Yes, we have that freedom. But balancing that freedom is that we have the responsibility to extend a courtesy and an understanding to other people who have those freedoms, and nurture that common space.
DR: When you’re playing jazz in a concert, and one of your musicians is improvising, do you know when he’s going to end or she’s going to end?
WM: You know when they’re going to end because we play on a cycle. We play on a form, a harmonic cycle that goes around and around, in most instances. There are many types of jazz, but in most instances we’re playing on a chord progression that repeats.
When you get to the top of that repetition, you start listening for “Is this person going to stop playing?” They normally will indicate to you when they’re getting ready to stop. But sometimes they keep playing too long. Then there are certain cues that take place on the bandstand to let you know it’s time for you to stop soloing.
DR: In your book on jazz, you talk about some of the greats you either played with or who influenced you. I’d just like to ask for your brief comments on some of them. First is Louis Armstrong. You originally thought he was, as you say, an Uncle Tom. But you obviously changed your view.
WM: Yes. It’s hard for later generations to understand the challenges of an earlier generation, and the norms of show business, and what Louis Armstrong did. Now I understand more of his genius and who he was and what he played.
When I look at the movies he made or the positions he took, I still don’t necessarily like that. I don’t like a lot of what Black people are in any of the American movies of the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s. A lot of it now has that same destructive mythology.
Later I learned and understood who Louis Armstrong was as a musician. That’s a totally different story. That man was a genius of such magnitude you could lie about how great he was and you still wouldn’t be saying enough.
DR: You’re a composer as well as a performer, educator, conductor, and so forth. One of the great composers in the jazz world was Duke Ellington. Did he have any influence on you?
WM: Duke’s intelligence, his dedication, over two thousand pieces—I love him.
Because I grew up also listening to classical music, I love Beethoven. The first symphonic piece I ever played was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. How Beethoven tied all the themes together—Duke Ellington wrote a piece that’s called A Tone Parallel to Harlem, and it uses the same basic concept, very little thematic material and a lot of development.
I go back to when I first heard Beethoven’s music and began to study it and listen to his symphonies and think about how he developed material. And I tie it to Duke Ellington’s developmental concerns and the things he did, albeit in another style of music. I love many other composers in the jazz tradition and in the classical tradition. Russian composers I love—Stravinsky, Shostakovich. I could go on and on.
DR: What about Dizzy Gillespie? Was he an influence on you?
WM: That was my man. The thing about Dizzy Gillespie that hit me first was the depth of his intelligence. I met him when I was fourteen. And when he started talking—oh, the way my daddy and other musicians listened to him. He’s part of the reason that we developed Jazz at Lincoln Center.
DR: You began playing jazz there in the late 1980s. That evolved into Jazz at Lincoln Center.
WM: We wanted to fill a space in American arts and provide enough education and music and advocacy for us to have our native art form when it came time for us to address our mythology and correct it, so that we could move forward as a nation.
We’ve succeeded beyond our wildest imagination with the volume of concerts we’ve been able to do. We built three concert halls in the middle of Manhattan on Fifty-Ninth Street, the House of Swing. We put on concert series over thirty years. We have twelve education programs. Even since this pandemic began, we’ve put out over five hundred or six hundred pieces virtually.
From the beginning, we had three tenets: no segregation, no generation gap, and all jazz is modern. We’ve continued to live that credo through all of these years.
DR: When Lincoln Center opened in the 1960s, people thought, “Okay, this is opera, symphonic music, classical kind of music.” What did people say when you said, “We need to do more jazz at Lincoln Center”?
WM: We had a lot of support from the top of the organization. The Constitution was not written with the rights of Afro-Americans and Native Americans in mind. But the Constitution can be amended, and it has been amended. And me and you are sitting here talking right now.
DR: What do you enjoy the most now? Is it composing or is it teaching? Is it conducting or playing?
WM: It’s all the same to me. I taught some of my students at Juilliard last night and we were talking about a chapter of Albert Murray’s book The Hero and the Blues. We’re on Zoom, I’m going back and forth with forty young people and they’re talking about what things mean and what does it mean to be in the moment. So for me it’s all a blessing. I feel grateful.
DR: Is jazz popular outside the United States?
WM: Jazz has never really been popular. It’s not popular like funk was popular, like rock and roll is popular. Jazz is meaningful and it’s necessary. Those who are interested in that like jazz. Those who are not, they don’t like jazz. We need to teach our kids about the music. It is a national art form.
DR: What is it that you would tell people about why the jazz experience as a listener is so compelling compared to other forms of music?
WM: Because it has a development section. You have to follow what musicians play from one point. Jazz is the music that’s most in the world like conversation. You interviewing me—we’re not really conversing, but I’m reading you. Like when I gave you that one real long answer, you gave me a couple of, “Okay, man, I’m getting ready to come in here.”
Jazz is a music that prizes individuality. You have a lot of great individuals you can interface with, from Lester Young to Billie Holiday to Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. You have great groups you can love that play in different forms. And you have the whole Afro-Latin form of jazz that takes you everywhere from Brazil to Cuba to Puerto Rico. It integrates your citizenship in and your understanding of the world.
Most importantly, it gives you tremendous pride in being American. We didn’t have to denigrate or cut anybody down or do anything negative to anybody to create this. It’s a nonpredatory form. It’s a symbiotic form. You can be as rich as you want to be in jazz and nobody else has to be poor. I’m going to do this till I die if I can, the Good Lord willing, if people will have me. I’ve been blessed to do something and get unbelievable support from people.
DR: If you could play with any two or three jazz musicians—without offending anybody you don’t mention—who are the ones you’d like to play with the most?
WM: I always say Count Basie’s band in 1937. One of my great mentors was Sweets Edison, and he was a member of Count Basie’s band in 1937. This man was the epitome of soul. Anything that could produce something as soulful as Sweets, I want to be a part of that.
RITA MORENO on the Actor’s Life
Actress
“How many times in my life have I said, ‘I’ll never work again’? How many times do actors say that to themselves? Over and over. It’s as though you somehow never learn that particular lesson, because show business is so bizarre, it’s so odd, it’s so demanding, it’s so mean.”
One creative cultural area where Americans have been at the forefront for over a century, even before recorded sound (“talkies”) was possible, has been the motion picture. From a base in Southern California, often referred to as Hollywood, entrepreneurs built studios, and young men and women came there to develop their acting skills, with the hope of becoming a star—a Clark Cable, Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, or Meryl Streep.
Some motion picture stars also become stars on Broadway or on television.
Few of those actors o
r actresses were at the top of their profession for seven decades and still performed in their late eighties. And fewer still were awarded all of the most significant awards of their profession: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, Kennedy Center Honor, and Golden Globe. And even fewer have also been awarded two of the highest awards a president of the United States can bestow on a performing artist: the National Medal of Arts and Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Actually, there is only one living person who has done all of the above, despite the fact that she suffered a great deal of discrimination in her career because she was Puerto Rican. That person is Rita Moreno, who first came into American consciousness as the Academy Award–winning Anita in the epic West Side Story movie of 1961. But that role did not free Rita Moreno from being typecast as the typical barefoot actress playing roles that Hollywood and Broadway thought appropriate for a woman of Latin descent.
In time, because of her considerable skills as a dancer, actress, and singer, and a larger-than-life personality combined with extraordinary beauty, Rita Moreno overcame prejudice and showed the full array of her talents through every medium available to performing artists.
She also led an at times tempestuous life. The longtime lover of Marlon Brando, she once came close to committing suicide over Brando’s infidelities.
I first came to know Rita Moreno when the Kennedy Center awarded her a Kennedy Center Honor in 2015, and I found her to be the most pleasant and engaging of persons, with no Hollywood star airs or pretensions. She had led a full life as a performer but still seemed to relish the thrill of entertaining others.
This interview, done on April 29, 2017, as part of the center’s Profiles in Creativity series, only summarizes some of the highlights of an exciting professional and personal life. The love of her life was actually not a famous performer, but a medical doctor, Leonard Gordon, to whom she was married for forty-five years until his death, and with whom she had one daughter, Fernanda, to whom she is very close. For those who want to learn more about this gifted woman, I highly recommend her autobiography, Rita Moreno: A Memoir. As in the interview, so too in the book, no holds are barred.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You’ve now been in show business for more than seventy years. An incredible career. You’ve won all the kinds of awards, every award you can possibly win—the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, every award. Why do you think you’ve been so successful? You had good genes? You worked harder? You’re smarter? You’re more talented? What do you think was the reason?
RITA MORENO (RM): Why do I think I’ve been so successful? I have no idea. That’s for you to say! Why do you think I’ve been so successful, seriously?
DR: You worked very hard, you had a lot of innate talent, you practiced when you were very young, and you were really driven. How about that?
RM: Here’s the thing. I know a lot of people who did all of those things and haven’t gotten as fortunate as I. I know a lot of people who deserve all of the attention in the world, all kinds of honors, and don’t have them. I really think at a certain point it’s in the lap of the gods. I do.
DR: Let’s think of it another way. You’ve been in show business for seventy years. Many people your age are spending time with their grandchildren—you’re doing that too—but they’re not competing actively in the performing arts world. You are now filming a new show for Netflix, One Day at a Time [it ran for three seasons starting in 2017, the year of this interview]. You must feel young there because Norman Lear is the producer and he’s ninety-four. Why have you decided to continue your career? Not that everyone doesn’t want you to do it.
RM: Because I love it! I love what I do. Look at me eighty-five, for God’s sake. I have an album out, in Spanish, which is produced by Emilio Estefan. I have a book out, which I know you’ve been carrying around. I have all of these things going for me. What an astonishing life I have. I wake up humming.
DR: You should bottle that. That’s pretty impressive. But let me ask: You’ve won all these great awards. Which one surprised you the most?
RM: The Oscar. At the time that the Oscars came along, I was doing another crappy film in Manila in the Philippines, where I was playing yet another dusky maiden, a guerrilla girl in World War II. Then to my astonishment I got nominated and I was flown into Hollywood for the night.
I was really pretty sure that Judy Garland was going to get it, because number one, it was Judy Garland playing a dramatic role in a film called Judgment at Nuremberg. I thought, “I don’t have a chance.”
But I wanted to be there just in case, and they called my name. I damn near wet my knickers. I could not believe it! I had flown in, I was exhausted with the time change. You saw that really thrilling and touching speech: “I don’t believe it.” I’ve always wanted to make up for that. I think I did when I got the wonderful Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.
But the best part of that night is that as I got off the stage, Joan Crawford was there. She was the cohostess, and I think Rock Hudson—yes, he gave me the Oscar—Rock Hudson was the other host. And she, Joan Crawford, liked to drink. Vodka was her drink, and she had a Pepsi cooler in her dressing room because her husband was Mr. Pepsi, I forget his name, a very famous man. [It was Alfred Steele.]
She had been spiking her Pepsis with quite a bit of vodka. When I got offstage and into the wings, she was drunk as a skunk. A photographer came over to take a picture. She saw the photographer and she grabbed me and hugged me. She was built like a linebacker.
She’s got me in this grip like this and the photographer says, “Can I see Miss Moreno’s face, please?” She really was crushing my face against her bosom, such as it was. “Oh no,” she says, “she’s so upset.” She wanted the picture, right? I’m saying, “I’m not upset, I’m not upset!”
It ended up that they had to wrest me from her grip. She would not let me go! They wanted to take me to the press room because I just won this amazing Oscar, this girl that half the world hadn’t heard of.
DR: Let’s go back to the beginning of your life. You were born in Puerto Rico, and your mother was only seventeen when you were born?
RM: I think she was about seventeen.
DR: You were living happily in Puerto Rico for five years or so.
RM: It was lovely. I was born in Humacao, and then we lived in a town called Juncos, which is right close to the rain forest. It was an idyllic life for a little girl. The fragrances—I mean, you can imagine, it’s just pure paradise, Puerto Rico. I used to play with these teensy little frogs that were no bigger than your thumbnail called coqui because they made that sound. Coqui! Coqui!
It was a wonderful life. Then my mother decided that we needed to have a better life. She left me with my father, whom she had divorced, and she took a ship to New York City, and worked in sweatshops as a seamstress. She made enough money at some point to go back to Puerto Rico to get me and bring me back to the United States for this better life that she thought about.
DR: You went on a cruise liner, which is a very big ship.
RM: You know what, the funniest things happen. God’s editing room sometimes does some interesting things. The moment we were out at sea we had a huge, really nasty storm. And everybody came from the hold where we were, which of course was not smart, because that’s when you really get sick.
The trip took about three days longer than it should have because of this awful storm. We approach the United States, and there is this enormous green lady holding the biggest ice cream cone I have ever seen.
DR: You had a luxurious apartment waiting for you?
RM: Yes, of course. In a place called La Bron—the Bronx.
DR: With lots of your relatives?
RM: Yes, it was wonderful. It was a four-bedroom apartment, but each family had a room, and my mommy and I had one room also.
It was really very tough. It was very difficult. And it was cold. I had never seen a tree without leaves on it. I remember, in the bus on the wa
y to La Bron, I said to my mommy, I said, “What happened to the trees? There’s no leaves!” She said, “It’s called winter.”
That’s when I learned that there was another different kind of weather. We didn’t have that in Puerto Rico. We had the rainy season, and we had hot and we had balmy, but we didn’t know about winter.
DR: Eventually your mother worked hard enough and you got your own apartment.
RM: We got our own apartment. We slept in one little small iron bed. And she sent me to kindergarten. I didn’t know a word of English. This was before the Puerto Rican diaspora. So there were very few Hispanic kids in kindergarten. That’s when I really began to understand that this was not going to be an easy life.
DR: There was discrimination. People called you names.
RM: Oh my God, I got called names. On the way to school, usually on the way back for lunch, on the way back from school in the afternoon. There were gangs, and I would do a zigzag route to our apartment building because these little gangs would gang up and call me names like “Spic” and “garlic mouth” and “gold tooth.”
I was very young. I didn’t understand why that was happening. When you’re very young like that, you are tender and you tend to believe what people tell you, and if they say you’re not worthy and that you don’t have value, you believe that. So I grew up feeling that way about myself. I never told my mom about those nasty occasions.
DR: Your mother decided that you might get some dance lessons and you became a child dancer?
RM: A friend of hers, Irene Lopez, was a Spanish dancer and she saw me bopping around the apartment one time and she said, “I think Rosita might have some talent. Can I take her to my dance teacher?” My mom said yes, and Irene took me to a man named Paco Cansino, who it turned out was Rita Hayworth’s uncle. He was kind of royalty in dance circles. That’s where I learned to dance professionally.
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