DR: You started getting some gigs. You were doing bar mitzvahs.
RM: I did bar mitzvahs! I did weddings, all kinds. Jewish, Catholic weddings. I was what, eight, nine, ten?
DR: When you get to the ripe old age of about thirteen, you’re doing Broadway.
RM: Yes, my very first theater experience.
DR: And what was that like?
RM: It closed overnight. One show. It was a shock. I found out that all of that kind of magic can go away literally overnight. We rehearsed for about three and a half weeks. We opened, and the next day they said, “Don’t come in.”
DR: After that show lasted one performance, you began to go back and do more of your dance routines in various places, but then somebody got you an interview with Louis B. Mayer.
DR: What happened was an actual talent scout came to see a dance recital by our dance school, which is what they did in those days. They would go to all kinds of places and see if they could find new talent.
He saw me and he thought I might very well have a future. He said, “The time isn’t right just now, but I’ll stay in touch with you, and when the time is right I’ll call you again.” He was with MGM Studios—the studio of my dreams, because that was the studio that had all of the great, great musicals.
Sure enough, about six months later, he called my mom and he said, “Louis B. Mayer is coming to town and I would like Rosita to meet him.” We did all that we could for me to look like Elizabeth Taylor. Little girls like me had no role models whatsoever, so I chose Elizabeth Taylor.
We went to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to meet him. We never even heard of that hotel. He had the penthouse. We didn’t know what that meant.
So my mother gets in the elevator and she doesn’t know what to do. So she goes to the desk, she says, “We are supposed to see Louis B. Major, what do we do?” He said, “Penthouse, P-H.”
Ah, okay. So we go up and it opens at his penthouse and there he is, all five feet four inches of him. You know, like the fellow in The Wizard of Oz, because that’s the studio that made The Wizard of Oz.
It didn’t take long. He looked at me and he literally turned me around, took my hands in his, and he said, he actually said, “Why, she looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor! So how does a seven-year contract sound to you, young lady?” I flew, I just flew. It was the dream come true.
MGM—you have to understand what a studio that was then. It was it for musicals. That was the studio. Fox made musicals, Warner’s made musicals, but nobody else had Gene Kelly under contract, nobody had Ann Miller, nobody had Judy Garland. That was MGM.
DR: So you had a contract and you went out to Hollywood. You’re what, seventeen or eighteen?
RM: I was seventeen. In fact they had to give me a guardian because I wasn’t eighteen yet.
DR: You go out and you show up in the commissary and you see Clark Gable.
RM: Oh my God, I see all of them start sauntering in like real people. It was just astonishing. I’m looking at the steam table, all these exotic foods like roast beef. I was brought up on rice and beans. And who is there? Elizabeth Taylor! I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was so thrilling.
DR: You made a couple of movies on your contract.
RM: I made a couple of movies there with Mario Lanza, who was the tenor of the time. He was actually quite wonderful.
DR: The eater and drinker of the time as well.
RM: Big drinker, big. He used to eat three pizzas for lunch. He really did have a beautiful tenor voice.
DR: So this is working out well. You have a contract for seven years. All of a sudden they don’t renew your contract.
RM: I did three films there. I did Pagan Love Song with Esther “The Backstroke” Williams. I lied. They said, “Can you swim?” and I said, “Yes.”
I had lied through my teeth about being able to swim. I suddenly thought, “I’m going to drown. I just better go in the hotel pool and start trying to do something.” I didn’t dare tell anyone, so I couldn’t have anyone teach me.
Believe it or not, one night I dreamt that I could swim, and I went into the pool the next day and I could do the backstroke. So in this big swim number with Esther at the head and all of these beautiful Polynesian-looking people—I’m supposed to be a Polynesian girl—there’s all of these people doing this graceful breaststroke and I’m doing the backstroke. But it’s the only way I didn’t drown. Probably nobody noticed because there were tons of people doing this
DR: Whatever reason they didn’t renew the contract, it wasn’t because of that, right?
RM: They didn’t know what to do with me. In those days, what are you going to do with this Puerto Rican girl? The fact that I didn’t even look exotic didn’t seem to matter. I had this name. Which was changed, of course.
DR: You might describe that.
RM: Moreno was my stepfather’s name, so it was Rosita Moreno, and they took me to Bill Grady, a casting director, who said, “You’ve got to change your name, kid. It’s too Italian.” They suggested some really hilarious names. The only one I really remember was—even I, as shy as I was, turned it down—Orchid Montenegro. It might have gotten me some jobs. Who knows?
I didn’t tell my mother I’d lost my contract for a couple of months. I would just go in the closet or in the car and cry and cry. Because it was as though Mr. Mayer was Daddy and he said, “We don’t want you anymore.”
Finally I told my mom, and it was a very scary time. 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.
I started to do television, doing westerns, and I started to do westerns outside of MGM. And boy, if you’ve ever worn buckskins at five in the morning on location in Kanab, Utah, you could die from the cold.
DR: While you were shooting something, somebody took some photos of you and Life magazine had you on the cover.
RM: That was 1954, and it was at the time when Desilu, the Lucille Ball company, was beginning to branch out to do four-camera shows, comedy shows. They were doing a pilot with Ray Bolger, and they had me do a dance number with him. He wasn’t really a dancer. He was a hoofer. There’s a big difference. And he kept stepping on my feet and just killing me.
Life magazine was doing a layout on these new shows. The editors at Life said, “Who’s that girl? Take some pictures of her.” They were thinking of doing a layout on young Hollywood.
Life magazine never had actors or actresses on their covers. They had political figures, they had presidents, they had people like that, but rarely show-business people. They said, “You’re going to make the cover in two weeks, unless President Eisenhower gets a cold.”
DR: He didn’t, and you got on the cover and everybody saw it. Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox said, “Can she speak English? Let’s line her up.”
RM: I got a contract with 20th Century Fox.
DR: Did they produce the movie Singin’ in the Rain?
RM: That was MGM. That was the other picture that I made at MGM. That’s one of my favorite movies ever, ever. It’s a classic.
Gene Kelly put me in a nontraditional part. I had a red wig and I could actually use makeup of my color for a change instead of that brown stuff they always used to put on me. I thought, “Oh, my career is made. I don’t have to speak with an accent anymore, blah, blah, blah.” Didn’t happen. Rita Moreno was a Hispanic name, and that’s what they saw.
DR: You developed a relationship with a lot of people in Hollywood. You wrote about that in your book, and we’ll talk about a few of them. One of them was Marlon Brando, who was the love of your life at that period of time.
RM: Well, he was the lust of my life. Big difference.
DR: He seemed to have an insatiable appetite. He had a lot of different women, and wasn’t monogamous exactly. That produced some depression.
The very next day I get a phone call. “This is Colonel Parker. I handle Elvis Presley. Elvis spotted you in the commissary at Fox the other day and he liked what he saw. He would like very much to meet you. Would you like to meet him?”
I thought of that rotten underwear, and I said, “Yes, I would.” So I went out with Elvis, who was darling. The best part is that despite the fact that there was no social media then, it got out immediately. He took me to this very famous nightclub called the Moulin Rouge, and it was everywhere. It was in [the Hollywood] Reporter, it was in Variety, it was in the gossip columns. Rita Moreno, Elvis Presley.
And of course Marlon heard about it and he got furious. He threw chairs. Which was wonderful. That’s the kind of relationship that one was.
DR: Because of your relationship with Marlon Brando, at one point you tried to commit suicide.
RM: It was one of those relationships where one person fed the other. It was just a nightmare. I really wanted to end it and didn’t know how. I ended it five, six different times, and I’d go back, and I’d go back. The last time I went back, I felt so awful about myself—how could you treat anyone so badly, how could I treat myself so badly?—that I tried to end my life. I almost succeeded too. I took sleeping pills. His assistant came in, and she couldn’t wake me up. That’s when she called the police and an ambulance.
DR: You came to the famous March on Washington in 1963, the civil rights march. What was that like?
RM: Harry Belafonte felt it was important that there be a Hollywood contingent. He wanted Dr. King to know that there were people in Hollywood in films who thought a great deal of him. So Harry invited a number of us. Sammy Davis, Diahann Carroll, James Garner, myself—I don’t remember who else, but there were some pretty fabulous people.
We sat no more than fifteen feet from Dr. King where he was speaking. I get such goose bumps just talking about it still. There was a moment when Mahalia Jackson said, because he was reading from a text, she said to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin, tell them about the dream!” I mean, I could just cry. That’s when he started to say, “I have a dream.” I was there! I was there. Ah!
DR: So as you look back on your extraordinary career, what would you say is the legacy that you would like people to think about you?
RM: I would like people to think of me only in one way: she never gave up. Perseverance.
MARK BRADFORD on the Visual Arts
Visual Artist
“I have markers laid down along the way. And I have a loose structure that I start off with. But then you always have to let the painting win. You have to let the material win.”
For centuries the art world looked to Europe for inspiration, creativity, genius, and unmatched masterpieces. But around the middle of the twentieth century, America developed its own distinctive visual art styles—from abstract art to pop art to street and graffiti art, among other uniquely American art forms.
The great American artists—Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others—became the leaders of the global visual arts world.
More recently, one of the most distinctive of the current generation of visual artists is Mark Bradford. From a young age until adulthood, he worked at his mother’s beauty parlor—and, without the money for paint, learned how to take materials used in the beauty parlor to create art that told a story quite different than what others had ever done.
Today, Mark Bradford is at the pinnacle of the U.S. art world, and has officially represented the U.S. abroad, a few years ago at the Venice Biennale. His expressionistic works of art use paper or materials other than paint to provide a unique texture, meaning, and depth. They often reflect the urban environment he knows from having lived much of his life in Los Angeles.
Mark Bradford’s works also reflect a deep sense of history and its impact on current America. And they send a message that makes the viewer think about life in America—the challenges and the opportunities relating to class, race, gender. That message is frequently communicated through a grid that reflects city life or a set of figures designed to evoke important moments in history.
Unlike some abstract artists, Bradford is quite willing to explore the meaning of what he has put on canvas (or other material). Bradford has, not surprisingly, been the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant.”
I interviewed Bradford virtually in January 2021; he was in his Los Angeles studio, preparing to work on another history-related creation. One of his most famous works in that genre is his epic recounting of Pickett’s Last Charge from the Battle of Gettysburg in a commission for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The work consists of eight separate paintings, each of which is more than forty-five feet long, completely filling one of the museum’s large circular floors. Although the Hirshhorn—part of the Smithsonian—is free to visitors, almost any price would be worth paying to see this monumental work, and to hear about its meaning from its gifted creator—an American original for sure.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): When you were growing up in Los Angeles, did you have any plans or dreams about what you might want to do when you became an adult?
MARK BRADFORD (MB): No, I did not. My dreams were basically kids’ dreams, playing, doing whatever was in front of me.
DR: How did working in a beauty shop as a young man inspire you to be an artist?
MB: Because inside the beauty shop there was nothing but creativity. Women would come in and they wanted to look like Farrah Fawcett, and you would try to do the best that you could to make them look like Farrah Fawcett. I was always aware that my mom was pulling things out of the air. It was magic. In that way, creativity was something that I used every day. My mother would say, “Mark, take these wigs in the back and do something.” I would pull something from the air. That was creativity for me, and I never associated creativity with being an artist.
DR: Were there things from the beauty parlor that helped you to create your initial works of art?
MB: End papers [used to wrap hair ends during perms] are the first thing I started using when I got out of grad school.
DR: When did you realize that you wanted to be a full-time artist?
MB: In grad school. I really thought I could do it, finally.
DR: What did you learn at the California Institute of the Arts?
MB: I learned that there was a whole history of people thinking and doing for generations what I was thinking and doing. I discovered a whole tribe of people.
DR: When you finished your formal education, did you have a style in mind? How did you develop that style that you now have, which is so distinctive?
MB: I didn’t have a style in mind, but I did know that I wanted to connect the social and art history in some form.
DR: Was it hard getting started as an artist? Did you have to do other jobs as well to pay the rent, or your success happened from the start?
MB: It was hard. I worked in the hair salon for the first six years of my career, but I just took whatever I could get. I would show where I could show. And yes, I struggled, I was on the bus. I worked in the hair salon and I was an artist in the evenings.
DR: How long does it typically take to produce a work of art? Do you work on one at a time or many at a time?
MB: I work on many at a time. I would say that to really produce a work of art I’m comfortable with takes me about sixteen months to two years.
DR: Where do you typically get your inspiration from for a work of art?
MB: I don’t know where it comes from. A conversation I have with someone, a book that I
’m reading, a social project, the news, history. It can be a little detail. I’m like Sherlock Holmes and I’ll follow that detail until it opens up a larger area, and a larger area, and a larger area.
DR: When you start a work of art, do you know how it is ultimately going to look when it’s completed? Or is there a fair amount of improvising?
MB: I have markers laid down along the way. And I have a loose structure that I start off with. But then you always have to let the painting win. You have to let the material win.
DR: Sometimes, in the old days, Leonardo and other artists would paint over things they had already painted. They didn’t like what they originally painted, I guess. Do you ever do that, or that doesn’t happen anymore?
MB: All the time. If you run an X-ray of my paintings, you will see paintings on top of paintings on top of paintings. You know how you can tell, in a painting of mine, is by the weight of it. If it’s really, really heavy, you can tell there’s about five or six paintings under there.
DR: Do you ask friends or others to look at your completed work to see what they think? Or do you not need that type of affirmation?
MB: I ask everybody from the mail lady to the curator and everybody in between.
DR: And if they say they don’t like it, what do you do? You say, “You don’t know much about art”?
MB: No, I ask them why.
DR: When did you first realize that your art was sufficiently attractive to art collectors, both individuals and museums, and you could make a comfortable living doing this?
MB: When I sold my first work, I didn’t know if I could make a living, but I certainly knew that instead of working in the hair salon five days, I could drop it down to three.
DR: When did you realize you could not only make a comfortable living but also could become a nationally and globally recognized artist?
MB: Never.
DR: You’re very well known.
The American Experiment Page 31
