Rita Moreno: A Memoir (11 page)

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

T
he 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.