by Rita Moreno
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 bei
ng 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?”
