by Rita Moreno
I heard sometime later that the photo was sold when items from his estate were auctioned off, its price set by the highest bidder. But only I know its true value.
* * *
Good movie roles came fewer and farther apart as I approached forty. Then, in 1969, I lucked out and landed the female lead in Popi. In this movie, the wonderfully diverse actor Alan Arkin played a Puerto Rican father at a loss about what to do with his children to save them from poverty. He schemes to take them out of New York City and send them by boat to the coast off Miami, Florida, so that the boys will be mistaken for Cubans and given asylum.
I played Alan’s girlfriend, Lupe, whose racial identity remains unspecified in the movie. Popi was a true pleasure, as Alan was such a gifted actor—except for one uncomfortable scene. It’s the part of the movie where Alan and I are supposed to be making love in bed—or rather, Popi and Lupe. We were totally “into” our roles (only in a professional manner, of course) when Alan’s real-life wife dropped by to visit. She said, “Hi, oh, my gawd!” and started toward the exit.
Alan jumped out of bed, standing at full attention in his boxers and socks. “Dana, I’d like you to meet Rita, Rita Moreno,” he said.
She was mumbling, “I’m so sorry, I…ah…didn’t mean to interrupt….”
By this time, I had pulled the thin sheet up to my nose to help hide my mortification. I whispered a sheepish, “Hi,” but she continued to mutter her apology for interrupting the scene, then disappeared off the set.
Alan was as embarrassed as I. And speechless!
The backstory: Both of us were quite modest. Under those sheets I was wearing dime-store bloomers, gym socks, and falsies double-taped to my breasts for cover. But it had taken both of us at least an hour to become comfortable enough with each other to do the scene. The mood had become impotent, actus interruptus.
Note to self: Spouses of actors should never, ever drop in uninvited.
* * *
I had my own marital movie crisis a year later, when the opportunity arose for me to play a role in the movie Carnal Knowledge. The script called for my character, a hooker named Louise, to orally arouse Jack Nicholson’s chacter, Jonathan. Lenny objected emphatically.
But I proceeded to make a case for the importance of this work: that it was not written to appeal to prurient interests, but to expose how men in America objectify women.
I went to meet director Mike Nichols at his apartment, and any hesitation I might have had after Lenny’s strong expression of disapproval was banished on the spot. Nichols wouldn’t let me leave until I’d promised to play Louise, who is the last stop on Jonathan’s sexual odyssey in the movie.
I loved the part, in truth. Louise was a hooker, yes, but the part was so well written that I could see a lot of potential depth in the role. Is Louise hating Jonathan while placating him? How cynical is her expertise? (Quite!)
Louise’s lines, a ritual speech to arouse him, are fascinating, at once literary and abject. In a way, Louise was the highest-evolved form of the subservient slave girls I had played from the start of my career: We had grown up together. How could I resist playing a part like this?
No actor could have walked away from that role, not under Mike Nichols’s direction and that cast: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, and Ann-Margret. Certainly not when the script was written by Jules Feiffer, for a movie that everyone expected to be an important and controversial picture. Which it was—Carnal Knowledge charted male sexuality in a way it had never been done before.
So what if it meant that I had to play a whore and feign pleasuring Jack Nicholson with oral sex for take after take? This was the greatest whore part ever written for the movies, and I got to end the movie with the ultimate line: “It’s up in the air.”
During our famous scene together, Louise coaxes Jonathan into an erection. His misspent youth was integral to the movie’s theme: that a man could go so wrong with his carnal desire that he would have to, in the end, be serviced and lose all opportunities for true love and happiness. By not allowing women to be equal, he ended up degrading himself as well.
In my mind, there was no question that Louise held him in bitter control: It is she who is in charge. I couldn’t wait to play her!
The scene, rich with symbolism, was performed on a hydraulic lift. I had only one place to find motivation as I spoke squarely into the cold, opaque blackness of the lens—in Jonathan’s eyes as I lured him into arousal. All this while the platform is inching downward. It required the presence of Jack, in character, lying nearby, to provide the necessary inspiration for me. Which he did, happily. I became exhausted mentally and physically as I “became” Louise, who appears to be descending endlessly.
Jack Nicholson was the most obliging of costars. Without him grinning and leering at me off camera, I don’t think I could have done as well.
That set turned out to be one of the more miserable movie sets I have entered, and the chilliest of backstages. I felt the weight of having disappointed my husband, who had deep reservations about the morality of the screenplay. Emotionally, I had moved to Siberia.
We rehearsed and rehearsed, and Mike Nichols kept saying, “Don’t act; keep it real.” He said that I was Louise—and “Louise is a hooker.” That didn’t feel good. In addition, shooting the fellatio scene took thirty takes, because Mike wanted that sexual scene in one continuous shot—no pauses. This was the first time I had been involved in making a film that was shot in continuity. It is a rare style of filmmaking. It is common to shoot all the scenes that occur in one location at the same time in that location or setting. This avoids moving around excessively, and is time-saving and efficient. But in order to build an ever-intensifying neurosis in his characters, Mike shot every scene in sequence. By the time I had arrived, I sensed that the toxicity of the characters had seeped into the psyches of some of the players.
It was a grueling experience, and an isolating one, too. Three days into making the movie, I had yet to share a meal with anyone in the company. I was missing Lenny and Fernanda, and I was damn lonely. I hated feeling like a pariah.
I assumed that it was just by chance that I hadn’t shared a meal with any of my coworkers, which happens all the time on location. So, hearing Mike, Jack, and Art talking about dinner plans in my presence, I said, “Hey, I’ve been here three days and I haven’t had dinner with anybody.” I can now see how my self-invite could have been off-putting to them, but not being included didn’t seem cordial to me.
Feeling obliged, Mike instantly asked me along that evening. I shared the most uncomfortable, chilliest dinner of my life. But it was not Rita who attended that dinner. It was Rosita. Seated at their table, I reverted to that demure, insecure little girl who didn’t belong. And I could endure that dinner only by forcing myself to think about the positive aspects of my life with every self-conscious bite. Oh, to be back home with my family.
BIG BIRD, THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, AND ME
During those first few years with Fernanda, it seemed like Lenny and I had created the perfect kind of marriage to raise a baby. I was happy to finally have a family to call my own, and content to feel settled for the first time in my life. And Lenny was euphoric in the way only a forty-seven-year-old first-time father of an exquisite baby girl can be.
Our love and marriage were embodied in Fernanda: We had “made” her, and she had made us feel happy and complete. We could watch her for hours as she found her little fingers and toes, learned to smile and sit up on her own, started walking, and then—very soon—dancing. Fernanda was dancing almost as soon as she could walk.
We had a beautiful place to live, too: an eight-room apartment in a landmark building on Manhattan’s West Side. Ironically, it was just a hundred blocks from the Spanish ghetto where my mother brought me when we left Puerto Rico.
When Fernanda was a little toddler, I wanted to encourage the creative side of her, whatever it would be. I would engage her in making collages with beans, lentils, and peas.
We’d get glue and put the beans on pieces of cardboard, making pretty designs. We would draw together, too. She loved that.
There was something that Fernanda always did that knocked me out. It started one day, when she was very little, even before she could talk, she got really upset one day.
“Do you think you need a little mothering?” I asked.
Fernanda just nodded up at me with her big eyes.
I had a rocker in her room, so I picked her up, sat down in the rocker with her, and began to stroke her hair, hug her, kiss her, and sing to her. I had Spanish albums with children’s songs, and some in English, too. Always after that, whenever Fernanda felt insecure or unhappy, she would say, “I think I need some mothering,” and I’d say, “You got it kid,” and I’d sit her on my lap and rock her.
Oh, how we loved her, Lenny and I! When Fernanda was ready to go to first grade, we couldn’t stand letting her out of our sight. So the first month or so that Fernanda had to get on the bus to go to school, we’d follow her. (You’d never think to put a child of almost any age on a city bus to go anywhere these days, but back then it was how every child went to school in New York.) We didn’t want her to know it, though, so Lenny would park his car around the corner, and after I put Fernanda on the bus, we’d get in his car and follow the bus all the way to school, just to know that our beloved daughter was safe.
Fernanda used to bring friends home from school, and I think I had as much fun as the girls did. I used to make a tent for them by covering the bridge table with a sheet, and Fernanda and her friends would hold their little club meetings there. She called it the PBS Club, which stood for Plays, Ballets, and Spooks.
Fernanda wanted to be a ballet dancer. Lenny and I told her that, if she did her homework, she could take classes at the New York City Ballet, so she did. She became a ballerina and loved it. At a different dance school, there was one especially wonderful dance class where the children were encouraged to move any way they wanted. The teacher would say, “Pretend you’re a rubber band. Now start dancing!”
I’d watch that class and think, Oh, man, this is lovely. I wish I’d had that freedom of expression in my dance classes.
We took Fernanda to museums, plays, and concerts. She loved Gilbert and Sullivan, even at a young age, and later, when she started to draw more seriously, she took classes at the Museum of Modern Art. She became a wonderful painter, and now she makes beautiful jewelry. I like to think that we set the stage for her to express her true self, as she found joy in creativity any way she wanted to express it.
* * *
What put my enraptured mami-hood over the moon was that I soon found work that fit seamlessly into being a mother. With Fernanda, I was watching the brilliant new children’s shows, like Sesame Street, and before you could say, “Alakazam!” I was appearing on them.
This was yet another instance where my perseverance paid off. I approached Jim Henson, the genius creator of the Muppets, and was as persistent as Animal: I threw myself at him and said, “I will do anything for you if you let me be a voice on Sesame Street! I will work for nothing!”
“Relax,” he said. “I’ll pay you.”
Soon I was happily engrossed in my new line of work, which felt like play. Yes, the hours were long, of course, and I suppose the work was hard, but in entering the world of children’s television, I crossed the line between work and pure pleasure. Across the border, I discovered a state of industrious ecstasy that climaxed in my series of outrageously fun performances.
In one performance on The Muppet Show, I sang “Fever” in my best torch-song manner in a hot tomato-red gown. I tossed my long dark hair in my best diva mode—“Fev-uh!” Then I gave Animal, the drummer, my very best Rita glare when he pounded his drums and tried to upset my sensuous decorum. In the end, I crushed his head between the cymbals with a resounding clang!
I delivered my hottest 106-degree “Fever!” in a fury of Puerto Rican sensuality and rage, and that seemed to tickle the funny bones of all of the kids watching—and perhaps tickled the other funny bones of any dads minding the kids who were watching this performance.
I had even more outrageous fun doing my version of an Apache dance with one of the muppets. In this duet, I spun out into the bistro set clad in stylized French dancer mode, beret and all, and performed the French version of a sexist tango. In the classic Apache (not pronounced “A-patch-ee” like the Indian, but “a-pash”), the man throws and tosses around the woman, who dances away from him. In my version of the dance, I tossed and threw around the man and won my round—as well as an Emmy award.
I won a Grammy award as well, this time with The Electric Company. This show was a bold experiment, an ensemble show that aimed to improve kids’ reading skills by having unreasonable amounts of fun. One of my most popular routines was my Tina Turner imitation, with kid backup singer/dancers. We all wore gold lamé and little plastic boots, and they moved in sync behind me as I delivered a hot but ridiculous: “un-” song: “Unbutton your love…unzip your lip and tell me that you love me.”
Best of all, the studio location was right across the street from our apartment on the Upper West Side. Fernanda came to visit me regularly on the Electric Company set. She loved that. I would take her visiting all the time to the Sesame Street studio as well. She had a wonderful and colorful childhood—and I had reached the pinnacle of happiness being her mother.
One other great perk of doing these children’s shows was having the opportunity to perform with some of the best performers around, like Bill Cosby and Morgan Freeman. My God, it was like we were doing vaudeville while at the same time helping children improve their reading skills.
I call those years—from the early 1970s through 1977—my “bliss years,” because I had never been so happy, both at home and in my career.
Yes, Jim Henson paid me; the union insisted. But I gladly would have paid him.
* * *
By now, I was nearly forty years old—a dangerous age for an actress. In the business, I might as well have turned eighty. Lenny was very sensitive to that.
But his good intentions sometimes backfired. He believed in me enthusiastically as an actor, and couldn’t understand why I was not in constant demand and getting great parts—or any parts. We’d be driving somewhere and Lenny would notice all the billboards advertising some new movie or play. “For God’s sake,” he’d say. “I don’t understand what’s going on here! You’re so talented! I don’t see why you’re not getting any work!” And he wouldn’t let up. Hearing this was unsettling. I’d roll it around in my mind. There are so many ways you can interpret a comment like that. I knew he wasn’t disappointed in me; he just wondered why Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, and Janet Leigh were “getting all the parts.” I questioned my relevance. Is my career ending right before my eyes? Do I have the wrong agent? Is my manager on top of things? Wait—but Lenny is my manager. (Not long after his retirement from medicine Lenny used his free time to help with my career. He soon assumed the role of manager.) Exhausted from all my mental computation and emotional roller-coaster rides, I’d usually just agree with Lenny’s comment, get quiet, and stew.
I did hit another high point in what I now believe is the more or less permanent rhythm of my professional life, with its perilous descents and soaring heights. The year was 1975, and I’d like to linger there a moment.
I was somewhere between a perilous descent and a soaring height, when in 1975, I was offered the delicious role of Googie Gomez, the awful lounge singer extraordinaire in Terrence McNally’s hilarious farce The Ritz.
I met Terrence for the first time at a James Coco party. James was a hilarious and adorable man who threw great parties. He and I were costarring on Broadway in the Neil Simon comedy The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.
At that party, as Lenny and I mingled with guests, James sashayed by, took my hand, and dragged me off to a bedroom. There sat Terrence on the edge of the bed talking to other guests. Jimmy said, “Rita, do that crazy Lat
ina woman for Terry.”
I’d developed my Googie character in a hundred “idle” hours in dressing rooms and at laid-back parties with showbiz friends. Who was Googie? She was the worst Hispanic cabaret singer of all time. Her gestures were operatic, her eyelashes were a mile long, and her makeup was applied with a trowel. Her slinky gowns suffered continual wardrobe malfunctions. Finally, though, it was Googie’s mispronounced English—which I owe to Mami—that placed her in the Terrible Performer Hall of Fame: “I hada dring, a dring about joo, babie….”
I believe I launched into the Player King speech from Hamlet for Terrence: “Es-pick the es-pich, I pra joo….”
Terrence wrote a play called The Tubs, which he first set in a bathhouse like the continental baths where Bette Midler got her start. There is something inherently crazy-funny about a sex-bomb singer in a gay bathhouse, wriggling and crooning to a bunch of gay guys in towels.
Terrence wrote Googie into his play big-time after seeing me at Jimmy’s party. Despite my being unavailable for the play’s world premiere at Yale, you can bet that I, Googie, was available for Broadway. I flung myself into Broadway Googie with even more energy than usual, bringing down the bathhouse and winning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
I was ecstatic! Winning the Tony Award in 1975 made me one of the few performers in history to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony!
For the awards ceremony, I wore an elegant, slinky, long-sleeved beige gown with a matching turban. My acceptance speech was over-the-top in more ways than one: I was wriggling, giggling, whooping, and hollering. I raised my arm and gave a victory fist. I had everything but a pie pan to bang.
