked in the downtown sweatshop, it was necessary for me to attend school. On my first day of school, Mami led me to the building, a stout brick fortress, to attend a kindergarten so alien from the white, sun-washed schoolroom back in Juncos.

I walked beside her, holding tight to her hand. The early morning was cold, and my overcoat hung heavy on my shoulders. There was a new variety of snow beneath my tropical feet: This version was a near gelatinous gray, and it was called slush.

Rosa Maria escorted me to the schoolyard, which was surrounded by a black iron spiked fence. Inside the fence, the kids were lined up in preordained “buddy” pairs. I quivered. There was no place for me; they all knew one another. I didn’t want to go in. I clung to my mother’s coat, and she used a ruse to make me let go.

“Wait here,” she instructed. “I’ll get you some gum, some chicle, and I’ll be right back….”

I stared at the pale faces of the other kids, who were now filing into the building. They were all speaking that language to one another. No one spoke Spanish. I didn’t see a single Hispanic face. Later I found out the reason for this: Because my mami was in such a rush to migrate, she was ahead of the curve. When we arrived in the mainland United States, mostly lone adults were coming over to work and make some money to send back to their families in Puerto Rico…. Mami was a forward thinker; she brought us here to start a new life—something most other Puerto Ricans wouldn’t do for twenty more years. Now I see she was a true pioneer; barely more than a girl, she left everyone and everything she knew behind to “colonize.” Her courage to move to a new world was admirable, but it left me the only Spanish-speaking kid in the schoolyard.

When the teacher came to ask why I was still standing there in the slush, I couldn’t understand what she said. I tried to answer: “My mami…chicle…gum…” but I could not make her understand me.

Why did Mami do that? Why didn’t my mother come inside with me? Why didn’t she wait and explain to them who I was? Why didn’t she come back? I began to cry; I couldn’t help it. Against my will, the teacher led me inside. I cried for my mami, even though I knew she wasn’t coming “right back.” The more frightening question was one I tried not to contemplate: Would she ever come back?

There are so many unanswered questions with my mother. Why didn’t she return for Francisco? Why did she sever all ties with Paco? Why did she have to tell me, that day when I stood alone in front of the strange school with all the staring kids, “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Did she avoid all unpleasant confrontation, or was there a deeper reason?

Whatever my mother’s reason, she left me that day, my feet numbing in the slush of the schoolyard, crying in Spanish, and no one understood me. As soon as I could, I started running back to the apartment…. I did that almost every day. If the class had recess, I left.

When I met my mami’s eyes, somehow I could not ask her: “Why?”

Then, just as she would do something so suddenly hurtful, my mother might commit a good deed, also without warning. One gray afternoon, when I came home from school, wept out, drained, and wanting only to curl up in bed, warm myself, and hug my knees, she said, “Surprise for you, Cooookie…”

She held out a cardboard box with airholes punched in—they looked like openings made with a screwdriver. I could hear something scratching inside, and a low familiar peep.

“Open it, Cookie…. He’s for you…. He’s your little Puchito.” In disbelief, I pried open the carton and there he was—or at least an identical stand-in yellow fluff-ball chick.

This stand-in Puchito was to live in our room at Titi’s—and he did, for a while. He grew fast, and lost his fluff in record time. In a few weeks he wasn’t a sweet fluff-ball chick anymore; he was a goose bump: a pebble-skinned, scrawny, raw-red-necked little rooster who skittered around our room on his big scaly feet and squawked at the Motorola radio. Apart from losing his chick looks, Puchito was firing off gooey greenish gobs of chicken shit and eating a fortune in birdseed. Whenever we sat down to eat, he fixed a beady red gaze upon us, which was uncomfortable, especially when we were having arroz con pollo or any other chicken dish.

Nonetheless, he made me laugh, and I often cut school to stay home with the chicken. Precedents were set; school wasn’t necessarily a given in our apartment. Mami was relaxed about my skipping.

Puchito was the single creature that was making me happy. He reminded me of home.

My mother soon found Puchito an unsuitable pet for apartment life; she exiled him to a poultry cage on the roof. I visited with him and sat on the roof, holding him and stroking his growing feathers. One day I went up for my chicken visitation and found Puchito upside down, his scaly feet in a death curl on his chest. I wept. I had lost my Puchito, and somehow, with his chicken death, he symbolized a second parting from Puerto Rico.

Puchito had been my best friend. I had no friends—no one could speak to me, and I understood no one. That was when I began to concentrate on inglés. It hurt to switch languages, to lose my familiar words, but I learned, in secret, to speak and understand.

Mami could speak: She was quick that way, but she dropped all the vowels: This led to her hilarious mistaken pronunciations: “Every Saturday, it’s time for us to change the shits,” and in summer, she would say it was too hot to work for “pissake,” and we should “go to the bitch.” I would correct her: “Say sheets. Say beach.”

And she had a great punch line: “I can’t. You know I got trouble with my bowels.”

But I didn’t want the accent. None of it. If I had to speak inglés, I would speak it perfectly.

And I did.

THAWING OUT

We celebrated a single event those first months in the Bronx: As the winter deepened and its bitterness numbed my fingers, toes, and face, something unexpected….

Through the frosted window of my first winter, I saw the unfamiliar lace of descending crystals.

“Maruca,” Mami cried out.

“¿Qué es eso?” I wanted to know.

“¡Nieve! Ice from the sky.”

“Snow.”

“Let’s go up on the roof.” I put on a jacket and a little wool cap. My mother and I ascended to the roof, only a short flight of iron stairs above us. We pushed open the heavy metal security door with the DO NOT ENTER THE ROOF warning, and stepped out on the urban equivalent of permafrost—frozen tar. All the ugliness of the city quickly disappeared, curtained and buffered by that first blizzard we witnessed. As the crystalline flakes flew, my mother and I opened our mouths. I stuck out my tongue and caught the delicious treat—the first offering of my new homeland that I could enjoy.

Maybe there could be miracles in America, after all, I thought. This white magic that dissolved like a quick kiss.

*   *   *

The suffering of winter gave way to the sudden city summer. New York City heat was different from Juncos heat—it was not so gentle. It descended like Mami’s two-ton hand iron and pressed onto the tar of the roof and the asphalt of the streets. Everything softened and stank of the tar. But it was heat.

And to the two of us Puerto Ricans—who froze through that first winter—it was a heaven-sent relief. Throughout that first torturous winter, I would have done anything to get warm—I even sat on top of the radiator, nearly burning my bottom. Always, my mother and I huddled for that heat, and it seemed as if our entire migration was going to be a heat-seeking mission, a constant attempt to get warm.

Then one day my mittens and socks, draped on the radiator to dry after being frozen nearly solid with slush, gave off a fragrant steam. It was not just the radiator hissing steam but the radiant heat of the new spring sun streaming through the window. The window glass felt warm. Then summer struck in an instant: A fly appeared and buzzed.

Though it may have been only April or May, the temperature rose, and with it my emotional thermostat. If I could stay warm again, life would not be so bad; I would not have to cling so hard to Mami in the bed, and dread crawling out from under the bedcovers so much.

As if the warmth unlocked our paralysis, we migrated again at once—to a new neighborhood, a better apartment.

“Come on,” my mother said. “Let’s find a place of our own.”

*   *   *

As soon as my mother could sew enough dresses and scrub enough Anglo apartments, and we could fold a small garden of tissue-paper flowers that we could then sell to the five-and-dime, we did move to a place of our own. The first place was a single small room, with one twin bed that featured an iron headboard and footboard that dug into her forehead and trapped her feet. But it was our own.

We moved up in the world—a literal ascension—to “the Heights.” The new neighborhood, in Washington Heights, was dramatic. The neighborhood was made up of steep hills that posed a challenge for residents on foot. We had to use the “step streets,” which were long stone staircases, sometimes a series of them, staggered, to make half-mile climbs across the neighborhood. We moved to Fort Washington Avenue—the highest-elevation point in Manhattan. You could actually feel the rise of the earth—a giant hill and the world seemed to open up on the horizon and soar across the river on a silver bridge.

For the first time in the city, I could see the skyline and the river. It wasn’t lush or beautiful like Juncos, but there was a wild uplift, an excitement that life here might be possible after all.

Our building was one block from the George Washington Bridge, and our apartment was on the top floor—we could not go any higher. The neighborhood rose and crested toward the steel ramparts that formed the metal extension of its fortunate topography. From our roof, the George Washington Bridge looked like a layered wedding cake. I felt I was on top of the world.

To a child, it seemed that our new home propelled us straight upward and onto the bridge entry. A constant hum and thrum of traffic sounded from this great portal. At night, the stream of headlights and red brake lights lit the access ramp and the bridge itself, and fired across the river like tracer bullets.

In the seventeen hundreds, Fort Washington had been an actual fort and had stood right here, where Mami and I lived. It was here that George Washington himself set up the defense against the British. And it was here that Rosa Marcano won her own battle for independence, a new home, and a new husband.

I shared a history with the George Washington Bridge; it was born the same year I was—1931. And both of us were still young and new when I moved next to it. The GWB was both impressive and frightening, and when I was older I was invited to run across it, hide under it—play the GWB games that attracted all the braver kids in Washington Heights…but I cringed and held back.

I adjusted better to the more natural environment the Heights offered. While not the same lush and gentle landscape of Puerto Rico, it at least did not share the dreary sameness of our Bronx neighborhood. The new neighborhood was not all cold stone, steel, and brick. To the north, there was a city version of a forest, Fort Tryon Park, without palms and ferns, but offering some respite from concrete. In the spring and summer, the border greenery, the turquoise oasis of the public swimming pool, the “secret” little red lighthouse below, and the Cloisters castle would offer enticements….

Even to a child, the buildings in Washington Heights looked better, homier than the massive apartment complexes on Mohegan Avenue; the Washington Heights houses were built in the early nineteen hundreds on a more human scale than the Bronx apartment warrens, with better construction, before the shoddiness of post-Depression, post–World War I building.

The Beaux Arts style, better-than-tenements midsize apartment houses had grand marble steps and ornate balustrades. Our first and longest-term residence, 715 West 180th Street, retained an external elegance in its carved stone, marble facade, and wrought-iron fire escapes with scrollwork. Inside, the main staircase was wide and took a graceful swerve at the bottom. The building was so old that it had been constructed before elevators; it was a very long climb up to the fifth floor, even on the wide marble stairs. It seemed in Washington Heights I was always climbing stairs—inside and outside. Wherever I went, I felt small.

Inside, the building was a Tower of Babel—a different language and cuisine on every landing. Curry and Urdu on one, Chinese and Hunan sauce on two, Italian and marinara on three, Russian borscht and cabbage on four…

This had its positives and negatives: Some spices tantalized; others turned rancid. This held true for behavior as well: A father one floor down beat his two daughters so regularly it became a sound track to life at 715—the repeated whack, whacks and high-pitched cries. But the girls seemed to accept this—and after a while, I did too; the shouts and whacks were a fact of life here.

And there were other facts of life we had to bear. For instance, the grandiose architecture ended in the hallway. Inside, the apartments were narrow, with tiny rooms; our one tiny bathroom was so minuscule that we had to walk sideways to get to the toilet, and the toilet paper roll was behind our heads, which created a challenge. We had a miniature table in our miniature kitchen. Even our appliances were miniature. As soon as icicles hung outside our kitchen window, we set a galvanized tin box out on the sill to augment our midget Frigidaire. Whenever we reached for a glass milk bottle from the windowsill box, a frigid blast of winter would hit us in the face.

But that was later. When we moved to the Heights, it was on a sultry day in summer and the neighborhood looked leafy, the building grand with its appealing features—not the least of which was the fire escape, with its ornate wrought iron.

We took to the fire escape as if it were a balcony; I enjoyed sitting on the wrought-iron-grille base beside an open window, listening to the radio perched on the windowsill. Our new radio, shaped like a small cathedral, blared music to me—and to any other appreciative Latinos within earshot.

The outdoors, the outdoors. At last we could again enjoy being outdoors. We soon appropriated the roof into our lifestyle, too. By day, it was our “tar beach,” my favorite leisure location. I could sit in the sun on a disposable blanket. “Pick one with rips,” my mother advised. “The tar can stain when it heats up.” It did heat up, and I could smell the melting creosote as I lay back to take in the city sunshine. I would carry up refreshments—a large jar of juice, the bottle saved from some spiced vegetable, and take sips throughout my long Saturdays of relaxation. I could read or, with my eyes closed, dream I was home…in Juncos.

At night, the roof became a star-and-skyline-lit patio accented by the diamond dazzle of the bridge. On summer nights we would carry chairs up to the roof and relax there, have drinks and even dinner. We enjoyed the setting.

Inside the apartment, a series of hard-won purchases were proof that our life was improving: the cathedral radio, first a small one, then a massive floor model; a telephone. Oh, life was better; Mami was right. For a time, life in the Heights continued its emotional ascent. Soon we were documenting our new lifestyle and joy in a series of photographs taken in our living room—posing in front of the Motorola cathedral-style floor-model radio (eventually replaced by a tiny screened floor model Motorola TV), me holding the new black rotary telephone receiver, aglow with pride. I would be dressed in hand-sewn frilly costumes—Carmen Miranda was a standout, complete with “fruit salad” headdress. Even the furniture was dressed up; my mother sewed slipcovers to cover everything: toaster, radio, TV. Rosa Maria left no living being or inanimate object undraped by her creative hand. She even made doorknob cozies, and when my aunt Titi was visiting and wanted to leave, Titi couldn’t turn the knob because of the cozy. “Son of a bitch! What did you do to the door?” But Mami kept going—covering more and more objects—even the large floor-model radio, completely encased; only the face of the radio peeked out from a little “window” my mother left open for the screen and dials to show.

For the first time in so long, since leaving Juncos and losing everyone there, I felt lighter, happier. In my new joy, I spun around the apartment in a spontaneous twirl. I had no idea at the moment of that spin that I was launching my show business career—that I would spin for the next seven decades onto stages and then film sets. All I knew was that blur of happiness and the sound of my mother and her friends’ applause. Rosita was dancing.

AMERICAN DREAM

My mother’s friend admired my impromptu pirouettes and said, “Why don’t you send Rosita for dance lessons?”

How old was I? Six? I was still in my own world, but I loved music, and I spun a solo spiral course around that tiny studio apartment. Such potential talent was rewarded, and my mother and her girlfriend, who had “connections,” enrolled me to study with an authentic “Spanish from Spain” dance teacher. “Spanish from Spain” was a serious distinction. It meant not Puerto Rican or Cuban or Mexican. “Spanish from Spain” meant the ultimate Hispanic caste. “Spanish from Spain” meant he would speak the cultivated dialect very different from Puerto Rican Spanish—Castilian Spanish, complete with the elegant lisp. “Spanish from Spain” was also something of a racial distinction: Puerto Ricans came in a myriad of races and skin colors—fair, golden, tan, dark brown, black; Spaniards from Spain were white, very white. I don’t know whether Puerto Ricans themselves held this as a slight prejudice, but being a “Spaniard from Spain” was definitely regarded as an haute category.

We traveled by subway to the dance studio of Paco Cansino. By luck, I was to learn Spanish dance from a master, a member of Spanish dance royalty. Paco Cansino was not only a Spanish dance teacher; he was the ultimate Spanish dance teacher. He was the teacher and uncle of Rita Hayworth. Rita was originally Margarita Carmen Cansino, a direct descendant of one of the great Spanish dancers of all time.

Rita Hayworth was a Brooklyn-born, half–“Spanish from Spain,” half-English girl who made it all the way to Hollywood, where they used electrolysis to raise her hairline substantially in order to broaden her forehead. The studio beauticians dyed her black hair red. She was the daughter of a famous dancer, and the granddaughter of an even more famous Spanish dancer, Edward of Seville, who invented the bolero.

To an eerie extent, I would follow in Rita’s footsteps—not only becoming her namesake, but also a professional child dancer. And I too would drop out of school and then become a movie actress.

Of course, Rita Hayworth also became an idol, a goddess, a bona fide star, who married the Prince Aly Khan. Many years later, I was invited by an Arabian sultan to lunch at his palace in Malaysia. But it was a case of mistaken identity. The aging sultan mistook me for Hayworth and asked after Princess Yasmin: “And how is Princess Yasmin?” I hesitated, then thought, Why spoil his fun? Make him look foolish? And when would I get another chance to dine in a palace?

“They’re fine,” I told him.

Rita Hayworth was my inspiration, and her influence on my life was everlasting; her uncle Paco’s instruction and impact were profound. Together they changed the course of my young life.

The trip to Paco Cansino’s studio started this journey…. For my first foray into “show business,” my mother, her girlfriend, and I took the subway down to West 57th Street. The Paco Cansino School of Dance was in what could be called the “Capezio District,” home to many dance schools, rehearsal halls, and costume and slipper shops. Just riding the elevator in the Carnegie Hall complex was a trip into the new world I would long to inhabit. I could hear opera singers practicing their scales—“La, la…la…la!”—and the sound of pianos playing and tap-tap-tappy tap dancers’ footfalls echoing through the building. From every floor, from behind every door came the music, the singing, the rhythmic tapping of feet. And from a small door at the far end of the hall, drowning out the rest, came the rapid boom-boom-boom of conga drums. My heart began to beat in time.

The Paco Cansino School of Dance was housed in one large, bare, and very dusty studio. Paco was the sole teacher, but what a teacher he was! He was a tiny, almost child-size man, not much bigger than me, but with perfect posture, who affected the “Spanish from Spain” look: slicked-back black hair with long sideburns. His thin, narrow-hipped dancer’s body was always costumed for class in a formal suit (always the same suit, and it had picked up the musty smell of the studio), cordobes hat, and boots, with heels that could really echo.

When I danced with Paco Cansino in performance, he wore the full regalia: cordobes hat, vest, shirt, fitted pants, and those Spanish boots that would raise a dust cloud when his heels struck the floor.

As Paco had instructed the goddess Rita Hayworth, so he was “grooming” me. Paco was a classic Spanish dancer, meaning he seemed to direct his attention to his derrière or his armpit when he danced. His dark eyes were piercing, his angular jaw tightly clenched. He seldom varied his fierce expression, made even fiercer by the shadow of his cordobes hat and long sideburns.

He led me around his dance studio, as serious and stylized as a bullfighter. Paco had perfected his “gesto,” the Spanish attitude—all thrust and angle from his chin to his heels: severe desire, controlled fury, the click of his heel and castanets. This was pure passion, reined in by prescribed dance moves. Paco taught me the classic sevillanas, the national dance of Spain. He led me around and around and straight ahead and danced me straight into my future.

When I was only nine, Paco Cansino decreed that I was ready. He booked me with him for my first theatrical professional engagement in a Greenwich Village nightclub. My mother came with me, carrying my costume in a bag; we rode the subway down to the Village. Inside, the club was dark with smoke, and the smell of whiskey integrated into the atmosphere. My mother and I hurried backstage to prepare for my debut.

I changed into my costume in a small dressing room; I remember peeing in the sink, for lack of the usual facility. For the first time I donned the traditional Spanish dance costume lovingly made by my mother: full ruffled skirts and embroidered blouse, combs and flowers in my hair. I got to wear powder, lipstick, rouge, and eyeliner. I was ecstatic. My mother stood back and sighed. When I looked in the little corroded mirror, I saw a new Rosita—so much more beautiful than the one I had always been….

Backstage may have been tacky, even sordid, but the stage was elevated by a one-foot riser and an immeasurable distance of emotional height. From the instant my foot touched that stage and I began to move to the music and spin around with Paco, I knew I had landed: The spotlight warmed me, and I felt the admiration from the audience (or imagined that I did). I basked under the lights and in an unfamiliar sensation: pure joy. There was no stage fright—I was dancing, doing what I loved.

I shivered with delight at the musical flourish and the nightclub owner’s introduction: “Damas y Caballeros, ahora dirigida del gran Paco Cansino, aquí: Rosita Alverio!”

It is just as well I couldn’t see past the lights—the “audience” was probably a roomful of inebriated men and my beaming mother. And they all applauded. I stood for my first bow, aglow, radiant in the spotlight I wished to remain in forever. Who needed school? This was what I wanted to do—forever and ever!

PAPO

Meanwhile, my mother searched for love—clad in home-sewn dresses tight against her curves, displaying her ample cleavage—looking for a new husband who could “protect” us. She found the first of the next four “husband protectors” quite soon.

I remember the addition of a larger bed, and the earlier and earlier extinguishing of lights. And my mami’s new, strange ceremonies with love potions and candles. I was sent on love potion runs to the botanica, where a cronelike creature lurked in the shadows, her gnarled vegetable roots hanging overhead, twisted, tuberous, and hairy.

This woman had powers and supplies to implement them. I was very frightened of her, and even in the dark of her shop, what I saw scared me—her glass eye and mustache—and I recoiled at the strange, sour stink she emanated. I had to breathe through my mouth; the atmosphere in her shop was so foul. The witch woman muttered and frowned as she sorted through her collection of dead snakes and glass jars filled with suspicious-looking organs and objects, and filled a bag for my mother. I don’t know what I would have done if my mother had sent me on a snake run. As it was, the product I had to carry home was strange enough—one bag contained five horseflies, which I dutifully carried back to my mother.

Mami muttered an incantation and crushed the huge black flies into some coffee grounds. The next thing I knew, she had a gentleman caller who, unsuspecting, sipped the potion/coffee. We both watched, in suspense, to see whether this chubby mustached man would succumb—to love or worse. But all he did was leave and never come back. Soon there were other men, other cups of coffee, and soon my mami, Rosa Marcano, would marry again.

How old was I when my mother remarried? I think perhaps six years old. She found her “protector” quite soon. I don’t remember when I first saw Enrique, but I do remember my mother’s big German woman friend who worked with her in the factories, and who was always offering to “fix her up,” and I have a sense she was somehow responsible for Enrique coming into our lives. There was always talk of men when Marga would appear, brimming with cleavage and sensuous energy. Marga was in love with her own breasts. It was not difficult to imagine carnal acts when she sat down in my mother’s kitchen chair and raised her sweater to reveal her modest but perfectly round breasts, which featured small pink nipples. “Aren’t they marvelous?”

Yes, they were. I had never seen pink nipples before, and I was transfixed. All the nipples I had previously seen were Puerto Rican nipples, which were brown. I studied my own nascent breasts and not yet extroverted nipples and felt sure they would be…brown. Which made Marga’s tiny pink rosebuds even more alluring.

Marga Linekin was a magnet for men, and I sensed that potential mates for my mother were drawn into her orbit, then skewered by my mother’s coy ways. No one could flirt like Rosa Maria: She would actually bat her eyes, tilt her head, and drop her voice to a sexual hush. When men appeared, she was all wonderment and whispered compliments. Of course, with this beguiling style, generous servings of homemade highly spiced food, and her own deep cleavage, she had many admirers. Not to mention the possible impact of love potions.

Soon enough, my new stepfather appeared—strawberry blond, blue-eyed, displaced Cuban Enrique. At this point, my mental time lapse takes effect and I have no memory of his arrival, only his presence for about seven years. “Papo,” as I called him, was a watchmaker. With a loupe to his eye and a steady hand, he repaired the intricate, delicate inner workings of precious timepieces. By necessity, he had developed infinite patience and a gentle touch. This made him an ideal stepfather.

One night, soon after his arrival, I walked into his and Mami’s bedroom and saw a project that he was working on in secret. It was big and covered with a cloth—I think so that I would not see it. I knew I was not supposed to be in the room, not supposed to see what was underneath. Of course I peeked—and I could not believe my eyes.

It was a perfect, beautiful Victorian dollhouse. I had never had such a happy shock. I almost fainted in my delirium. Could he have built this for me? He must have, bless Enrique. It was his gift to me, this perfect dollhouse, complete with tiny Christmas lights that would flare on and illuminate the miniature rooms and their lavish little furnishings.

My mom walked into the room and caught me. “Aha!”

I turned the color of a tomato, and even now I can still feel that heat scald my face. It was my joy, my shock at the gift, and the embarrassment at being caught. I don’t think I ever blushed again; I used up my entire lifetime supply of blush in that one moment. I vowed never to be caught with a guilty face again.

For the rest of my childhood, I would gaze into the dollhouse, transfixed. In a way, I moved into Enrique’s dollhouse. It was so magical and safe inside. And I could control the tiny family who lived in the house: Mami, Papo, and Little Girl. This new life was beyond what I ever imagined, and for this time interval I believed in Mami again: She had found me a good Papo. She had done the right thing and she had found him—a protector. Once again Mami made me happy, and I could dance and sing and enjoy the miniature perfect world of the dollhouse and the watches Enrique repaired.

A happy home has its own music. The house hummed with Mami’s Singer sewing machine as she worked the foot treadle. This machine was so old, it was not an electric model. All the energy came from Mami, from her foot tapping and rising and falling. It sounded like the roll of a Spanish rrrrrr! As if in accompaniment, I danced in time with its pulsing, while Mami was creating headdresses and costumes for me. All the apprehension that had been in me since we left Juncos began to settle down and at last vanish. In its place came a contentment that was long-running enough to take for granted. All the time, there was so much happy music—not only Mami’s sewing machine, but we also had a windup phonograph that sounded so much like a cat in heat when we wound it that we named it “La Gatita”—The Little Cat. Mami would sing along to the songs on the phonograph. She was singing and sewing; I was spinning and dancing. We bought fancier appliances, and Mami dressed them in her handmade slipcovers. Oh, I tell you it was a party again. It even smelled like Juncos—garlic, tomatoes, peppers, cilantro. Those were years filled with flavor and song. In his quiet, gentle way, Enrique had fixed everything.

Even our neighborhood was alive with happy sounds. The streets were filled with peddlers: “I cash clothes!” cried out the rag seller. Only it all ran together like a chant: “Icashclothes.” This call—“Icashclothes”—translated as, “I will buy your old clothes to resell.” Other men offered knife sharpening. A hunched little man yelled up, “Umbrellas! Got any umbrellas to fix today?” Even better was, “Ice! Ice! Ice!” in summer. And best of all was a trip to the corner soda fountain for my addictive favorite: a strawberry shake. Mami was relaxed and amiable in supplying necessary dimes and Indian-head nickels, sometimes even shining quarters (big money) to purchase treats.

On the city street, I played the sidewalk games—potsy, stickball, ring-a-levio, red light/green light, punchball, hopscotch. I made friends with other little girls who liked to dance; we put on costumes and spun through our living room. We even “entertained” on the rooftop; there are photos that demonstrate our high-flying kicks and deep pliés. We wore slave-girl costumes that proved prophetic of the roles I would play later in films.

Eventually I started doing a Carmen Miranda act at bar mitzvahs and wedding halls. My mother sewed me the costume and varnished the fake fruit for my headdress. I danced and sang “Tico Tico” like a miniature Carmen. Those were happy days. So content! So alive!

Even World War II was not perceived by me as the threat it was. As long as I could be cocooned in my apartment with Mami and Papo and mentally enter the magic world of my dollhouse, I felt safe. The war, to me, meant blackout drapes, radio broadcasts, and duck-and-cover drills in school. At the sound of a test siren, we would all fall to the classroom floor and crawl under our desks. As nothing ever happened, I perceived this more as a dramatic recess from the ongoing quizzes—which I dreaded more than the unknown war. The war meant opportunity—more jobs through the USO, the private, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission was to support the troops by providing entertainment “until everyone comes home.”

I would dance on the docks to entertain the troops waiting to ship out overseas. Sometimes, a gong rang to summon the sailors or the marines, and they had to get up and leave midnumber to board their ships and prepare to sail. I would be twirling around in a banana headdress and singing “Rum and Coca-Cola” for a packed house and suddenly the uniformed audience would bolt, leaving me clicking my castanets for only a few strays. The last bit of American entertainment many of those boys saw was little Rosita, with her varnished banana-and-pineapple towering temple of a headdress, a little girl who danced and sang as a miniature Carmen Miranda. I hope this helped. Now, it is poignant to realize many of those boys never did come home and I danced for kids who would die. At ten, I was oblivious to the true meaning of war and what tragedy would follow.

My show business career continued, undaunted by Hitler overseas. If anything, I took a flying leap forward—onto the stage and screen….

Soon Mami and I had secured booking agents of various types—agents who booked me to sing in clubs; agents who booked me to speak the roles in radio plays. I started with The Ave Maria Hour, which was in English on radio. My mother seemed to make friends quickly at the stations, and that probably helped get me some callbacks. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she also started a romance with one of the radio announcers, Edward Moreno. I was intent on the new career opportunities.

Soon I branched out. When popular movies played in Spanish-speaking neighborhood theaters, they needed a Spanish-language dubbing, just as if they played in a foreign country. I was the Spanish-dubbed voice to many great English-speaking films, which probably planted the seed: Why not me? Why couldn’t a little Latina be a leading lady, too?

Maybe the seed that sprouted later was planted then: Why couldn’t I play child star parts like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz for real? Movie dubbing and radio were my first acting schools, and I must have shown promise, for one opportunity led to another. Mami was elated—I was her pride but also her pocketbook. My earnings helped a great deal to support our little household.

Later in my life, I played Mama Rose in Gypsy. Of course my past as the breadwinning dancing daughter of a mother with great dreams for her child raised comparisons. Even the names were almost the same: Rosa Maria/Mama Rose. But on this count, I let Rosa Maria off the hook of being an overly aggressive stage mother. She did not need to prod or push me. I leaped to the stage. “This is all I want to do! This is what I love! This is what makes me happy!”

Being onstage, moving to music—performing! It made me deliriously happy. I could escape any worries and past grief when I performed. I felt I was free, flying, above everyday concerns (and I still do feel that way when I perform). Work that you love is the purist escape; it is also salvation.

While on the surface it may have looked like child labor, it was child labor by a very willing and happy child. Nothing gave me more pleasure than working. And my mami was part of it; I could not have done it without her. Not only had my mother designed and sewn my fanciful costumes, but she paid for all my lessons—which went beyond Spanish dancing to modern dance, ballet, tap. My feet were never still, and she was working night and day, sewing for others, cooking, doing whatever she could—and she did this joyfully also.

I was not exploited; we were a team. She was in it with me in a way no one else in my life ever did share my career and dream. Both of us would scour the trade papers, and I’d say, “I’d like to try out for this,” and she would support me.

She encouraged and clapped and cried out how wonderful I was, and I danced, sang, acted.

Mami began to dream of the “Great White Way,” and I was delighted to go there. The Great White Way was also a personal transformation. By age ten, I wanted to ditch the Carmen Miranda act and go big-time: Betty Grable was my new role model. I tried to transform myself—paler makeup, straight hair. I went to the Rose Meta House of Beauty in Harlem and asked them to get rid of my Puerto Rican kinks, my pelo malo. The Rose Meta House of Beauty torture-technicians poured lye on my hair and combed it straight, while my scalp felt as if it had caught fire. The treatment wore off in about a month, and the Hispanic kink reasserted itself. Nonetheless, I soldiered on, wearing little Judy Garland outfits, jumpers and hair tamed by pigtails. Cute, cute, all-American girl.

At thirteen I auditioned for and won my first part on Broadway. The play was Skydrift, starring Eli Wallach. The plot concerned a planeload of soldiers who were killed in the war but flew in as ghosts to revisit their loved ones one last time. I played a loved one.

My big scene was at a dinner table with the leading lady. On opening night, my innate theatrical sense told me things were not going over with the audience, so I tried to enliven the scene by slurping a spaghetti strand slowly, holding it high on a fork and sucking the noodle so it slithered into my mouth like a snake. It did seem to attract audience attention.

After the show, backstage, the leading lady, Lily Valenty, almost throttled me into becoming a real ghost. She actually took me by my little neck and shook me and, with a dramatic tremolo in her voice, said, “If you evah, evah do that again, no matter where I am, I will hear about it and I will find you and I will kill you.”

I nearly peed my pants.

But there was no need for her to kill me, as the show itself died—closed after that one performance. I couldn’t believe it; neither could my mother. But Rosa Maria Marcano had sat there in an orchestra seat, proud to see her child on Broadway—and to see her very first play ever.

Regardless of my very quick Broadway debut, I was incredibly happy. I felt such joy when I was on the stage and wanted to do nothing else. School became an unbearable distraction. I ducked out of classes whenever possible, and quite completely at the first opportunity. For a time I attended the Professional Children’s School, and then I stopped going and dropped out of school. My mother did not seem to care, and I was more happily involved in my show business career.

Oh, life in Nueva York could be good. Of course, in the very sunlit instant I had that thought, my stomach squeezed and I also believed, This will be taken away from me…. A shadow followed me like a backup dancer, making me worry that it would be only a matter of time before I would lose everything. This dark presence would pursue me for much of my life; she was an evil spirit, but also my alter ego. She followed me wherever I went and hissed, Your happiness won’t last….

THE LOSS OF PAPO

It seemed to me inevitable that as soon as life was happy and hopeful, it would all melt away quickly.

The person who brought joy and security back into my life, who brought light into my dark world, disappeared. Enrique lasted for about six years—the single stretch of my life in which I had a kindly “father.” My Papo. He kept the lights on, not only in the dollhouse, but in our apartment. He had a clever trick to stop the electric meter from working, so in essence we got our electricity for free. He would insert a hairpin in the light meter box in the hallway. When the meter reader came into the building, a cry went up—“¡El pillo!”—and someone in my apartment would fly at the box and withdraw the pin, and for a brief time the meter would spin, recording our kilowatts.

In truth, this “trick” made me anxious; whenever there was some unexpected knock on our door, I waited to be apprehended, to lose what happiness I had restored. And that dark presence was heard again; that little voice inside whispered, It can’t last. If only Enrique could have stayed. I might have been spared the agonies of my youth and turned into a different woman. My feelings for men would have been forever altered, and I am sure the impression would have been more favorable, for Enrique was unlike any other man in my mother’s orbit—consistent, gentle, loyal.

Of course she left him; she left him for another man.

Perhaps it was my fault. It was my show business career that ended her marriage to Enrique. Had I not occasionally sung on Spanish radio, she would not have met her next husband, Edward Moreno, whose name I bear along with my eternal distaste for the man himself. I never forgave Edward Moreno for breaking up my mother’s marriage to my beloved Papo, Enrique. That kind man, my Papo, had been the only man who gave me loving paternal care. My biological father, Paco, had disappeared so early, I had no good memory of him. And now another hurt—Papo had to leave, and in his place was the Latin lover, Edward Moreno, who seemed sleazy and false to me. I think I suffered the classic stepchild mistrust and dislike of a new stepparent. At the radio station, it was painful for me to watch my mother bat her eyes and speak in a coy, phony flirtatious way to Edward Moreno. She worshiped the man, and I could not understand why.

Enrique must have suspected he was to be replaced; he changed. Whereas once he had always been occupied in fruitful endeavor—fixing watches, enhancing the dollhouse, and generally being a pleasant, contented presence—he metamorphosed into a man hanging over a bottle of rum, pouring himself straight shots. I could feel the bitterness emanate from him like toxic cologne. I still think it was sad; he deserved much better treatment. And I would forever miss him—the only man I remember as a father, the one I called Papo. One day Enrique was gone and my mother was all eyes and coy whispers for his replacement—Eddie Moreno.

Edward Moreno, with his good looks, thick hair, and suave baritone voice, was the most cultivated-sounding man my mother had ever met. She widened her eyes when she saw him at the radio station, and although he was Mexican, he spoke to her in elegant Spanish. I had never heard a Hispanic man speak so articulately. And he had a beautiful, deep “radio” voice.

She wanted him and she got him. And the seething, mostly silent battle began: my cold war with my mother’s “hot” Latin lover. I avoided him as much as possible, which was easy, as I was out at work most of the time. I hated observing their passion. I had lost Papo and a good deal of Mami’s attention. It was because of Edward Moreno that I regarded Latin men with mistrust for a long time. When I finally had a Latino boyfriend, he was very cavalier, and I never had another. But now I understand that prejudice was unfair and there are many faithful, kind Latin men who make wonderful fathers and husbands. Yet “Latin lover” was a cliché that held true for Edward Moreno. I could see he was a flirt and I doubted he could be true to my mother. Later, he left his only child, his son, Dennis, which confirmed my low opinion of him. But nothing could dissuade my mother from desiring Edward Moreno. Too often I heard the bedsprings squeak and I wanted to scream. What became of Papo, kind Enrique? He did a dissolve, vanishing forevermore.

I turned out the lights in the dollhouse. Never again would I look for a real father. Or look to my mami for permanence.

Mami had let me down in other serious ways: Francisco had yet to appear; she could not be trusted. “Mami, ¿cuándo viene Francisco?” “Ay hija, ¡pronto! ¡Pronto!” Soon…but my baby brother never reappeared. Ever.

*   *   *

During this time, my life divided—a sharp boundary between my career and my home life. Increasingly my career took precedence, and my life at home, with Mami and the man I always loathed, Eddie Moreno, became merely a backdrop.

But that backdrop changed: We moved out of the city to a house in a Long Island town called Valley Stream. Even though my life was moving elsewhere, I could not help but feel the surge in my mother’s and my own spirit when we crossed the threshold into that first modest little brick house. A house! A real house in the real America, not one of the ethnic “ghettos.”

We were out of any version of el barrio. This was a white Wonder-bread American suburb on Long Island. We were only twenty miles outside of the city, but it felt like we were a world away. It was a small tract house, but to me it was like we were living in the wide-open country. In fact, our little house was beside the last remaining stretch of agriculture in the area: a beet farm. There was a big sky, deepest blue, with puffed clouds that rolled by. And at night we could hear little birds and animals call out to one another. At dawn, the sky was the same pink that suffused Juncos. Although we had no El Yunque mountain or rain forest, there were the fertile fields, the same green scent perfumed the air, and some nearby chickens could even be heard crowing. At dawn the birds screamed, and for some deep reason, their screams called forth contentment in me. I loved the call of the morning crows. No parrots or macaws. But suburban American birds tweeted—as did the nightingales and chickadees. Not coquí, but at night American bullfrogs who croaked basso profundo most of the time, but could also really harmonize their peeps in the night chorus. And we smelled the earth again, the loamy soil and the wild onion in the grass. Mami would get excited when she saw a monarch butterfly, and I did too.

I suppose this was living the American dream for Eddie and my mother. It hurts to say this, as I hated him so, but Eddie Moreno seemed to delight Mami. And even for me, living with him on Long Island gets mixed reviews. Eddie Moreno made that real, honest-to-God house possible. For a while, this made it easier to tolerate him.

For the first time I felt that being Judy Garland was within my pigtailed reach. I might have even been wearing a gingham pinafore or a pair of overalls. I was just your neighborly all-American girl, whose name happened to be Rosita!

The beet farm that started next to our little brick house at the very end of South Hommel Street seemed to me the epitome of Americana. I only wished that I liked beets! I would tiptoe between the deep scarlet-and-green-leafed rows to steal a few. I’d pull up a cluster of those fat-bottomed beets and let the real American dirt fall in clods at my feet, and I’d say, “Yup. That’s our farm, there, heh, heh, heh.” I became little Miss America! I really was Dorothy in my Long Island suburban version of Kansas.

The kids who lived in my area were so friendly and outgoing, I just couldn’t believe it! So different from the city. Nobody was swinging a bat or hissing, “Spics!” I was invited to parties and danced with nonethnic boys to “String of Pearls,” one of the great swing tunes of the time.

And, of course, I was a good dancer, so all the boys wanted to dance with me. I even had my first real crush. I met Bobby Laparcierie, the boy of my dreams—all-American, lanky, very witty (not funny, witty), whose intelligence and way with words just melted my heart. He was literally the boy next door, and I would crouch on the grass beside his house to peek in at him in the basement. Many years later, he appeared at my cabaret show, and I had him stand, lanky as ever, at the end of the evening as I introduced him to the audience. My heart still skipped a beat when I saw him.

Yet, that dark, niggling presence kept whispering that familiar chant. Like when I prepared for my first school dance: You’re not good enough.

The three boys that came to escort me waited at the door while I wept into the medicine cabinet mirror. I wouldn’t leave the bathroom. I was still no good, not right. In the mirror my skin was a sallow brown, a shade that would never be accepted, no matter what I tried to believe. Mami was loath to be the messenger, but in the end had to send them away without me.

And my tolerance of Eddie soured into chronic hostility. I always felt he would be like the tornado that descended on Dorothy’s Oz, turning everything upside down, then blowing out of our lives. And eventually I was proven right.

But as long as I was performing I was okay, and I took every opportunity, every job, to get out of the house and stay up on the stage.

Mami let me travel far and wide to work in nightclubs. I had an old suitcase jammed with my mami-made costumes that I lugged all over the place. The venues were not very glamorous, but to a girl my age, they meant I was making some real money for the first time. That money went to Mami for our combined expenses, but no question—at sixteen I had become a teenage breadwinner, heavily supplementing Mami and Edward’s earnings. I hit the road—alone—traveling by train and bus to distant cities to dance and sing.

Now, looking back, I think, How dangerous. How could she let me go? At that time, though, I was pleased to be working. But there were circumstances that were a little shady. I remember a show at one nightclub in Pennsylvania in particular. I entered the run-down establishment to discover that it was really a secret gambling club. The men couldn’t care less about seeing me and the other girls dance. They were gangsters, and in retrospect I shiver in relief that I was not raped, robbed, or worse.

Not that I didn’t have close calls. Some jobs were so far away that sometimes I had a six-hour commute by a relay of buses and trains, all the while lugging that suitcase. Even a teenager gets tired! Late one night, I made a mistake and accepted an older man’s seemingly kind offer to drive me home. Instead, as I slept soundly in the passenger seat, he drove me to a deserted, wooded dead end. I awoke with a start to the feel of his wandering hands on my body.

“What!” A chill went through me—this was New York, and I had heard plenty of tales; the tabloids screamed of young girls being found raped or dead in “secluded wooded areas.” How could I have been so foolish?

I thought fast and gasped, “I’m only sixteen!” Underage carried some weight in those days. His hands paused.

“You look older,” he said, and I could see he was still debating whether to force me or not.

“I am underage!” I gasped.

He sighed, disappointed, and drove me home. I tiptoed into the little brick house by the beet farm, and listened, without any awareness then of the irony, to the pants and sighs coming from my mother’s bedroom. I never accepted a ride again. I seized hold of those subway straps and hung on—for dear life and virtue.

Then, when I was seventeen, Mami’s belly began to swell. My mother didn’t say a word, but it was apparent: Another baby was on his way, a baby brother—buttery skinned, with a downy head and bright round brown eyes like Francisco’s. But he wasn’t Francisco. He was Dennis Moreno.

However, I absolutely adored my new little brother. He was so cute, and I reveled in being a big sister again. I played with him, tickling him, biting his toes, singing sweet songs to him—anything to make him smile. I didn’t even mind changing his diapers. I delighted in my dimpled roly-poly brother, despite my scorn for his father. But the truth was, I was already halfway out of the house, running toward my own future on very shaky high heels.

PART II

Hyperbolic Hollywood

MAKING MOVIES: MY LEAP TO THE SILVER SCREEN

Of course, every actress and dancer cherished a dream: to leap to the silver screen. The bar mitzvahs, Ave Maria Hour, and movie dubbing were the warm-up—the next great step would be on to film, and toward that goal, Mami and I left my eight-by-ten glossies and résumés at every casting office in town, and attended as many open calls and auditions as possible. It was at this point that I started using the name Rosita Moreno. Nobody could pronounce Alverio correctly, and I suspected if they couldn’t pronounce it they wouldn’t remember it. Why would I take the name of a man I despised? Honestly, it had nothing to do with him. The name was handy; it was convenient. And I actually thought it was a pretty name. So Rosita Moreno I became.

Mami and I went to the open calls and auditions on foot and by subway and bus—wearing out shoe leather and heels, spending what earnings I had on bus and train fare. And it wasn’t long before these efforts paid off: I was called back after a screen test. I auditioned for a large, juicy role in an indie film, which turned out to be the launchpad for three young actresses who would have major movie careers: Anne Jackson (a young woman married to Eli Wallach), Anne Francis (a young blond beauty soon to become very famous)—and me.

I must have been born to this: I made a quick adjustment from in-person performances, which are “large” in comparison to film, to the nuances of expression that are suited to the big screen.

*   *   *

SO YOUNG, SO BAD: WHAT MADE THEM THAT WAY? screamed the movie poster. The 1950 poster shows three slutty-looking women who look more like adult prostitutes loitering for johns than the juvenile delinquents we were alleged to be. The poster image is so caricatured that it is as distorted as a cartoon; it is hard to tell, but I think the slouching brunette is supposed to be me. The pretty blonde with the Veronica Lake–style hairdo and the distinctive beauty mark near her lip is Anne Francis (later of Forbidden Planet and Honey West fame). I don’t know which actress the other blonde, the one with the cigarette dangling from her lip, is supposed to represent, as she didn’t really look like anyone in the film, but it was probably a cartoon version of Anne Jackson. This was one of those posters that had nothing much to do with the nature of the movie.

Look closely at that poster, and as a backdrop motif you can see the villainous matron of the reform school spraying me and the other girl inmates with a huge fire hose.

On the surface, my first released movie looks like a prime specimen of the Hollywood B so-terrible-it’s-funny film. And for most of my life, that is how I viewed So Young, So Bad. You just don’t go around saying, “I’m so proud I was in So Young, So Bad.”

But was it that bad? Was it bad at all? Was I bad in it? Now, more than sixty years later, the movie is worth a second look.

Seen through the lens of time, and focused with more knowledge regarding the cast, writer, and director, So Young, So Bad offers some surprises. Maybe the picture is not what it sounds like; maybe the title and the poster were someone’s overwrought inspiration to promote the film, which was released within a day of the highly successful Caged!, a women-in-prison movie that received three Academy Award nominations. Caged!—“The Story of a Women’s Prison Today!”—was a similar story, with Eleanor Parker as the young girl in prison, and Agnes Moorehead as the witchy prison official.

Later in my life, the movie may have sounded laughable, but to the teenage me, Rosita Alverio Moreno, commuting from Valley Stream, Long Island, to the theater district, So Young, So Bad was a big break. It is also the only movie in which I’m credited under my real name, Rosita.

The picture was produced by and starred a very famous actor, Paul Henreid. Henreid had two iconic screen characters to his credit: Victor Laszlo, the noble leader of the Nazi resistance, in Casablanca, and he was Bette Davis’s married lover in Now, Voyager. It is in Now, Voyager that Paul Henreid, in one of film history’s most famous scenes, lights two cigarettes in his mouth at the same time, before proffering one to Bette Davis.

My part as “Dolores Guerrero, vagrant” is my first big-screen Hispanic role, but Dolores is no spitfire. She is the softest and sweetest of the inmates, given to welling up in tears and strumming sad, solitary songs on her guitar. She doesn’t seem especially vagrant-y. She suffers some breaks with reality and quivers in a corner from time to time. Dolores is shy, and has episodes of total hallucination and withdrawal. My ethnicity is, if anything, exaggerated in a positive way: On visiting day, my screen family—so generically ethnic they seem to be of every nationality—arrives in a joyful throng, carting a picnic basket and chianti bottles, and they soon launch into a family singalong.

Dolores Guerrero is one of the few roles that I played in which I was called upon to be “plaintive.” My first line is a wan, “I’m the only one who didn’t get to take a shower.” Mostly, I shuffle along with the other girls through a series of mistreatments.

I do get to sing and play guitar to the other inmates, however, and that is my favorite scene. The girls discover me, alone and crying yet again, but singing in Spanish through my tears. The girls all respond in wonder, and gradually I begin to smile again.

That is a rare happy moment for me as Dolores Guerrero, however; too soon, the vicious matron whacks off my hair (really my wig) and leaves me with a pixie cut that is actually quite cute and close to the way I style my hair now.

Henreid plays the sensitive, enlightened new institution psychiatrist who tries to make reforms, such as ending torturous punishments like fire hosing and solitary confinement in a black hole. It is his tender, regretful voice-over that narrates the saga of how he arrives at the reformatory in good faith, discovers the sadism, and fights to get rid of the evil of matron and her cohort.

The big scene occurs when the reformatory matron, who gives Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a run for her money, turns the fire hose on the girls in the basement and almost drowns a few. So Young, So Bad was low-budget, so we didn’t shoot at a studio. Our set was an old nursing home made to replicate a reform school. It was very authentic. Even the water in the hose gushed with real force, knocking us to the basement floor. And unlike “movie water,” which is usually at least tepid for the actors’ comfort, the reformatory school hose was spouting freezing-cold water. Where was the Screen Actors Guild when we needed our union?

The mean matron (played by Grace Coppin) also kills a pet bunny. Delicate Dolores (whose name means sorrows) can’t take the abuse; in the film’s climactic scene, she is found dead by hanging—a suicide. Cut down by Paul Henreid with what was supposed to be noble regret, I am sorry to report that the great actor used the scenes of cutting down my dead body as an excuse to run his hands over my breasts. We did many takes, and, of course, being dead, I could not even flinch, let alone protest. The subtext was funny: Paul Henreid never seemed to realize I was wearing falsies, and he was sneaking feels of foam rubber. An undercurrent of unwholesome desire runs—unintentionally, I am sure—through Paul Henreid’s performance. Sometimes the camera reveals more truth than the actors intend: There is a close-up of him looking down at Anne Francis that definitely borders on lechery.

For all the overhyped ads, the film is actually very nicely shot in black-and-white, directed by Bernard Vorhaus, and has an impressive roster of young actresses playing wayward girls: Anne Francis, of the famous birthmark near her lip, is achingly young, tall, slim, and blond, and turns in a terrific performance as the seductive ringleader who tries to escape. So Young, So Bad was also the first film for Anne Jackson. She plays a tough cookie whose aggression is channeled into writing.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that the creative trio responsible for the film—Bernard Vorhaus; the screenwriter, Jean Rouverol; and Paul Henreid—were about to be blacklisted. Vorhaus and Rouverol were members of the Communist party, and Paul Henreid was blacklisted as a “Communist sympathizer.” Henreid, born the son of an Austrian baron, became very left-wing, despite his aristocratic background. His political inclinations took a hard left turn when he was filming in Austria and his crew was attacked and pursued by Nazis.

There had been major studio interest in the film until the blacklist went into effect. After failing to get that financial backing, Paul Henreid put up fifty percent of the funding, and it was the best investment he ever made. So Young, So Bad turned out to be very profitable, and one of the first successful “independents.”

Over time, the picture has gained some respect as a Time Warner classic. It is well loved by viewers, and I can see it in a new light myself.

So Young, So Bad—was it really that bad? Now that I am so old, so good, I think it is a fair film for its era and very watchable. It deserves the cult status it has earned. I’m so pleased that every notice of the movie mentions “Rita Moreno (appearing under her real name Rosita Moreno).” Perhaps in the tremulous Dolores, there was also more truth than I realized then. At that point, and even now, I was more vulnerable than “spitfire,” and as I discovered later, suicide would become an act with which I was all too familiar.

On review, I would give the film several stars, and I have no regrets.

HOLLYWOOD HEAVEN: LOUIS B. MAYER AND MGM

When I was five, I reversed Dorothy’s enchanted journey and stepped out of Technicolor Oz when I left the vibrant-hued Puerto Rican rain forest for gray New York. Twelve years later, I recrossed that threshold into the brilliantly colored kingdom of Hollywood.

When I was sixteen, I would get the biggest opportunity of my young life. Right before I landed the role in So Young, So Bad, a talent agent spotted me at a dance recital and recommended me to the superwizard mogul Louis B. Mayer—the Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios, the huge studio that had produced The Wizard of Oz and hundreds of other major motion pictures. MGM and its rival studio, Universal, vied for preeminence in show business at the time, but it was MGM that claimed “more stars than there are in the heavens.”

My fateful meeting with Mr. Mayer was arranged not long after I finished filming So Young. Could little Rosita Dolores Alverio from Nowhere, Puerto Rico, possibly join the ranks of Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and my own personal teenage idol, Elizabeth Taylor? Although Rosa Maria Marcano extolled my looks—“Nonni, joo are the most beautiful girl I ever saw. No one is prettier than joo. No one!”—I took her words with more than a few grains of salt. I was a five-foot-tall, skin-one-shade-too-dark Hispanic girl whose feet still felt like leather soles from running barefoot on the rough roads of Juncos. I knew how much I relied on Maybelline and other Woolworth’s cosmetics to create my beauty. Could I possibly transform myself into a legendary beauty? In my mind, I never looked better than okay, but I knew I could “doll up” well and present a glamorous image if I worked on it.

I would try. This was my big chance, and Rosa Maria Marcano and I knew it. We flew into fast-forward to redo my entire appearance. Of all the MGM stars in my age category—which included Deanna Durbin, Debbie Reynolds, and Jane Powell—the one who reigned supreme, with her violet eyes and high-raised bosom and tiny waist, was British-born fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. I sat down and watched, along with the world, as this supernaturally gorgeous young girl starred in a series of animal-love movies, such as National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, and was propelled to superstardom. I studied her unique face with determined interest: What made her so impossibly beautiful? Was it the near-mutant genetics—violet eyes, double eyelashes, thick but uniquely slanted black eyebrows, the graceful Cupid’s bow of her full lips?

Violet eyes were impossible to replicate, but the rest could be mimicked. My mother and I set to work with lighter facial foundation, eye pencils, shadow, and lip brushes. The hairstyle was the only part that was easy. But with work and artistry, Elizabeth Taylor’s eyebrows and lips were superimposed on my face. My mother and I worked as on a palette: Renoir and Modigliani with five-and-dime cosmetics. As makeup artists, we were world-class: In the mirror, a semblance of Elizabeth Taylor emerged. I looked back at “her” reflection in my mirror. I didn’t have violet eyes, and even I hesitated to add the finishing touch—her famous beauty mark—on my right cheek, but otherwise, it was Elizabeth Taylor who stared back at me.

But how to simulate the Elizabeth Taylor body? What of the impossible combination of high, creamy cleavage and a wasp waist? Face and body makeup, paler than my natural skin tone, gave me her English complexion; creative brassieres and a waist cincher lifted and squeezed. I felt my inner organs compress, but with a little help, I, too, had a hand-span waist. Breasts I never had were added. Creamy they could never be, but I could display the new cleavage and hope for the best.

We spent our savings on hair salon and nail salon appointments, and bought an entire new Elizabeth Taylor wardrobe. Rosa Maria Marcano stood back and sighed. “Perfecto!” I looked in the mirror and saw…a stranger. But gorgeous. With such alchemy and spendthrift daring, how could we miss?

We went on our way to my go-see with Louis B. Mayer, my head held high, breasts pushed up high, and hopes high. I winced as I walked on my new, painful spiked heels past the other look-alike little brick houses on our block on the border of the beet farm, to catch the bus to my future. I teetered onto the bus, then boarded the LIRR to the stunned stares of the other passengers. Rosa Maria Marcano beamed. She herself looked like she could be Elizabeth Taylor’s mother—Hispanic style.

The journey from Valley Stream to the Waldorf Astoria at 49th Street and Park Avenue did not measure very far in time or distance, but the Waldorf existed in another zone, a stratosphere away. My mother and I had never even gone to a hotel before. As I could not truly walk in my new high-heeled shoes, we splurged on a yellow Checker cab to take us from Penn Station on 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue to the famous hotel.

Louis B. Mayer, the Wizard Star Maker, was not exactly waiting for us in his castle tower, but we were “expected.” That alone was such a miracle, my heart pounded and my palms moistened. Under my Elizabeth Taylor–style low-cut, bosom-revealing blouse, beads of non–Elizabeth Taylor perspiration gathered. I willed my body not to sweat.

We passed through the guard stations of Oz—manned by doormen and a concierge who directed us to the Waldorf Towers penthouse. We had never heard the word “penthouse” and stared at the elevator buttons. Afraid to be late, we took a stab at “PH.” Rosa Maria Marcano and I ascended. I knew Louis B. Mayer was the star maker and the star acquirer. He had fought Darryl Zanuck at Universal Studios for Elizabeth herself, both men crying out, “Sign her, sign her! Don’t wait for a screen test!” Louis B. Mayer lost the first round, and Elizabeth Taylor went to Universal for the first year of her Hollywood career—until she was fired for “her prematurely adult face.” Aha! Mayer knew, as he always knew: She was a star, little old adult face and intense expression or not. From then on, Elizabeth Taylor was Mayer’s prize gem.

Could I be his next?

There he was, Louis B. Mayer, in a suite so luxurious I could not take it in. And the view! ¡Dios mío! Seemingly all of Manhattan spread out below. I could imagine him staring out at the city like a king surveying his kingdom. But I could not look at skylines; I had to focus on who was directly in front of me: the little man who would decide the course of my life.

The Wizard of the Waldorf was a squat little man, balding, with very little silver hair, who wore wire-rimmed glasses. I didn’t know it then, but Louis B. Mayer, born Lazar Meir and originally from Minsk, had traveled an immigrant journey parallel to my own. He landed first in Canada, where he was chased on the mean streets of Saint John, New Brunswick, by Canadian bullies screaming, “Kike! Kike!” before he arrived in the movie capital of the world to eventually become the king.

But we weren’t here to reminisce about our humble beginnings, and our meeting was short. I hardly had time to exhale—which was just as well, as that would have been difficult in my waist cincher. He held out his hand, which was the first manicured male hand I had ever seen, let alone held. His skin was soft as a baby’s. He checked me out for a matter of seconds before something in his eyes sparked and he said the equivalent of, “Sign her, sign her!”

“She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor!” the wizard decreed. “How does a seven-year contract sound to you, young lady?”

I levitated. My mother levitated. The Waldorf Towers spun around, and in my high-heeled slippers, I rematerialized on the studio lot in Culver City. It would be a long time before I wished to be back on the farm “in Kansas”—or its New York equivalent: a suburb next to a beet farm in Valley Stream. I did not have violet eyes, but I never looked back.

Rosa Maria Marcano and I were delirious with joy. We picked up and moved, with Dennis, to a charming cottage in Culver City, near the MGM lot, that the studio secured for us. At this point, Eddie Moreno decided to sign up for the army and was sent to Japan. Mami didn’t seem fazed by this new arrangement. This is what we had fantasized about—the possibility of my being a young star and making it big, and our whole family living a more glamorous life in proximity to the stars. As for myself, I was thrilled that he was no longer around.

It all happened so quickly. We sold the house near the beet field and moved with everything we owned. I bought an old car and learned to drive. I imagined myself scooting around Hollywood, meeting the stars, actually working with them! No more buses and trains. I did not have the hubris to imagine limousines. And yet I never really doubted that I would act in movies. I had a sense of destiny. My dreams were coming true—in detail.

Hollywood was everything we had imagined and more. And there were palm trees and our own familiar warm, sunny climate. This was the best of Juncos plunked down in Hollywood. My mother was sure I would become famous: “Nonni,” she said, “joo are a star here.” I was making two hundred dollars a week! That was a lot of money at the time. We were rich! No one could have been more dazzled by this new world than I was—this might as well have been Bel Air and a million-dollar contract. I had moved to Hollywood heaven—to MGM, where there were “more stars than in the heavens” and they were everywhere to be seen. And now I walked among them.

*   *   *

On my first day at the studio lot, I went to meet the producer of the film I’d already been assigned to—The Toast of New Orleans—who invited me on a tour of the MGM lot. But first he took me to the Commissary for lunch. Wow! The scents, the mounds of steaming exotic foods—roast beef and gravy, pure white mounds of mashed potatoes, quivering molds of Jell-O trapping jewellike fruit and everywhere I looked they were there. Crazily beautiful people, Ava Gardner, Jean Tiernary, oh gulp, Joan Crawford. All of them staggeringly beautiful. They were another race. Was I really a part of this?

And then on our way out, I met my first real movie star, who greeted me with a raffish grin and a know-it-all look in his eyes. A lock of dark hair hung over his forehead and left eye. Rhett Butler. Clark Gable. He touched my hand and gave me an even bigger smile than I had seen on Rhett. If you have never been close to a movie star in your life, the impact is surreal: On the one hand, most stars are shorter than they are on screen (except John Wayne, who was somehow bigger), but their faces loom larger than normal humans’, coming right at you into your own face.

There he was, with his thick eyebrows and big ears. It was impossible for me to even speak; I squeaked. Clark Gable did not seem aware of his effect. In my head I heard him say, Rosita, I don’t give a damn.

In reality, Clark Gable said, “Rosita. Great name, kid.”

I did not have that name for long.

I was summoned to the office of the most famous and powerful casting agent in Hollywood, Bill Grady. My heart hammered within the confines of my waist cincher.

It won’t work out after all, I thought as I climbed up the narrow stairs to his backlot aerie. The dark, unimpressive staircase gave me intimations: I was about to be fired. They had taken a closer look, under the glaring sun of Hollywood, and seen that I was no Latina Elizabeth Taylor. There was no such thing. I was a Puerto Rican kid without a prayer, and my nemesis alter ego, that voice, added, A Puerto Rican kid with a bit of acne that all the pancake makeup in the world cannot quite conceal. I was sure I would be returned, like an impulse buy, to whatever bargain basement I came from.

Bill Grady’s gaze narrowed as he examined my face. He did nothing to reassure me. I felt my eyes, which I knew were the wrong color, widen. I was also aware that they had a tendency to “pop,” so I concentrated on getting them to calm down and settle back in their sockets. I braced myself for the worst: I would have to go home and go to secretarial school. I had tried secretarial school once and run, silent-screaming, back to my mother and another round of auditions, which I thought had paid off.

I almost heard him say, We’re letting you go, but no, he was saying something different. He was saying, “Your name has to go.” He squinted again. “Too Italian.”

In a trance, I heard him speculate on possible screen names: “Ruby Fontino? Marcy Miranda?”

I didn’t even have time to flinch. The names got worse. “Orchid Montenegro!”

I didn’t want to be Orchid Montenegro. Or any one of them. The truth was, I liked my name—Rosita Dolores Moreno. Hadn’t I already debuted as a vagrant reform-school girl in So Young, So Bad? Would I lose whatever following I might have picked up? (I did not even have the time or confidence to consider: Would I lose myself?)

“I got it!” Bill Grady was saying. “How about Rita, after Rita Hayworth?” I trembled—at least there was recognition for me. Rita Hayworth/Margarita Cansino, my dance teacher Paco’s niece. She of the raised hairline and lengthened legs. A Spanish girl goddess with an English name.

“Rita Moreno,” Bill Grady decreed. “That’s who you are and that’s who you will be.” In that moment my old life would officially end.

STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS

The first two films I made for MGM were The Toast of New Orleans and Pagan Love Song. Viewed today, in which even our movies are more cynical and realistic, their gaiety seems a demented delirium. Why is everyone so happy? Why are we leaping around, bursting into song without any excuse, with wild disregard for the actual musical traditions and culture of the native characters—Cajuns and Tahitians?

In The Toast of New Orleans the Cajuns sound like Italians, and the semiunderwater musical Pagan Love Song might as well be Oklahoma! Esther Williams and handsome Howard Keel take soaring tower dives between crooning out odes to Tahiti. In both movies, the plots are thin to nonexistent: In The Toast of New Orleans, a simple Cajun fisherman, Pepe (played by Mario Lanza), woos and wins an aristocratic opera star (Kathryn Grayson). Pagan Love Song revolves around an even flimsier plot in which Esther Williams plans to leave Tahiti (but of course she won’t), and Howard Keel seems about to lose his entire stock of coconut oil (but of course he doesn’t). In the end, everyone kisses, sings, dances, swims…without an obvious pause for breath or attempt at credibility.

There is a manic quality to both musicals—everyone is smiling and skipping and pretending to be ethnicities they are very obviously not. Esther Williams is supposed to be a Tahitian (okay, maybe a half Tahitian, but even with brown makeup slathered everywhere, she looks, at best, like a shapely Miami Beacher with a great tan). And in The Toast of New Orleans, the obviously Italian Mario Lanza is a Creole shrimp fisherman who bursts into operatic song. In both pictures, I play “cute” ethnics and employ my newly invented “universal ethnic accent,” which is a coy pidgin English of no discernible authentic origin.

In Pagan Love Song, as the native girl Terru, I wear a two-piece sarong and continually stand on tippy-toes to look up adoringly at Howard Keel (I have no choice but to look up—he was six-foot-four). Our big scene—which admittedly was a huge break for a teenage girl from Juncos, via Washington Heights—is “The House of Singing Bamboo,” in which Howard Keel sings a song originally created and sung by Judy Garland as “Hayride.” The song is an odd transplant to Tahiti, and I don’t actually sing, but bang rhythmically on the bamboo alongside Howard Keel as he croons.

In The Toast of New Orleans, as the Cajun girl Tina, I don’t really have a plotline, but I burst forth instantly—singing and dancing up a frenzy of swirling skirts and petticoats that presage my skirt-swirling turn in West Side Story. And I dance and sing with none other than the fantastic dancer James Mitchell. I had been terrified to dance with such a classically trained ballet dancer (he was Agnes de Mille’s protégé), but I showed him one of my Spanish dances and he was agreeable—I danced for him and he approved. I assume that if he had deemed me not worthy, my dance number would have been cut. We do a wild number called “Tina Lina”—swirling and spinning and affecting quite a bit of the mating dance in a ritualized Hispanic manner, so in a sense I was right at home. Behind us, trying to obscure his stocky legs while belting out lyrics, was Lanza.

During my dance, I pass my breast within fractions of James Mitchell’s chest and then taunt him by spinning off…and spin off I do at the finale: smack at Mario Lanza, who releases his perilous glass-shattering high note…. After all that strenuous workout and the supple grace and strength demonstrated by James Mitchell, I, Tina, still prefer Mario Lanza (who doesn’t want me, of course). In that regard, the film came closer to being realistic than at any other moment.

Mario Lanza (real name Alfred Arnold Cocozza—changed, of course, by Bill Grady at MGM) was thirty at the time, with a beautiful tenor voice that would later enable him to play his idol, Caruso. Offscreen, he was helpless to his addictions—food and alcohol. Whenever I went into his dressing room, I found him eating gargantuan amounts of food. Mario had an insatiable appetite—he was famous for eating two and a half chickens at one sitting, and I always wondered, Why two and a half—why not quit at two or go on for three?

The very first time I walked in on him on his lunch break, Mario was polishing off his third full-size pizza pie and downing a full bottle of red wine. It was no mystery why his weight fluctuated between 250 pounds and the 160 pounds he needed to weigh to look good on film. Even when he was 160, as I danced around Mario, I noticed that the buttons on his vest were popping.

Kathryn Grayson, his aristocratic costar, complained that he tried to French-kiss her on-screen; she said he pushed his garlic-laden tongue into her mouth when she could not get away. She had to sing despite gagging.

One night, offscreen, drunken, he staggered under Kathryn Grayson’s window and serenaded her in his perfect tenor, “Be My Love”—until her boyfriend came out, bellowing. Mario, though young, was long married and a father of four. He was wild, woolly, and mischievous.

I couldn’t help but like him, and only eight years later I was saddened to read of his death in Rome at age thirty-eight. He had been, as usual, trying to lose weight for a role, and subjected himself to a “twilight sleep” crash weight-loss treatment that kept the dieter under deep sedation. He’d also been taking drafts of the urine of pregnant women. These methods were controversial and were suspected in hastening his sudden death. There may have also been a genetic factor, though, as later two of his four children died at a young age. A few months after Mario’s death, his wife, only thirty-seven, died of “broken heart” syndrome. Within less than a year, their children were orphaned. So sad!

Looking back at the movie now, so light and frothy, it is impossible to imagine what tragedy lay ahead. There was no shadowy premonition, but Mario Lanza did seem to be careening out of control in that all-too-familiar Hollywood way that seems to ensure an untimely end. He was a substance abuser, but his substance wasn’t heroin or cocaine; it was a triple order of family-size pizza with all the extra toppings—but maybe it was just as deadly as an overdose.

Thanks to his recordings, Mario Lanza remains an icon in the opera world. But who can hear his rich tenor and not feel sorrow that he died so young? His movie persona lives on for me, as it does for his many fans. In my mind I see him still, jumping up at that banquet scene in The Toast of New Orleans and startling everyone when he announces, “When I feel happy, I have to sing!” And bursting forth with his trademark song, which will also echo forever in my memory: “Be My Love.”

Filming Pagan Love Song was a wonderful experience. I will say that the joy that suffused the film was also true off-camera. Such total euphoria offscreen on a shoot was unusual. Esther Williams, the competitive swimmer, appeared genuinely joyous as she tower-dived through cerulean clouds; she was ecstatic. Howard Keel too seemed endlessly affable, and willing to joyfully sing and simultaneously spring off tower diving boards as well. It turned out that Esther Williams was pregnant by her adored husband at that time, Ben Gage, and she was very happy about that. I have to say, she seemed a very contented person generally, and of unbelievable physical prowess and daring. Though pregnant, she did all her own stunts, and continued to do so through successive pregnancies and films. She was…well, buoyant.

However, now when I reconsider the film, I am a bit embarrassed by the disrespect it shows to Tahitians. Nineteen fifty was a different time, and it was routine to show such blatant disregard for native people, who were treated in this film with a celebratory condescension. In Pagan Love Song, the natives are delighted to do heavy field labor and scale coconut trees without pay, in exchange for a chance to have a party and sing and dance. Right. Obese “Tahitian” women (really Samoans) are shown enjoying a game of skip-rope. Every single Polynesian person is depicted with an IQ of about seventy and the maturity of an agreeable three-year-old.

I am afraid that I embodied every cliché of the coy, childlike Polynesian as Terru. I was never less than giddy—giggling and squealing and sulking in turn. If anything, my “brother” Tavae is more demented and downgraded, and together we sink our coconut canoe and sputter through our cute near-drowning. Poor Charles Mauu, who played my brother. He actually was Tahitian; it must have been painful for him to see his culture ridiculed. Or maybe, as is often the bottom line with actors, he was just glad to get the work.

(Aside: I didn’t know how to swim until I filmed that sinking-canoe scene, but I learned, just as I learned every movie skill I needed—when I needed it. Throw me in the water, and I will act as if I can swim.)

Did any of this strike me at the time as racial stereotyping? I was eighteen, wearing a sarong and ensconced on a tropical island set with stars on location in Hawaii. What do you think? It was paradise. And I was having the time of my life.

*   *   *

My next film was one of the great—possibly the greatest—MGM musicals of all time. Gene Kelly picked me for Singin’ in the Rain. The icing on this sweet prize was that I would not be playing a coy little ethnic maid with my own pidgin accent; I was playing Zelda Zanders, the ingenue who becomes jealous of Debbie Reynolds. It was refreshing, after being cloyingly sweet for too long, that I could play the nasty little snitch. And I wore the most gorgeous silk flapper dresses ever!

In retrospect, I cannot believe my temerity: Gene Kelly asked me to cut my long curly black hair. You would think I would leap for the hairdressing scissors. But oh, no. Little Rosita chose this moment to spit a bit of fire: “I don’t cut my hair, Mr. Kelly.” And I had the nerve to go on: “Cutting hair is not the custom in Puerto Rico. Girls and women never cut their hair; it is a point of feminine pride.”

He caught his breath. I don’t think young actresses countered his requests very often. Then he said in that mellifluous voice of his, “Okay, you’ll wear a wig.”

And I did. A gorgeous red flapper wig. I was awfully hot under the lights. But beneath all the layers, Rosita’s hair remained uncut.

Meanwhile, what a thrill to work with Kelly and Donald O’Connor. Debbie Reynolds was actually more of a novice than I was. I was a dancer, at least; Debbie had never danced—she had been a gymnast. I will say she worked hard to catch on, and I worked hard to perfect the intricate steps laid out by Gene Kelly, who was pleasant but strict about getting it right.

The sad story was Donald O’Connor, a very young actor/dancer/singer at the time. He was such an enormous talent, and the tragedy is that he was never truly acknowledged in his lifetime for the inspired performer that he was. He had grown up a child actor in a vaudeville family, and he had the proverbial rubber bands in his legs. I watched every single take—and there were many, for various reasons—as he climbed the wall to get the perfect cut on the “Make ’Em Laugh” number. I think he had to do it four hundred times, and he got bruises and rug burns and went to the hospital afterward. He was also smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. He was a brilliant dancer, but in my opinion he stole more than one dance sequence from Gene—particularly that “Moses Supposes” number! No one had ever done anything like it. That man could dance like no one else.

But of course, in the stupid ironies of “the business,” Donald O’Connor’s star didn’t get to shine as brightly as it should have. You see, Donald had been “loaned” from Universal, at that time regarded as a very inferior studio, to do Singin’ in the Rain, and after it was wrapped, Donald was sent back. It sounded like “sent back to prison,” and in a way it was. Universal did not make the prime quality musicals that the Arthur Freed unit at MGM did. At Universal, they stuck Donald into a long, long contract with Francis the Talking Mule. He had to talk to that mule for a decade or more. No wonder he drank. A lot.

When people think of Singin’ in the Rain, the classic scene of Gene Kelly skipping down the street singing the title song is the first thing that comes to mind. That scene has gone down in history as the most ebullient moment in cinema. I was there watching the day they filmed it. I was always there watching; I never left the sets, even when I was not in a scene. So I know the painful truth behind that ebullience. The day of the shoot, Gene Kelly was almost deathly ill, and he had to spend the day dancing and singing under a heavy synthetic downpour. He was running a 103-degree fever, and the water was ice-cold. (When did Hollywood catch on that the water could be warm?)

The longer Gene Kelly skipped and sang, the harder and colder that water must have felt. I winced every time he closed that umbrella. At a key moment, the water actually gushes straight from a gutter rigged to dump directly on his head and he takes his hat off! And sings right up into the downpour: “I’m happy again!” He was lucky to survive.

Gene Kelly remains in my mind a classy performer in a classic film, showing the ultimate in classic determination. I was inspired—for life.

I was riding high. Three musicals in two years, working alongside some of the greatest performers in Hollywood. This was the big time! How far little Rosita Dolores Alverio from Juncos had come! I had left that life—I had left her—far behind.

STILL ROSITA

Hollywood was a world away from Washington Heights, a universe away from Juncos. But just as my star was rising, my old life would catch up with me, blindsiding me. A trip back east and an unexpected reunion with none other than Paco Alverio would remind me that I was still Rosita.

I, along with a number of MGM players (I remember Katy Jurado was among them), was sent to a cinema back east—somewhere in Connecticut or maybe Philadelphia—to help dress up the opening of an MGM film. I don’t remember the film—it must have not been a great one. MGM must have felt it needed some help or we wouldn’t have been carted there. I do remember this promotional delegation was made up of a group of lesser players. I’d probably already filmed Pagan Love Song, and it may have been on the way to release. I was brought in as a young starlet for the preshow announcement and the premiere party.

Out of the past, from nowhere, it seemed, there was my father standing in the wings. Somehow he had been admitted backstage on a special pass.

It took a few seconds for my eyes and mind to adjust to this Paco: He was not the young Paco I vaguely remembered from Puerto Rico. This Paco was an old, old man, wizened from the sun; his slicked hair was almost gone; he was balding and had a pleading look on his face, as if he already knew he was not going to be welcome.

Seeing my father was a slap in the face of memory: his eyes, darting, his mustache, even thinner…Yes, it was him. His slouch was gone; now he leaned forward, a supplicant. His little face screwed into a silent apology.

Flash to the last time I had seen him: as my mother held me up on the deck of the SS Carabobo for that last look. Flash farther back: Don’t look there, under the outhouse door, into the fetid shadow. Something dangling in the dark.

Paco Alverio reappeared in the shadowed wings of some grand old cinema—whatever its name was—fancy the way they were in the fifties: gilt encrusted, the movie “palace” of Pennsylvania or whichever nebulous state in my memory. And he was not alone. Paco Alverio had brought his “new” family with him. In my memory, his little group consisted of two boys, a girl, and a woman who had the beaten look of a servile wife. Or is it my imagination filling in the details?

The children seemed embarrassed and discomfited. In my memory, they cower behind their mother, holding her skirt. And they are so tiny. The new wife was tiny too, tinier than I am. They were a Lilliputian family from another time and place.

Paco Alverio introduced me to his wife. I don’t remember her name, only that her hair was permed, and he introduced me to his children. (I can’t quite say his “other” children—I felt so disconnected from him, from all of them—but I do remember him saying, “These are your brothers and sister.”)

He hugged me with tears in his eyes, and said something like, “I know. I should have tried.” Meaning, I guess, that he’d failed as my father. Failed? How about disappeared? Become invisible? How about been nonexistent?

I was angry with this stranger who, now that he had seen me in films, suddenly showed up. This stranger who’d never made an effort to help my mother out in any way. Who drove her away from home with his cheating. I was further angered that he’d brought a sob story with him to get a pass backstage: “I’m her long-lost father.”

Katy Jurado, being Hispanic and empathetic (the two go hand in hand), was already misting up, thinking that she was witnessing a great moment in my life, and was telling everyone backstage who would listen as we stood in the stage-left wings, “It’s her long-lost father; it’s her long-lost father!” Not too many of the actors were interested, because they were going over the lines they had to utter onstage at any moment. “Long-lost father. Nice.”

“Two minutes!” the stage manager hissed. Leaving my side one by one, the actresses and actors were vanishing into the stage lights, as if being beamed up to another planet…and I was next!

I stage-whispered to Paco Alverio, “Write down your address and phone number.”

He fumbled for a piece of paper and scribbled down something and handed it to me. Of course, I had no place to put it, so I folded it and stuffed it down my cleavage, then ran onstage and into the white light. And then I was beamed up myself, smiling and mouthing my scripted jokes. The stage was hot and I felt myself begin to sweat. But it was also a “warm bath,” as they say, and the heat and light embraced me and did beam me up—back into my new life on another planet.

The applause went on for a bit. Was it for me or for gorgeous Katy Jurado (later a Marlon Brando love, a rival, but at that moment my comrade in sequins) or for both of us? By the time we were finished and I ran back on my wobbly high heels to the wings, Paco Alverio had disappeared for good. Forever.

Maybe it was that he reappeared and disappeared with such unexplained suddenness, but I felt my anger surface—scalding hot—and I began to tremble with rage, with all the words I had not had time to utter: Where were you all my life? Why didn’t you ever help my mother? Why didn’t you try to find me before? What are you doing here, now that I am in bright lights? Cashing in?

I remembered the paper I’d wadded up and stuck in my dress. I reached in to retrieve it, and of course it had gotten wrinkled and damp. I unfolded it and smoothed it out, and I could just make out his written address in New York. There was no phone number. Had he just moved to America and had no phone yet? Or did he just not have enough money for a phone? Or was Paco Alverio now so sensitive, he realized that I would never dial his number? This time, was he courteous in leaving, or did he slink off, knowing he was unwanted?

In the heat of my rage, I went back to the dressing room and cleared a spot amid the makeup bottles, tubes, and brushes. I saw my own eyes, bright in the mirror—too bright. I wrote fast—too fast:

You were never in my life. I have nothing to say to you now. Don’t try to contact me ever again.

I hesitated over the signature. Who was signing this? Rita Moreno…or…the little girl he never bothered to see?

I pressed down hard and the point on the fountain pen spluttered its royal blue blood.

Rosita

*   *   *

Was it days, weeks, or months or years later that I regretted mailing that letter? Now I feel the ache of lost chances—my chance to know more, to hear Paco Alverio’s reasons (excuses). I tossed off, in my anger, an opportunity. Is there anything sadder than permanent regret?

It was fairly soon that I realized my other real loss: I had lost my chance to connect to another person I loved, and when I said his name, I trembled again—not with anger but with longing for someone who would now never be found: “Francisco.”

*   *   *

Sometime around then, when I had that ill-starred reunion with Paco Alverio, my mother received an ultimatum from her second husband, Edward Moreno. Moreno, still in the army, contacted my mother and asked her to join him in Japan. Rosa Maria could either join him or not, but if she didn’t, it would have an obvious effect on their marriage.

So far as I can recall, my mother never hesitated: She would remain with me and Dennis in the little cottage in Culver City. Why did she make this choice? Was she choosing her daughter over her husband? Or was the marriage ending anyway? I never thought to question her decision to remain behind with me. She was enjoying my “stardom,” our new life in sunny California, and the sweet little cottage that felt like home. Her commitment to me had always been absolute. Me staying there and Mami on another continent? I could not imagine such a thing, and apparently neither could she.

Edward Moreno walked out of our lives. Soon the distance became a true divorce, and Edward Moreno existed only as a silver-tongued radio voice coming over the radio airwaves with pretty poor reception from the faraway land of Japan. Also inevitable: his acquisition of a Japanese wife and a “new” Moreno family.

I didn’t miss Edward Moreno. I had always loathed him, and his absence from our life was a pleasure. I think Dennis felt differently. He had grown into a boy who was tall for a Latino his age, who moped about the house. Dennis looked lonely even when we were all with him. My mother nagged him: “Why don’t you go out and play ball? Why he watch so much TV?” And I ran interference for him, saying, “Mami, just leave him alone.”

Then one day, she did.

With the awful timing only real life can achieve, no sooner had her husband left than I, her sole remaining breadwinner, lost my job.

After the headiness of my sort-of starring in three major MGM musicals and hanging out with the greatest stars “in the MGM heavens,” my charmed existence skidded to an abrupt halt. No one was calling me in—for any other movie or even on a go-see. It was as if they forgot I existed. One day, unable to bear the suspense, I went into the office to take the bad news on the chin, and it came slamming at me: Bill Grady told me, “You’re fired. They’re dropping you like a bad habit.” Just like that. And you know what I said? “Thank you.”

I was evicted from Oz with a thud when the Wizard pulled a lever that terminated my contract. He simply did not renew the option and I was instantly among the unemployed.

Why? That is the most dangerous question to ask yourself when you are dumped—whether by a studio or a man. The answer, at such an abysmal moment, tends to be: “It’s my fault.”

Had I been too coy with my transethnic accent? When I review Pagan Love Song, I ask, Maybe I was “too cute” as Terru? Didn’t I sing and dance well enough? Once the Elizabeth Taylor makeup was removed, was I pretty enough?

My answer was to retreat to my room, and brood. Perhaps basing my pretense that I was still contracted to MGM on Laura’s ruse in The Glass Menagerie, I concealed my unemployment from my mother until it became obvious.

Needing money, Rosa Maria Marcano went back to work the way only Rosa Maria Marcano could—rolling up her sleeves and working night and day. Again she sewed, she designed, and then she cooked! In restaurants. With her incredible adaptation to extreme circumstances, she became an assistant cook. This was amazing, and her new income could support our little cottage lifestyle while I was “in between pictures.”

I gathered up what would always help me through my life: the determination to persevere. To stand up and say, “No, I deserve to work in movies. I like that life.” To spit a bit of real fire and say, “No. I will not be rejected like this.”

And so I marched forth again, in my Elizabeth Taylor makeup, waist cinched, and in high heels to audition and get cast—however, wherever, I could. I would do anything—and I did.

But with both Mami and me working who would care for my little brother during the day? It was soon summer and with no school, arrangements had to be made; an eight-year-old couldn’t be left at home alone. Mami decided to farm Dennis out to the Pear family. They were nice enough, had children of their own; but they lived so far away. I have no idea where she met them. I was profoundly sad when we first left him; he looked so puzzled. And my sadness intensified every time we went to visit. How could we abandon him like this?

When Dennis was about twelve, there would be another occasion when Mami would send him away, this time to military school. I still consider my mother’s motives. I know she didn’t do this because Dennis was a bother or a brat or got into trouble. He was a good kid. But this was the second son she had left rather unceremoniously and with barely a backward glance. Was there something in Rosa Maria Marcano’s past or attitude toward males that made these leavings possible? She stuck with me, and I never doubted that she always would, though I did have to meet her standard. I was always the “doll-baby Rosita, Nonni,” who had to be pretty, perfect, and then…a star.

Was my mother’s love conditional? I was too uneasy about her to test those waters. I made sure I was all those things she wanted. I tried so hard to please her, to this day, I don’t know whether the goals were mine or hers. I certainly came to believe in achieving stardom—with my whole heart. I was firm in my resolve not to be booted out of Hollywood so soon after my arrival and quick adaptation to its enchantments.

To work, I had to jump into deep schlock, and this was the era of the worst of my Lolita/Conchita Hispanic spitfires in low-cut blouses and dangling hoop earrings. I would do whatever it took—take whatever job—if it kept me among “the stars.”

RITA RISING

On the roller-coaster ride that would become my career, I soon rose to the heights once more. My luck served me once again: A Life magazine editor, flipping through images, stopped at my glossy picture and said, “Her!” It could not have been better publicity—and it was a miracle. The cover blurb enticed: “Rita Moreno: An Actress’s Catalog of Sex and Innocence.” While I had my share of bad luck in my childhood, I suddenly hit a streak of great luck. Mami and I were thrilled and bought up so many Life magazines, there were hardly any left on the newsstands in our neighborhood…. But it didn’t matter. I was on a winning streak.

Darryl F. Zanuck spotted that Life magazine cover, with me baring my teeth and looking over my bare shoulder, and before I knew it, I signed another seven-year contract, this time with 20th Century Fox. I was being considered for a great role in a terrific new project: another first-class musical, but this time at 20th Century Fox. The King and I starred Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. I was in the running for the part of the Siamese concubine of the King of Siam, Tuptim. The main competition was France Nuyen. I was sure that France Nuyen would win the part. She was at least part Asian (Vietnamese). She was younger than I—France Nuyen was only seventeen to my now twenty-five—and, at least in my eyes, she was more beautiful. She was obviously more right for the role. I was Hispanic, not Asian, and by now actually a tad old for teen concubinage.

That I felt wrong for this role didn’t stop me from fighting for it. I won the part and found myself kneeling, my hands pressed together, a towering templelike gold headdress atop my head, and showing a bare midriff. Deborah Kerr announces that she has come to Siam to teach English.

“I already speak English,” I murmur in my universal ethnic accent.

“And very well!” said Deborah Kerr, with her crisp enunciation.

It was a wonderful experience; the film was not shot on location but in a series of elaborate soundstages at the studio. They created gardens, the palace—it was truly an amazing production because it looked so authentic. Even though I believed I was wrong for the role and France Nuyen would have been a better choice, I loved the part. Tuptim is a pivotal character who brings on the denouement of the film: When she and her lover Lun Tha flee the king, he sends out a search party. They find the lovers and Lun Tha is killed. In the film, Tuptim reacts with hysterical grief; in the earlier versions, she was executed as well.

But in this retelling, the king is supposed to beat her; however, he cannot bear to do this. Failing to do his kingly, manly duty to punish an errant concubine sends the king around the bend and he begins to die.

*   *   *

The movie was hailed as a major hit, and I received good reviews. I looked just beautiful in the costume and headdress. Eventually I approved of my own performance, if not my phony accent.

Fortunately, I kept on working, but I must have been filed under the category of “general ethnic.” I guess they figured that if there was some sort of accent, darker skin, or an exotic look, a little Puerto Rican girl could play the role.

Indian maiden roles were popular in the era. The Indian maidens in Hollywood became a stereotype—insulting along both sexual and racial lines…. The maidens are all captured in some sexy way, and they either love the Indians who capture them (the majority of the time) or not…. But the race issue becomes complicated, because some of the Indian maidens are really white maidens captured as babies by Indians. Mostly the captured maidens, whatever their original race, want to stay in buckskin and braids and stay captured—think Natalie Wood, whose character was white, but prefers the Comanches in the film The Searchers. On the other hand, Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven was an Indian baby adopted by whites as an infant. When her Kiowa brother wants her to come back to the tribe, she kills him. Are you following all this? I was always rankled by that scene, because she kills her own flesh and blood! Just as I hate Pocahontas causing the death of her Indian fiancé to marry John Smith, whose head looks like a box of cereal in the Disney animation. I know this choice was probably done to make a Native American girl seem more acceptable—“She really prefers white men!”—which is such an insult.

The Yellow Tomahawk, with Rory Calhoun and Noah Beery Jr., seemed to break the mold. I play a different kind of maiden—a pure Cheyenne Indian, yet the role is comic. Honey Bear has a huge crush on Noah Beery Jr. and spends most of the movie chasing him. And as a surprise ending, she gets him. But Noah Beery Jr. is playing a Mexican, so I guess this doesn’t count as a mixed marriage.

Rory Calhoun was an hombre offscreen as well as on-screen, and no stranger to gunslinging in real life. He had been slinging guns and crossed state lines after a jewelry robbery—a federal crime that landed him in a penitentiary. Rory was also a legendary womanizer, and when his wife divorced him, she named seventy-nine adulterous lovers, and his retort was, “She ain’t named a third of them!”

The leading lady, Peggie Castle, was also no angel. She was a real femme fatale—racking up four husbands and countless lovers, and downing a river of alcohol. She lived up to her motto, “No one ever found a nice girl interesting,” and perished in mid-drink of cirrhosis at age forty-two, sitting on her second husband’s sofa, weeks after the death of the third husband.

Yes, it was a real shoot-’em-up time. This was the era in which I was exiled to that arid ranch out in Monument Valley, Utah, where they filmed all the Westerns. For years I wore those Indian maiden costumes and played parts that involved being captured by braves or the whites who were retaliating against the braves. I was sexily swinging my fringes and once again speaking in my generic ethnic accent.

The Indian maiden roles had their challenges. For starters, buckskin is one of the most uncomfortable materials to wear; it is stiff and freezing cold during those dawn shoots in the desert. Any close-up of me in The Yellow Tomahawk or the The Deerslayer or any of the buckskin-and-braid epics I filmed would show my skin stippled from the cold. All my maidens had goose bumps.

As I look back on my Indian maiden period, I can see that the films also all had a barely veiled sexist slant: that girls should be captured, writhing, and either enjoy submitting or kick till the bitter end. The Arab maidens did the same thing. All maidens ultimately spoke in sibilant subservient whispers when they “caved” to warrior chieftains, super cowboys, sheikhs, or white liberators of captured maidens.

I see now that any movie in which I ended up saying the equivalent of, “Yes, sire…” or, “He is my chief…” was undeniably sexist at its core. I suppose the blame should be laid at the well-shod feet of the movie moguls, and in part on the male screenwriters who catered to or shared these slave maiden fantasies.

I did not get into the “Bible soft-porn epics,” many of which starred Susan Hayward or Jean Simmons; the Bible pictures also had slave girls submitting all the time, but they became devout Christians. Instead, I served my time in leather-thonged bondage; I never got to murmur to Moses or dance around the golden calf, or even strip on a rooftop, knowing Gregory Peck was watching me. I don’t know why not! I kept playing maidens, but the closest I came to biblical was a desert Arab maiden in El Alaméin. I played an Arab maiden who wore a turban, which I later learned was forbidden—Arab maidens are not allowed to wear turbans; only Arab men are allowed to wear them. El Alaméin was a hilarious shoot done in Malibu, where we filmed among the beach dunes to simulate the North African Sahara. This meant the cast had to constantly crouch to hide the horizon line, which included the Pacific Ocean. The occasional surfer was edited out.

Perhaps The Deerslayer was the most emblematic of my maiden roles. I played Hetty Hutter, the “strange, untamed” daughter of a nasty Indian-killer settler who propelled me and my calmer blond sister (Cathy O’Donnell) up “Indian-infested” rivers on his handmade floating fort. My nasty father kept looking for “Injuns” to kill, to add to his scalp collection. Hutter was a mean son of a gun, and it was good to discover that I wasn’t really his daughter. The reason I was so wild and untamed and wore leather and never combed my hair was that I was one of those captured-as-a-baby Mohican maidens, and, of course, a hellion (Mohican spitfire) like me was going to be subdued—somehow! The movie poster shows me in a triple armlock, being restrained by no fewer than three warriors—one of whom has prominent underarm hair, a dead giveaway he was not a “real” Huron, as many Native Americans are known to be descended from the Mongolian race and have little to no body hair. The hirsute, swarthy “Indians” in the movie were most likely not Native Americans. “Do the Huron have underarm hair?” That question could be the subtitle to the stories of all the unlikely casting of ethnics in films of that period.

To the rescue came the Deerslayer, a white man reared by Mohicans who had to save the life of a Mohican raised by a white bigot. The Deerslayer was played by Lex Barker, the “tenth Tarzan,” but one of the most popular Tarzans of all time. This incredible drool-worthy hunk had an Indian blood brother, Chingachgook, who was played by a Hispanic actor whom I worked with on two movies: Carlos Rivas, a six-foot-tall Mexican, had also played my “Siamese” lover, Lun Tha, in The King and I. I rarely worked with a Hispanic leading-man type. This handsome Latino actor was an exception to the rule—but like me, he was working as a disguised all-purpose “ethnic.” As I rarely got to work with a Latino actor, even disguised, working with Carlos twice was like winning the lottery against high odds.

Carlos was also droolingly attractive, talented, and committed to ending racial discrimination. In retrospect, maybe The Deerslayer wasn’t all that bad!

If I want to point to a racist, sexist film, I think The Yellow Tomahawk fit that bill “best”; i.e., it was the worst offender. If ever I felt like a spitfire in real life, it was having to play these stereotypical roles, which were just as demeaning as the cutesy ethnics I had played in musicals. I longed to be cast as a genuine person, without racist or sexist overtones. Where was a good, honest dramatic or comic role for me? I knew I would give that my best, and I bet I would be good, if I ever got my chance. My fury would simmer for years, as I was offered degrading roles right through my sixties.

I should note that a lot of white ingenues—not just ethnic Puerto Ricans—played Indian maidens and other slave girl roles. Which goes to show you that often it is hard to distinguish what wrong is being done to you because you’re ethnic or just because you’re female.

PART III

Men, Love, and Romance

EYE CANDY AND LEGGY LADIES

I arrived in Hollywood during an era when you couldn’t just be a singer or a dancer. You did it all or you had trouble finding work. I could do it all, but Hollywood still didn’t quite know what to do with me. For publicity purposes, I was stereotyped as a hot Latina with smoldering eyes and hips that wouldn’t quit. But the truth is that I’d had far less sex than you might imagine. I was still in my teens and, in reality, quite prudent and conservative when I first arrived in Los Angeles.

Who I really was didn’t matter to the Hollywood publicity machine. Hollywood relied on its young actresses to be eye candy, to decorate its opening events and parties like so many bright, sweetly scented flowers. We were even expected to date publicly. I played along—sometimes with hilarious or disastrous results—while trying, at the same time, to resolve who I was as a woman, a lover, and—eventually—a wife and mother.

Along the way, I had to learn the difference between lust, true love, and obsession—the kind that can prove to be fatal.

*   *   *

When I was a young starlet at MGM, part of my job was to attend social events. At the behest of the publicity department I was asked to do a number of things, among them to be taken by the publicity people to veterans’ hospitals to visit “the boys.”

I wasn’t the only one to do this. MGM lore tells us that Ann Miller once told a veteran amputee, in her most thoughtful and gentlest voice, “Well, honey, better luck next time!”

Perhaps Ann Miller was insensitive to his legs because so much focus had been paid to her own. Ann was a dancer, singer, and actress, a native Texan who had been discovered as a nightclub dancer in San Francisco when she was only thirteen years old. She began doing musicals with RKO and Columbia Pictures until signing with MGM, where she rose to stardom in musicals like Easter Parade, On the Town, and Kiss Me Kate.

Ann’s long, shapely legs were famous around the world not only because she could tap-dance faster than any other woman in the business, but simply because they were gorgeous to look at. We forget that, in that bygone era, legs mattered more than they do now. The publicity department asked starlets to display their endless legs in a variety of poses: legs kicking, legs extended, legs shown from the rear, as starlets bent over or peeked backward over their shoulders. Everywhere you saw glam shots, there were legs.

No one was leggier than Ann Miller. Her legs were so long that they were the reason panty hose were invented. Previously, long stockings had been stitched to panties, but Ann had the wardrobe department design continuous underpants that extended into hose.

Ann died several years ago, but I love to imagine her legs in a Busby Berkeley–ish heaven—still kicking. I find it hard to believe that they ever stopped. She certainly displayed them (and they looked good) long after the rest of her had aged.

I was weak in my own knees when I was told that I would fly out with Ann Miller on a four-day publicity trip to Palm Beach, Florida. Flights were different then. They took a lot longer, for one thing, and on the early Pan Am planes, the front-row seats faced one another. I found myself eye-to-eye, knee-to-knee with Ann Miller, one of my idols. She was then about twenty-five, and not only were her legs as lovely and long as advertised, but her face had a preternatural glow.

So there I was, Rosita Dolores Alverio, sitting opposite the great Ann Miller and hopelessly, totally tongue-tied. What do you say to your personal icon? You say:

Rita: I’m a dancer, too, and I’ve admired your dancing all my life.

Ann: Oh, that’s nice, honey. What kinda dance?

Rita: It’s Spanish dance.

Ann: (glazed eyes)

Rita: Yeah, it’s uh, you know, uh, it’s flamenco, the sevillanas, pronounced “sevi-yah-nas.”

Ann: Sevi-what? Sevi-what-nas? I see! Like rumbas and tangos? Spanish stuff!

Rita: (with a barely discernible sigh). Yesss…Yes, that’s kind of it…. So, I want you to know that I just love it soooo much when I’ve seen you dance on all those platforms and steps and stuff! I mean, it’s really scary, and boy, I just don’t know how you did it! (Pause.) How do you do it?

Ann: Listen, honey, what’s your name?

Rita: Rita.

Ann: Well, lemme tell ya somethin’, honey, if I have to do one more fuckin’ dance on one more fuckin’ platform, I will strangle that fuckin’ choreographer!

Every time my idol dropped the old F-bomb my head literally snapped back with each utterance. I gasped but did not wish to appear critical. On this mission, Ann Miller was the headliner; I was only eye candy.

The reason we were assigned to fly from LA to Palm Beach was to open the famous Casablanca-style luxury hotel the Colony, known for its art deco palms and white leather Polo bar. For this occasion, I was outfitted with a gorgeous wardrobe borrowed from the MGM costume department. Just packing had been a heady experience. All of my dresses had been worn by stars and were stored with labels like, “Ava Gardner, screen test,” or “Bette Davis, party dress.”

At that time, Palm Beach was a seriously big-time society place with very wealthy “gentlemen,” mostly scions, and bejeweled, coiffed Babe Paley types. (I believe that Palm Beach is still in that time, having been placed in suspended animation around 1953.) “Coiffed,” in this case, meant a very smooth, jaw-length, “barely there” pageboy with a side part. Even then, Palm Beach women were skeleton-thin (what author Tom Wolfe would later dub in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities “the X-rays”). This made me question the Duchess of Windsor’s old saying, “One can never be too rich or too thin.” Palm Beach women seemed to be both.

The Palm Beach women fell into two categories: the old-style heiresses who resembled the horses they rode, and younger trophy wives. The prettiest and youngest of the trophy wives I met on that weekend jaunt was an instant favorite of mine, Gregg Dodge, otherwise known as Mrs. Horace Dodge Jr. She was an expensive bottle blonde whom I had last seen performing at the Copacabana as a showgirl.

Gregg had become the fifth wife of the Dodge auto heir at the first moment that she noticed a breast droop. Smart move, as the wealth seemed limitless. (As it turned out, Gregg would hit that limit, but it did take her some time to achieve bankruptcy.) When I met her that weekend, she was in her glory— gorgeous and rich, so very rich, and still a happy-go-lucky Texan gal who wanted to show it off and share her good fortune.

When Gregg invited me to her mansion on the main mansion drag, Ocean Drive, it was obvious that she had scored wealth beyond anything I had ever even glimpsed. As she led me up to her bedroom, I noted that Gregg was even leggier than Ann Miller. I would have loved to see them in a kickoff.

We were already deep in girl talk. I gushed, “I just thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life when I saw you strike a pose.” I meant it! I also complimented Gregg on her gleaming skin.

She couldn’t wait to pass along her secret: “Vaseline! But you apply it very, very thin, sweetie.” This was an old showgirl trick.

We walked through what seemed to be a series of walk-in closets. (If memory serves, an entire floor of the mansion was a walk-in closet.) Finally, Gregg said, “Come ovah to my fuh closet and I’ll lend you one of my stoles.”

Oh, my God! I thought, as we walked into a vast cooler. Is this what heaven is like? Heaven in the Arctic! The closet was filled with forlorn dead creatures, which didn’t bother me in the least back then. Gregg chose a silvery blue mink stole and stooped to drape it over my shoulders. I felt like kneeling, as if this were a coronation.

I walked on air for the rest of the week, feeling very complete, thank you very much.

Gregg Dodge went on to live a long, expensive life. I suppose you could say that she “misspent” her later years, since she spent every cent of Dodge’s money. Dodge decided to divorce her at one point, crying, “I can’t afford this woman anymore!”

He dropped dead before the divorce was final, but Horace had cut her out of his will—and besides, he didn’t have any money left, thanks to Gregg’s talent for spending. But, ever resourceful, Gregg sued her mother-in-law, claiming she interfered in their marriage and turned Horace against her. They settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but it was rumored to be in excess of nine million dollars.

Gregg spent that money, too. Finally, she married her bodyguard and spent his money. He shot himself in the head. She went on to live a long life, dying at age eighty-seven, but she died in “reduced circumstances.” I can still see her legs, her hair, her glowing skin…and feel the surprising lightness of that fine “fuh” she draped across my shoulders.

*   *   *

The most important evening event on that publicity weekend was the official opening of the Colony Hotel. This took place at the in-house nightclub, the Royal Room, which still functions and books many cabaret artists. The place was jammed with socialites, horsey folk, and famous people of every stripe.

The person I remember most vividly from that event was Anita Ekberg, the Swedish-American model, actress, and pinup girl. Anita, a lush Nordic beauty, was at the height of her fame and caused a stir every time she brandished those exceptional “ladies”: her giant breasts. And brandish those breasts she did, causing much alarm or joy, depending on your gender.

Anita made all of the papers the next day because she—most likely in her substantial cups, pun intended—decided to grace the waters of the Atlantic Ocean with her voluptuous self. Well! The word got around instantly—isn’t that what press agents are for?—and at least three-quarters of the populace of the Royal Room raced out to see what was going on.

It looked like the club was vomiting people as out they scurried. The ladies got sand in their golden sandals and hopped about on one foot to take them off, looking for all the world like crazed marionettes in their hurry to see the spectacle.

And what a sight it was! Anita emerged from the sea like Venus rising above the frothy waves, minus the clamshell, strapless chiffon clinging like Saran Wrap. She truly showed the world and us mere mortals what God can achieve on a good day.

But all good things have to come to an end. The goddess, walking along the sand, fell down ugly. Splat! Right down on her ample derriere, ass over teakettle, glocken over spiel, and legs splayed, one still airborne as her goddess tunic slowly crept up to her knickers and, the final insult, her tiara cocked over one eye. Showtime was over and that rude, fickle audience sauntered back to the club, looking forward to more booze and buzz.

I was sitting with Ann Miller close to the door that led to the beach, watching the sandy crowd crunch their way back to their tables, when I spotted a very handsome redheaded gentleman in full formal wear. He was accompanying a lovely, regal woman wearing the gown of the moment. I had seen that dress in Vogue magazine that very day: a silk taffeta print with large red roses on a full gathered skirt. Gorgeous! It was the very first time I’d ever seen a woman wearing white opera gloves. In other words, a lady.

As this couple slowly walked in, sauntering as though to catch everyone’s attention, the gentleman in question caught my eye with an expression on his handsome face that was unmistakable. His hairline moved back an inch, as when a predatory animal spots his prey and paralyzes it with “that look.” It was obviously lust at first sight, and I remember thinking Whooo, this guy don’t waste no time!

All of this happened in the wink of an eye while his white-gloved companion in the beautiful dress was busy trading hellos with friends. To me, though, their procession was taking place in slow motion as they reached their destination at the opposite end of the room. They were gorgeous.

For the rest of the evening, I played a private little game that I called “eyesies.” Every time I looked this man’s way, I would catch him sending me smoldering signals. They were so obvious and so shameless that I actually started to laugh. Whenever I caught him staring at me, I would point my finger at him as if to say, Caught ya! He didn’t even blink.

I’m surprised that no one else noticed our game, but they were too busy looking at this beautiful couple. I was also stunned that a man with such a perfect woman at his side could be even remotely interested in the likes of me.

At one point, I asked Ann to take a look to see if she could identify him. “Oh, honey, who the hell knows?” she said. “They all look the same to me: rich!”

I want to add that, had I sent the most subtle I’m interested! What next? visual message, I have no doubt that this man would have sent someone over to my table to escort me upstairs. No doubt whatsoever!

Imagine my shock, then, weeks later, when the redheaded man who had flirted so boldly with me reappeared on the cover of Life magazine and I discovered who he was: the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.

There was a show that night with an upcoming comic who probably wanted to slit his throat after his stint, because nobody, but nobody paid the least attention to him except Ann and me. The first rule of thumb in my profession is to never, never, never perform for high society. They will murder you; they will destroy your will to live through their toxic inattention.

After that debacle at the Royal Room, we were all invited to attend a reception at one of the Topping brothers’ mansions on the waterway. I don’t remember which Topping brother it was, but brother Henry was married to Lana Turner, and brother Dan later became part owner of the New York Yankees.

The mansion was exactly what you would expect if you lived in that milieu, but you can imagine that my eyes were popping out. The front lawn was actually at the back of the house, because that was where the boats—or rather, the yachts—were docked. That was where all of the outdoor festivities took place.

Out on the lawn, I ensconced myself on a carved-stone Victorian bench, where a number of rich old roosters put the make on me. I really wanted to go back to my room, but Ann prevailed upon me to stay.

At one point, Ann also somehow convinced me that we should go on an exploratory mission to look inside all of the medicine cabinets. I did investigate a few medicine chests with her, but got cold feet after I saw a year’s worth of condoms in one. Yes, the entire bloody cabinet! I fled the house at that point, fearful that the owner/reprobate would somehow find me looking in there and haul me off to one of those endless bedrooms to give me what-for with his bottomless supply of Goodyears.

A bit shaken, I returned to my perch on the front lawn that was really the back lawn. This time, not a soul approached or spoke to me, but I wasn’t moving from my cold stone bench. I was kind of hoping some of those old farts had fallen into the canal. In truth, one of the boats was rocking rather suspiciously.

Ann finally came outside again, looking so breathless and wide-eyed that I asked whether she’d been caught during her exploratory journey through the immense manse.

“Oh, my gawd, honey!” she said, with those Minnie Mouse eyes as big as plates. “You will not believe this! I’d already finished with the cabinets and walked out to the hall when I heard some thuds coming from behind a closed door. I opened it, and would you believe it? Pressed against a bookcase was a woman with her skirt over her head, with a man leaning into her with his pants around his ankles, doin’ it!”

Ann was shrieking by now, so I was grateful for the band playing the good-night song, “Wishing (Will Make It So),” as she told me in detail about the amorous couple having a major go at it.

“There were a number of books, some open, that must have tumbled from the force of the action and lay all over the floor,” she said. “Well, you know, that makes sense, right? When you’ve got a skirt over your head and don’t have a clue where you’re being pushed, things will fall off the shelves.”

“So what did you do?” I was completely caught up in her story, picturing the whole scene.

“I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept saying, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God, ohdearohdear, ohmy!’ Have you any idea how complicated it is to pull up your undies with a skirt over your head? Well, better than showing your face!”

We were helpless with laughter by then, as I tried to imagine Ann Miller, Miss Potty Mouth, reduced to uttering pithy things like, “Oh, my!” while this hapless couple skittered around, skidding on books and trying to pull up their underwear.

The next day at lunch, I tried to guess which couple Ann had surprised in the act, but it was impossible. I observed too many red-eyed people looking as if they wished they were dead. You know, with the kind of expression that says, What was I thinking?

Ann and I had some more raucous laughs over the mating couple, and I made her swear that she’d really uttered those inane words, so unlike her. She assured me that yes, it was the truth. She was that genuinely shocked.

Ann then told me that she had become very fond of me. “You’re okay, honey,” she said, adding that she had planned a special treat for me when we flew back to Los Angeles that day: She had rearranged our Pan Am tickets so that we could enjoy a three-hour stopover in New Orleans and have dinner at Antoine’s, the restaurant for “great, great Southern and Cajun cookin’, honey. Really glamorous!”

And it was! It didn’t hurt that I was with the great Ann Miller, either. They rolled out the red carpet and sent over their violin trio, along with a bottle of Champagne while we dined. Could a little Puerto Rican girl have asked for more?

At the airport terminal afterward, I watched Ann buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of costume jewelry and tchotchkes, such as a three-inch Eiffel Tower. Her absolute favorite souvenir was a pair of dangling plastic fruit earrings in tropical colors.

“Look, honey, aren’t these adorable? And only a hundred dollars!”

One hundred dollars. Half my weekly salary! I wondered whether I’d ever be able to be so carefree with money.

When we landed in LA, Ann gave me a lift in her big black limousine. She dropped me off at my Culver City cottage, gave my stunned mother a big hug, and disappeared from my life for ten years.

THE COCKTAIL PARTY: PIMPED?

At that time, a starlet’s life followed a pattern of nearly enforced public dating. Often, budding starlets like me were paired with young male wannabe stars and sent out on the town for what were really photo ops. We were the young pretty faces and had nothing to do with each other before the date, during the date, or after the date but pose for the pictures. Those dates were superficial and false, but the publicists convinced me that they were essential to my career.

Other kinds of studio “dates” were more ominous. For some girls, this practice came uncomfortably close to pimping. If they went along with everything the men in power proposed, they descended from starlet to some kind of hybrid creature—a harlet?

At one point early in my career, I was “set up” to attend a party where I would supposedly meet a lot of famous people at a Bel Air mansion. I was encouraged to go by the publicity people, because these “important people” could help my career.

To prepare for this appearance, I was even allowed into the costume department, where I could choose a dress from racks labeled, “Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner…” I picked out a gorgeous lacy dress that had been worn by Debra Paget, a starlet at Fox. (I knew this because I had seen a picture of her wearing it.) The dress was filed on the costume rack as “Ingenue: fantasy party dress.” How dreamy is that?

This beautiful gown was strapless and quite low-cut, but of the full-skirted, lacy, innocent Cinderella type of design. Wearing it the night of the party, I felt airy and light enough to dance all night. And even though I still secretly thought I was plain, I conceded that, with my makeup tricks, I looked…well…quite pretty.

I did not comprehend that I was about to be in the company of legendary lechers until after it was too late. One of the party guests, Harry Cohn, was the studio boss whom Elizabeth Taylor had once called “a monster.” The head of Columbia Studios, he was rumored to demand sex from all of his female stars in exchange for employment. Movie stars such as Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak, and Joan Crawford were known to have rebuffed his advances.

The party host, Alfred Hart, was equally horny and evil. “Alfred Hart of Hart Distilleries,” as he was always referred to by public relations people, was supplying the party venue—his Bel Air mansion—and, I suppose, the booze. Hart was a longtime associate of the Chicago mob and had a reputation for doing business with known gangsters. He had been a beer runner for Al Capone and later developed an odd “friendship” with FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who also kept a file on him. In 1948, Hart had invested seventy-five thousand dollars in the famous gangster Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel and was implicated in a corrupt racetrack deal.

Since that time, Alfred Hart’s mob involvement has been well documented in several books, especially around an infamous legal case involving the takeover of the Del Mar Racetrack. He lived his corrupt life in the orbit of more famous mobsters and movie stars.

I didn’t know it yet, but many people in Hollywood had ties to organized crime, and names that came up around Alfred Hart included Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Around the same time that I met Hart, future president JFK was also seen with his crowd, and even shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner, with a famous gangster.

I was soon to discover that show business, politics, and organized crime all overlapped, crisscrossing seedy borders. That night, I innocently stepped right into a trap of corruption in my lovely borrowed dress and strappy diamond slippers.

*   *   *

Knowing none of this, I was excited and naive. I must have looked to these men like a dewy-eyed innocent, and fair game. I floated in my beautiful gown and clutched a tiny purse that held my keys, a lipstick, and a five-dollar bill. My date for the evening was to be Harry Karl, a shoe magnate who later became famous not only as “the shoe magnate who married Debbie Reynolds,” but as “the bogus millionaire who bankrupted Debbie.”

When Karl appeared in the doorway of my apartment in Westwood, I thought he was good-looking enough but was slightly disappointed. I had seen his picture in the papers, but in person Karl’s features were somewhat coarser. He had slightly kinky iron gray hair and dressed very much in the style of many men in the business, along the lines of “the look” that Sy Devore designed for almost every successful male in Hollywood.

Sy was expensive, but so much in demand that he had created a breed of clients who appeared to be clones of one another. Whether it was the effect of the wide lapels, shawl collars, or vents in the back, the men all looked like dressed-up chorus boys from an expensive production number, or well-heeled, gnomish gangsters. The fabric always appeared to be just a little too shiny. To complete the ensemble: Gucci moccasins in velvet, suede, or crocodile skin.

Karl looked like an overgroomed gangster and may well have been one, given his cohorts. He drove a canary yellow Cadillac convertible, and we sped off in it to the gated Xanadu of Bel Air. We made very small talk, and it quickly became apparent that we were definitely not meant for each other.

In fact, it was unclear whether Harry Karl was a married man at that very moment. Karl was either married to Marie McDonald, the blond bombshell star of Pardon My Sarong, or he may have been momentarily single, on the brief hiatus between their two marriages to each other. I later discovered that, despite being such a homely troll, Karl had an insatiable appetite for beautiful young women. Apparently I wasn’t his type, though, and I’m still grateful for that today. Perhaps in this instance being a Latina helped. He was no gentleman, but he seemed to prefer blondes.

Oh, well, I thought, that’s fine. This is a business outing.

I reminded myself that this party was a chance to meet important people, not a real blind date or a place to pursue romantic interests. Besides, I was excited and eager to see the inside of a famous mansion and meet the rich and famous.

At least I wasn’t disappointed by the setting. Karl drove through a set of massive curlicue iron gates onto a vast estate. We passed a tennis court and groomed hedges where gardeners were feverishly at work, wielding heavy pruning shears that gleamed in the late-afternoon sun.

A uniformed valet whisked away the yellow Cadillac on our arrival, and we were greeted at the door by a formally dressed butler (in livery!) who took my wrap. Another butler instantly materialized, offering us a round silver tray that held champagne flutes sparkling in the roseate light.

My hopeful little spirit rose at the sight of bubbly in crystal. I gratefully accepted a glass and thanked the butler. When I turned around, Harry Karl was gone—so completely gone that I couldn’t see him anywhere! Meanwhile, the host, Alfred Hart of Hart Distilleries, introduced himself and led me around to various clusters of glamorous-looking people, introducing me to everyone as this “sexy little starlet.”

Hart dropped me off at a bridge table in the middle of the living room, introduced me to Harry Cohn, and left. “Are you the new girl at Twentieth Century Fox?” Cohn asked.

“Yes,” I said, and we made small talk for a few minutes.

Then, out of the blue, Cohn said, “You’re very fuckable. I’d like to fuck you.”

He said it in the same kind of tone you might use to remark on the weather. My response was pathetic. I gave him a horribly crooked quasi smile and excused myself.

I found the powder room, locked the door behind me, and leaned against it. I was panting with anxiety, thinking, What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

I stayed in the powder room as long as I could, until someone knocked and I had to leave my safe haven. I looked for Karl to ask him to take me home, but couldn’t find him. I didn’t want to attract attention by moving around any more than I absolutely had to. I chose a spot in a corner of the room with the most people and sat down, trying to figure out what to do.

The orchestra started to play a bolero, and our host, the gnome, asked me to dance. I could hardly refuse him in front of everyone, I thought. Besides, at least here we were surrounded by other people, including his wife. What could happen?

Alfred Hart of Hart Distilleries whisked me (as well as a gnome can) to the dance floor of his vast living room and held me very close. Within one minute he started to breathe heavily, and perspiration began beading on his upper lip and forehead. He squeezed me so hard that you couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between our bodies, then began grinding against me. His wife could not have been more than two yards away, but she was flirting with another gnome and playing poker (a different sort than her husband’s version of the game).

This was a nightmare! I tried to push away from him without making a scene. Hart pulled me even harder against him, now seriously panting. At this point, he had his arm fully around me so that I couldn’t get away

“Please let me go,” I said. “You’re hurting my back.”

“You’re a sexy little bitch, aren’t you?” he said, panting.

“Oh, my God, Mr. Hart, please. Just let me go.”

“I’ll bet you’re wild in bed!”

At that, I shoved him as hard as I could, finally freeing myself from that pelvic death grip, and got away.

“Hey!” he said. “Don’t play that game with me, sister.”

Trembling with fear that someone would catch on to what was happening, and that somehow I would be accused of a sexual act with this rutting Chihuahua, I fled to the powder room again to calm down.

I was desperate to escape, but my “date” was still missing. I wanted no part of Harry Karl anyway. I realized that this party was a troll-and-starlet mixer, and wondered how many girls like me had ended up in an upstairs guest room, on soiled sheets, and left parties like these shamefaced. Count me out! All I wanted to do was flee—and bathe.

I splashed cold water over my face, and of course my mascara started to run. I gave my eyes a hasty wipe and sidled toward the front door. I didn’t ask the butler for my wrap for fear of being found out.

When I opened the door, a whoosh of lovely clean air hit my face. I started walking fast, still nervous that someone might try to follow me. I did have a five-dollar bill in my bag. I could have called a taxi, except that I was too afraid to go back inside the house to use the phone.

I was starting to remove my high heels, thinking that somehow I would walk back miles and miles to Westwood, when a pickup truck arrived to collect the gardeners I’d seen working earlier in the day. They were Mexicans; I ran over to the truck and spoke in Spanish to one of them.

“Please, can you take me home?” I begged.

The men didn’t ask why. They understood without a word. They sat me down on the front seat, and one of them gently put his work jacket over my shoulders. They drove me home without a word. They were the only gentlemen I met that night.

DATING, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

I actually lost my virginity twice.

How is that possible? It isn’t, unless you repress the first painful experience, which I evidently did for years.

I was a teenager. The extent of my sex education was the book Being Born, accompanied by my mother’s, “Here, Rosita, read this.” As I look back at that quite progressive act (for the time), I find her effort actually astonishing. Yet there was no discussion to follow the reading. All I could figure out was that the man is a farmer and the woman is a field and somehow he plants a seed in her. The end! And perhaps this lack of understanding was why I became the unwitting field for the man who forced himself on me.

Much later I would learn how common it was for aspiring actresses to have sex to get a part—it was almost expected of starlets. But that was something I would never think of and never do, ever! I had felt increasingly uncomfortable around this man, my very first agent, and in my naïveté, I evidently did not decipher his amorous signals.

Many agents in that era were of the booking sort. They didn’t build careers; they pursued gigs. If you worked, they made money. My agent-selecting process was from the school of eeny, meeny, miny. I’d look through agent/manager trade magazines and just pick one, make a call and see whether I could arrange a meeting. Surely my mother must have been as clueless as I was about the risks of the unchaperoned meetings. There were no background checks or child-predator laws in the business back then.

On one such interview when I was fifteen years old, I was escorted to the dressing room by a prospective agent and given a long-trained gown with only postage stamp–size nipple coverings. Luckily, they were enough—I had yet to develop breasts. The costume, he explained, was for a nudie show to open in Montreal. He knew I was underage, but what did that matter? It was in Canada, and they didn’t care and neither did he. He wanted to book me and earn his commission. No big deal! I fled. And never said a word to my mother.

I did finally secure a “reputable” agent. Or so I thought. He needed my talent and I needed his jobs. He was “miny” on my prospecting list. I was instructed to meet him one evening at his apartment. From there he would escort me to a very important event. I arrived early, he offered me a soda, and I sat on the couch waiting to leave. I began to feel uncomfortable. I didn’t like the way he was staring at me, and I tried to look away. He sat beside me, took the soda from my hand, and placed it on the end table. He stroked my cheek, whispering, “Such a pretty little girl.” Then he bent me over the arm of his couch, started kissing me, and forced himself on me.

It had the speed and intimacy of a vaccination. The hurt of the penetration was quickly numbed by fear welling up within me. I ran out of his apartment crying and terrified. He caught me by the arm at the elevator door and professed his love for me as I pulled away and ran into the elevator. I don’t think I breathed again until the elevator reached the lobby and I left the building. I never told my mother.

But I had to work with him. He was the source of my work. And I had to work. I couldn’t quit. I would have to acknowledge it happened, buck up, try to forget it, and move on. That’s when, I suppose, selective amnesia set in—until now.

*   *   *

I willingly lost my virginity several years later on a movie location—an arid Western ranch in Utah. It was freezing, especially when I was dressed in buckskin. Out on that desolate set, I always seemed to be running across the scrubby terrain with buckskin fringes in full swing, playing those clichéd Indian maiden roles that I so loathed, in which I murmured submissive lines such as, “Yes, my chief,” “I was captured,” “I can take you to the gold,” or, “I’ve never known a white man….”

That part was almost true. For years, I believed the handsome crewman I chose to be my first real lover was my first. He was gentle, sweet, expert—and married, which I didn’t know initially. When I found out, I’m sorry to say that I had no compunctions about making love with him. At that point, you could say I was hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed it, because I had so much pent-up passion and no place to put it. I wasn’t in love, but in lust.

After that, a number of well-known men passed through my life with varying degrees of intimacy, as I began to date and have occasional lovers. But there was a veil of secrecy at that time over sex, as gauzy as a slave maiden’s dancing costume. It still was not okay for an unmarried woman to be sexually active—not even in Hollywood.

*   *   *

Whenever I wasn’t working on location, I would return to my cheap apartment. I was now living on my own, practicing independence and trying to advance my career. My apartment was next to a Shell station on Sunset Boulevard and Doheny Drive, ground zero for “the Strip.”

Traffic was constant: insomniac red lights, the blare of horns, blasts of exhaust, and screeches of brakes. I was living in a squealin’-tire, permanent red dawn. Decades later, when I saw the movie American Graffiti, I was taken back to the Strip, remembering those street scenes with the cars cruising and the cross-car flirting. It was like being there again.

The place felt apocalyptic—and it was. I lived right up the hill from Marilyn Monroe. I still lived in that neighborhood years later, when she was found dead of an overdose. That intersection was a dangerous place to be both physically and psychologically. It was here where the American movie-star dream met reality.

The heart of Sunset Strip was Schwab’s, the drugstore where Monroe was ostensibly discovered. Schwab’s was the famous, or perhaps infamous, soda fountain where many young wannabe actors hung out, nursing sodas for hours. I was a champion soda nurser. I could make that soda last more than an hour while I was chatting with all of the other aspiring young things, particularly the good-looking young men. I was doing the “starlets’ dance.”

Between jobs, I visited museums or libraries to tax my limited little mind. I also faced reality for weeks or even months at a time, squeaking by on unemployment insurance. Those were the bitters that I downed after I drank my sweet strawberry shakes at Schwab’s. Leading our perilous lives without a clue, we starlets were the glamorous characters in our own made-up plays.

Yo-yoing between the condescending movie roles I was offered and the occasional good parts, I maintained an uneasy balance. I did the public “dating” that was required of me as a young starlet, but I refused to play the game any further than that, no matter what it might do for my career. In that way, I was very principled.

I remember one close call, though. I was under contract with 20th Century Fox when Darryl F. Zanuck was replaced by Buddy Adler, a rather tall, handsome, slender man with striking white hair and a lascivious look in his eyes. I was living with three other girls in a small house, and Mr. Adler, who had first spotted me in the commissary, must have called our answering service every day for three weeks.

Somehow I would evade him. If I answered the phone and heard his voice, I’d say, “Oh, I’m so sorry; Rita isn’t here right now! This is her roommate. Can I help you?”

Finally, the third week that he called, one of my girlfriends answered and he said, “Just tell Miss Moreno that I tried,” and hung up. It was a very scary time for me, because I was newly under contract. I thought, Well, I guess that’s the end of that, because I’m certainly not going to take up with that man.

Fortunately, compared to the other endangered starlets, I did well. I did get work, and I had a love affair with a major star who happened to be a great actor, and whom I really did love. For every girl as “lucky” as I was, there were a hundred wannabes who had to pack their bags or stay in LA as waitresses, “whorelets,” or worse.

There was a death toll, a nervous-breakdown toll. But this was lotus land, City of Angels, Hollywood—and no one kept a body count.

*   *   *

One of the oddest encounters I had during those early years in Hollywood was with Howard Hughes. At the time I was only a nineteen-year-old starlet; Hughes was in his mid-forties, and infinitely rich and powerful. I don’t know how he decided that we should meet. Had he seen me in a film? In person from a distance? Was he interested in me for a film? I never did find out. It didn’t matter.

I had never seen the mysterious billionaire, but even before meeting him I knew that he was famous in several arenas. Hughes owned RKO Studios and had produced a number of films. He was also well-known as an inventor, a designer of things as diverse as brassieres and airplanes. One example: He engineered a bra for Jane Russell’s breasts in The Outlaw. (She refused to wear it.)

Hughes was both more and less successful with his airplanes. He created some exciting planes, but also crashed two of them. He almost died in one crash, which clipped two houses and destroyed a third; he also burned a hole in the roof of a Tudor dwelling occupied by the foremost interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. Hughes was seriously injured in that crash and afterward suffered from a lifelong addiction to intravenous codeine and other painkillers. The narcotics partly explained his numerous “eccentricities,” but not entirely, as he had shown some very odd obsessions long before the crash.

Perhaps the part about him that interested me most as a young starlet was that Howard Hughes was known to be not just a lover of movie stars—he was a famous seducer of actresses—but a star maker. Hughes proposed to Joan Fontaine several times and lived with Katharine Hepburn, who wrote that they were both “dedicated loners.” His other involvements included Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, and Jean Harlow.

What I didn’t know about Hughes was that he had been an oddball for many years. As early as 1938, he had been known to count the green peas on his plate and separate them by size. He gave a manual to his employees on how to open a can of peaches; the instructions involved removing the label and scouring the can several times. He was famous, too, for not letting anyone hand him food unless their hands were wrapped in several layers of paper towels.

When Hughes wanted to ask me on a date, I received a summons from Kane, the emissary to Hughes who performed all of his personal tasks. Mr. Kane approached me, looking very mafioso, and said, “Mr. Hughes wonders if you would like to join him for a private movie screening.”

On the designated night, a car arrived at eleven p.m. to whisk me off to a Goldwyn studios screening room. I hadn’t yet moved to an apartment; Mami left the light on in the cottage, and I knew that she would sit on the sofa until I was returned to her.

My first meeting with Hughes seemed to occur in synthetic crepuscular dimness, with a low murmuring sound track in the background. When I think of him now, I picture Howard Hughes in shadowed profile. The famous man sat in the screening room wearing earphones around his neck.

“Hello,” he greeted me in a high, thin voice. “I’m about to watch this movie.”

It was a foreign film, the opera Pagliacci, starring Gina Lollobrigida, and it wasn’t very good.

Hughes wore his earphones the whole time we were viewing the movie. After it ended, he asked, “What do you think of her?”

I had been reduced to a state close to rigor mortis brought on by a combination of boredom and anxiety throughout the entire picture. Now I managed to say, “I think the girl was awfully pretty, but not a very good actor.”

That was it for our first date. Two weeks later, Mr. Kane, whom Hughes described as his “man who did everything,” called again. “H.H. would like to take you to dinner,” Kane said. Mr. Hughes had been nice enough before. Maybe now we would talk about a film for me.

So once again, a limousine arrived to shuttle me to an unknown destination. It turned out to be LAX. As the chauffeur opened the door, I was dwarfed by the garish steel structure that sported the flying saucer–like restaurant on top. And it didn’t stop there. When the elevator beamed me up to the mother ship, its doors opened to reveal the payload…me. I could see Hughes through the harried crowd, sitting at a table across the ship’s bay. I walked toward his perch to the cadence of the flashing colored lights that sent their beams as signals everywhere, as spaceships are wont to do. He didn’t notice my approach as he sat hypnotized, staring out one of the many portals that adorned every arc. What was this place? What about Romanoff’s? Chasen’s? La Scala? Couldn’t we go somewhere normal?

I sat obediently, trying to eat but mostly moving the peas around my plate and not really tasting anything. I labored to look interested as Hughes explained radar to me. “Oh, my…uh-huh…my, my…that is so interesting.” We never did talk about a movie role for me.

After that debacle, Hughes took me home in his own car and walked me to my door. “Good night, and thank you for a lovely evening,” I said.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Good night, and thank you—’”

“Speak up!”

Oh, my God, I thought, he’s almost deaf. “I said, ‘Good night.’”

Four windows lit up. My goodness, I was waking the entire neighborhood!

We shook hands and he spoke in his high, aspirating, reedy little voice: “You are a beautiful child.”

I never saw him again.

*   *   *

In 1957, only a few years after I “dated” him, Hughes went more deeply into his personal hygiene routines. Again, he was sequestered in a screening room, this time a studio, the Martin Nosseck Projection Theatre. Martin Nosseck was his projectionist, and in a way his significant other. Hughes needed him to project the films, which he watched for hour after hour, day after day, in his continual synthetic twilight…which that time lasted for four months.

Hughes never left the room in all that time. He lived on take-in chicken, chocolate bars, and milk. He urinated into bottles and stored his bowel movements in containers. Needless to say, he also let his grooming go. He wrote instructions to all of his aides saying, “Don’t look at me.” They were spared the sight of him that way, though I guess someone peeked, as there is quite a bit of reportage on this phase.

When he emerged in the spring of 1958, Hughes reeked. His hair hung long and matted, and his fingernails and toenails were curved like talons. This was a coming attraction to his last decade, when he settled into this condition as a permanent state. He did, however, see a lot of film—reel after reel after reel.

Hollywood is an incestuous place. I never saw Hughes again, but we remained connected in ways neither one of us could have predicted after our two dates. Hughes eventually married the lovely Jean Peters, who costarred in Viva Zapata! with both Anthony Quinn, another of my Hollywood dates, and with the first great love of my life, Marlon Brando.

In his paranoid style, Hughes had Jean guarded night and day. This incited Marlon’s passion for Jean. Marlon literally tried to climb in through her bedroom window. As I was to discover for myself, he couldn’t stand to let a woman go unseduced!

But, in this rare instance, Hughes proved to be more than a match: Marlon was thwarted. He never got her, a rare defeat.

*   *   *

One of my more pleasingly normal dating relationships while I was at 20th Century Fox was with Geordie Hormel, the scion of the Hormel ham family. Thank God he wasn’t an actor. He was, in fact, a fine pianist and a sensitive, attractive young man who was a bit eccentric. He was very wealthy, but didn’t use his money in the usual ways. For instance, he collected old Packards at the time.

Geordie and I had been enjoying our romance for more than a year—although I wouldn’t have said I was in love with him—when our relationship was rudely cut short by the police, who I believe wrongly accused him of possessing a large amount of marijuana.

One night the cops came bursting into Geordie’s house, where I was asleep on the couch; they said they had found a “stash” in Geordie’s car and arrested him right then and there.

“Get up, Sleeping Beauty!” they yelled at me, and grabbed my purse to start rifling through it. When they went for my overnight bag, I just went crazy. I was going to die of embarrassment. In those days you didn’t sleep with men, and in that bag were personal things that you bring when you’re sleeping with a man, like underwear and a negligee. Sex was a normal enough activity, but it would have been a scandal in those hypocritical times.

I fought very hard with them not to open the bag, but the cops pushed me down on the sofa and said if I didn’t let them open it, they’d charge me with obstructing justice. I just started to cry and cry, I was so humiliated, as they upended my bag and everything in it fell on the floor.

I tussled with one officer and was threatened that I’d be taken to jail if I didn’t cooperate. Somehow I talked myself out of that! Still, it was bad enough. The media had a field day with headlines like, “Ham Heir and Sexy Pixie.”

Geordie denied that the marijuana was his, and I believed him. His defense lawyer contended that Geordie had been framed. At the time, Geordie was playing piano in a trio, with a bassist and a drummer, and they had gotten a gig at the Captain’s Table, a popular jazz joint on La Cienega Boulevard. I had heard that the bass player, Robert Shevak, smoked a lot of grass, but as far as I knew, Geordie never touched it. I didn’t, either; in fact, I hardly even drank alcohol, just taking a few sips now and then to appear social.

Geordie’s defense team contended that the cops came to Shevak one night and said that they wanted him to plant some grass on the visor of a big old Packard that Geordie drove, so that they could make some news and some money, and Shevak agreed.

I testified for Geordie as a character witness at his trial and he was eventually acquitted. I’m embarrassed to admit that I felt frightened and pressured into breaking off the relationship, something I regretted, because Geordie was a nice young man and I truly believed he had done nothing wrong.

*   *   *

I first met Anthony Quinn in my early twenties. He was a manly, much-married forty-year-old. He wasn’t a big star yet—except at seduction. But his role in that performance didn’t get a good review from me. Tony wasn’t nice to women. I suffered whiplash from his sudden uncourtly and uncouth departure.

But I was attracted to him because we had many things in common despite being years apart in age. He was ruggedly handsome and sensual. Women found him difficult to resist, and many men wanted to be him. He was more than six feet tall, loomed over me, and had a huge head and a sonorous voice.

Tony was one of the few Hispanic men in my life, and what we shared was the experience of Hollywood’s ethnic stereotyping mangle, which had Tony playing ethnic roles such as Indian and Hawaiian chiefs, Chinese guerrillas, Filipino freedom fighters, and Arab sheikhs. Underneath, he and I both simmered with resentment over our stereotypical casting.

Tony was a real mentor for me in one important way: As an actor, he always did what he could within the roles he was given. His Crazy Horse portrayal in They Died with Their Boots On had real dignity, for example, and it did a lot for Crazy Horse’s reputation.

Mostly Mexican, Tony had an Aztec Indian mother and a paternal Irish grandfather from County Cork, Frank Quinn, who rode with Pancho Villa. Tony would get furious when the Irish part was mentioned, but he kept that Irish last name despite being born in Chihuahua, Mexico, with six out of eight Mexican grandparents. He felt pure Mexican and started out Catholic. At one point, he even wanted to be a priest! He was long past that phase when I met him. He had become, for the record, a Pentecostal follower of the faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson.

Tony was a womanizer and a serial marrier. He racked up three legal marriages and one common-law relationship, using the same marriage MO each time: He would seduce his future wife while married to the present one. Save for his first wife, Katherine DeMille, a daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, Tony’s second and third wives were both in his employ while he seduced them. He often announced, “I want to impregnate every woman in the world!”

He died trying, too. Tony fathered more than a dozen children whom he acknowledged and, whenever he wasn’t married, bedded hundreds of girls.

When I reflect on my relationship with Tony, I can’t help but see how closely we were connected in ways that went away beyond our brief time together. When the first great love of my life, Marlon Brando, triumphed as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tony was one of the first to replace Marlon for Broadway and on tour. He received the best reviews of all the Stanleys who followed.

And it was when Tony and Marlon filmed Viva Zapata! in 1952 that Anthony Quinn truly became a star. As Zapata’s brother, Eufemio, Tony played not a condescending joke of a Mexican, but a real Mexican. (It would be another decade before I would be lucky enough to play the true-life, nonclichéd Puerto Rican Anita in West Side Story—Puerto Rican, but real Puerto Rican.)

Ironically, Tony always resented Marlon for getting the starring role in Viva Zapata! He rebuffed Marlon’s attempts at friendship while they were shooting, despite the fact that Marlon respected him so much as an actor and tried hard to keep things equal between them.

Tony actually bested Marlon at the Academy Awards, though: Marlon Brando didn’t win for Best Actor that year, but Anthony Quinn did win in his category. He was the first Mexican-American to ever win an Oscar (Best Supporting), earning it as Zapata’s brother against Marlon Brando’s Emiliano. Brando lost the Best Actor Oscar that year to Gary Cooper in High Noon.

MEETING MARLON

I am wearing a scent, Vent Vert by Balmain, as I write these words. It is a scent that Marlon Brando often wore. It’s a woman’s perfume, but Marlon often used women’s perfumes, and this was his favorite.

For more than fifty years now, I have been wearing Vent Vert (Green Wind). It is a fresh scent, clean and natural. When I inhale it, I inhale the memory of Marlon, and I can almost feel his smooth, polished skin and taste his sweet breath. I remember how he spoke to me, how he played the drums, how he made love…and how I almost died from loving him.

Not every woman has known a great love, but I have been lucky enough to have had two.

My first, Marlon Brando, almost proved fatal.

*   *   *

Marlon had initially spotted me on the cover of the March 1, 1954, issue of Life magazine, taken when I was twenty-two years old. It’s that famous head shot in which I am looking back over my shoulder. My teeth are bared and my eyes are widened in a classic come-hither expression that is both sweetly innocent and tantalizingly sexual. This was my Gypsy persona, complete with dangling earrings. After I knew Marlon, I understood why my image, as captured in that photograph, made me perfect Marlon bait, ripe for the taking.

I ended up in Life magazine completely by chance. Around that time, they were starting to do television pilots in Hollywood, and I had been cast in 1953 to do a television pilot with Ray Bolger. Ray, who is still probably best-known for his role as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, was a Broadway personality—not classically trained as a dancer, but what they called an “eccentric” dancer: He hoofed and he entertained people. When I did the pilot with Ray at Desilu studios for his variety show, Where’s Raymond? (later called The Ray Bolger Show), Life was covering it, and their photographer took some pictures of me as well as Ray.

Apparently, as the pictures were being shown around the Life office, one of the editors asked, “Who’s that girl?” when he spotted me. And when someone said he didn’t know my name, but that I had a part with Ray Bolger, he said, “Find her! She looks interesting.”

The people from Life came to me then and asked whether they could do a photo layout of me, and possibly a cover. Well, I happily agreed, and a photographer came to take me all kinds of places, where he photographed me in different outfits and various poses, from an innocent girl in a lacy blouse to a lipsticked wildcat in a plunging Indian dress.

The magazine’s editorial board loved the pictures and made up a whole story line about “An Actress’s Catalog of Sex and Innocence.” The article itself described me as a “Satirist of Sex,” and began this way: “Rita Moreno is a 22-year-old starlet who can sing, dance and even, to the extent this ever becomes necessary in Hollywood, act.”

Did I mind being portrayed as a “Satirist of Sex”? Absolutely not! Are you kidding? Every actress, big star and little star and no star, would have killed at that time to land on the cover of Life magazine. My God, that was a huge deal! Life rarely put a lot of actors and actresses on their covers, because it was essentially a newsmagazine, so this was major.

Besides, during much of my young screen life in Hollywood, there was no other way for me to go than for those sexy, ethnic roles. If I didn’t want to do that, if I wanted to concentrate on principles rather than on getting work, I would never have made another film, and I never would have been on television. You played the game however you could.

In fact, that article led to my being signed with 20th Century Fox, because Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of the studio, saw my picture on the cover of Life and said, “Who is this girl? Can she speak English? Find me that girl!”

They found my agent and signed me on the spot. Things happened like that sometimes in Hollywood, and it was so bizarre. Meanwhile, I did whatever I had to do, because I always felt I was talented. I was going to persevere, convinced that someday, someone of importance would discover me. Insecurities and all, that belief drove me most of my life.

*   *   *

Marlon was instantly so intrigued by my photograph on the cover that he tried to locate me. He couldn’t, for whatever reasons. It wasn’t until much later, after we had started seeing each other, that Marlon and his lifelong makeup man, Phil Rhodes, discussed who I was and why I looked so familiar. That was when Marlon finally recalled first seeing me on that magazine cover.

We first met in the makeup room on the set of Désirée, the 1954 film in which Marlon played Napoleon opposite Jean Simmons as Désirée Clary. I’d like to say that Marlon had the Napoleonic comb-over pasted to his forehead at that very moment, and perhaps was wearing epaulets and the snug white Napoleonic emperor’s breeches. In reality, Marlon was wearing his signature white T-shirt and white cotton jeans.

Marlon was beyond handsome. With his muscular physique, hooded eyes, full lips, and quick mind, he was swaggeringly irresistible, with a profile that should be on a Roman coin. Just meeting him that first day sent my body temperature skyrocketing, as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath, and I went into a full-body blush.

It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs, novels and Wagnerian operas. From the moment we met, I felt that a web had been spun between us, drawing me to Marlon. Amazingly, he felt the same way, and made no secret about it. From that day forward, Marlon Brando and I were locked in the ultimate folie à deux, a crazy love that lasted for years, until one day I quite literally was forced out of a coma and had to choose life over him.

I was living at the Hollywood Studio Club when Marlon and I first started seeing each other. HSC was a well-known home for young women in show business, providing single and double furnished rooms for a nominal rent, plus breakfast and dinner. It was run by the Y, and had a midnight curfew and stringent rules about social behavior. Probably the most famous actress living there at the time was Kim Novak.

Marlon began to pursue me by telephone after that first meeting. The phone was in the hall, and the other girls were electrified by his calls: “Marlon Brando is on the phone for you!” one or another would shriek when they heard his voice.

And, boy, was he on the phone—for hours at a time. We would talk—well, he did most of the talking, interspersed with periods of silence that might last as long as a half hour. Anyone who was close to him had the same experience with Marlon’s phone calls; the great writer Toni Morrison, a good friend of his, also remarked on those long periods of silence that took place whenever Marlon was thinking.

Most people wouldn’t dare do this on the phone, because they’d know the person on the other end would say, “Hello? Hello, are you there?” But Marlon’s friends all got used to it, and so did I. I got to the point that I understood he was there, and that it was worth waiting for him to talk. Clinging to the receiver as I waited for him to speak again, I could almost hear Marlon’s busy mind ticking like a clock. On one occasion, I gave myself a complete mani/pedi while planted on the hallway floor, tethered by the cord stretch of the house phone, cradling the receiver on my shoulder and waiting for him to speak again.

The girls of HSC soon counted on me for their vicarious connection to this star who, at thirty years old, had achieved a meteoric rise to fame. Once, during one of my phone marathons with Marlon, two girls laid hands on the phone box, pretending to channel him.

During our phone calls and dates, I managed to piece together some of his history and to understand why he was so determined to rebel against almost everyone and everything.

Marlon was the child of two alcoholic parents. His father was a salesman who would check into a hotel and give the bellboy money for a bottle and a hooker. His mother, Dorothy Pennebaker, drank and found escape in theater. It was from her that his talent sprang. She headed a theater company in Nebraska, where Henry Fonda was one of her protégés.

As a young boy, Marlon was always caring for wounded and abandoned animals. He was the kindest of boys, and his lyrical descriptions of his boyhood showed his keen eye and fine instincts. Despite a difficult childhood, when he was older and on the road he always wrote affectionate letters to his family and signed them, “Bud.”

Like me, he’d had a sketchy education; Marlon was such a prankster during his school years that he was expelled from several, including a military academy, for things like throwing lighted firecrackers into a theater audience. But he was one of the smartest men I have ever met. He had a keen curiosity and a sharp intelligence, and was never boring.

Marlon could seem like a bully, flying off the handle at times, but he was also one of the most sensitive men I knew, always standing up for anyone he perceived as an underdog, like those suffering at the hands of class or racial discrimination. Maybe that was why he played those roles so brilliantly onstage and in film: He appeared a brute force of nature with a poet’s soul. A sensitive colossus.

“Sometimes I put on an act and people think I’m insensitive,” he said once. “Really, it’s just a kind of armor, because I’m too sensitive.”

I understood at once what he meant. I was the same way, expected to play the role of a hot Latin spitfire (or even “Satirist of Sex”), when in reality I was a determined, reliable, hardworking actor always in search of a better part.

At age twenty, Marlon had followed his sisters to New York, where he was fortunate enough to stumble into Stella Adler’s acting classes. Adler based her acting approach on the Stanislavsky Method—something most actors simply call “Method acting”—a technique based on intellectual honesty and gut instincts. Marlon embraced it, mind, body, and soul.

Even starting out in theater, he was a kind, giving boy. When Marlon met Tennessee Williams for the first time, up in Cape Cod at a cottage that the playwright was renting, “Bud” slept on the floor and fixed the electricity, the plumbing, and just about everything else (and won the part of Stanley Kowalski in the process). He was shy and unassuming.

Marlon’s stage role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan in 1947, was such a standout that he decided to try Hollywood, intending to make a movie or two before heading back to do live theater in New York City. Marlon despised the bogus glad-handing of Hollywood and made a point of thumbing his nose at all of the usual publicity machinery, especially the gossip columnists. He wasn’t going to pander to anyone.

Things didn’t turn out quite the way he planned. Marlon made several movies in quick succession, each better than the last. He was nominated for Best Actor for his role in Kazan’s film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. He lost out that year to Humphrey Bogart for his role in African Queen. However, in rapid succession Marlon was nominated for Best Actor three more times: for Viva Zapata! in 1952, for Julius Caesar in 1953, and again for On the Waterfront in 1954, which finally earned him that statue. Marlon had proved to Hollywood that he was bankable and believable for any role, from a Mexican to a Shakespearean leader to a longshoreman who “coulda been a contender.”

Hollywood was in awe of him. So was I.

On our very first date, Marlon took me to an amazing party where the other guests included James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jack Palance, and Eli Wallach…. It was an all-star, all-Method-actor party. I felt awed and out of my league, but thrilled to be there, especially with him.

We grew intimate quickly, and I began spending a lot of time at Marlon’s house. To say that he was a great lover—sensual, generous, delightfully inventive—would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul. Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.

He introduced me to so many new ideas and really educated me about the world. Marlon made me politically conscious. I saw him doing things, getting involved in events to raise awareness about Native Americans and other causes, and I would realize there was a lot going on in the world that I’d never thought about. I was really very ignorant and unaware; I was mostly absorbed by “me.” And it was Marlon who awakened me to things beyond myself.

He gave me books to read, like The Art of Loving by philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a marvelous book that I still treasure to this day. Marlon told me to read books on history, especially about the Civil War, slavery, and Native Americans. He gave me books that weren’t necessarily popular titles, but were interesting and informative about the world.

And he actually taught me about manners. I talked too loudly; Marlon made a great effort to help me understand that everybody in the restaurant did not have to hear what I was saying to him. He taught me where spoons and forks go when you set a table.

Marlon even taught me about grooming. Yes, that was important. Until meeting him, I had been dressing in the way that I thought I “should” dress, which was in that sexy Latina way. I wore very tight dresses with tight belts, so that I had a real curve around my hips. I also wore way too much makeup, because I thought I needed to; I did not believe that I was very pretty.

Slowly, slowly Marlon helped me grow up. This unexpected tutor became my caring mentor.

I didn’t ask Marlon much about acting, because I knew he didn’t like to talk about it, and bemoaned people who made it the topic when they were with him. He just hated it! But one day I finally had the confidence that he wasn’t going to throw me out the window or something, and I asked him how he could play a bad guy, like he did in The Young Lions. Marlon gave me the best advice about acting I ever got.

“Don’t play it like a bad person,” he said. “Be absolutely justified in whatever you do, because your character believes she’s right to do that thing.”

That’s the kind of skill you learn over years with an acting teacher, and that’s what Marlon taught me. I would have a chance to practice that method much later, in the only movie we’d ever do together.

As I fell ever more deeply in love with Marlon, that romantic expression “in his arms” took on an entirely unique meaning for me. Marlon’s arms embraced me in a way I had never known. It wasn’t just his muscles holding me, loving me, but his very being.

Even though we never said the words “I love you,” as much as Marlon could love any woman, I know that he loved me.

LOVE, OBSESSION, AND MIND GAMES

There is a thin, razor-sharp line between love and obsession. When it came to our relationship, Marlon and I both balanced precariously along that line, our intense passions inevitably causing us to not only crush and cut and burn each other’s souls. He may have been one of the smartest, most contemplative men I ever knew, but there were two sides to him: Marlon the sensitive and kind, and Marlon the heedless and hurtful.

Fame did not improve Marlon during the years following his success in On the Waterfront. He was becoming sullen and insolent with directors, and would deliberately irritate everyone by appearing with his pet wild raccoon, Russell. Sometimes he’d pull crazy pranks, like going to professional meetings with a fried egg in his hand.

The wilder and more rebellious he seemed, the more women wanted to tame him, I suppose. This was a dangerous combination: Having so many women offer themselves to him, even stalk him, made Marlon careless and disrespectful of his lovers—including me.

I don’t believe that he ever meant to be deliberately cruel to me. Marlon was in the throes of his own compulsion, which left him with insatiable sexual needs. Because he was perhaps the most desirable man in the world back then, he was like a lethal sexual weapon. He could seduce any woman he wanted, and that made him a walking A-bomb. He broke my heart and came close to crushing my very spirit with his physical infidelities and, worse, with his emotional betrayals.

I suppose that today’s experts would label Marlon as a sex addict. He was, like his father and like my own father, fiercely, ferociously jealous of any other man who paid attention to any of his women of the moment. Yet, no matter whom he was with, Marlon was unable to control his own desires for other women, unable to control his passion.

Marlon had his own explanation for his need to conquer so many women. In his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, he attributes his compulsive conquests to being deserted by the first two important females in his life: his mother and his nanny, Ermi.

His mother “left” him emotionally through her alcoholism, while his first love—a teenage Danish nanny named Ermi, who, according to Marlon, slept naked with him while he was a child of seven—eventually left as well. When Ermi got married and deserted the family without offering him even a good-bye or an explanation, Marlon’s sexual feelings for her became entangled with his fear of abandonment.

Marlon effused about Ermi’s “sweet breath,” like “fermented fruit,” as he had about his mother’s. Marlon himself had sweet breath, and he seemed chemically sensitive to others who also had this trait, since his mother had “a sweetness that came from fermented alcohol.” He said that my breath was sweet as well.

Ermi, who was part Indonesian, was almost certainly the inspiration for Marlon’s obsessive desire for women with dusky skin like mine. All his life, Marlon preferred women of color. I was an early and lasting example, but Marlon compulsively bedded Tahitians, East Indians, Native American Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Asians, Jamaicans…just name an ethnicity with a tint. All of his children are of mixed race.

The first desire a young boy experiences for a beautiful babysitter must be a very strong force, because Marlon was never cured of his endless quest to find a desire that matched it. He was helpless in his passions and wanted sex constantly, no matter how inappropriate. His compulsions made him miserable, and his actions led to a legion of angry or demolished women, and, most seriously, a disturbed extended family of children. Whatever damage was done to Marlon in his childhood was compounded by the hurt he inflicted on others.

How and why did I keep taking him back? I wonder that now. After all, I had seen my mother hurt by unfaithful men, starting with my very own father. I had always sworn that I would not allow myself to be treated that way under any circumstances.

Yet month after month, year after year, into my mid-twenties and beyond, I was unable to refuse Marlon when he came around—no matter what he did or what I heard. Our on-again, off-again affair continued despite the fact that, in 1957, Marlon married Anna Kashfi at her insistence because she was pregnant with his first child. That marriage lasted for only two years; in 1960, Marlon married Mexican actress Movita Castaneda, an old flame of many years. That marriage again lasted just two years. He had children with both of these women: Christian, his oldest son, with Anna, and Miko and Rebecca with Movita.

None of these hard truths lessened my obsession. Marlon was that irresistible to me, and I was that determined to conquer him. I couldn’t stay away. In fact, I was becoming addicted to the challenge of winning him over and over again, seduced by the roller-coaster emotional and physical thrill ride of being with Marlon.

Why didn’t I leave him? Because there were periods of absolute happiness when I was with Marlon unmatched by anything I’d ever experienced. Despite everything, Marlon was very kind to me, particularly at times when it didn’t involve his masculinity or our relationship. He was kind to me in the sense that he tried to make me understand that I had worth and value.

Really, it’s a wonder that I didn’t succeed in just doing away with myself during that time. I had such a low opinion of myself. But this man who was killing me was, at the same time, saving me. It was so bizarre. Marlon took care of me and protected me in certain ways—even against myself.

He’s the fellow who sent me into therapy. One day Marlon saw me on a television talk show, and the next day we went out and he said, “You really need to see somebody, Rita. You have a lot of problems.”

In a way, I think this proves how much Marlon cared about me, because he had to know that at some point—if I stayed in therapy with a good doctor and tried to help myself—our relationship was going to end. He had to know that. He was a very, very smart guy.

Even I had to know that. Still, the games continued. Whenever Marlon was off with another woman, married or not—or with many other women, as sometimes happened—I would do whatever it took to bring him back to me. This sometimes meant dating other men to make him jealous, because the one thing Marlon could not stand was the idea of my being with someone else.

*   *   *

It was because of Marlon, really, that I became involved with Dennis Hopper. Dennis was five years younger than I was, a cocky man who took himself oh, so seriously, even though I knew him before his biggest career success: cowriting, directing, and acting in Easy Rider.

Both Marlon and Dennis towered over me. As a petite woman—five-foot-two—I am always acutely aware of height. I know who is taller than I am, and by how much. Dennis listed his height as five-foot-nine, but Marlon is also listed as five-foot-nine, and I just know that Marlon was taller than Dennis. I didn’t have as far to reach on tiptoe to kiss Dennis!

An aside: Male actors fool around a lot with their height; they wear lifts in their boots, that kind of thing. And a curious fact: Both Marlon and Dennis played the male lead in Napoleon movies, and Napoleon was way shorter than either of them, only five-foot-six.

Of the two men, Marlon and Dennis, who had the bigger ego? That was easier than measuring their actual height: No one had a bigger ego than Marlon.

In other words, Dennis didn’t make as much of an impression on me as he might have liked. He was such a baby when I knew him, and didn’t yet have the string of wives and girlfriends that he later acquired. He was notorious for being unable to sustain a relationship. He was, like Anthony Quinn, a serial marrier—Dennis married five times and divorced everyone. His marriage to Michelle Phillips was the shortest, lasting only two weeks. Even at his tragic end in 2010 at age seventy, dying of prostate cancer and weighing only a hundred pounds, Dennis was still summoning what strength he had left to divorce his last wife.

Dennis also had a long, feverish history of drug use and violence. He stabbed Rip Torn and lied about it on a television talk show—a fib that cost him $1 million in lawsuits launched by an enraged Torn. (It was never a good thing to enrage Rip Torn, who famously bit Norman Mailer’s ear and was more recently arrested after breaking into a bank with a loaded gun.)

Dennis hadn’t become that stormy when I knew him; he was more egotistical than stoned. I probably wouldn’t have even dated him but for one compelling reason: Being with Dennis was like offering an hors d’oeuvre to Marlon—to make him jealous.

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

Marlon 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.

Marlon’s response? That he had been “taken”—the abortionist had not earned his fee. Marlon wanted his money back!

Afterward, I had a hollow feeling and couldn’t control my emotions. I raged and wept. I was in the kind of agony that only an obsessed, mistreated lover can understand. The memories of tenderness and passion between Marlon and me only added to the torment. Even Marlon’s first wife, Anna Kashfi, had said that she was sure Marlon preferred me. Why couldn’t I at least have had his child, like those other women?

Marlon seemed to be testing me: Where was my pain threshold? How much more could I take? Why was he both tender and indifferent? The fact that I knew some of the answers didn’t help.

The sorrow over losing the baby and the humiliation of knowing what I had done with Marlon—and kept doing, over and over—was destroying me. Again and again I had taken Marlon back, running to him no matter what he did, only to have him do something even worse the next time. These were the redundant agonies of a dangerous love affair that had long ago spun out of control.

Things only worsened between us after that, if that is possible. Marlon was filming Mutiny on the Bounty, mostly on location in Tahiti, and we were apart a great deal. He was playing the role of Fletcher Christian, a lieutenant aboard the Bounty who falls for a Tahitian princess. The princess was played by the exotically beautiful French Polynesian–Chinese actress Tarita Teriipia, and Marlon was soon as smitten with her as his character was with the princess in the film. This, along with the sheer number of his infidelities and the depth of his involvements, marriages, and babies, drove me to my limit.

Despite his new relationship with Tarita, Marlon called me upon his return from shooting Mutiny on the Bounty. As always, he was eager for me to come over to his house and resume our affair.

I was alone in his house, waiting for him to arrive, when my pain became intolerable. How can you keep taking him back? I asked myself. He hasn’t had just one woman. He’s had legions! It will never stop!

The truth kept buffeting me in waves, as if I’d suddenly regained consciousness and clarity after so many years of being lost in this fog of obsession. I constantly, coldly, cruelly reminded myself that, during the years that Marlon had been carrying on his passionate affair with me, he had married and definitely impregnated not just one, but two other women. Yet he hadn’t even let me have our baby, when other women were having his babies all over the world! Was I that unlovable, that undesirable to him, that he couldn’t give me that small comfort?

Over the past few years, I had been learning a lot more about myself with the help of my therapist, Murray Korngold. I knew that it was quickly becoming a matter of how much longer I could shoulder these psychic insults without bringing this very dark drama to an end, or resolving to stick it out to the end, and I had no idea what that might look like!

I must have had at least five or six breakups with Marlon, only to return to his bed after massive wooing and purring and dinners and implied promises that things would be all right once he returned. But here’s the rub: Those “morning-after” drives in my car back to my house after giving in to Marlon yet again were among my sorriest, saddest experiences. I felt used and thoroughly humiliated every time. Empty, the life sucked out me. Feckless. And at the same time, sooo disappointed in myself, which made me feel even worse, if that was possible.

I knew that things were getting really, really bad when I stopped crying despite the fact that my eyes watered constantly from keeping tears at bay. I was also on phenobarbital for a hyperactive thyroid condition. This drug, a known depressant, simply made me feel completely hopeless—and I think helped lead me to believe that there was only one answer left: I had to end our affair for good, even if it meant ending my life.

When Marlon made it back to California to film the interior shots for Mutiny on the Bounty, I went back to him despite having said I wouldn’t. I felt battered and completely passive. He was shocked by my appearance. I had barely eaten for a week, and I truly looked like a wraith. Did that stop him from desiring me? No!

The one thing that both of us had always clung to—well, that I had clung to—was the intimacy and warmth of sex. When Marlon and I were making love, it seemed like we could share astonishingly deep feelings of warmth and trust. I was still moved by the strength of that man’s arms. Those arms, those bloody arms! Nobody else could give me what his arms did. I wanted to be buried in them forever. They were the only thing that gave me solace and made me feel protected.

But not this night. On our first night together after Marlon returned from Tahiti, I felt like a rag doll with no strength or free will whatsoever. I felt only disgust at myself for being back with him. At last, on April 19, 1961, my pain had become unbearable. The strongest desire I felt was to escape and not feel anything anymore.

When I woke up very early the next morning, Marlon had already gone to the studio, but this time I did not drive home. Instead, I went directly to the medicine cabinet, took out a bottle of Marlon’s sleeping pills, poured a handful into my left hand, and stared at them for a very long time. I reminded myself that this was not a scene in a movie—that if I swallowed these venal little bullets, I would surely die.

“So think about that, Rita,” I said aloud, staring at myself in the mirror.

I truly detested the image reflected back at me: a weak, self-pitying, frail woman with disheveled hair, hollowed cheeks, a shiny red face, and a swollen, leaking nose. What could be salvaged here? Nothing!

I threw all the pills down my throat before I could change my mind, drained a glass of water, and said, “Well, there. You see? That wasn’t so hard!”

I went to bed to die. This wasn’t a revenge suicide, but a consolation, an escape-from-pain death. I wasn’t picturing Marlon crying at my funeral and missing me or anything remotely like that. I just desperately wanted to finally be at peace.

My immune system was further depressed by the phenobarbital that I was taking, which meant that my chemical cocktail worked quickly. I was discovered by Marlon’s trusted longtime assistant, Alice Marchak. If she had arrived a few minutes later, I most certainly would have been dead.

Yet, I did some odd things for a suicidal person. Sometime during my attempt at eternal sleep—I moved. I’d guess two hours in, I felt the urge to urinate and actually rolled out of bed onto the floor and crawled to the bathroom just off the bedroom. I crashed into walls on the way, because I couldn’t see more than an amber ambience all around, no distinct objects, just vague shapes. I groped my way to the toilet, climbed up on it, and urinated! Then I fell off the commode and crawled and crashed my way back to bed.

When Alice first came in to work, she had seen me in Marlon’s bed but assumed that I was asleep. After several hours, however, she began worrying because I still didn’t appear. I seemed so inert when she checked on me again that she tried to awaken me.

Alice saw that I was unresponsive and assumed the worst. Panicked, she called Marlon to rush home from the studio. Then, with the maid’s help, Alice managed to drag me out of bed and put me into the shower, where she ran cold water over me. I clearly remember her shouting, “Rita, why did you do this?!”

The cold water must have momentarily shocked me into a dim consciousness, because I answered. I heard my own little, high voice say, “I’m so unhappy.”

The last thing I remember is Alice and the maid laughing hysterically as they tried to get a response out of me while in the shower. Looking back on that day, I’m positive that their reaction must have been because of that syndrome where people are so horrified or so nervous that they respond inappropriately—and do the opposite of what they feel. At the time, though, I remember thinking, “Why are they laughing at me?”

The cold shower probably sent me into shock. The doctor who treated me later said that a cold shower is about the worst thing for someone whose system is already in severe distress and shutting down. He also told me that he performed one of those tests where you run the point of a needle or pin across the arch of a person’s foot and wait for a reflex. I didn’t respond at all, which was an ominous moment indeed for the doctor, Marlon, and my therapist, who also came to the house.

Dr. Korngold, my therapist, told me of a curious occurrence in those moments before the ambulance arrived, when the doctor was trying to resuscitate me: Every time something was said by him or the doctor trying to help me survive, apparently I would start to sob and vocally keen. He has always believed that I responded that way because I was so moved by the efforts to counteract my profound sadness, and found my will to survive.

“You have an exquisite hold on life!” Dr. Korngold told me.

I wasn’t so sure about that. It astonished me to learn that the healthy part of Rita had fought the act of going quietly into that good night!

At the hospital, they stuck pins into the soles of my feet again and there was still no response at all. And, even in my unconsciousness, I truly believed that I wanted to die. When I could talk, I tried as hard as I could to talk everyone out of helping me: Alice, the medics, the nurses. It would be better, kinder, to let me slip away.

I was not thinking of my mother, my brother Dennis, or any of my friends and acquaintances who would care and be wounded by my death. All I wanted to do was escape from pain—just like that baby bird that had closed its eyes and died in my hand when I was a little girl.

I wanted to check out. Escape. I couldn’t do life anymore.

*   *   *

When they pumped my stomach in the hospital, I retched up a dead white pasty fluid. As I regained consciousness, I heard the attendants say, “That’s all that’s coming up? This sticky white stuff?”

Their voices were very loud and they sounded shocked. Yet I wasn’t: I hadn’t ingested anything for days other than coffee and cigarettes. They should not have been talking about me in my presence at all, but that’s hospital attendants for you. It was a reprise of the thugs who carted me off when I was a sick five-year-old during the chicken pox epidemic.

That evening, my therapist visited and alerted me to strange sounds emanating from behind a curtained-off bed beside mine. “You hear that, Rita? That is the sound of a death rattle,” Dr. Korngold said. “You’d be making that same sound right now if you hadn’t been found.”

I had come that close.

At that very moment, I knew I would never, ever do such a thing again.

Deep in my unconscious I must have known that the most destructive part of myself was dead…gone for good. At last, the part of me that had wanted to die did.

How to survive suicide? All I can say is that, when I sincerely tried to die, my spirit rose up and allowed the strongest part of me to take over and fight for my life.

*   *   *

I wasn’t instantly cured of my obsession, of course. Nobody ever is, not when a deep love is as addictive and self-destructive as mine was for Marlon.

The day after my suicide attempt was one of the worst days of my life. When my mother and my little brother Dennis came to see me in the hospital, it became immediately clear to me that, when you kill yourself—or try to—you wound those who love you. They can’t help asking themselves why they didn’t see it coming and do something to stop you from feeling this sad and defeated, this hopeless. They must wonder, How could this person I love so much still feel so alone in the world?

For my part, I had to ask how I had reached such a low point in my life that I could be so selfish. How could I not have considered my mother and Dennis when I thoughtlessly swallowed those pills? My own mother, who was so proud of me and had done so much for me! And Dennis, my innocent, overgrown pup of a brother! He was only sixteen years old, and despite his lumbering height of six-foot-two, he still had the same baby face that had made me love him from the moment he came into my life.

“Oh, God! I’m so sorry!” I repeated over and over. I couldn’t even look them in the eye.

My mom was in tears, looking absolutely dumbstruck. “Did I do something to cause this?” she asked. “Was it Marlon? Why? Why?”

Dennis was devastated—and devastating to look at. I could see in his face that he understood, as I hadn’t, that if I’d succeeded with those pills, I would have been lost to him forever. And my little brother would truly be lost without me, his ally and defender. The look on his tearful face said, You didn’t think of me, did you?

I did not. An act that was, in my mind, supposed to give me peace had nearly betrayed me in the most unexpected and heartbreaking way. How could I have not thought of them?

Yet, at the precise moment I’d swallowed the pills, I had thought of no one. Not even Marlon. I had just wanted an escape from my torment.

Now, seeing my small, precious family at my bedside made me vow to change my life. “From now on,” I promised them, “everything will be different.”

And that was when I made what even Marlon termed “the sharpest right turn” he had ever witnessed.

*   *   *

In the ultimate irony, the person most responsible for helping me heal after my breakdown—apart from myself, of course—was Marlon. He was the one who had originally suggested a therapist. Now Dr. Korngold said, in no uncertain terms, that I must give up Marlon forever.

“Rita, you must never, ever see him again,” Dr. Korngold said. “It will kill you.”

He told Marlon exactly the same thing: “Do not ever see Rita again. You will kill her.”

It was wrenching to know that I would never be with Marlon again, but to do otherwise would be to die. I knew that I must avoid Marlon at all costs if I were going to save myself—and the people I loved most in the world, my mother and brother.

We moved on, Marlon and I. He married Tarita, his Tahitian princess, in 1962. They bought property in Tahiti and had a son, Simon Teihotu, and a daughter, Tarita Cheyenne.

Me? I went back to trying to find acting jobs and a semblance of normal life.

SAVED BY WEST SIDE STORY

Often in my experience, the lowest lows in my life have been followed by great, unexpected highs. West Side Story would change my life forever, but not before months of arduous work, a demanding schedule, the exhausting rehearsal—and my failed suicide attempt shortly after the film wrapped.

It doesn’t seem possible that it has been so many years since I spun around in that violet dress, petticoats flaring, singing “America.” But fifty years later, George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn, and I were kneeling in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on a red velvet cushion with sticks in hand to write our names in wet cement below our hand- and shoe prints. I was thankful my faithful friend and dance partner, George, offered Anita one more “lift.”

“Rita Morno?” he read. In the excitement and flashing of the cameras, I’d written my name without the “e.” Oh the things we forget at eighty!

Later that evening, I’d get to celebrate with the “kids,” the dancers from West Side Story, now in their sixties and seventies.

The fiftieth birthday of West Side Story marked a half century of change and many hard-won victories for minorities in show business.

The role of Anita in West Side Story is the epitome of the great ethnic role. Yet a funny, little-known fact is that the show was originally conceived as a Jewish gang versus an Irish gang—and it was called East Side Story! If that show had been made, I wouldn’t have been cast, certainly. I am forever glad that the producers decided that the Irish/Jewish story had already been told onstage as Abie’s Irish Rose.

While I had been balking all my life at playing stereotyped Hispanic roles in the movies, all of those Conchitas and Lolitas, I leaped at the opportunity to audition for the part of Anita. Anita was real! She was Puerto Rican, and she was fighting for her rights. She had plenty to say about what was wrong in America—and in the world. At this point, I’d never been given the opportunity to play the part of a woman who stood up for herself. Her suffering, her anger, were my suffering, my anger. Becoming Anita was a personal mission for me. I had fled down those mean streets in fear of the gangs, chased and haunted by that awful hiss: “Spic!”

When I had to play the attack scene in the candy store, I wept and broke down—right on set. It was that incredible, amazing, magical thing that happens sometimes when you’re acting and you have the opportunity to play a part so close to your heart: You pass through the membrane separating your stage self from your real self. For a time, at least, you are one person. Could that be the scene that caught Oscar’s eye?

Going into the production I knew that West Side Story wasn’t guaranteed to be a commercial success. When I heard the price of tickets would be five dollars, I actually cried out, “No one will come!” Reserved seats for a movie? It was unheard-of, and my dark little alter ego foresaw failure.

I admit now that even after the movie was finished and I knew it was brilliant, I still did not foresee its success, despite the sweat and tears and talent poured into making the film by greats like Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins, the latter of whom I had worked with on The King and I, his only other film.

I was in complete awe of Jerry Robbins. He could be frightening to work with, because he could be so temperamental, ferocious, and even mean. Before he left the set of The King and I to go back to New York, Jerry had told me that he was going to make West Side Story on Broadway. He said that he thought I’d be perfect for the part of Maria, the part eventually played by Natalie Wood in the film, and asked whether I’d audition for it.

I agreed, but at the last minute got cold feet. I felt so unsure of myself at that time that I didn’t think I could do it. My prior stage experiences, like Skydrift and Camino Real, had all been ego-destroying disasters. To me, the stage yawned open like a black cavern, and I was terrified about going back in there. I wanted to stay in movies.

My future role as Anita, the one that would win me that golden Oscar, was played on the Broadway stage by Chita Rivera. It had to have been very difficult for Chita, who performed brilliantly in the play, not to appear in the movie. Compound that with the fact that her husband, Tony Mordente, played in both. Under those circumstances could I have been as gracious as Chita? Years later, I attended her one-woman show and laughed hysterically hearing her say, “When Rita Moreno got the role of Anita in the movie West Side Story, I wanted to kill myself. But when she won the Oscar for West Side Story, I wanted to kill her!” And I said to myself, “That is one classy dame!”

When it was announced that West Side Story would be made into a movie, the news hit the media and filled every trade publication. My agent, Mike Rosenfeld, was on the phone instantly to tell me he had submitted my name for the part of Anita. I told Marlon what Mike had done, and, knowing how badly I wanted to make a movie again, he called Mike to encourage him to “work hard to get her that audition.” It was a very generous act on Marlon’s part, as he was loath to deal with anyone at any level of the Hollywood establishment. Later, Mike told me about Marlon’s call and how, when he heard Brando’s voice, he shot up from his chair as though royalty had entered the room. “Then I damn near passed out,” he told me. But even with Mike’s concerted efforts, he still couldn’t arrange an audition or get through to producers.

It was Jerry Robbins who told codirector Robert Wise, “She’d be perfect for the part of Anita.” And when I got the call to audition, I was both elated and panicked. I had just over a month to prepare, and hadn’t danced since my MGM days. I ran to the local dancing school and took lessons all day, every day. I nearly killed myself trying to improve my skills. Could I even do it? It had been more than ten years since I’d put on my Capezio dancing shoes. I sought out a friend who had played the part of Anita on the coast-to-coast tour of the play and asked her to teach me some steps.

Then it came time for the three days of audition. The first day I sang, and that went well. Day two was acting. I chose to read from the candy-shop scene, and could tell Jerry and Robert were very moved. I felt hopeful until Jerry warned me that if I didn’t cut it in the dance auditions, I was out. He added that he really wanted me for the part, but it all depended on me. Nothing like a little pressure!

My heart leaped to my throat the day of the dance audition. What if I wasn’t good enough? What if the steps I had learned weren’t the same? What if I couldn’t manage the turns? I wanted this part so badly!

I was being shown the steps by Howard Jeffrey, Jerry’s dance assistant, and I was beyond relieved that they were the same steps I had learned. Sometime later I heard that Howard reported to Jerry, “She’s pretty good. She has style, she’s funny and vivacious, and she’s out of shape, but I couldn’t believe how quickly she picked up the steps.” Ha! Perseverance and hard work paid off again!

Let me say a little more about Jerry Robbins’s reputation for meanness and maltreatment of dancers. It is well-known Broadway lore that he had finally so angered the male dancers in the production of the play that they burned their knee pads in front of his office door. From months of observation, I concluded that Jerry was filled with a puzzling self-loathing that spilled over onto all the people with whom he worked, especially the men. Jerry was never mean to me, but he was brutally hard on me. Never mean, but sitting on the fence of mean.

I felt I couldn’t keep up with the younger dancers, who had such superior skills. I was out of my league. Plus, I could never, ever be as good as Chita—forever the best. But I kept dancing—dancing to perfect the steps, dancing to keep up with Marlon, and dancing with anxiety, my faithful partner, all the way to a breakdown.

Although it may seem bizarre, given the chance I would work with Jerry again in a heartbeat. Jerry’s choreography was wildly original and impossibly brilliant. Torn ligaments, twisted ankles, and pulled backs were necessary offerings to Jerry, our god of dance. I was having great difficulty with my knees during the production, so I went to see an orthopedist. He took one look at me and said, “It’s very simple; you have old knees.”

“Old knees? I’m only twenty-six!”

And he said, “Uh-huh…”

I understood what Jerry was getting at with his choreography, but who would buy it? I wondered. Leaping male dancers doing balletic moves in alleyways? Of course, it worked not only well, but outrageously well.

Sadly, Jerry was fired before the movie was finished. But the filming would never have gotten finished if it had to meet Jerry’s impossible standards. He was such a perfectionist, he could never declare, “It’s a print.”

Jerry ended up doing all of the choreography save for one number, the mambo at the gym. Whatever his perfectionist, impossible nature, Jerome Robbins was a genius. What a joy to have worked with him!

One of the few things that I disdained while filming the movie was the makeup used to paint the Puerto Ricans the same color. We Sharks were all the same homogeneous brown! Our gang, including me, was a uniform tobacco brown color, and that was just plain wrong and inaccurate. Puerto Ricans, with their varied genetic ancestry—Spanish, Taino Indian, Black, Dutch—are born with a broad palette of skin colors, from outright white to true black.

And, of course, it was uncomfortable for Hispanics to see Natalie Wood play Maria, especially because we’d heard that Natalie hadn’t wanted the part, but had been so prevailed upon to take it that she couldn’t refuse. Natalie seemed uncomfortable in her role as Maria when she was around us, a rowdy, raucous group of dancers. This may explain her nonengaging demeanor with us “Gypsies” throughout the shoot. It might have been helpful had we been able to bond with Natalie, but she kept her distance.

Having health problems during the shoot made it difficult for me. I was hyperactive due to a thyroid condition that caused my eyes to “pop.” If you watch the movie closely, you will see that my vivacious eye rolls are just a tad exaggerated, though I do like to think that I got away with it.

Robert Wise confided later that he almost didn’t cast me because of my “popping eyes.” He constantly directed me, “Watch your eyes!” And so, on top of singing, dancing, and acting simultaneously, I also had to concentrate on keeping my eyelids lowered.

Ultimately, I can’t say that anything about the making of West Side Story was a mistake, because the movie was brilliant and made history. It was a revolution, especially given the excitement of the choreography. Nothing like this had ever been done on film before. The reviews for the movie were ecstatic. One famous New York Times critic, Bosley Crowther, praised me in particular—but I was a bit crushed to see that he fell back on my least favorite cliché: “Spitfire.”

*   *   *

As West Side Story was nearing the end of production, I became more and more exhausted. I was dealing with a thyroid condition, my relationship with Marlon was unraveling, and while I was filming West Side Story I was also filming Summer and Smoke. Paramount was very eager to have me play the part of sexy temptress Rosa Zacharias in this film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play. I wasn’t especially happy about my role in Summer and Smoke, because although it was an important film by a very important playwright, I was again playing a stereotypical Latina.

I am profoundly saddened to remember that this perfect storm of despair led to such a desperate attempt to close the book on my life. The suicide attempt and the difficult healing process afterward were arduous. Yet I am forever grateful for the support of my close friend and roommate Phyllis, who made other chapters possible. So I dutifully moved forward and found another part—a character somewhere between “island maiden” and “strong native female”—and traveled to the Philippines to play a girl guerrilla, a hybrid double agent/whore/fighter, in Cry of Battle. The picture costarred Van Heflin as a seedy opportunist ruthlessly switching sides in the Philippine guerrilla war versus their own military government and the Japanese.

Cry of Battle was a B picture and closely censored by the Filipino government. In truth, the part was just another paycheck and wasn’t at all helpful to my healing, but at least the location was nearly identical to the rain forest of my childhood, El Yunque. In a way, it felt as if I had returned home, because of the gentle, smiling people, the rain forest, and the fragrant flowers. I could easily remember standing in the river while Mami did our wash. I hoped this was symbolic of my new start in life—my rebirth.

*   *   *

That movie shoot was distinguished by two remarkable occurrences. The first was the appearance of a never-before-seen half brother, a son by my biological father, Paco Alverio. When the boy called and told me that he was stationed nearby for the U.S. Army in Japan, I excitedly invited him to meet me in my hotel.

He was a slight young man with a thin mustache. I imagined a resemblance between us, but maybe there was none. The boy was so shy that he was almost silent as we sat there in my hotel room and regarded each other. I autographed a picture for him as I tried to draw him out, and gave him all my contact information. Although I had refused to see our father again, I was pleased to meet him.

But the boy literally was too shy to speak, which made the visit painful for me. It was also poignant; after all, we were related, and we could have been a family. I was truly starting to think more and more about family.

Would I ever become a wife and have a family of my own? I was beginning to feel a longing for stability that I’d never experienced before.

The second occurrence happened on February 26, 1962. I was stunned. It was late in the evening when I returned to the hotel from the day’s shoot. There, waiting at the front desk, was a telegram from my agent informing me that I had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story!

It had never occurred to me that I might be nominated for the Oscar. It just didn’t seem in the realm of possibility, especially for a Puerto Rican girl. Only one Hispanic in history had ever won an Oscar: José Ferrer, who had earned the Best Actor award for playing a non-Hispanic role in Cyrano de Bergerac.

In fact, no Hispanic woman had ever won any Oscar, ever! I didn’t even dare hope that I’d actually win. It is a cliché, I know, when people say, “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” But for me it was true. It was an honor. More than that, it was a dizzying joy for me to be nominated, erasing much of the pain of the previous several years. I thought it was impossible to go farther than this nomination, but one thing was for sure: I was determined to fly home to LA for the awards!

There followed a flurry of negotiations with the movie company. The result was that they would release me for only three days: one day to fly over, one day for the Oscar ceremony, and one day to fly back to the jungle.

I didn’t care. The important thing was that I was going! I ordered a heavily brocaded dress made of special Japanese obi fabric, a gorgeous gown with a black bateau top that I still have (and can still get into, happily).

On April 9, 1962, I attended the Academy Award ceremony. George Chakiris, who had also been nominated, was my escort, and on the way in the limo we laughed and practiced our “loser faces”—the fake smiles we would need to show when other actors won in our categories.

I was so convinced that I wouldn’t win that I almost gave that fake smile when my name was called: “And the winner is…Rita Moreno!”

Stunned, I made my way up to the stage and stared in disbelief as Rock Hudson handed me the Oscar. I was so giddy that I was literally speechless. I didn’t thank anyone, because I hadn’t prepared a speech. All I managed to say was, “I do not believe it! And I leave you with that!” before I ran off.

As I glided offstage, the cohost of the ceremony, Joan Crawford, seized me and trapped me in her viselike grip. She was built like a linebacker. “I am so glad,” she intoned, “that you have chosen to share your moment of triumph with me!”

She held me for a good fifteen minutes, mugging for the photographers who were there to photograph me. Because of our height difference, I never saw Joan’s face—just her impressive bosom. When the photographer finally managed to peel me from her death grip, I was ushered to the press room, where I congratulated George, who won the award for Best Male Supporting Actor, and join my mom, who was waiting in the audience for me to return.

That night was wonderful. But the best part was later, when I heard from my dear friend, Liz Torrea that, while the Oscars were being televised, there was a sacred silence in El Barrio—Spanish Harlem—and in all of the other Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New York. My people were holding their collective breath. And what an outcry when I won! People were literally hanging out their windows, yelling, “She won! She won! She did it!” What they were really saying was “We won!”

That Hispanic groundswell of pride and support made me happier than just about anything else about the award. As if to underscore this sentiment, when I flew back to the Philippines the next day and began the ascent to the jungle location, I saw a commotion on the mountain. It was a long procession of people coming down the slope: Every Filipino in the movie was marching down the mountain, singing and calling out congratulations. They all carried signs that said, “Mabuhay, Rita! Victory, Rita!”

FINDING MYSELF IN POLITICS

By the time I won the Oscar for West Side Story, I felt like I was truly seeking a healthy new life. In group therapy, I met a wonderful woman who introduced me to the sit-ins, marches, and political movements that were just beginning to heat up in the 1960s, especially those around civil rights. This woman had come from the old lefty days and was a fountain of knowledge.

Perhaps as valuable as my therapy, then, was its offshoot: my growing commitment to political causes. I had discovered that the best cure for the sort of obsessive self-involvement that had contributed to my troubled life was to direct my energies outward to a wider range of interests. I began to see myself as part of the bigger picture, and to realize that, as someone who was now a public figure, I had the capacity to help others, or at the very least raise awareness. And, as I discovered, the more I worked for causes greater than myself, the less wrapped up I was in my own troubles.

My first real foray into the political arena was a “Ban the bomb” demonstration. Strontium 90, a radioactive deposit from atomic testing, had been landing on fields where dairy cows grazed. The scientific community had established that strontium 90 was getting into milk. It was a big environmental issue, like global warming is now. Many, including myself, felt strongly that we had to do something to get rid of it fast! Otherwise, the chemical might deform the bones of future children. I was horrified by the possibility, so I picked up a placard and marched.

From then on, I was very much enlisted in political causes, mostly to end atomic testing and racial and economic discrimination. Major stars, regular actors, and members of the film community were awakening to the need to be politically active, rising to the front lines, because we knew that we were visible and could get the TV and radio time needed to give voice to valuable causes.

The atmosphere was highly charged throughout the 1960s. It’s hard to believe now, in this very different time, how excited we were, and how deep our commitment was to end all kinds of ills. The FBI was also very involved in tracking us as a result.

Probably the most historic political event I participated in during that time was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. Attended by some 250,000 people, it was the largest demonstration ever held in the nation’s capital, and one of the first to earn extensive television coverage.

Of course I had to be there, and doing so changed my life forever. I would never again sit back passively if I had an opinion, because I witnessed firsthand how important it is to speak your mind and work together to right whatever wrongs are being perpetrated by the government.

That year was filled with racial unrest and demonstrations. Sit-ins and picket lines were everywhere, even outside Woolworth’s. College kids both white and black sang “We Shall Overcome” along with adult protesters. It was all very new and very brave. The nation’s pulse was racing.

It was a social revolution whose participants were being beaten, even killed. Media coverage of police actions in Birmingham, Alabama, where attack dogs and fire hoses were turned against protesters, sparked national outrage.

Demonstrations took place across the country, peaking with the first March on Washington, the event forever immortalized by Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

On August 28, l963, I boarded a famous flight—a planeload of celebrities dedicated to the cause who were flying to Washington for the march. Had that plane gone down, it would have created a dearth of movie actors and a loss of other talent, as there were also writers and directors on board. Diahann Carroll and Sammy Davis Jr. were on the flight with me. So was Jim Garner, who had been a friend of mine since our first screen test, nervously guzzling Pepto-Bismol to ease the growl of his ulcer. This was probably the first time Jimmy had ever committed himself publicly to any political cause, and like many of us, I’m sure he was probably wondering what this act might cost him with respect to his career. I was very touched, because he participated anyway, knowing it was the right thing to do.

Marlon, of course, would never have missed this event. He had been dedicated to raising awareness about racial issues all his life. I saw Marlon at one of the tactical meetings prior to the March on Washington. A lot had happened since then: I had won an Oscar, and he had married Tarita. When Marlon spotted me and said a soft “hello,” I nodded curtly and reminded myself to stay away from him for my own good.

Seeing Marlon again, I felt a rush of fear, experiencing it as an all-too-familiar flash of extreme heat coursing through my body. It was such a primal reaction that I was embarrassed, especially because I could feel a deep blush coloring my face at the same time—from that other, more familiar heat of desire. Unbelievable! Obsessions die hard. You really have to live your life watching for banana peels and carry a very big stick.

That thought actually made me remember something that Marlon once said to me. He was constantly characterizing me as eternally hopeful, and one day he mused, “You carry a stick with a nail in the end, like a park attendant. But instead of picking up trash, you pick up bits of hope and deposit them into your little brown paper bag.”

It still makes me laugh. I know it’s true.

Harry Belafonte was at that organizational meeting where I saw Marlon, and he was on the celebrity plane as well. In fact, Harry was the one who had pushed us all to participate, because he felt so strongly that the film and performing industry should be represented at the march. He knew that our presence would attract the media and strengthen the cause.

Determination was in the air. No one believed for one minute that this time of our lives wouldn’t have a profound, permanent effect on this country. And I was part of it. It was all so exciting. The experience has stayed with me forever, and to this day I have remained politically committed to causes close to my heart, including racial equality, breast cancer, hunger, and AIDS.

Even today, I can vividly remember the excitement of being in Washington on that scalding hot day. Nobody was quite sure how many people would turn up for the demonstration, but the numbers exceeded all expectations. An estimated quarter of a million people marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial in what turned out to be both a protest and a communal celebration.

By the time we had made it to the Lincoln Memorial, where the speeches would be given, everyone was steaming hot and soaked with perspiration; I wished I had brought a hat. Our group was fortunate to have privileged seating not ten feet from Dr. Martin Luther King himself!

The event included musical performances by Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mahalia Jackson, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Charlton Heston, who in later years was most often regarded as a conservative leader of the National Rifle Association lobby, was then regarded as a “wild liberal.” He was part of our contingent of artists, which that day included not only Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, and Sammy Davis Jr., but also Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, and writer and poet James Baldwin.

The two most noteworthy speeches came from black Georgia state representative John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. Representative Lewis, of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), was the one that day who really declared a war for racial equality.

But for sheer eloquence and staying power, it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s epic “I Have a Dream” speech that had the most lasting impact on me, as it did on the nation. I count myself privileged to have heard the speech live as he delivered it. I was sitting so close to him that I could see Dr. King’s beautiful brown face, lit with conviction.

In that glorious, mellifluous voice, King delivered his sonorous “I have a dream” refrain, speaking of an America where children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

I swear I vibrated like a tuning fork with his words. I was ready for change.

*   *   *

Life is curious. I certainly never expected to launch a new romance on a day of so much exciting political activity, but that was exactly what happened: I became involved with James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, because of the March on Washington.

At thirty-five, James Forman was a good ten years older than most of the SNCC membership and had assumed a natural leadership role. He seemed to tower above everyone, especially me, and he was such a handsome, imposing man that I was instantly drawn to him. I could not help but note his beautiful coloring. He had smooth, creamy brown skin; a darker cap of fine nubby hair; strong, straight features; and, most arresting of all, eyes that were a rich mahogany. He had the loveliest, friendliest face I’d ever seen, and he wore the signature denim coveralls that had become the symbol of working people everywhere.

I knew who Jim was before that day, because I had admired his charismatic speeches. On the day of the march, I recognized him in the crowd at once. We hit it off immediately and had lots to talk about after the event. Jim’s reverence for Dr. King was touching; he struck me as a very authentic man, with a certain freshness about him that was like a gentle breeze after the Sturm und Drang of my life. I was completely smitten.

It never occurred to me that anything would happen between us, because we led such different lives. But, following the march, Jim and I continued meeting by chance at meetings and protests. One day, he offered me a ride home.

“Sure,” I said. “But would you mind stopping at a hamburger joint somewhere? I’m dying of hunger.”

“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

Despite 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.

At the heart of the play is a contentious married couple, Sidney Brustein and the character I played, Iris Parodus Brustein, his wife. My original leading man, the first Sid Brustein, was Mort Sahl. He had seemed like such a brilliant choice, but he never did learn his lines, and then he vanished, too. With only days to go before opening night, a stalwart actor, Gabriel Dell, stepped in and tried to master that enormous role in the complex play.

At the same time, Alice Ghostley, who costarred, was suffering from enormous personal problems in her marriage and was becoming odder and odder. When her marriage had reached a particularly low point, I invited her to be a houseguest to offer a retreat. I never expected how affected she had become. On one occasion she called me into the bedroom to show me the lint in her shoes. “See what they are doing to me?” I didn’t know who they were or what she was talking about. I drew a warm bath to calm her and when she came into the bathroom the toilet unexpectedly made a groaning sound. She squealed, “You see I told you, they’re after me.” Unsettling days!

In the play, Iris and Sidney are not only at odds with society, but with each other. If I ever needed any reminders of what I had been through, the play afforded one every night. My sister in the play, embodied by Cynthia O’Neal, killed herself 109 times during the run. The effect of her tragedy was to reconcile me with my onstage estranged husband, Sidney.

My character’s name, Iris Parodus Brustein, heralded the theatrical and tragic nature of the play: Parodus is a Greek word pertaining to the chorus that may come and go to herald the action. Knowing writers, the name was no coincidence, and it did seem as though a Greek tragedy was ensuing not only onstage, but off.

As we approached opening night, everyone associated with the play was hoping that Lorraine might somehow make it, but sadly, in the end she was too ill to attend. We opened to mixed reviews and extremely low advance ticket sales.

All of the actors had already taken pay cuts, but Brustein is the only play in my memory where the cast members passed the hat after the curtain, hoping to collect enough money to meet the daily expenses of production.

*   *   *

Once again, true to the patterns in my life, it was during this low point in my career that I met Lenny Gordon, my second and greatest love.

“Do you want to meet the most wonderful man in the world?” my friend Leah Schaefer asked.

She had to ask me more than once, believe me. It took a lot of cajoling to get me to agree to be fixed up with another man, because I no longer had much faith that there were many wonderful men out in the world, waiting for me to meet them. After a lot of persuasion on her part, though, I begrudgingly agreed to meet this Mr. Wonderful at Leah’s apartment.

There, I found myself face-to-face with a handsome, witty fellow who was a practicing internist at Mount Sinai. “A nice Jewish doctor”—a redundant phrase, no doubt.

Lenny captivated me with his deep intelligence and funny, funny sense of humor. He made me rethink the word “nice,” which for me, normally, was the kiss of death where men were concerned. He walked me home that night and asked whether I would be interested in going to a New Year’s Eve party the following week. When I said yes, he looked so delighted that I found myself smiling back at him as brightly as he was smiling at me.

“Great! Where shall I pick you up?” he asked.

“How about Henry Miller’s Theatre right after the show?”

After the show? Later, Lenny told me that he went home feeling completely perplexed. “I thought that you were either planning to see a play by yourself on New Year’s Eve, poor thing, or you were going to see the play with someone else and then dump him to meet me!”

Lenny didn’t like either option. Nonetheless, he was waiting in the lobby at ten forty-five sharp, just as we had agreed. People were hurrying out of the theater so that they could go elsewhere to celebrate, but not Rita. He was confused but kept standing there.

And what was I doing? I was backstage. As soon as the curtain hit the floor, I had hurriedly given the cast members a New Year’s kiss and rushed to my dressing room to tear off my costume. My hairdresser, Molly, pulled off my wig and was planning to style my hair as quickly as she could. I got rid of my theatrical makeup and eyelashes, then waited for Lenny.

As the minutes ticked by and I continued to wait and wait, I thought, Well, now, isn’t that a fine thing, to be dumped on New Year’s Eve by the “nicest man in the world”?

When Lenny still didn’t show, I flashed back twenty years to an adolescent date I’d had for the circus—my very first date. The boy who was my date had arrived so late that the interval between his expected and actual arrivals was excruciating. I was absolutely sure he wasn’t going to show up; I paced frantically, wringing my hands with anxiety. And then, of course, the young man appeared, out of breath, having run from his delayed train.

Now I was experiencing a reprise of this emotional low—and on New Year’s Eve, yet. “Wonderful man, huh?” I muttered. “Great way to start my New Year.”

At the same time, Lenny was frantically looking into the empty auditorium and asking the one female usher left if she could please check the ladies’ powder room for a petite woman with brown eyes and curly hair.

“Nobody there, sir,” the usher reported.

Am I really being dumped on New Year’s Eve? Lenny thought. Then another possibility dawned on him. Oh, my God! Maybe I’m at the wrong theater!

He ran outside to check the marquee. There, as plain as the nose on his face, he saw: “Rita Moreno in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”

Finally grasping the truth, he rushed to the stage door, where the relieved doorkeeper pointed to my dressing room. I was just leaving as Lenny caught up to me.

“Wait! You’re the Rita Moreno?” he called.

Well, I was charmed. You know why? Because he hadn’t known who I was. He was simply interested in me as a person!

We arrived at the New Year’s Eve party at eleven forty-five, just in time to exchange a chaste kiss at midnight. Afterward, a smitten Lenny whispered to a friend, “I’m gonna marry that girl!”

My stage name, Parodus, did forecast more drama. The play closed after 109 performances, and the playwright, the great Lorraine Hansberry, only thirty-four, died on the night of the final performance.

And, of course, I had met the greatest love of my life, Lenny Gordon, to whom I would be married for nearly half a century.

PART IV

Reinventing Myself

MARRIAGE AND MAMI-HOOD

In the beginning of our relationship, I was very skittish with Lenny. I kept him at arm’s length both physically and emotionally. I didn’t feel good about that, but I was still having trouble believing that this was real—a mature, tender, reliable man who loved me as much as I wanted to be loved.

About two months after we were dating, though, Lenny took me to the airport. I was flying to Paris to participate in a celebration of West Side Story’s first-year anniversary at the theater in which it had opened in France, the George V.

In those pre–terrorist threat days, you were still allowed to accompany someone to the gate when you were departing. As a very discouraged Lenny escorted me to the gate, I stopped him and said, “Don’t give up on me yet.”

“What?” he said.

I repeated it. “Don’t give up on me yet. You know what I mean.” Then I turned and walked onto the plane.

This wasn’t something that I had planned to say to him. It just came out. I finally understood that a part of me had been waiting for the sorts of bells and whistles that Marlon set off when I met him. But, as we’d driven in near silence to the airport, I had realized how much I would miss Lenny’s steady companionship when I was in Paris, and I dreaded leaving him. I knew he felt the same sense of loss that I did, even though I wasn’t going to be gone long.

I think that was the moment when I realized that I’d grown up. Bells and whistles weren’t what I needed anymore. In fact, bells and whistles were now alarms, reminding me of unrealistic expectations. I wanted to be content, and to be loved in a way I could trust. Lenny, I knew, could help me live that kind of happier, more settled life.

In 1965, Lenny and I were married in front of a justice of the peace at City Hall in New York. I wore a pretty, simple little dress. After the ceremony, we went out for Chinese food with his best man, Al Moldovan, and my best friend, Leah Schaefer, who introduced me to Lenny and has remained a friend forever. She made a very funny crack while we were eating that I’ve never forgotten: “The problem with going out for a Chinese meal after you get married is that you want to get married again.”

I knew that I’d made a wise choice marrying dependable, sweet, thoughtful, wildly intelligent Dr. Leonard Gordon, who I knew would never betray me. He would protect me even if it meant throwing himself in front of a car for me. Oh! How did I ever get so lucky!

When I first told my mother that I was going to marry a Jewish man, she had a little trouble adjusting, despite being impressed that he was a doctor. The very first time she opened the door to him, she said, “Are joo a Yew?”

Poor Lenny said, “What?”

“A Yew, are joo a Yew?” she said.

And the poor man was so confused, he said, “Jes, I am!”

Lenny’s family, on the other hand, was thrilled by our marriage. Lenny had been married once before, unhappily, and his family thought I was the cat’s meow, probably because I was so thrilled to have a family. All I had in the world was my mother and my brother Dennis. So when I inherited a family, these dear Jewish people who were so sweet and welcoming, it was marvelous.

They were wonderful to me, always. I actually got them all to celebrate Christmas. That included Lenny.

As a Jew, of course he never would have thought to get a Christmas tree, but I am a child when it comes to Christmas. I am an absolute infant! I decorate anything in sight. If you don’t move for five minutes, I’ll decorate you! It was killing me that I wasn’t going to have a tree. Lenny had agreed to a family gathering and meal on Christmas day to appease me, but, “You can’t call it Christmas dinner,” he said.

I cried a lot as our first Christmas approached, because Lenny wouldn’t relent. “Christmas is a mercenary thing, a way for stores to make money,” he said.

“I’m fine with that! Please, Lenny, let me just have a tree!”

“No, no, no,” he said, no matter how much I begged him.

I was miserable. Then, the night before Christmas, Lenny gave me this great big box and told me to open it. I thought it was odd that he was giving me a Christmas present, and even odder that he wanted me to open a gift the night before, but I did. And inside that box, there it was: a fake little Christmas tree, with the balls and tinsel and a little set of lights. It was the scrungiest thing you’ve ever seen, and it must have cost him all of twenty bucks. But it was a tree!

I called Lenny’s family and said, “Don’t forget to come over tomorrow! I’ve got presents for you!”

They did, and experienced their very first Christmas under my glorious tree. As a “gift” to Lenny I cooked a traditional Jewish meal. And Lenny’s aunt, Tanta Shirley, looked at the spread on the table and asked, “Vat, no toikey?”

My mami, her fifth husband, Robert, and my brother Dennis arrived in time for the festivities. Lenny had flown them in as a surprise. For the first time since my childhood in Puerto Rico, I felt I had a family. The room was filled with the sound of klezmer music from the hi-fi, along with the disparate accents and the clatter of platter to plate. As I stood to offer a toast of thanks, I cried tears of pure joy! No few bottles of Manischewitz later, we all danced a tipsy salsa!

We had the best, most wonderful time, and for years after, Lenny and I celebrated real Christmases with his family.

*   *   *

One night while we were still dating, Lenny had taken me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and asked, “So if we get married, do you want kids?”

I had answered, “You bet.”

We didn’t wait long. After our wedding, Lenny, ever the helpful doctor, charted my ovulation every month and took my temperature to make our dream come true as fast as possible. It worked like a charm! One day I took my temperature, and it seemed like the very next day I felt six months pregnant, I conceived so fast. My breasts were immediately tender, and my belly and wardrobe soon disagreed. Boy, was I ready to be a mother, and boy, was this baby meant to be!

My pregnancy went well, but I had two secret concerns. The first was that I wouldn’t be a good mother. I’d had therapy for years, long enough to know my character weaknesses. I knew that what mattered most to me was me, and worried that I might be too self-absorbed and narcissistic (not uncommon traits among actors) to love a baby. In fact, I found myself becoming a little more self-absorbed, worrying about whether or not I would be self-absorbed!

I also fretted about the baby’s skin color. I’m ashamed as I recall this now, but I couldn’t help thinking, My grandfather had dark skin. What if the baby is dark? How will Lenny feel? How will his family feel? How will my child feel if she has to deal with prejudice? How would everyone feel about my child if she were black? How would I feel?

Skin. It still mattered. I knew it shouldn’t, but until I had my daughter and realized I would have loved her just as passionately no matter the color, I worried about it. Such is the insidious nature of prejudice that even I had absorbed some fear of my own heredity, as I wondered what African genes might lurk under my own skin.

My mother had endured a hard labor to produce tiny little me, and I expected to have to endure the same for my own child. I got it. After twenty-four hours of contractions without making much progress, my obstetrician opted for a C-section. Our daughter, Fernanda, was born sitting up, as if she’d been patiently sitting on a chair inside me, waiting to make her grand appearance in the world.

The moment Lenny put our daughter in my arms, I forgot everything but how much love I felt for this diminutive creature who had my big plump baby cheeks. She was lying on my chest with her little unseeing eyes, and when I looked at her, I had an epiphany.

I thought, Dear God, I will have to be responsible for this gift until the day I die. I couldn’t believe that fate would grant me such a gift. Fernanda and my grandsons are now my soul, my life, my heart, my everything.

Fernanda was the image of me as a baby, and as olive-skinned as her mami and my own mother. Everyone in the family loved her. Lenny’s aunt squeezed her baby cheeks and said, “Oooooh, I luff her so much, I vant to moider her!”

As for my other fear—that I might be unable to let go of my own ego to love a baby—that, too, evaporated in about two seconds the first time I held Fernanda in my arms. If anyone tries to harm this baby, I will kill them! I thought.

I stared at my little one so intently as I nursed her that I got a pinched nerve in my neck. I had not known before Fernanda came into our lives that motherhood is a romance, too. Whether I was with her or not, I thought about her all day and anytime I woke at night. If she was napping, I’d have to check on her about every twelve seconds, just to make sure she was still breathing.

And Lenny? Before we met he had resigned himself to a life alone—now he had a family. It is impossible to describe the love that washed over him as he gazed down at the baby he thought he’d never have.

Those first few months of motherhood were among the happiest of my life. All I did was eat, sleep, and care for my child. I had never known such contentment. The birth had left me encapsulated in a blissful bubble of time with Fernanda. I was bathed in the pearly incandescence that motherhood can often bestow, so joyous that I didn’t notice—or care—that I was completely dependent on Lenny, who ran the show and took over our finances.

At first, and actually for many years, it felt terrific to let Lenny be in charge. Number one, I am no good at figures. And number two, I am no good at figures! Math was the worst subject for me in school. I admit this: I still count on my fingers. I think this has to do with not knowing English when I was learning arithmetic as a child.

Before I met Lenny, my financial situation wasn’t good—I think I had about five thousand dollars in the bank. So when Lenny took over not just the finances, but everything, at first this was a godsend to me, especially because Lenny was so supportive of me as an actress. Friends told me he would just glow whenever he saw me perform.

Soon after Fernanda was born, I went back to work, with Lenny’s encouragement. In 1969, I was lucky enough to find a role that helped me grow as an actress. In The Miracle Worker, a play produced by Philadelphia’s Playhouse in the Park, I played the part of Annie Sullivan, the Irish schoolteacher who teaches Helen Keller how to sign. This was the first regional play I’d ever done, and what made it really special for me was that I was doing live theater, I played the part of an Irishwoman, and the director, George Keathley, inspired me to give my best as an actor.

Up until that time, I had played mostly the same roles in films or on television: sexy little bombshells or Indian maidens, or a little girl from India or Arabia. I had never had a chance to play a non-Hispanic person with urgent needs who could change things, a person of great character.

And this was a director who said, “I don’t want you to start counting on your looks. You’re going to wear no makeup, a dress that’s all black, no adornments, nothing. I want you to learn how to walk like Annie Sullivan.”

“How am I going to do that?” I asked, a little panicked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Find out.”

I did, and that was one of the most wonderful experiences I ever had as an actress.

I loved being a doctor’s wife, too. Like all doctors’ wives, I got to be a good diagnostician; I really did. I would sometimes diagnose our friends before Lenny could find time to see them, and I’d tell him what was wrong before he even had a chance to think about it. I’d say, “Oh, I think she has pleurisy, don’t you?” Or, “Oh, she’s going to get an infection in her foot if she doesn’t put something on that!”

Lenny worked at a hospital, the same one where Fernanda was born, and had a very interesting private practice as well. He saw ordinary people, of course, but he also saw gangsters, chorus girls, and gay men. He was absolutely a nondiscriminatory person who never had any doubts about the goodness of people.

Many gay men mentioned Lenny’s name to others in the gay community, because he was one of the very few doctors at that time who didn’t judge them. He would just treat them and take care of them as he did anyone else. Lenny never rushed his patients through their examination. He would always have them sit for a while and talk to him about what was wrong—or just ask about their lives. He even made house calls. Do doctors even do that anymore?

One gangster patient of Lenny’s brought in another gangster to see him, a very famous one. Lenny saw him, talked to the man for a whole hour, and gave him a checkup. The whole examination must have taken more than two hours.

Afterward, the gangster said to him, “So whadda I owe ya, Doc?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lenny said. “Fifty dollars?”

The gangster gave him a strange look and tucked a hundred-dollar bill into Lenny’s lab coat.

The friend who’d brought that man to Lenny called about three days later. “Ya asked fa fifty clams?” he asked incredulously. “Now he tinks yer a shitty doctor and he’ll never come back!”

*   *   *

I was thirty-four years old when Fernanda was born, certainly old enough to know that people don’t change overnight. Yet I fantasized that my motherhood would bring me closer to my own much-married mami. I also imagined that, in giving birth, I had simultaneously shed all of the neuroses of my previous life.

I was wrong on both counts.

When my mother flew to New York to see Fernanda for the first time, I pictured her running into the house at a fever pitch and grabbing the baby, doing the Puerto Rican version of kvelling. Instead, when Rosa Maria arrived at our apartment, she entered kvetching. “My plane was late,” she complained, “and it was so crowded I could hardly breathe.”

Her complaints went on for several more minutes as she described in detail how tired she felt, how her baggage had arrived late, and how heavy it was. Meanwhile, I was standing in front of her holding Fernanda and waiting for her to notice the baby.

It never happened. All my mother could talk about was what had inconvenienced her! She seemed not to see her beautiful grandchild at all, until I actually lifted Fernanda up and held her right under my mom’s nose.

“Mom, meet Fernanda!” I demanded.

And then Mami responded in the most unexpected and perfunctory way. She touched her fingers under Fernanda’s chin, chucked it lightly, and said, “Well, look at joo. Qué cosa linda.” She didn’t even ask to hold the baby, but turned quickly back to her bags and pulled out a baby wardrobe she had knitted and tatted. She told of all her effort and the time it took to make them, but she never reached out to pull her first and only grandchild into her arms.

She had sewn dozens of little baby dresses, booties, and caps. Upon seeing those tiny, perfect items, I was astounded, but not for the reason you might think. It was lovely of my mother to make this wardrobe, of course, but I was thrown back to Juncos, to being dressed in my mother’s creations as I became her “living doll.” Not for the first time, I wondered about my mother and the focus of her feelings. Why was everything, in the end, all about her?

The heartache caused by remembering this scene arises not only from seeing my mom’s misplaced attention in that moment, but because it may shine too bright a light on my own life. I never reconnected with my Puerto Rican family, and if you ask me why, I will answer honestly, “I don’t know.” It remains a black hole of mystery. I can reason that, like my mami, I somehow allowed my preoccupation with myself and what I had done or what I was doing at the time to distract me.

As for the notion that my neuroses had evaporated, yeah, right! I felt as though I had it all: the perfect husband, my Gerber baby, a luxurious apartment in the city, a cottage in the country. This Puerto Rican girl was living the quintessential American dream.

Breaking news: reality check! It took me a decade to wake up to the subtext of my relationship to Lenny, to realize that the unspoken contract between us stated that Lenny would be my “good daddy” and I would be his “little girl forever and ever.” A deal always has its price, and in our case the terms were clear. We both accepted them for many years, but, before the end of our marriage, we’d have to find a way to renegotiate our relationship.

MARLON AND I MAKE A MOVIE

After all that we had been through, I had salvaged a friendship with Marlon Brando. I was in love with Lenny and entranced by my new life as a wife and mother, but Marlon was still one of the smartest, most reflective men in my life. We had shared so much pain, but so much happiness, too, and we stayed in touch as friends.

I believed, and I think Marlon did also, that we had made a civilized segue into a friendship that preserved our better instincts toward each other. I think we both trusted that our passion was permanently on a back burner. But we were destined to have one more tumultuous encounter—a very public one, as it turned out, that was captured on film for eternity.

Marlon had cordially reached out to both me and Lenny in friendship. He had always loved talking on the phone and still did, and he was still capable of those twenty-minute pauses, which drove Lenny mad. I’d hear him say, “Marlon, are you still there?” I’d chuckle—I had grown accustomed to those chasms of silence long ago in the boardinghouse hallway. So, when I was worried about never working again in Hollywood because of the precipitous fall in movie offers since my Oscar win for West Side Story, I called Marlon and told him that I was looking for work. Fernanda was only a toddler, but I was already realizing that I was never meant to be only a housewife and mother.

Instead of brushing aside my comment, as so many actors would have, Marlon—who had just made Reflections in a Golden Eye, a box-office flop despite his skilled performance—immediately responded to me in the most positive way imaginable. “I think you’d be wonderful for the female lead in my next picture,” he said. “I’ll try to get you the role.”

And he did. Marlon didn’t just get me the role; he fought for me, and shamed the producers into giving me a decent salary instead of the peanuts they initially offered.

The movie, called The Night of the Following Day, was based on the novel The Snatchers, which in turn was inspired by a real-life kidnapping of a young heiress. The story was shocking for its sexual torture of a little girl by the kidnappers. There was a long history of failed scripts, until the writer/director, Hubert Cornfield, who was then a young man, solved the problem by raising the age of the girl to late teens so that it avoided the charges of being prurient and attractive to predators.

It was a good cast. Marlon played the kidnapper, along with Richard Boone as “second-banana” kidnapper. I played a drug-addicted stewardess who was part of the kidnap plot, and Marlon’s lover.

I had arranged for Lenny and Fernanda to join me in France a few weeks into the shoot. Lenny couldn’t leave his medical practice any sooner, which left me “alone” in a remote village in Brittany during a chill in the off-season. Marlon was already there when I arrived, and greeted me with perhaps more warmth than I expected.

He suggested that we have dinner, which we did in his suite. After dinner, I sat on the chaise and he at the table as we remembered old friends, shared stories, and caught up on the details of our lives.

Marlon then excused himself to go to the bathroom and, in the time he was gone, I fell asleep. I’d had several glasses of wine during the course of our storytelling. I don’t know the amount of time that passed, but I woke with a start to discover Marlon lying close behind me. I could feel his firm belly against my back and his breath on my neck.

“Marlon,” I said, “we can’t do this. You know we can’t.”

“Just let me sleep with you,” he pleaded. “That’s all I want, to sleep with you.”

I wasn’t having any part of that. I gathered my wits and myself and left.

The shooting continued, but it was a troubled set. Marlon held the director in contempt; to be honest, the director was inexperienced and in over his head. But Marlon could be childlike and impossible under such circumstances. He was refusing to follow direction and wouldn’t speak to Hubert. Hubert soon hated Marlon, because he feared that his movie, upon which he’d staked so much, might suffer the same dismal box office reception as Reflections in a Golden Eye.

In the moody atmosphere of that chilly seacoast village, we continued as best we could. The entire cast and crew soon became disconsolate in the isolated beach-cottage set, where we were being fed an endless diet of Dover sole at the hotel. I tried to hold cozy dinners for the cast to alleviate the tension, but something always seemed to go wrong. One night, I asked the hotel to have an Italian pasta dinner for a change. They presented us all with huge bowls of spaghetti—and a giant bottle of ketchup. It was back to Dover sole after that.

Matters improved when my husband and Fernanda arrived, but the worst was yet to come: the love/fight scene that I had to play with Marlon. The scene is quite graphic. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of doing nude scenes. I’ve never performed in the buff, but this particular scene required me to appear naked from the back. So beneath my robe I taped a tea towel to the front of my body.

As the scene begins, my character—who is high on heroin—is seething with anger. She believes her lover has cheated on her, so she slaps him. Now, I personally detest violence, even in make-believe. I am loath to hit or harm anyone. In rehearsal, Marlon insisted that we improvise the scene, as he disliked the script. He also coached me to hit him hard enough to make the slap believable. The director called, “Action!” and I drew back and slapped Marlon with resolve. What followed was not improvisation, but revelation, as his pure, primal instincts transformed Marlon into a wounded, vengeful animal. And as if in suspended animation, I saw his face change; his eyebrows pulled up, and his usually narrow eyes opened fully. It was a look of incredulity. I had hit him. Rita Moreno challenged the Marlon Brando. With a you-don’t-do-this-to-me look in his eyes, he hauled off and slammed me with the full force of his powerful arm and open hand. I saw sparkles of light from the force of the blow, and the energy knocked me backward. I felt stunned, then enraged. As the synapses of my brain reconnected, old wounds, hurts, resentment, and disrespect coursed through my body. The festering decay rose like pond scum to the surface, and Rita Moreno emerged as the offended lover. I went ballistic, insane, crazy, and I unleashed both shrieks and punches fueled by the accelerant of rage stored somewhere deep within me. Marlon, with raised forearms, defended himself in the boxer’s defensive pose. The camera kept rolling, and the entire uncut, unaltered scene remains intact. There is much commentary online about how this one scene is the most authentic.

The director always allowed us to review the dailies, the scenes shot the previous day. That evening, I related to Lenny what happened on the set. I did not want to see myself displaying such raw emotion, so I asked Lenny to check out the dailies for me. When he returned, he said, “Wow, you two were very, very good.” My sweet husband!

*   *   *

The sphere of privacy that Marlon inhabited was quickly invaded after his death by a frenzied press. To their surprise, only one photograph hung in his home, and it was in his bedroom. The photo portrays two lovers embracing: she with naked back to the camera, he caressing her while looking longingly into her eyes. It was the picture taken of us following our volcanic confrontation on film. How could I have known that the feeling expressed in those eyes would linger to the end of his life?

I heard sometime later that the photo was sold when items from his estate were auctioned off, its price set by the highest bidder. But only I know its true value.

*   *   *

Good movie roles came fewer and farther apart as I approached forty. Then, in 1969, I lucked out and landed the female lead in Popi. In this movie, the wonderfully diverse actor Alan Arkin played a Puerto Rican father at a loss about what to do with his children to save them from poverty. He schemes to take them out of New York City and send them by boat to the coast off Miami, Florida, so that the boys will be mistaken for Cubans and given asylum.

I played Alan’s girlfriend, Lupe, whose racial identity remains unspecified in the movie. Popi was a true pleasure, as Alan was such a gifted actor—except for one uncomfortable scene. It’s the part of the movie where Alan and I are supposed to be making love in bed—or rather, Popi and Lupe. We were totally “into” our roles (only in a professional manner, of course) when Alan’s real-life wife dropped by to visit. She said, “Hi, oh, my gawd!” and started toward the exit.

Alan jumped out of bed, standing at full attention in his boxers and socks. “Dana, I’d like you to meet Rita, Rita Moreno,” he said.

She was mumbling, “I’m so sorry, I…ah…didn’t mean to interrupt….”

By this time, I had pulled the thin sheet up to my nose to help hide my mortification. I whispered a sheepish, “Hi,” but she continued to mutter her apology for interrupting the scene, then disappeared off the set.

Alan was as embarrassed as I. And speechless!

The backstory: Both of us were quite modest. Under those sheets I was wearing dime-store bloomers, gym socks, and falsies double-taped to my breasts for cover. But it had taken both of us at least an hour to become comfortable enough with each other to do the scene. The mood had become impotent, actus interruptus.

Note to self: Spouses of actors should never, ever drop in uninvited.

*   *   *

I had my own marital movie crisis a year later, when the opportunity arose for me to play a role in the movie Carnal Knowledge. The script called for my character, a hooker named Louise, to orally arouse Jack Nicholson’s chacter, Jonathan. Lenny objected emphatically.

But I proceeded to make a case for the importance of this work: that it was not written to appeal to prurient interests, but to expose how men in America objectify women.

I went to meet director Mike Nichols at his apartment, and any hesitation I might have had after Lenny’s strong expression of disapproval was banished on the spot. Nichols wouldn’t let me leave until I’d promised to play Louise, who is the last stop on Jonathan’s sexual odyssey in the movie.

I loved the part, in truth. Louise was a hooker, yes, but the part was so well written that I could see a lot of potential depth in the role. Is Louise hating Jonathan while placating him? How cynical is her expertise? (Quite!)

Louise’s lines, a ritual speech to arouse him, are fascinating, at once literary and abject. In a way, Louise was the highest-evolved form of the subservient slave girls I had played from the start of my career: We had grown up together. How could I resist playing a part like this?

No actor could have walked away from that role, not under Mike Nichols’s direction and that cast: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, and Ann-Margret. Certainly not when the script was written by Jules Feiffer, for a movie that everyone expected to be an important and controversial picture. Which it was—Carnal Knowledge charted male sexuality in a way it had never been done before.

So what if it meant that I had to play a whore and feign pleasuring Jack Nicholson with oral sex for take after take? This was the greatest whore part ever written for the movies, and I got to end the movie with the ultimate line: “It’s up in the air.”

During our famous scene together, Louise coaxes Jonathan into an erection. His misspent youth was integral to the movie’s theme: that a man could go so wrong with his carnal desire that he would have to, in the end, be serviced and lose all opportunities for true love and happiness. By not allowing women to be equal, he ended up degrading himself as well.

In my mind, there was no question that Louise held him in bitter control: It is she who is in charge. I couldn’t wait to play her!

The scene, rich with symbolism, was performed on a hydraulic lift. I had only one place to find motivation as I spoke squarely into the cold, opaque blackness of the lens—in Jonathan’s eyes as I lured him into arousal. All this while the platform is inching downward. It required the presence of Jack, in character, lying nearby, to provide the necessary inspiration for me. Which he did, happily. I became exhausted mentally and physically as I “became” Louise, who appears to be descending endlessly.

Jack Nicholson was the most obliging of costars. Without him grinning and leering at me off camera, I don’t think I could have done as well.

That set turned out to be one of the more miserable movie sets I have entered, and the chilliest of backstages. I felt the weight of having disappointed my husband, who had deep reservations about the morality of the screenplay. Emotionally, I had moved to Siberia.

We rehearsed and rehearsed, and Mike Nichols kept saying, “Don’t act; keep it real.” He said that I was Louise—and “Louise is a hooker.” That didn’t feel good. In addition, shooting the fellatio scene took thirty takes, because Mike wanted that sexual scene in one continuous shot—no pauses. This was the first time I had been involved in making a film that was shot in continuity. It is a rare style of filmmaking. It is common to shoot all the scenes that occur in one location at the same time in that location or setting. This avoids moving around excessively, and is time-saving and efficient. But in order to build an ever-intensifying neurosis in his characters, Mike shot every scene in sequence. By the time I had arrived, I sensed that the toxicity of the characters had seeped into the psyches of some of the players.

It was a grueling experience, and an isolating one, too. Three days into making the movie, I had yet to share a meal with anyone in the company. I was missing Lenny and Fernanda, and I was damn lonely. I hated feeling like a pariah.

I assumed that it was just by chance that I hadn’t shared a meal with any of my coworkers, which happens all the time on location. So, hearing Mike, Jack, and Art talking about dinner plans in my presence, I said, “Hey, I’ve been here three days and I haven’t had dinner with anybody.” I can now see how my self-invite could have been off-putting to them, but not being included didn’t seem cordial to me.

Feeling obliged, Mike instantly asked me along that evening. I shared the most uncomfortable, chilliest dinner of my life. But it was not Rita who attended that dinner. It was Rosita. Seated at their table, I reverted to that demure, insecure little girl who didn’t belong. And I could endure that dinner only by forcing myself to think about the positive aspects of my life with every self-conscious bite. Oh, to be back home with my family.

BIG BIRD, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, AND ME

During those first few years with Fernanda, it seemed like Lenny and I had created the perfect kind of marriage to raise a baby. I was happy to finally have a family to call my own, and content to feel settled for the first time in my life. And Lenny was euphoric in the way only a forty-seven-year-old first-time father of an exquisite baby girl can be.

Our love and marriage were embodied in Fernanda: We had “made” her, and she had made us feel happy and complete. We could watch her for hours as she found her little fingers and toes, learned to smile and sit up on her own, started walking, and then—very soon—dancing. Fernanda was dancing almost as soon as she could walk.

We had a beautiful place to live, too: an eight-room apartment in a landmark building on Manhattan’s West Side. Ironically, it was just a hundred blocks from the Spanish ghetto where my mother brought me when we left Puerto Rico.

When Fernanda was a little toddler, I wanted to encourage the creative side of her, whatever it would be. I would engage her in making collages with beans, lentils, and peas. We’d get glue and put the beans on pieces of cardboard, making pretty designs. We would draw together, too. She loved that.

There was something that Fernanda always did that knocked me out. It started one day, when she was very little, even before she could talk, she got really upset one day.

“Do you think you need a little mothering?” I asked.

Fernanda just nodded up at me with her big eyes.

I had a rocker in her room, so I picked her up, sat down in the rocker with her, and began to stroke her hair, hug her, kiss her, and sing to her. I had Spanish albums with children’s songs, and some in English, too. Always after that, whenever Fernanda felt insecure or unhappy, she would say, “I think I need some mothering,” and I’d say, “You got it kid,” and I’d sit her on my lap and rock her.

Oh, how we loved her, Lenny and I! When Fernanda was ready to go to first grade, we couldn’t stand letting her out of our sight. So the first month or so that Fernanda had to get on the bus to go to school, we’d follow her. (You’d never think to put a child of almost any age on a city bus to go anywhere these days, but back then it was how every child went to school in New York.) We didn’t want her to know it, though, so Lenny would park his car around the corner, and after I put Fernanda on the bus, we’d get in his car and follow the bus all the way to school, just to know that our beloved daughter was safe.

Fernanda used to bring friends home from school, and I think I had as much fun as the girls did. I used to make a tent for them by covering the bridge table with a sheet, and Fernanda and her friends would hold their little club meetings there. She called it the PBS Club, which stood for Plays, Ballets, and Spooks.

Fernanda wanted to be a ballet dancer. Lenny and I told her that, if she did her homework, she could take classes at the New York City Ballet, so she did. She became a ballerina and loved it. At a different dance school, there was one especially wonderful dance class where the children were encouraged to move any way they wanted. The teacher would say, “Pretend you’re a rubber band. Now start dancing!”

I’d watch that class and think, Oh, man, this is lovely. I wish I’d had that freedom of expression in my dance classes.

We took Fernanda to museums, plays, and concerts. She loved Gilbert and Sullivan, even at a young age, and later, when she started to draw more seriously, she took classes at the Museum of Modern Art. She became a wonderful painter, and now she makes beautiful jewelry. I like to think that we set the stage for her to express her true self, as she found joy in creativity any way she wanted to express it.

*   *   *

What put my enraptured mami-hood over the moon was that I soon found work that fit seamlessly into being a mother. With Fernanda, I was watching the brilliant new children’s shows, like Sesame Street, and before you could say, “Alakazam!” I was appearing on them.

This was yet another instance where my perseverance paid off. I approached Jim Henson, the genius creator of the Muppets, and was as persistent as Animal: I threw myself at him and said, “I will do anything for you if you let me be a voice on Sesame Street! I will work for nothing!”

“Relax,” he said. “I’ll pay you.”

Soon I was happily engrossed in my new line of work, which felt like play. Yes, the hours were long, of course, and I suppose the work was hard, but in entering the world of children’s television, I crossed the line between work and pure pleasure. Across the border, I discovered a state of industrious ecstasy that climaxed in my series of outrageously fun performances.

In one performance on The Muppet Show, I sang “Fever” in my best torch-song manner in a hot tomato-red gown. I tossed my long dark hair in my best diva mode—“Fev-uh!” Then I gave Animal, the drummer, my very best Rita glare when he pounded his drums and tried to upset my sensuous decorum. In the end, I crushed his head between the cymbals with a resounding clang!

I delivered my hottest 106-degree “Fever!” in a fury of Puerto Rican sensuality and rage, and that seemed to tickle the funny bones of all of the kids watching—and perhaps tickled the other funny bones of any dads minding the kids who were watching this performance.

I had even more outrageous fun doing my version of an Apache dance with one of the muppets. In this duet, I spun out into the bistro set clad in stylized French dancer mode, beret and all, and performed the French version of a sexist tango. In the classic Apache (not pronounced “A-patch-ee” like the Indian, but “a-pash”), the man throws and tosses around the woman, who dances away from him. In my version of the dance, I tossed and threw around the man and won my round—as well as an Emmy award.

I won a Grammy award as well, this time with The Electric Company. This show was a bold experiment, an ensemble show that aimed to improve kids’ reading skills by having unreasonable amounts of fun. One of my most popular routines was my Tina Turner imitation, with kid backup singer/dancers. We all wore gold lamé and little plastic boots, and they moved in sync behind me as I delivered a hot but ridiculous: “un-” song: “Unbutton your love…unzip your lip and tell me that you love me.”

Best of all, the studio location was right across the street from our apartment on the Upper West Side. Fernanda came to visit me regularly on the Electric Company set. She loved that. I would take her visiting all the time to the Sesame Street studio as well. She had a wonderful and colorful childhood—and I had reached the pinnacle of happiness being her mother.

One other great perk of doing these children’s shows was having the opportunity to perform with some of the best performers around, like Bill Cosby and Morgan Freeman. My God, it was like we were doing vaudeville while at the same time helping children improve their reading skills.

I call those years—from the early 1970s through 1977—my “bliss years,” because I had never been so happy, both at home and in my career.

Yes, Jim Henson paid me; the union insisted. But I gladly would have paid him.

*   *   *

By now, I was nearly forty years old—a dangerous age for an actress. In the business, I might as well have turned eighty. Lenny was very sensitive to that.

But his good intentions sometimes backfired. He believed in me enthusiastically as an actor, and couldn’t understand why I was not in constant demand and getting great parts—or any parts. We’d be driving somewhere and Lenny would notice all the billboards advertising some new movie or play. “For God’s sake,” he’d say. “I don’t understand what’s going on here! You’re so talented! I don’t see why you’re not getting any work!” And he wouldn’t let up. Hearing this was unsettling. I’d roll it around in my mind. There are so many ways you can interpret a comment like that. I knew he wasn’t disappointed in me; he just wondered why Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, and Janet Leigh were “getting all the parts.” I questioned my relevance. Is my career ending right before my eyes? Do I have the wrong agent? Is my manager on top of things? Wait—but Lenny is my manager. (Not long after his retirement from medicine Lenny used his free time to help with my career. He soon assumed the role of manager.) Exhausted from all my mental computation and emotional roller-coaster rides, I’d usually just agree with Lenny’s comment, get quiet, and stew.

I did hit another high point in what I now believe is the more or less permanent rhythm of my professional life, with its perilous descents and soaring heights. The year was 1975, and I’d like to linger there a moment.

I was somewhere between a perilous descent and a soaring height, when in 1975, I was offered the delicious role of Googie Gomez, the awful lounge singer extraordinaire in Terrence McNally’s hilarious farce The Ritz.

I met Terrence for the first time at a James Coco party. James was a hilarious and adorable man who threw great parties. He and I were costarring on Broadway in the Neil Simon comedy The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.

At that party, as Lenny and I mingled with guests, James sashayed by, took my hand, and dragged me off to a bedroom. There sat Terrence on the edge of the bed talking to other guests. Jimmy said, “Rita, do that crazy Latina woman for Terry.”

I’d developed my Googie character in a hundred “idle” hours in dressing rooms and at laid-back parties with showbiz friends. Who was Googie? She was the worst Hispanic cabaret singer of all time. Her gestures were operatic, her eyelashes were a mile long, and her makeup was applied with a trowel. Her slinky gowns suffered continual wardrobe malfunctions. Finally, though, it was Googie’s mispronounced English—which I owe to Mami—that placed her in the Terrible Performer Hall of Fame: “I hada dring, a dring about joo, babie….”

I believe I launched into the Player King speech from Hamlet for Terrence: “Es-pick the es-pich, I pra joo….”

Terrence wrote a play called The Tubs, which he first set in a bathhouse like the continental baths where Bette Midler got her start. There is something inherently crazy-funny about a sex-bomb singer in a gay bathhouse, wriggling and crooning to a bunch of gay guys in towels.

Terrence wrote Googie into his play big-time after seeing me at Jimmy’s party. Despite my being unavailable for the play’s world premiere at Yale, you can bet that I, Googie, was available for Broadway. I flung myself into Broadway Googie with even more energy than usual, bringing down the bathhouse and winning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

I was ecstatic! Winning the Tony Award in 1975 made me one of the few performers in history to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony!

For the awards ceremony, I wore an elegant, slinky, long-sleeved beige gown with a matching turban. My acceptance speech was over-the-top in more ways than one: I was wriggling, giggling, whooping, and hollering. I raised my arm and gave a victory fist. I had everything but a pie pan to bang.

I was full-out Googie, and my Rosita also popped out of the clock like a cuckoo, crowing, “Rita Moreno is thrilled, but Rosita Dolores Alverio of Humacao, Puerto Rico, is undone!”

And then she, Googie Gomez/Rosita, couldn’t resist saying, “I am not the supporting actress of The Ritz. I am the leading actress! Listen, honey, honey—the honly thing I support in tat cho is my beads” (pronounced beeets).

I was forty-four years old, still in my prime. But now I can say it: I went too far on that stage. No wonder the Tonys’ producer was displeased with me. He had a right to be.

In 1981, I was fortunate enough to be cast with Carol Burnett in an Alan Alda movie, The Four Seasons, a romp of a film featuring an endangered species: middle-aged couples and aging actresses. I became fast friends with Carol Burnett during the shoot. The movie worked even better offscreen than on-screen, because we all laughed nonstop as we were making it. But the sad truth is that finding work in Hollywood—or anywhere as an actress—was now very difficult. I was no longer a “hot chick.” Nobody remembered, much less cherished, my Oscar turn in that violet dress, and my kiddie-show fame did not translate into grown-up prestige.

I had battled racism and sexism all my life. Now I had to battle the worst enemy of all: ageism.

Growing old in Hollywood is a serious deficit. If you can’t pose in a bikini and run a seven-minute mile without your thighs trembling, you are done. Frankly speaking, m’dear, I think we are expected to either kill ourselves by age thirty-six—as so many actresses have done—or shrink quietly away into the shadows, clutching our cardigans and wearing sensible shoes.

I wanted none of that. But I also refused to compromise and make myself look younger than my age. For one thing, I already looked younger than my age. Blame heredity. I was actually rejected for the few roles that existed for women over fifty. In 1990, I went to see the great television producer Norman Lear to discuss the part of Charles Durning’s wife in a pilot Norman was producing. He took one look at me and said, “Durning’s wife? Are you kidding? You look like a kid!”

“But, Norman, I’m sixty.”

“Getoutta here!” he said with a twinkle.

But I went to my car and cried—I looked too good for my age. Yet another problem.

On top of that, these roles were limited to small, unimportant mom or nana parts. Meanwhile, I continued turning down gang roles and the usual stereotypes.

I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever find steady work again.

THE ACCUSATORY BANANA

Very early in our marriage, while discussing hopes and dreams for the future, Lenny offered without missing a beat, “And we can travel, have a little getaway in the country, you’ll quit show business, I’ll retire from practice….”

“Wait a minute. Uh, what—what about show business?” I interjected.

And in the most casual tone he continued. “Oh, we can talk about that later, not important right now….”

There had always been a certain amount of power push-pull in my marriage, as Lenny and I tried to balance my desire to work and be independent with his desire to be the family provider and protector. While these roles had satisfied both of us during Fernanda’s early childhood, I was growing increasingly restless as Lenny continued to try to control everything in my life.

I let the first warning bell go off without comment, but now I heard a gong. I call this “the Infamous Banana Incident.”

One morning, Lenny walked into the kitchen while I was peeling a banana. He watched me pull on the stem for a second, then snatched the fruit out of my hand and said, “That’s not the right way to peel a banana.” Then he opened the drawer, took out a paring knife, and began to cut the stem. For whatever reason, this was the one time out of many when I was being shown the Lenny way, the “right way,” as opposed to the Rita way, the wrong way, that I chose to plant a flag, declare it my territory, and demand, “Off!”

There ensued a twenty-minute argument in which Lenny continued to insist that there were right and wrong ways to do things. Flummoxed by the sheer absurdity of this heated argument, I asked him whether he was listening to himself, only to have him restate his position once again.

A flash of heat went through my body—the same primal reaction I’ve always had when frightened or cornered. The inherent stupidity of our argument left me, an otherwise articulate person, sputtering in rage and frustration.

The banana argument continued, and then he did it for the first time: Lenny pointed his finger at me and wagged it. I have always perceived this gesture as judgmental, accusatory, and self-righteous. Now the alarms were blaring. This was not about peeling fruit, how to adjust the thermostat, or what lights to turn off; this was about our marriage, give-and-take, cutting some slack. If I couldn’t carve out some space for myself, it did not portend well for our future together.

I had to leave the room. “We’ll finish this discussion later, when we both calm down,” I said.

*   *   *

“He’s a finger wagger!” I reported on the phone later that day to the most unlikely of marriage counselors: Marlon.

There was a big pause. Then Marlon said, “He actually did that? He wagged his finger at you?”

“Yes! And it just made me crazy!”

“Huh. Anybody did that to me, I’d take him by the neck and throw them down the stairs!” Marlon said. “You’ve got to make him stop.”

“How, for God’s sake?”

“Tell him! Just tell him him how it makes you feel.”

At the time, the irony was lost on me that Marlon had done more than wag his finger at me, and more than once. I did what Marlon suggested and told Lenny that I felt belittled, accused, and angry when he behaved self-righteously. He took it well, I thought, but went on to substitute the finger with a closed fist and the knuckle from the pointing finger sticking up, unmistakably conspicuous.

I had to laugh. In one of my dreams I took the ultimate revenge: I bit it off. His finger, that is.

*   *   *

In our seventh year of marriage, Lenny and I discussed divorce for the very issues that had begun to be entrenched during in the Banana Accusation. Lenny adored me and I adored him, most of the time, but Lenny had the “Lenny way” to do most things and was not tolerant of the Rita way of doing things—nor, for that matter, of anyone else’s way.

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.

Try to stop me. If I wasn’t hired, I decided that I would be inventive and do my own concerts. That’s exactly what I did. It might even have been Lenny who suggested it, saying, “Why don’t you do a cabaret act?”

With that, we were off. We put together our own show with a choreographer, a music arranger, and dancers. Lenny was my manager/roadie. It took months of performing at whatever venue before we recovered our investment and made a dime.

I remember one terrible engagement in the bar of a Marriott hotel at the Chicago airport, where we got snowed in on top of everything else. The stage was about three feet high and there were four of us, three male dancers and me. We had a marvelous salsa routine where we had to dance and jump off stools. It was fine for me, because I’m short, but the boys were taller and literally had to bow their heads when they were standing on the stools and dancing, because the ceiling was so low.

After the wannabe-but-didn’t-quite-make-it tour, I did some tent shows. Sometimes I’d open for a big act, like Ben Vereen, and for others I was on my own. We took the show to Boston, Wisconsin, Illinois, and everywhere in between. It was a way of getting experience, I thought, and boy, was I right.

We played in a lot of dumps. One of my favorite terrible stories is the time we did a New Year’s Eve in the Italian Catskills. I had put together the kind of act where I didn’t just do numbers that were snappy, loud, and fiery. I had included ballads, too. As an actress who sings, I love those.

The ballads were lyrical and demanded attention. And here I was, singing these fabulous, obscure songs on New Year’s Eve in this humongous ballroom, where people were yelling, laughing, and tossing rolls to one another. It was maybe one of the worst concerts I’ve ever had to do. Nobody paid attention, nobody! And the applause was the sound of one hand clapping. I was so angry that I wanted to die, but now, in retrospect, it was hilariously funny.

Later on, when my act was refined, I opened for Sammy Davis Jr. in Vegas and Tahoe. Sammy was brilliant and a real showman. As I finished my act, Sammy would walk onstage at the crest of my applause, and my hard-earned reward became his drumroll.

“I know what I’m doing,” he said with a laugh when I pointed this out. “I’m not going to wait for that applause to die down!”

I also had the opportunity to open for George Burns, a really wonderful, hilarious old man with the brain of a ten-year-old—and I mean that in a complimentary way. George had a very young girlfriend, Carol, and he used to always invite Lenny and me to his dressing room to have martinis with him. That man, who was then ninety, would have two double martinis after every show. I’d be under the table with that, but he showed no ill effects at all.

I was opening for George at Harrah’s in Tahoe one night, and just out of mischief, because he was such a cutie, I walked out of the wings and said, “George, your fly’s open again.”

Without thinking twice or even stopping, he said, “That’s all right. It’s got makeup on it.”

I was so lucky, sharing the stage with George and Sammy and so many other great performers who were models of perseverance for me, as I hope to be for others.

LOSSES AND BLESSINGS

Reflecting on life, I think Lenny was so dear to me because, from the time I first met him, he was the most stable force in my life.

As he and I were working through our marriage, the 1980s brought a terrible sadness: My brother Dennis Moreno had become an alcoholic at a very young age, maybe seventeen. But he joined AA and did terrifically well after that, rising to an important position in the organization because he had done so well and was so helpful to everyone. Dennis was still like a big bear cub, and I loved hugging him.

Then, after winning that long battle against alcohol, Dennis suffered an ironic and terrible accident at age thirty-five. Riding home from an AA meeting on his motorcycle, his girlfriend clinging to his back, Dennis was struck by a drunk driver. He was not in any way at fault. He was helmeted, sober, and obeying traffic rules.

Dennis and his girlfriend were both killed instantly. He left behind two young sons.

My mother heard the news and called me. It was July 24, 1983. I was still in my early fifties then. I couldn’t believe that my little brother was gone.

My mother never got over his death. And, on that buried subbasement level where I hold my own grief, neither did I. The mourning for my big puppy dog of a kid brother has yet to burst through, but it is there, like a terrible weight in my heart. I can still see his sweet, sad face before me: hangdog, the imprint of rejection by his father stamped on his features like a seal.

*   *   *

My mother’s death, when it came, was unexpected. I had placed my mother and her “Ultra Right Wing” husband in an assisted-living community twenty minutes from my house—close enough that I could run over if she needed me. How I would have loved to welcome her into my home, but I knew that Lenny would have none of that. I didn’t even ask. He was always kind and polite to my mother, but there was no chance that he would share our home with her.

She was sad, so sad. I would visit her and just hold her, hold her hand. There were no words. I wanted her with me so badly. When I saw her, she held my hand so tight; alive, she held me in a death grip.

This fifth marriage, which Rosa Maria had entered with her usual ebullience, had drained the joy out of her. In their little community, my mother had started off so well. I still recall her easy laugh, her hospitality, her card playing. Oh, she could be such fun, so raucous! There was something impish in her even as an old woman.

I had the pleasure of buying a house for her: a surprise. I drove her to see it—it was so charming, a bright, sun-filled stucco house in a quiet, palm-filled neighborhood. I led her inside. “Do you like it, Mami?”

“Oh, is too expensive.” She turned to go.

“No. You don’t understand,” I told her. “This is your house. I bought it for you.”

She stood still for several minutes; she could not absorb this.

I had imagined a sunlit, happy life for Mami and her fifth husband. The house was in a community of couples their age. She loved to play cards, have dinners. She would have lots of friends here.

At first, that was how it went. Rosa Maria Marcano made friends fast—but she lost them even faster, as soon as her friends met Robert Williamson, husband number five. He was big in the worst way: huge wattles, serious dewlaps, and a gut to match. He posed like the Western sheriff he had once been, and spoke his bigoted opinions in a loud voice. He could carry a gun. He was for law and order, but I bet he never read anyone their rights. Certainly he never read Rosa Maria Marcano her rights. He wanted someone to serve him, and she did.

Marooned in her marriage, alone in the house with him, my gregarious mother listened to the clock tick. Nothing remained between them that I could discern, but for their inability to leave each other. As her husband’s health failed, he began falling down. Given my mother’s own health problems and age, it was impossible for her to care for him. So I did the only thing I could do: I moved my mother and her husband into an assisted-living apartment.

Who knows what my mother thought about during those endless, sunlit, lonely days? Did she think about her lost parents? Of Justino or Juncos? Of Francisco?

My mother never talked about her father and stepmother, Fela. She had returned to Puerto Rico only once, late in her life, to try to finally connect with family again. By then it was too late. She didn’t tell me until months after she had made the trip; all she could find out was that most of our family was dead and gone. There were a few cousins, but nobody she was close to, and that was it.

I believed her, because although I had been back to Puerto Rico myself every two or three years, usually for work, I had never found any family either. One particular time I was in Puerto Rico to receive an award and some people showed up, claiming to be family, but I didn’t have a clue who they were, and they didn’t know any of the same names I did. I’m guessing they were making up those names and weren’t related to me at all.

Lenny had been trying to find Francisco for me, but all we’d heard was that he had moved to San Diego and died of a drug overdose, although I was never able to confirm that information. I had shed bitter tears about Francisco passing away, but I wasn’t about to tell my mother what I knew. She would have been so devastated. As it was, she had already lost Dennis. Everyone was lost to her but me.

I went to see her often. When I held my mother’s hand, I felt the warmth of her skin, yes, but also the sadness of her entire being. Her heart was broken.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

One bright day, in the middle of the day and for no apparent reason, as she had not been ill, Rosa Maria Marcano’s heart just stopped.

Maggie, Dennis’s first wife, whom I had hired as a caregiver, said she heard my mother make a small gasp before she uttered her last words: “Just let me die.” Maggie called me at once to let me know.

When I am deeply upset and inwardly undone, I become very controlled. I got into my car and drove, careful to obey the speed limit and use my turn signals down the freeway to the assisted-living complex. I remember that the day was very bright; the palms gleamed silver in the noonday sun.

I found my mother dead, with a blue tube in her mouth. The paramedics apparently had tried to revive her. I hated that—that awful blue tube.

I sat down beside her and held her hand again. This time, her hand was cooling, then cold. And I saw her again as I first remembered her: my young mami walking ahead of me, hair and hips swinging, laundry headdress in perfect balance, that near-dance procession to the stream. She walked with all of the other pretty young mothers through the rain forest, past the flowers and sugarcane. I heard her sing and laugh.

It seemed as if we should have another chance, should be able to reverse time and start our lives together over again.

I waited with Maggie and Mami’s husband, Robert, as he sat in shocked stillness until her body was taken away. I still did not cry. I did not really mourn her; I couldn’t for so long. I think that grief as deep as that must be delayed; there must be some anesthetic for the soul to protect you from a loss you otherwise couldn’t bear.

What I wouldn’t give for some time with her now! To make repairs somehow, to hold her even more than I did. To just hug and kiss her constantly. When is it time to stop?

It wasn’t enough, what we had together.

The undertaker did a wonderful job on my mother’s hair and makeup. I was so pleased to see her like that. She would have been pleased, too; I know it. She looked as pretty as she ever had: Rosa Maria, the woman everyone fell in love with. She appeared to be resting, waiting, and she was so, so pretty. The blush on her cheeks, the rose on her lips. Her long eyelashes lowered, as if she were about to bat them one last coquettish time.

That was how I last saw my mother. Mami.

Only six months later Robert Williamson, husband number five, died. I honored his request and saw that he was interred in the veterans’ cemetery nearby. It was a lonely scene; he had no family, no friends. Maggie, Lenny and I stood nearby to oversee his burial.

*   *   *

My grief over losing Dennis and my mother was balanced by blessings from Fernanda. After years of saying to my daughter, “If you get married, don’t expect me to buy an over-the-top expensive gown,” I went happily berserk with joy when she announced her engagement.

My reasoning about the dress had always gone something like this: You wear a wedding dress only once, and then what do you do with it? Why buy an expensive one? After all, I had been married in a sensible dress.

But when my daughter said she was getting married, that whole no-fuss idea went right out the window. I blabbed to everyone I saw, “My daughter is getting married!” And for Fernanda, we bought the dreamiest, princessy wedding gown we could find.

We staged the wedding at a gorgeous resort in the Carmel Valley, and we rode to the ceremony in a horse-drawn carriage. It was perfect.

I now had a handsome young man in my life. And so thoughtful! I had been in the garage vacuuming the Volvo when my now son-in-law David came by and asked first me and then Lenny for Fernanda’s hand in marriage. He assured me that he loved her deeply, and he fully believed it would be forever. So what did I do? I blubbered like a Puerto Rican.

Our first grandchild, Justin, came into this world with Lenny and me standing beside our daughter’s delivery bed as cheerleaders.

Two years later, when the next adorable baby boy, Cameron, arrived, David gently suggested, “Do you think you two could stay out of the delivery room?”

We did, but we were right outside the door. And more important, we now lived nearby, where we could dote and help out whenever there was a need.

We had moved from New York to LA when Fernanda was an early teen. The stress and winters in New York and Lenny’s practice, compounded by his failing health, required the move. I’d at least be close to my profession, and that might help my career. Who knew?

After the wedding, Fernanda and David moved to northern California. She called to invite us to visit them in their new home. “Berkeley is such a special place, Mom, and I know you’ll love it,” she said.

While we were visiting her that weekend, Fernanda and David drove us to wine country and we did something we had never done in our lives: We went wine tasting. The problem was, Dr. and Mrs. Gordon went wine swallowing. Tasting? What’s that? We were clueless!

By two o’clock in the afternoon, we were bombed. Fernanda decided it was time to pour us back into the car and take us back to her house. On the way there, I slurred, “You know, this is a very nice life. Let’s move up here.”

And Lenny, who was absolutely crocked, because he normally didn’t drink much at all, said, “Yeah, whatever.”

We moved to Berkeley within two months. Lenny and I built a home together, a beautiful modern sculpture of a house carved into the hillside, with a 180-degree view of northern Californian heaven. The house is built of glass and cement, and is stunning. Its prescribed and definite lines reflect much of Lenny’s personality.

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

Finding 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

After 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.

I pleaded with the supervisor to let me wheel Lenny to the room, but of course the answer was no. “That will create an insurance nightmare,” they explained. “It’s against hospital policy.”

My patience was worn out. We must have passed at least six people on the way upstairs, still lying on their gurneys and waiting for rooms.

It was nearly midnight when we finally arrived at the room after a ten-hour ordeal. Lenny woke up and began to writhe and twist again as an army of doctors and nurses came in to ask him questions. It was so painful to watch. They needed answers, and Lenny needed morphine.

“No morphine until the workup is done,” they said.

His agony was only intensified by the puncture of needles and the prods of the examination. It was not easy for the doctors, as their patient was doubled over with pain, yet they asked more questions and then even more. Eventually he was given an injection of morphine. Mercifully, he went still again.

But it wasn’t over. Now I had to decide whether, after this ordeal, we wanted to transfer him to a “better” hospital a few blocks away and possibly go through this den of pain again, or stay put. I opted for staying. I was now in that space between a rock and a hard place. I’ll never know whether it was the right decision.

I asked for a cot and got a wooden chair that tilted, with leather pads for your bottom and back that made me sweat all night. For the rest of the night, my husband had occasional respites from pain, thanks to small doses of morphine, but whenever the drug wore off, he would start moaning and whimpering.

Let me say that no matter how exhausted you are, you can’t sleep through that. So I’d get up and try to soothe him and wait for the shot. I couldn’t sleep; I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for hours. I felt my stomach trying to consume itself for lack of food. About two o’clock in the morning, a nurse came to give him a shot. I asked her whether I could have a cup of tea, and she returned, bless her, with the tea and two packets of graham crackers. It was a banquet! I had to hug her and ask her name: Mali.

I looked up Mali’s schedule so that I could call on her for help during the night shifts. And that is how you do it: You slowly find the schedules of the nurses who are kind and helpful, and, if at all possible, you wait for their shifts to ask for small favors or assistance. Small favors sometimes consisted of requesting broth, because Lenny’s stomach was now rejecting certain foods on his dinner tray; or I asked for extra towels to place under Lenny’s knees, or to use to wipe up his vomit when he unexpectedly projectile-vomited all over the bed and I couldn’t find a nurse to help me. She was probably helping someone else get through the night.

I really struggled to find a way to understand the failings of this overcrowded and understaffed ward, and concluded that it wasn’t in Lenny’s best interests if I flew off the handle with temper tantrums over endless oversights. The only solution was to swallow my anger and distress, and instead make friends with those among the staff who were amenable. My primary objective was to see to it that my husband got what he needed, when he needed it, and to be his ally and advocate.

At the end of the first week—actually on that weekend—a cot was delivered to my room. Oh, glory! That I could feel the floor with my back was almost immaterial. I simply put some towels and folded sheets under the bed and voilà! I had a real bed.

Lenny was worsening. He was routinely wheeled from floor to floor for test after test. He was delivered to what I call the “machine rooms,” for MRIs, CAT scans, and X-rays, where he had to wait in the freezing-cold hallways as he slowly moved up the line to be seen. On one occasion, he returned shivering after waiting for three hours. That did it! I squirreled around, found the laundry closet, and grabbed three blankets for future journeys to other floors.

On one occasion while Lenny was away, I spilled my cup of cocoa on the floor of his room. I soaked it up with Kleenex and discovered the floor was filthy, even after the daily mopping. It made me wonder what was in that water and on that mop. So I went to a neighborhood grocery and purchased two spray bottles of Lysol. With paper towels from the bathroom, I wiped that floor clean on hands and knees and cleaned the sooty windowsill, too. Never mind, I thought: It gave me something to do while I was waiting.

Each evening, for the sake of my mental equilibrium, I would go out for dinner and, depending on the severity of the day, have a glass or two of wine. I did this after I had accompanied Lenny for his evening meal, where he was eating less and less. I ate alone, but it remained my one daily treat.

One afternoon as Lenny was napping, I went to my hotel room and showered. It was pure bliss. I hadn’t been there in days. I packed several pairs of pajamas, then purchased a bag of fashion magazines and the New York Times for Lenny.

“Your hair smells like a bouquet of flowers,” he told me as I handed him the paper.

I was on top of the world that day.

*   *   *

After all of his torments, the test results revealed that Lenny’s intestine had twisted and he needed surgery immediately. The diagnosis had taken a week. I called Fernanda and she came right away. She wanted to be there when her father woke from surgery.

The procedure went very well, and Fernanda and I were hopeful that all of us would be home soon. It was so good to see our girl again. Is there anything more moving than to look into your child’s face as she tries to be brave? I wanted to smother her with kisses.

Fernanda was concerned about her dad, but she was also considerably worried about me. Lenny, of course, was in Papa heaven just to gaze on her sweet little face when he awoke from the anesthesia. Believing all would be well, Fernanda flew home to California. In three days we could celebrate our forty-sixth wedding anniversary with Lenny on the mend. What a gift, I thought.

Time passed and our days acquired a rhythm. I read the New York Times to Lenny most days. We occasionally watched sports on TV, talked politics with an old medical colleague, and discussed at length the sorry deterioration of this once great hospital. We concluded more than once that the day of the great hospitals was probably over. We entertained ourselves by playing games like hangman, and did crossword puzzles. And, twice daily, we would walk the halls of our floor, Lenny using his IV caddy as a cane on wheels while I steadied him, holding his elbow on the other side.

I believed with all my heart that I would be taking Lenny home soon. Then he began to fail, just like that. People of his age are so susceptible to just about anything floating through the air, especially after surgery. He had entered the hospital with a bit of pneumonia and became a perfect petri dish for bacteria in search of a home. It happened so quickly; other infections invaded his vulnerable system.

Lenny became very fragile. He was always a slender man, but he began to look frighteningly thin and frail. His stomach rejected any nutrition. Broth and more broth, and Jell-O was a positive feast. I grew alarmed by his extreme weight loss. At my behest, the doctors agreed to add intravenous proteins and vitamins.

My darling Lenny became frightened, too. He was a doctor, after all, and he knew that he was on a downward descent. He wouldn’t voice his fear, so I didn’t voice mine, either, but it was the elephant in the room.

From the beginning of the ordeal, Lenny continually thanked me for being by his side. He went into paroxysms of appreciation and appeared surprised at how well I was looking after him, thanking me over and over.

This surprised, pleased, and dismayed me. How could I not care for him? Did he think I would slip away to go shopping?

The sicker he became, the more Lenny pointed out my compelling fealty. It stung. I understood it: In his mind, I was still his little girl, and little girls aren’t capable of taking on difficult challenges. But it stung.

Well before this ordeal, I had become emotionally distant from Lenny. I had reached the point of giving up on our relationship. We were such different people. I had planned to live out the rest of my life by his side, but not necessarily on his side. One thing was certain: I would never leave him. When Lenny got sick, for the first time in our forty-five years of married life I was actually allowed to look after my husband. He had no choice. The man who could accept nothing from me for nearly a half century of marriage—the man whose control regulated the direction of giving so that it was always from him to me—was finally allowing me to take care of him and love him back, to pour myself into him as he had done for me all those years of married life. Until now, he hadn’t understood that receiving is the yin to giving’s yang in a loving relationship.

And here’s what happened as a result: I fell deeply in love with my husband all over again. I literally bathed in the glow of what felt like “first love.”

I couldn’t do enough for him. I washed Lenny, brushed his hair, cut his nails, and groomed his beard with delight. I sang to him. I was deliriously happy. I felt young again. I covered him with kisses and professed my love to him over and over. It was one of the best times of my life under the shadow of something dark and fearsome.

*   *   *

As Lenny’s sickness progressed, he constantly fought for air. He couldn’t draw one decent deep breath. It was torture for me to see him gasp and choke and cough. I often dreamed that I couldn’t breathe, either, and would wake up gasping.

The time had come: I had to make the most dreadful phone call of my life. I called Fernanda in choked sobs and said, “I think your daddy is dying.”

I could sense her fighting hard to keep her composure. She told me that she was on her way and would bring our grandchildren and her husband, David. I suggested that she leave the two boys behind, since they were, after all, only ten and twelve, to spare them upset and pain. She took serious umbrage. Of course she was right.

When they arrived, Justin, our firstborn grandson, observed Lenny’s frail body. This was his “Gramps,” with whom he had such an extraordinary relationship. His birth had provided Lenny with the son he had always wanted. They’d play chess and have long talks about life. Lenny would help with his math homework. And, oh, those wicked, sweaty games of Ping-Pong! Lenny was his best buddy and defender. But now those adoring grandpa eyes were unable to follow the boy who had come to visit one last time.

I tried to welcome my boys as though it were a fine reunion. I put Lenny’s glasses over his eyes and roused him to see his beloved “little men” one more time. “Look, sweetheart, look who’s here,” I said as I brought the boys to his bedside.

When Lenny saw them, he registered the dearest and tenderest smile I’d ever seen on his face.

Cameron, the little one, touched his grandpa’s hand, lingered a moment, and then in stunned, tearful silence retreated to a chair.

“Give Grandpa a spoonful of water,” I asked Justin, because Lenny’s throat was so dry from the oxygen tube.

As Justin did, Lenny gave him a sweet smile and took the water like a little bird.

Afterward, Justin put the spoon down on the bed, went to his chair, and let out an enormous silent scream as tears cascaded from his eyes—a boy who never cried. I wanted desperately to bear his pain for him.

And then David did something that will stay with me always: He lifted Justin onto his lap and surrounded him with his arms. I shall love him forever for that.

David and the boys returned to California. Fernanda stayed with me. She offered many times to stand guard and stay with her daddy. She and David had brought a blowup mattress, which happily replaced the sagging cot. But I needed to be there for Lenny, for me. By now I knew the hospital’s routine well, and should Lenny wake up, I knew that he would want to see my face.

Fernanda and I talked earnestly about Lenny’s suffering. I shared how her dad would spend hours of each day gasping for breath, struggling for air. I told her how, every time Lenny’s throat became dry from the oxygen tube, he would ask for water to ease the discomfort. A drink was not possible for him, so water-soaked Q-tips became the best delivery system. Even that bit of water in his mouth would produce a coughing fit. How could we let this go on?

*   *   *

As infections multiplied, the doctors added additional antibiotics to his intravenous tubes. Lenny struggled to keep up, but couldn’t. No! No! This could not go on! Wasn’t that why Fernanda and I were there, to ease his way through this painful journey?

After much deliberation, we both agreed with profound trepidation to ask the hospice people about ending Lenny’s suffering. No, not end his life—this was never our desire—but rather to ease his burden by giving him constant sleep. Hospice care workers were the most sensitive and thoughtful people in the hospital. They understood perfectly what Fernanda and I wanted for Lenny.

“This is what I want you to do for me when it’s my time,” I told Fernanda.

After the hospice intervention, Lenny slept peacefully twenty-four hours a day—no coughing, no gasping, no choking. I conversed with him in case he could hear me, relating stories about his adored grandchildren, his devoted daughter, and all of the latest news. Lenny had always enjoyed hearing the news; perhaps it would make him feel like he was still in touch with the world.

His body began to get very cold. For years, before he was sick, there were times when I used to banish him to his side of the bed, because his body temperature was like an oven, but now the warmth was leaving. His youthful hands still had not a vein in sight, but they were cold and dry. Oh, so dry.

One evening, as I was speaking to Lenny, I paused to hear his uneven breathing. I held his hand in mine and dropped to my knees. Aloud, I said, “Oh, my God! What have I done? What have I done?”

I spoke to Fernanda the next day, and she reminded me that he was now only sleeping, not suffering.

I used to go to sleep with Lenny’s steady breathing, but there came a time when the unevenness would wake me up with a start. On the twenty-sixth day of our hospital stay, I was actually getting some deep sleep when the night nurse came in and woke me up. It took a number of shakes.

“Mrs. Gordon? Mrs. Gordon, your husband has stopped breathing,” she said, uttering the words without any affect whatsoever.

I jumped up from my blowup mattress and stood at the foot of Lenny’s bed. I just stared in disbelief at my still, nonbreathing Lenny. He looked so frail, almost tiny, this man who had loved too much. Can a man love too much?

I sat down on the edge of his bed and kissed and caressed his elegant head over and over. I ran my hands through his silvery silken hair and cut off a lock of it to put in a tiny silk pouch.

Then I went for my overnight bag and stood at the door for one last look. I saw a long montage of two lives wound around each other like a caduceus. Did Lenny take parts of me with him? I wondered whether he took the little girl, Rosita, still clinging, with him. How does that work, such an enormous, rich, complicated life emanating from this slender figure?

No tears at this moment. I was cried out. It was more like an aching dry grief. I went to the door and took one last look. Can a man love too much? I’ll never know.

I went outside into the stifling Manhattan night and hailed a cab.

THE ATTIC

A self-portrait is painted from a reflection on a mirror. But for much of my life, the mirror offered only a flat image without the necessary angles, shadows, and bending of light needed to produce a three-dimensional portrait.

In 2004, while performing Master Class at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California, I met the producer and artistic director of the theater, the brilliant Tony Taccone. We became fast friends. I was drawn to Tony for his direct, unadorned style. He was forthright in his dealings with everyone, and I appreciated how he defended nonprofit theater in such an honorable way.

It was Tony who invited me to consider cowriting a play with him about my life. At first I didn’t give the idea serious consideration. I thought I didn’t have much to say and my life wasn’t that interesting. But sometime later he broached the subject again. This time I brushed him off with an “I’ll think about it,” knowing that I wouldn’t. But I did. I found every excuse not to do it. First I blamed Lenny—He won’t want to know some of the stories; they’ll embarrass him. Then I considered the old wounds that it would open, and somehow I knew it would require me to feel unhappy, guilty, and sad. But Tony persisted and gave me one last nudge before I agreed. And about a year before Lenny passed I started working on the project, which would become a play about my journey, Life Without Makeup.

It was hard work getting started. But with Tony as a faithful guide, I began to unwrap the story of my life. Remembering caused me to tap into experiences I had forgotten. I was moved as I saw the arc of my life and how my journey was the American story, the American dream. Dreams come in many flavors, and mine, as I expected, would include sadness, hurt, regret, and unexpressed grief. But there were also wonderful epiphanies as well. Even some mysteries were solved.

The project was a success, first in its cathartic effect on me, and then for the theater; the play met with great success. It was wonderful to be onstage again. And it was especially moving to hear the shared stories of patrons who would come backstage after the show, or wait on the street to tell me their stories.

Realizing the impact of the play, my manager at the time, David, urged me to consider writing this book. I protested much less. I enjoyed the honest sharing with my audience, and learned that when the rusty hinges were freed, the door swung wide-open, and their stories poured out to let me know that I was not alone. Perhaps a book would permit the same thing to happen for a wider audience. So I went back to the attic of my mind, which offers treasures not to be found anywhere else. It is a vast, powdery place; a beam of amber light shines through one window, displaying particles of memory like so much dust. This echo chamber of my memory is filled with moans and sighs, raucous laughter, squeals of delight.

I pick up the scent, the moist fragrance of the rain forest. I inhale deeply and I go there, into the cathedral green, with the mystical hanging orchids. I hear once more the call of the wild birds, the whistle of the coquí.

This is what I see: daguerreotypes of my maternal grandmother, Trinidad Lopez, a corseted patrician Spaniard. My mother is there, Rosa Maria Marcano, bent over a sewing machine. I see my little brother Francisco, three years old, my mirror image, grinning, his skin the color of shiny copper. I see Dennis giggling as I changed his diaper, Marlon squeezing me with those arms as I laughed till I cried, and friends from so many phases of my life. And Lenny, my dearest, my loyal husband and best friend: Lenny, always in my corner.

Past sorrows, recent sorrows, and the looming specter of guilt—of feeling not good enough—made up the flat image I saw on the mirror. But now I see my life in full dimension.

Yes, there are loose ends, but here I am, healthy, happy beyond what one reasonably expects, fully able to remember and reflect, and equipped to dream. I’m deeply grateful for the applause, and I thrive in the spotlight. Yes, I love the attention. But when the early morning fog blankets the hills where I live and the curtain lifts, I look out the window and see, far below, my daughter’s home filled with the lives of two budding little men, and my heart is full.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Rita,” he said, “we should write a play about your life.” And after much hesitation on my part and steady perseverance on his, Tony Taccone, the Artistic Director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, coaxed Rosita Dolores Alverio out of the shadows and onto that Berkeley stage to expose my Life Without Makeup. Tony, my dear friend, thank you for being an inspiration, guide and collaborator.

“You must write a book, a chronicle of your life, the history of your career. Your story needs telling for posterity. Think of your grandchildren!” Those words, spoken by David Belenzon, sparked the genesis of this project. Because you valued my story, David, it encouraged me to tell it more fully.

For my literary agent, Dan Strone, CEO of Trident Media Group, my thanks for introducing me to the able team at Penguin. Also, thanks to Dan’s assistant, Kseniya Zaslavskaya.

Laura Shane Cunningham, my deepest gratitude for your intuitive observation. As an unrelenting romantic, you were the perfect cheerleader and collaborator; without you, I could never have translated passion to page.

To the entire Celebra publishing group, expertly lead by Ray Garcia, publisher, muchisimas gracias to you and to Phil Wilentz, production manager; Alissa Amell, text designer; Craig Burke and Julia Flieschaker, publicists. And Denise Silvestro, my editor, what can I say? It was you who shepherded this project to a successful completion. You were endlessly patient with this first-time writer and thoughtfully constructive in helping sculpt the arc of the story. ¡Te aprecio!

Patti Pirooz, because of your skilled direction during the audio recording, the manuscript was further fine-tuned. Reading it “out loud” certainly helped iron out the last kinks. Good ear! Great job!

Allison Janice, thank you for researching and acquiring all the necessary photographic permissions for the book.

Judy Katz, of Katz PR, my publicist and friend, it’s my turn to put you in print and say thank for your steady and faithful service.

And finally, for John Ferguson, my guardian, consigliere, and purveyor of wisdom, my appreciation without end for seeing me through this difficult journey in unremitting pursuit of authenticity and fidelity. For asking the tough questions and demanding answers. For holding my hand through rivers of tears and ancient wounds.

But most of all…most of all, for helping me get my joy back.

Bracing myself against New York’s winter chill—it’s time to go home.

My beautiful mami and me.

A last memory of me, Mami, and Abuelo Justino.

Showing off Mami’s needlework—stitched, I’m sure, with love.

A smiling Dorothy on the outside, a conflicted Rosita on the inside.

The “Liz look”—playing a role was easier than finding myself.

A young actor is grateful when the photographer offers a free picture—this is that picture.

Playing Indian princess number 36…or is it number 42? I lost count.

The Deerslayer—I dreaded wearing those icy-cold buckskins.

The Yellow Tomahawk—Noah Beery Jr. (to my right) and Rory Calhoun (far right).

The King and I—that ten-pound headdress made a real impression on my scalp.

“Who is this girl?…Find me that girl!”—Darryl F. Zanuck

On top in “America,” the seminal role of my career.

The happiest night of my life, until Fernanda arrived.

Reportedly “the photo” found in Marlon’s home when he died.

Before the I do’s—Lenny and me outside of New York’s City Hall.

Holding Fernanda at a political rally—the babysitter didn’t show.

Finding my voice, taking a stand.

Loved by Lenny—encouraging me between acts.

Fernanda “Nandy,” my beautiful daughter.

Posing with my biggest fan—Mami.

Adoring smiles, loving words, but so many things I wished I would have asked her.

The key to having it all is loving it all.