Rita Moreno Has Time Only for the Truth

When Rita Moreno was sixteen, her mother brought her to the Waldorf-Astoria to meet Louis B. Mayer, the all-powerful head of M-G-M. They were told to go to the penthouse, but, she recalls, they didn’t know which elevator button to press. “P.H.,” the concierge advised. Moreno had dressed like her role model, Elizabeth Taylor, with a cinched waist and manicured eyebrows. It worked: Mayer eyed her and exclaimed, “She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor!” He signed her to a seven-year contract.

Since then, Moreno has become one of a handful of people with an EGOT: an Emmy (two, actually), a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. The Academy Award, of course, is for playing the sharp-tongued Anita in “West Side Story” (1961), and her remarkable career stretches from the golden age of movie musicals (“Singin’ in the Rain”) to Norman Lear’s recent reboot of his sitcom “One Day at a Time,” in which she played a bawdy Cuban grandmother. At eighty-nine, Moreno looks and acts half her age, and she’s not slowing down. In December, she appears in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” and this week marks the release of a documentary about her life, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” directed by Mariem Pérez Riera and executive-produced by Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“I’d made a big promise to myself that, if I was going to do this, I was going to be as honest as I possibly could be,” Moreno told me recently, of committing her life story to film. That meant revisiting its unhappier aspects. When she got to Hollywood, she was cast as one ethnic stereotype after another—not just spicy Latinas but simple Native American maidens and the Burmese ingénue in “The King and I.” Decades before #MeToo, she was groped and harassed by powerful men and treated as a sex object onscreen. And, during her tumultuous eight-year affair with Marlon Brando, she survived a suicide attempt and a botched abortion. But Moreno has lived long enough to tell the tale her way—and to see Hollywood reckon with its demons. We spoke recently at The New Yorker Live, a monthly virtual-event series for subscribers, and again by Zoom. Our conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity.

How has the pandemic been treating you?

I’m one of the lucky ones. It’s been a frightening year, but it’s also been a way to discover things like hummingbirds in my garden, and gardening. I live on a beautiful hill in Berkeley that overlooks all of the bridges, so I get the sunsets. And I’ve gotten rid of a lot of crap, because I’m a collector. How did such a little woman get so much crap in her life?

Rita Moreno on The New Yorker Live

Subscribers can watch the interview and all previous conversations in our digital event series.

What do you have?

Clothing. Earrings. Necklaces. Accolades—and I’m actually getting rid of some of that stuff, too. Some awards are pretty ugly, you have no idea. The ugliest ones are usually made of marble. I can just see the garbageman saying, “Is she serious? I’m taking this home!”

A few years ago, you wore your Oscar dress from 1962 again at the Oscars. Do you save costumes and things?

Yeah. What are you going to do with an Oscar dress, throw it away? It just sat there in the closet. It didn’t even have a plastic cover over it. I did have it altered, because I’m wider than I used to be. I thought I would get criticized. To my surprise, a lot of people just loved it.

Where did you get it back in 1962?

I had it made in Manila when I was doing a movie. It was after “West Side Story,” and it was one of those World War Two movies, where I was playing yet another sad island person, a Filipina this time. I remember that MacArthur—Helen Hayes’s son? I can’t remember his first name. That’s what happens when you get to be this age—nouns have become my mortal enemy. What did you ask me?

We were talking about your Oscar dress.

Oh, yeah. Anyway, it got tons of publicity. And, now that the Academy Museum is about to open in L.A., I offered it to them, and it’s going to be on display.

At this year’s Academy Awards, you got the Elizabeth Taylor slot, presenting Best Picture. It was a really strange ceremony.

Wasn’t it bizarre? I watched the first half in another room. My daughter and I, we were in this beautifully decorated lobby at the train station. I think change is a good idea, but to change it so much, I think, did it harm. And then they changed the position of Best Picture, which is normally last, because I guess they were thinking that Chadwick Boseman was probably going to win [Best Actor]. They took a huge gamble that did not pay off. I felt sorry for Anthony Hopkins, who the next day did this apologia from Wales.

And now you have this documentary. What does it feel like to be in your living-legend victory-lap phase?

It doesn’t feel like a victory lap, because that’s not my thing. I don’t want to get even with anybody. I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to me in the business, even forgetting being Puerto Rican in this country. But I made up my mind—and only with psychotherapy, which I credit for helping me straighten out my sense of who I really am—that I don’t want to indulge in that kind of “Well, what do you think of me now?” Actually, that felt good!

You left Puerto Rico when you were a small child. Do you remember anything about the journey?

I remember everything. I remember the storm at sea, soon after we left Puerto Rico. Everybody in steerage went upstairs, thinking that we were going to feel better, and in fact it was worse. I remember a very young woman singing to her baby as the ship was rolling. And I remember throwing up a lot.

You’ve described New York City as a reverse Oz, because you came from lush Puerto Rico and suddenly it’s the Depression-era Bronx. What was life like?

It was difficult. The Puerto Rican diaspora had not happened yet, so there were very few Latino kids. When my mother put me into kindergarten, I didn’t know a word of English. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Growing up, do you remember seeing any Hispanic actors onscreen, like Lupe Vélez?

I remember seeing Lupe Vélez—the “Spitfire.” [Vélez starred in eight “Mexican Spitfire” films, playing the hotheaded Mexican singer Carmelita.] That’s what she was doing. I remember thinking, I don’t think that’s funny. My mom and I still went to see Spanish movies in Spanish, so Vélez was in those. Dolores del Río, who was staggeringly beautiful. A comic actor named Cantinflas. And Pedro Armendáriz, Mr. Sexy—if there ever was a sexy Mexican guy, ooh! He did Mexican Westerns, with the sombrero and the jangling spurs. But I was seeing mostly American movies.

You performed in night clubs at the very start of your career, right?

I did. In New York, you were not allowed to perform in night clubs unless you were eighteen or over, and I started when I was sixteen. I remember, one time, the owner saw a cop coming in for a drink, and he rushed back and took me out into the night club, put his wife’s mink coat on me, and put a drink in front of me, so the cop would think I was—what’s the word I want? Somebody who was there for a drink.

A patron?

A patron. I was going to say “passenger.” That’s what happens when you’re in your eighties. It’s just so fucking boring.

You became an M-G-M contract player when you were extremely young and played a string of stereotypical ethnic roles, which you call the “dusky maidens.” What do you think when you see those movies?

Luckily, I don’t see them. I’m only seeing them now, because of the clips of the documentary. I feel very sad—for me. I didn’t know how to fight back. I was, believe it or not, a rather shy girl, because I had been made to feel that I had no value, that I was just a little “spic,” which was one of the names I got called constantly when I was younger. Thank goodness for psychotherapy. This doctor was wonderful. He actually got me to say that I was a good person and that I had value, and the day he got me to say that, which was eight years into therapy, I burst into tears. He said, “Why are you crying?” And I said, “Because I don’t really believe I have value.”

Why do you think you felt that way?

Oh, it’s easy. When you’re a five-year-old kid, which is, I think, how old I was when I got to America, and you are called bad names constantly when you’re on your way to school, you’re tender. I began to believe that I was a spic, whatever that was. I knew it was bad. And it’s the one thing I couldn’t share with my mother, because instinctively I felt that there was nothing she could do about it. She was working so hard, two or three jobs at a time. I was sensitive enough to understand that I couldn’t burden her with that, so it was something I carried by myself. There’s still a little girl who lives in me, who says, “Ha ha, I knew you couldn’t do it.” And the mark of a mature Rita is that I am now able to say to that little girl, “Go to your room!”

Those “dusky maiden” films seem so archaic now, but you could argue that there’s been only so much progress in terms of Latino representation in Hollywood.

I’m really at a loss to understand why the Hispanic actor is still ignored. We are not represented. And, when we are, we’re gangsters—not all the time, but it’s bad. Where is our “Moonlight”? I feel that we can learn something from the Black community, in terms of how they’ve dealt with their outlier-ness. I’m going to Puerto Rico in about a week to première the documentary. We’re going to see where my family’s house used to be. It’s very important to me that people understand that I am, first and foremost, a Puerto Rican woman, of Puerto Rican birth.

Many actors from that era tried to Anglicize themselves, like Rita Hayworth, who changed her name from Margarita Cansino. Was that ever an option you considered, to try to “pass”?

I never thought of myself that way. It’s not that I was so heroic; I was not allowed to forget it. One of the most heartbreaking things that happened to me, and it happened so frequently, is I would go to my agent and say, “I heard that such-and-such a movie is going to be made, and I think I’d be really good in the part. Would you please talk to the producer? I’ll be happy to audition.” It never worked. They wouldn’t even see me.

It seems like “Singin’ in the Rain” was an exception to the rule.

That’s Gene Kelly for you. He didn’t think that way. Gene was really a very astute political person. I was a contract player, and he was trying to use contract players. He said, “Will you cut your hair to do this?” I said no. And he said, “Oh. Nobody’s ever said that to me before.” I was terrified. I thought he’d say, “Well, you can just forget this one.” But he didn’t. He put a wig on me, that red wig, and I played Zelda Zanders. And I actually believed, because I was so young, that from then on I wouldn’t have to play any of those little island girls. Little did I know.

Not to dwell on the sins of Old Hollywood, but you also tell several stories in the documentary of being sexually harassed or worse, including the time you were introduced to Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, and he said, “I would like to fuck you.” How did the #MeToo movement resonate with you, as someone who had these stories from more than half a century ago?

I was so excited to see women valuing themselves. I used to be deeply embarrassed by people like Bella Abzug, who just spoke her mind. I think of her now and just treasure her. But it took me a long time to understand that I had those rights.

One of the incredible things about your career is that you overlapped with the old studio system, and with moguls like Harry Cohn—who was notorious for his casting couch—Louis B. Mayer, and Darryl Zanuck. What were your interactions like with the men who ran Hollywood?

The man who took over [from Zanuck] at Twentieth Century Fox, where I was under contract, was named Buddy Adler. He was a really good-looking man, tall and slim, with short gray hair, sort of George Clooney-ish. He took a real liking to me, and he started to stalk me on the phone. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I thought, He’s going to try to get me in bed, and I’m not going to let him. Or maybe I will—I don’t know. I was that insecure. He must have called for over three months. I was living in a house with three other girls, and I always had them answer the phone and say I was in the shower or I was away. Finally, he said, “O.K., just tell her I give up.” And then he stopped calling. I was so terrified because I really did feel helpless.

You also talk about going on fake dates set up by the studio. Can you explain how that worked? Did you just get a call from some executive saying, “You need to show up at a première tomorrow night with So-and-So?”

They would literally book you, usually with another young actor from your studio, but sometimes from another studio. We didn’t have to love each other or anything; we just had to look pretty. I wasn’t too shocked at that. That’s what you do, right? And you went somewhere, had your pictures taken by a photographer, and, if you were lucky, your photo got into a movie magazine. I actually have some of those magazines, which are just treasures, because some of those pictures of me were hot.

Is that how you wound up going on dates with Elvis? Was it a publicity stunt?

No. When I was under contract at Fox, Elvis was there one day in the commissary, and he spotted me. Soon after, I had a terrible falling out with Marlon, because I found some lingerie in his house. He was a big womanizer, and I knew it, but every time something happened I would be just as angry as if I had never known it before. I left his house weeping. And, the very next day, a man calls me up on the phone: “Rita Moreno? This is Colonel Parker. My client is Elvis Presley. He saw you in the commissary, and he liked what he saw. And I’m wonderin’—and Elvis is wonderin’—would you like to meet him?” And I thought of Marlon, and I thought of the lingerie, and I said, “Yes, I would.” So Elvis and I dated a few times, and, even though there was no social media then, boy, it got around fast. He took me to a night club called the Moulin Rouge, and it got into all the gossip columns. Marlon found out about it and was very, very angry. Actually, he threw chairs. It was wonderful.

So it had its intended effect of making him jealous.

Marlon did not treat me well—we went together eight years—but people make unspoken contracts with each other. In my case, it was: “You be the daddy and protect me, and I’ll be the pretty little girl and make you very happy.” That’s what happened in my marriage, too. The day I wanted to start growing up is when my marriage really became torture for me. And for him. My husband was a terrific man, just not a good husband. He was a controller. When you hear in magazines or on Twitter, “She likes bad boys,” it’s not so much that you like bad boys. It’s that you know you’re going to be rejected, probably in the same way that your father rejected you, and you are determined to win him over. I wanted Marlon to marry me and love me and succumb. And you know what? If he had, I probably would have left him in two days.

Did he have anything to do with awakening your political consciousness in the sixties?

Not really. I was in group therapy, and there was a woman there who I liked immensely, and she was very political. I never finished high school, so I always admired people who were more educated and had better vocabularies than I did. She’s the one who got me involved. The very first thing I did was the “Ban the Bomb” movement, when Nevada was having atom-bomb tests and there was radioactive fallout. The cows in pastures were eating grass that was [contaminated] by strontium 90.

In the documentary, you talk about going to the March on Washington in 1963. Did you go with a Hollywood contingent?

Harry Belafonte put this together. I think that he wanted Dr. King to know that there were people in Hollywood who weren’t just interested in fake eyelashes. A whole bunch of us filled an airplane to Washington, D.C., never thinking that it would turn into this astonishing event. I was fifteen feet away! Mahalia Jackson, the gospel singer, was very close to Martin Luther King, and, when he started his speech, she said after about ten minutes, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” Because he had done this speech before about the dream, and that’s when all hell broke loose. [Gasps.] Oh, I get enormous goosebumps.

Let’s talk about “West Side Story.” In the documentary, you say that your character, Anita, became your role model. What do you mean by that?

Anita was the only Hispanic character I ever played who had a sense of dignity, who was courageous. Anita was so different from me, and she became my role model because she defended herself, and I’d never been that way in my life.

Can you describe what it was like to go back into the world of “West Side Story” some sixty years later, in this Steven Spielberg remake?

Absolutely thrilling. Steven called and told me that he was doing his version, and would I be interested in being in the film? I said, “That’s flattering, but doing a cameo would be so distracting for the movie.” And he said, “No, it’s a real part! Tony Kushner wrote it for you. You are Doc’s widow”—the man who ran the candy store where the Jets hung out. It was actually Tony’s idea. He still cries at the original “West Side Story.” But that film had many mistakes in it, and there was some meaningful ignorance with respect to Hispanic people.

Right, you had to wear brownface.

Dark, dark makeup, which had nothing to do with my skin color. That was Jerry [Robbins]’s idea. He wanted a contrast between the Puerto Rican gang and the white boys. In fact, some of the Jets had to have their hair dyed blond. That was Jerry’s thinking at the time: if you were white, you had to be fair.

Ariana DeBose plays Anita in the new movie. Did you trade notes on the character?

No, I didn’t want to intrude. But I took her to lunch the first day we met, and I said, “I’m going to offer you a gift that you don’t have to accept.” And I told her that there was a scene which, to my dying day, I will regret the way I played, because I feel I didn’t have the help from Robert Wise, the [co-]director—he was wonderful, but this is one time I felt that he was lacking. And I said, “I would like to tell you how I think it should be played, just that one line. Is that O.K.?” She said yeah. And I told her, and I think she used it.

Can you say what the line is?

I don’t want to tell you because it would spoil it for her. By the way, she’s a ferocious dancer. What I really love about her being chosen for this is that she’s Afro-Puerto Rican. That’s great.

After you won your Oscar, in 1962, you didn’t make another movie for seven years. Why was that?

Oh, it was shocking. One of the show-biz heartbreaks of my life. I thought for sure my career was just going to wing upward, but there was nothing offered. This business is so cruel. So cruel. The very few things that were offered were gang pictures. Please! It took me seven years to do another movie—“The Night of the Following Day” and “Popi,” with Alan Arkin, where he played a Puerto Rican, which of course wouldn’t happen now.

Soon after that, you had a memorable scene with Jack Nicholson in “Carnal Knowledge.” Did you have any trepidation about playing a call girl?

My husband had all the trepidation. Mike Nichols called and said, “I really, really want you for this.” If I was very sensitive, I would have said, “Why does he think of me as a call girl?” When my husband read it, he said, “You are not doing this movie.” And I said, “Oh, I have to. This is so ahead of its time.” It got to the point where he was saying, “Please, don’t do this movie.” I had a meeting with Mike at his apartment, and when he was through with me you could swear that I was the leading person in that movie. I’m so glad I did it.

What was your relationship with Jack Nicholson?

It was terrific. One day at lunch, he came over and said, in that marvellous drawl of his, “You know, I used to sit on the curb at the gate of M-G-M studios and wait for you. You used to give me heart attacks. You wore these tight white dresses, and you were always tanned.” I couldn’t help but just preen like a little rooster! Ooh, I loved hearing that.

In the seventies, you were on the educational show “The Electric Company.” There must be so many Gen X-ers who have a special relationship with you because you taught them how to read.

More than once, I’ve walked into a restaurant and heard someone say, “Hey, you guys!” It’s very nice. I love having done that show because I always considered it a public service. I thought Bill Cosby at that time was absolutely necessary for that show. He was very funny, and he knew how to talk to kids.

How did you react when the revelations about Cosby came out?

I was very sad. I don’t want to bring that up again. The last thing I want to do is make him more miserable than he probably is in prison. But it was a terrible, terrible thing.

What do you remember about the young Morgan Freeman, who was also on “The Electric Company”?

We had a great chemistry together. Morgan, for a very short while, didn’t want to be doing the show, and I played the mama and said, “You can’t keep coming in here late, because a lot of people are waiting.” He didn’t say a thing—he’s a very proud man—but from then on he came to work on time. He’s one of the few show-business people that I have great affection for.

You were also on “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show.” How did you end up working with Jim Henson?

They had a studio two streets from us on Broadway. I saw him at a restaurant one day, and I literally got on my knees. I said, “I beg you to let me do some little-girl Muppet voices.” And I did. I would say, “You don’t have to pay me.” And he said, “No, I do. This is a union shop. We have to pay you.” And then, a number of years later, I went to England to do “The Muppet Show.”

You had incredible chemistry with Animal.

Oh, yeah. Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever saw?

Certain performers are so good at acting across from Muppets. Charles Grodin, who just passed away, is wonderful in “The Great Muppet Caper,” where he has a steamy affair with Miss Piggy. Is there a secret to acting with Muppets?

Not really. You [have to avoid] looking at the Muppeteer, which a lot of people do because it’s a natural instinct to look at the person who’s doing the voice. But I love comedy. This was my idea, by the way: “What if I’m trying to be really sexy?” We had me in a great gown and a long wig, and I looked absolutely smashing. Animal’s last line, after I smash him with the cymbals is, “That’s my kind of woman!” And most people don’t hear that because they’re laughing.

I wanted to ask you about the “One Day at a Time” reboot and working with Norman Lear. Did you know him before you started working together?

At one time, when I couldn’t get hired for love or money—I hadn’t done a movie for, like, four years—I was so depressed, and my agent called and said, “Norman Lear’s doing a pilot with Charlie Durning. You want to go up for the part of his wife?” [The pilot was for a show called “P.O.P.”] And I said yes. I’ve never looked my age—I have really good skin—and [Norman] said, “What are you doing here?” I was wearing a short skirt, which was a mistake because it made me look even younger. And he said, “No, go away. You could never be Charlie Durning’s wife.” I think I was fiftysomething. It was done in a very sweet way, but I went to my car and I cried for two hours. Every time I thought I was done, I’d start crying again. I lost a lot of work because I never looked my age.

You’ve had such a long career, and it’s had these peaks and valleys. What do you think accounts for that?

The very same reason that people in the old days wouldn’t see me for a part—because I was Latina. I mean, they just couldn’t get that word out of their heads. And the older I got, the more impossible it was to get the role of a younger woman. It was a mess. And yet I’ve had this very bizarrely fortuitous life, where things have kind of dropped in my lap, like the M-G-M contract.

It almost seems like you’re a Rorschach test for how Hollywood is thinking about Latina women through any decade.

That’s a marvellous way to put it. You’re absolutely on the money. Because Jennifer Lopez—she’s beautiful, she’s talented, and she’s obviously very smart with respect to her career, but, every time people talk about Latinos, her name comes up. I always want to say, “But she’s not the only one!”

That’s why it’s such a shame that “One Day at a Time” got cancelled, because it’s not like there are five other shows about Hispanic families.

It broke my heart. It broke all our hearts. We knew we had something so special. And Justina [Machado], she’s a terrific actress. Why isn’t she a big star? I don’t get it. Eva Longoria, she’s not a big star. I mean, she’s in commercials a lot because she’s absolutely beautiful, but she’s not in a lot of movies. So you tell me. What is the problem?

I have a theory, and it’s that we tend to silo ourselves because we’re from different countries. We’re Mexican, we’re Puerto Rican, we’re Cuban, we’re Argentinian, we’re from Spain. I think that has something to do with it. I can’t think of anything else that makes any sense.

Well, it’s also that people in positions of power aren’t investing in those stories.

Yeah. And there’s ageism. Why do I have to play a grandmother? Why can’t I be a lawyer defending somebody’s case? Why can’t I be a doctor?

I’ve heard you say that you wanted your character on “One Day at a Time” to be sexual. That’s so interesting, especially because you talk about being cast as a sex object early in your career. It seems like this time it was much more on your terms.

Absolutely. I said to them, “I know I’m playing a grandmother, but that doesn’t mean that everything turned to dust—the ovaries just went pfft.” She still has feelings for men. I said, “If I can’t have that, then I’m not going to do it. Then I’m just another one of those grandmas.” And they loved the idea, to the extent that they’d sometimes write something and I’d say, “You want me to say this? What’s wrong with you?”

What are you going to do to mark your ninetieth birthday, in December? I know you love throwing costume parties.

I think I’m going to do that again. Obviously, I couldn’t do that last December. But I’m going to be circumspect about inviting too many people. I think the theme is going to be Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican food, and I will probably have a conjunto perform. And everybody will dance.