Rita Moreno Interview: ‘Brando Didn’t Know How To Make Love…’

Yahoo.com, By Helen Brown-THE TELEGRAPH, Posted December 10th 2021

“Fiery? Fearless? Sexy? Oh yes! I can be all those things,” says Rita Moreno who, 60 years ago, brought those qualities to her blazing, Oscar-winning performance as Anita in West Side Story. Now, on the brink of 90, she’s returning for Steven Spielberg’s remake – “fabulous, of course” – in a new part tailor-made for her. “I have grit, I love to laugh, I know I give off these positive vibes…”

But when it came to making a new documentary about her extraordinary life as a Puerto Rican in ­Hollywood, Moreno knew she would have to be frank about some of the “terrible” experiences through which she had kept on smiling. In Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, she describes being raped by her agent at 17, repeatedly betrayed by her long-term lover Marlon Brando, and cast as a series of demeaning “dusky maidens”, plastered in make-up the colour of mud. “I had to talk lahhk theeees,” she says of the generic “ethnic accent” she was required to deploy, whether playing characters of Thai, Native American or Latin American origin. “My lines were ‘Why you like white woman?’ and ‘Why you take gold from my people?’”

Speaking by phone from her home in Los Angeles, she tells me that when the film-makers first approached her about the new documentary, she wasn’t sure she had much to say. But watching news coverage of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, she realised “that my story was profoundly relevant to what’s happening in our society right now. I promised myself I would not indulge in any bulls—. I would have to be honest. At my age, what the hell am I protecting, anyway? I have the power to give people the truth and I think that can be immensely helpful”.

Moreno, one of only six women ever to win the EGOT “grand slam” of performance awards – picking up Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony statuettes – was born Rita Alverio in Humacao, Puerto Rico, in December 1931. Her earliest memories are of a lush green paradise in which she was always barefoot. But in February 1936, her seamstress mother (still only 22) moved to New York with her little “Rosita”, leaving behind an ex-husband and young son.

Rita would never see her brother again. Her arrival in wintry, concrete New York felt like a reversal of The Wizard of Oz: in that moment, her life went from Technicolor to black and white. “Boy gangs” hurled racist abuse at her as she walked along the freezing pavements: spic, garlic mouth, gold tooth.

‘I was a very original piece of work’: Rita Moreno in 1955 – Alamy

After taking up dancing lessons with Rita ­Hayworth’s uncle, it dawned on little Moreno that performance might be “the perfect panacea”. She made her professional debut at a bar in Greenwich Village at the age of six, was adding her voice to the Spanish dub of films by the age of 11, and made her first appearance on Broadway at 13. She was hired to perform at the docks for soldiers heading off to fight in the Second World War. “I sang Rum and Coca-Cola in a hat my mother had made to make me look like Carmen Miranda,” she says. “A bell would ring and half the boys in the canteen would leave. I didn’t realise how many of them would not be coming back.”

At 16, already the family’s sole breadwinner, she was spotted by an MGM talent scout and summoned to a meeting at the Waldorf Astoria with studio boss Louis B Mayer. Seeking an appropriately starry look for the encounter, Moreno styled herself after Elizabeth Taylor. Struck by the resemblance, Mayer offered her a contract on the spot. She now laughs about how hard she had worked on her acting and dancing, when all she had needed for her big audition was for a man to like how she looked.

A year later, she was raped by her agent. “I was 17 years old and menstruating,” she tells me, with ­unapologetic bluntness. “I was so excited that he was taking me to a fancy restaurant. I’d only been on one date before, to the circus. I had no reason to believe anything untoward would happen if we met at his apartment. He may have misunderstood, but if he did it’s because he wasn’t in tune with the fact I was a girl.”

“Here’s a peculiar thing,” she continues, “I never assigned the word ‘rape’ to what he did to me until I came to film the documentary.” So how did she define it? “I thought of it as an ‘attack’… No. I would think he ‘forced himself on me’. I couldn’t give it the proper name until I was filming. And it’s an important story because of what it says about me, that I continued to let him act as my agent. I didn’t value myself then. And I have no doubt, no doubt, that my ethnicity made him feel I was less valuable than other girls.”

Moreno ran out of the agent’s apartment and limited her dealings with him to the phone. But the harassment continued. In Just a Girl… she describes attending a cocktail party in her 20s at which she was introduced to Harry Cohn, then head of Columbia – “a distinctly crude and vulgar man”. Within minutes he’d told Moreno, “You know I’d like to f— you?” That “may have been the third time in my life I’d heard that word”, she says – and boggles that her only response was to “giggle like an idiot and back away”.

Her film roles of the period stayed close to the “dusky maiden” stereotype, with the exception of a sparkling turn as a giddy starlet in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and a lovely song as Tuptim in The King and I (1954). In 1954, Moreno met the 30-year-old Marlon Brando on the set of his Napoleon biopic Désirée. Three years earlier, Brando had smouldered his way to international sex symbol status playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and in her memoir, Moreno remembers that, as a 22-year-old, “just meeting him that first day sent my body temperature skyrocketing… It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs”.

Today, she tells me that “the sexual part of my relationship with Marlon was luminous, incredible”. But when I say I was surprised to learn he was such a giving lover – in her memoir she describes him as “generous” – Moreno pulls me up sharply. “Wait, wait, you’re making an assumption,” she says. “He wasn’t giving – or, for that matter, loving. He never ‘made love’ to me. He didn’t know how. It was a very tempestuous, very sexual relationship, but by no means was it loving. It only became loving after it was over and he called me all the time and we shared all these secrets with each other.”

Over the seven years of their on-off relationship, Brando was repeatedly unfaithful. At one point, Moreno attempted to make him jealous by dating Elvis Presley, whom she has described as sexually disappointing: “More like a baby brother who couldn’t make interesting conversation.”

Moreno’s affair with Brando only ended after she got pregnant (not entirely by accident) and Brando arranged an illegal abortion, which was botched and nearly killed her. She attempted suicide in his house, after which, she tells me, “I was in therapy. I was in love with him for a long time after it ended. But I knew this man was poison. My doctor told me he was poison. I could never see him again.”

The couple were reunited seven years after their break-up, on the set of the 1969 crime movie The Night of the Following Day. The script required them to argue, but, Moreno says, “all the stuff came to the surface and I just went nuts”. On demand, she slapped Brando in the face “and I saw his hairline go back two inches. He looked like an animal. His nostrils flared and he whacked me. And that’s when I went crazy. The director sure as hell kept rolling”. With some satisfaction she tells me that, among her fans, this “happens to be the favourite scene of many people”.

Somehow, in the years that followed, the pair fumbled their way towards an enduring mutual affection. “Marlon loved me because I was a very original piece of work,” Moreno says now. “I was not like any other woman he consorted with. I could embarrass the hell out of him. He’d start stuttering. I could just look at him and say. ‘I know exactly what you’re up to’, and he would start giggling. It was delicious. I didn’t realise I had one up on him. I was such a dummy.”

Unusual among Hollywood stars of the era, Brando was a passionate advocate of political causes and his civil rights activism inspired Moreno to follow suit. She counts taking part in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as one of the great moments of her life: she sat a few feet from Martin Luther King as he delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

Moreno as Anita in the original West Side Story film – Getty

The year Moreno broke up with Brando was also the year she filmed West Side Story. The stage musical, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim – a trio so combustible many were astonished they stayed together long enough to get it written – had stormed Broadway in 1957. But with its avant-garde score and tragic narrative of gang violence, few people expected it to repeat that success on screen. In a period that had seen Warner Bros pay $5.5 million and a share of profits for the film rights to My Fair Lady, an independent company paid just $350,000 to secure the rights to West Side Story.

From the start, Moreno had qualms about accepting the role of Anita, girlfriend of the Puerto Rican gang leader. Above all, she worried about singing the song America, in which her character trashes the reputation of the actress’s beloved birthplace. “Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion,/ Let it sink back in the ocean,/ Always the hurricanes blowing,/ Always the population growing/ And the money owing.”

I ask Moreno if her mother might have had more sympathy with Anita’s view. “That’s right!” she says. “My mother could never let go of the idea that America was the solution. And seeing how things turned out, it was the best thing for me, so I concur. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Puerto Rico. But Anita isn’t expressing my views, or the writer’s views or the director’s views. Anita is a girl who much prefers America to Puerto Rico and who gets smacked down by the boys every time.” Above all, she says (doffing her cap to the great lyricist who died a few days after we spoke), it’s a song that tells the audience “what was – and still is – really wrong with America. It’s on the nose, thank you, Stephen”.

Moreno is less complimentary about another linchpin of West Side Story’s creative team: choreographer Jerome Robbins. “Jerry was a very difficult, very sadistic fellow when he became anxious,” she says. “And he was anxious for most of his life. He could smell out victims, like a pig looking for truffles. He worked me insanely hard and I worked like a dog, trying to keep up with the rest of the class. But I’m one of the few he didn’t pick on. Apparently, he respected what I’d done in The King and I.”

‘I knew this man was poison’: with Marlon Brando in The Night of the Following Day, 1969 – Alamy

Moreno had expected the roles to come flooding in after she lifted her Oscar. In fact, she didn’t appear in another film for seven years. In 1965, she married cardiologist Lenny Gordon and although they remained together until his death in 2010 – and had a daughter, Fernanda, in 1967 – their relationship was far from the idyll it appeared to be.

“My husband was embarrassed by the things I like most about myself,” she says now. “He hated me being raucous, laughing too loudly, my potty mouth. And I don’t drop all those words every few minutes like some people. But I drop them when they feel right. It’s a wonderful emotional release for me.”

Moreno’s career picked back up via a long-­running role in the 1970s children’s television show The Electric Company, with Morgan Freeman (she won her Grammy for a tie-in album), an Emmy-­winning appearance on The Muppet Show (1976) and, more recently, a terrifically tense turn as a psychologist nun in Oz (1997-2003). When it came to filming the surprisingly powerful reboot of the 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time for Netflix in 2017, Moreno insisted that her character, Grandma Lydia, had a sexual element – and got her way to glorious effect.

When Spielberg announced his decision to remake West Side Story, Moreno was initially wary, she says – how could he improve on the original? But she now declares herself delighted by what the director (with screenwriter Tony Kushner) has done with a story that has obsessed him since childhood. During the making of the original, while filming a scene in which the Jets chase Anita around Doc’s Drugstore and pin her to the floor, buried trauma came rushing to the surface. “I call that the rape scene,” she says. Afterwards, she fled the other actors, tripped over a cable and was found sobbing beneath the lights.

So she was surprised to discover that in Spielberg’s remake, playing the newly created role of Valentina – widowed proprietress of Doc’s – it would fall to her to stop the assault on Anita (played by Ariana DeBose). “It was positively creepy and eerie to remake the ‘rape’ scene with Ariana as the new Anita,” she says. “It’s the one scene that I had real difficulty playing. I kept saying, ‘I’m playing the wrong person.’ It never got comfortable. I didn’t tell Steven, but I never was able to make the transfer. This version was more violent; really, really scary. It’s a very necessary scene. But… oh, God.”

Having overcome fears that Kushner’s script would be “too dark”, Moreno embraced her role as executive producer on the new film. “I don’t want the public to think I’m denigrating the original, because that was an incredible movie,” she says. “But Tony really goes into the politics of 1957 in a way we didn’t in the original. Nobody even thought of it. If they had, we would have been wearing make-up that was our own colour,” she laughs. “Thank goodness we’ve moved on from that time.”

However, the question of racial representation in Hollywood remains fraught. Moreno found herself in hot water earlier this year when she defended her friend Lin-Manuel Miranda against accusations that his new film In the Heights had failed to adequately depict the dark-skinned Afro-Latino population of the Manhattan neighbourhood in which it is set. “People had every right to object to what they felt was wrong, to what had been inadvertently ignored,” she says now. “But what a way to do it! His film had just come out and got wonderful reviews, and I thought the timing was horrendous. I really felt, boy, are they picking on the wrong guy.”

Who wouldn’t want Rita in their corner? Happy to be single, happy to be working, happy to be planning her 90th birthday this month with her daughter, who’s hovering close to the phone as we talk, she draws our interview to a close. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” she tells me, “and this has been a marvellous conversation about it all. But now I have to go and get on with the rest of it!”

West Side Story is in cinemas Friday December 10. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It is on digital download from Monday December 13