Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It (Roadside Attractions, PBS-TV, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I watched a fascinating documentary on PBS: Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It. The title came from a T-shirt she was given by the organizers of a banquet held to honor her late in her life (she’s 87 and still very much alive), on which they have emblazoned this slogan that seemed to encapsulate everything about her career they wanted to honor. Rita Moreno was born on December 11, 1931 in the Puerto Rican village of Humacao, where her mom chose to deliver her because it was the only town in this part of Puerto Rico that had a hospital. When she was six her parents split up and her mom took her to New York City, which she described as “Oz in reverse” – she went from bright, colorful, warm Puerto Rico to cold, ugly, grey New York. She started dancing professionally at age 10 and by her teen years she had built up enough of a career that when MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer came to New York to stay in the penthouse at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, she and her mom decided to brave the daunting task of getting in to see him.

Rita won a movie contract without having to sing, dance, act or do a screen test, but she soon found out that MGM was only going to give her cookie-cutter “exotic” roles. She recalled that for these parts, they would cover her face in makeup the color of mud and demand she speak in what she quickly came to call “my universal ethnic accent.” There’s a funny bit in which Moreno recalls being cast as a Polynesian or an Arab or anything else, and she would illustrate how she spoke in these roles – which was identically. Occasionally Rita would get a part that would not typecast her as an ethnic – as in the marvelous 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, in which she played flapper star “Zelma Zanders” in this tale of the transition from silent to sound films. Rita recalled watching star Gene Kelly film his iconic number in which he dances in a downpour while singing the title song – but those were exceptions.

In 1956, in The King and I, she was stuck with the part of Tuptim, Burmese slave girl who is given as a present to the king of Siam (modern-day Thailand) even though she’s really in love with the man who’s brought her from Burma to Siam, Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas). Yes, that’s right: the makers of The King and I cast two real-life Latinos as Asians in this film – but then they also used the Russian-born Yul Brynner to play the King. Actually Tuptim has at least a bit more agency than most of Moreno’s characters – she asks the film’s heroine, British governess Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr, voice-doubled in this musical by Marni Nixon), for books to read to improve her English, Anna gives her a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and she immediately decides to write a play based on it and perform it for the King to dramatize her own plight.

That plight, Moreno soon learned, was shared by attractive Hollywood women off-screen, too, She recalled being at a party hosted by a middle-aged man who had made a fortune outside the movie industry, at which she met a man very well known in the movie industry, Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn. “I’d like to fuck you,” Cohn told Moreno – though at least he was honest with her: Moreno recalled another guest at the same party who just hugged her closer and closer until he had his cock right up against her private parts. He kept rubbing against her, tighter and tighter, until he climaxed under his clothes and withdrew – and Moreno recalled pleading with the Mexicans who were working as the party’s cooks and household staff to take her home. When one of them did, she thought he was the only real gentleman there. Harry Cohn would be the real-life model for Norman Mailer’s fictitious studio head, “Herman Teppis,” in his 1956 novel The Deer Park, whose title references French King Louis XV and his infamous habit of ordering his various mistresses to cavort naked around an actual garden at Versailles, where he would also get naked and pounce on whichever one – or ones – he wanted. The saddest scene in The Deer Park is of a starlet on her knees giving “Teppis” head; she thinks she’s going to get her a part in a film while he’s thinking to himself he’ll make sure she never gets work on his lot.

Later Moreno said she was out-and-out raped by her agent – she said she wasn’t sure what had just happened to her, but she still continued to use him as her agent even afterwards. Moreno’s personal life did a major turnaround in 1956, when she started a long-term off-and-on affair with actor Marlon Brando, a bona fide superstar and a tempestuous personality who offered any woman he hooked up with a wild ride. He advised her to go into psychotherapy – On the Waterfront writer Budd Schulberg recalled that Brando had it written in his contract that every night he’d quit work at 5 p.m. to see his analyst – and though he was very controlling the two stayed together until 1962. Apparently due to the emotional strain of this relationship, Moreno attempted suicide iin 1962 by stealing some of Brando’s sleeping pills, and she remembered coming to in the hospital and realizing she was still alive. Years later, in 1969, Brando and Moreno were cast together in a movie called The Night of the Following Day and Moreno said that having to do a slapping scene in the movie – first she slapped him and then he slapped her – finally exorcised her feelings for him and let her get on with her life.

By then Moreno had already got married in 1965 to Dr. Leonard Gordon, with whom she stayed until his death in 2010 despite her dissatisfaction with his control-freak tendencies and the way he managed her career. Moreno’s professional peak came when she was cast in the blockbuster hit film West Side Story, playing the part of Anita, who like Moreno herself was a Puerto Rican immigrant, though for her big number, “America,” she asked that the original lyrics by Stephen Sondheim be changed to be less anti-Puerto Rican. West Side Story swept the Academy Awards in 1962 (though it has aged rather poorly since; as with Hollywood’s previous adaptation of a Leoanrd Bernstein musical, On the Town, the decision to shoot the opening scenes on location just makes the studio-bound rest of the film look annoyingly “fake” by comparison), and Moreno, much to her surprise, won the award for Best Supporting Actress. She also gave the shortest Academy Award acceptance speech on record – all she could think to say was to blurt out, “I don’t believe it!” – but it would be her first step towards winning the awards quadrifecta: an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony (“EGOT”). '

Since then Moreno has had a polyglot career, quitting Hollywood after her West Side Story award because all she got offered afterwards were more roles about teenage women stuck in the middle of gang wars between teenage men. Moreno was also one of the first performers to take advantage of the greater freedom to participate in social activism once the repression of the McCarthy period started to ease and the civil rights movement, which first affected African-Americans but soon encompassed other ethnic groups as well as women, provided an outlet for celebrity activists. Moreno recalled being at the 1963 March on Washington and standing about 15 feet away from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and with her own experiences of sexual assault she was not surprisingly an early supporter of the #MeToo movement. In fact, one of director Mariem Pérez Riera’s most effective gimmicks was showing Moreno in the foreground while the U.S. Senate hearings at which Christine Blasey Ford testified that years before U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a college party. To Moreno, there was no question that Ford was telling the truth (as there wasn’t to me, either: her account had just enough details to be believable without being so detailed it seemed fabricated, and Ford’s most harrowing testimony was the laughter Kavanaugh and his frat-buddy friend aimed at her, as if to say, “You can’t touch us. We’re part of the elite and you’re a no-account peon,” and Kavanaugh was right in that he ended up on the Supreme Court, where he’ll almost certainly be one of the justices who will vote to overrule Roe v. Wade and once again make American women legal slaves to their wombs).

Moreno’s more recent career has been all over the map, including working on The Electric Company (the sequel to Sesame Street in which Moreno played a reading teacher and had the catch phrase, “Hey, you guys!”), playing a nun on the TV series Oz (there are two fascinating clips in which she is interrogating the young Christopher Meloni about sex, and in particular whether he’s willing to have sex with men in the prison environment where women are unavailable), doing a Latin-themed reboot of Norman Lear’s sitcom One Day at a Time and showing up in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story as Valentina, the widow of the candy-store owner from the original film. I loved the irony of Moreno’s appearance on The Muppet Show singing “Fever,” a Latina singing a copy of a white woman’s (Peggy Lee) rewrite of a song originally by a Black man (Little Willie John Davenport).

The documentary featured many Latino/Latina performers of today who say how seeing Moreno on stage or screen inspired them and encouraged them to think, “Well, if she can do it, there’s a place at the table for us” – including Eva Longoria, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Hector Elizondo, Karen Olivo, Justine Machado, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sonia Manzano. There were also interviews with Moreno’s daughter, Fernanda Gordon Fisher, and glimpses of Moreno’s two grandchildren, as well as prominent non-Latinos like Norman Lear (who also is credited as co-executive producer on this show), George Chakiris (her West Side Story co-star), Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg (who spoke of the commonalities with Moreno as another woman of color trying to make it in a white male-dominated business) and Terrence McNally, who recalled that Moreno’s caricature of an impossibly untalented entertainer led him to write a stage part for her in his play The Ritz, which she ultimately got to film as well. There’s even a credited appearance by Chita Rivera, who played Anita in the original 1957 stage production of West Side Story but was passed over in favor of Moreno in the film.

Sinde the Moreno documentary, at 88 minutes, was a shade too long for PBS’s American Masters series (and I’ve never figured out when someone is an “American Experience” and someone else an “American Master”), they let the show run its full length and padded out the two-hour time slot with a half-hour mini-documentary on Latinos in Hollywood called Lights, Camera Acción! This show mentioned Latinos and Latinas who were major Hollywood stars even before Rita Moreno – including Dolores Del Rio (who got to play a Frenchwoman in her greatest film, the 1934 biopic Madame DuBarry, directed by William né Wilhelm Dieterle and a prelude to the spectacular biopics Dieterle would make for Warners about Louis Pasteur, Émile Zola, et ai.) and Ramon Novarro, as well as Lupe Velez and even Rita Hayworth, half-Anglo and half-Argentinian (“Haworth,” without the “y,” had been her mother’s maiden name; her father was the Argentinian dancer Eduardo Cansino and in some of the early films she was billed as “Rita Cansino” before she dyed her naturally black hair red and went through an elaborate, painful process of elecrolysis to raise her hairline).

It also mentioned the stereotypes Latinos were pushed into in the early days of Hollywood – including one early film actually called Broncho Billy and the Greaser – though in a film made to celebrate Latino contributions to American culture it seemed odd that the filmmakers took the obligatory swipe at D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation. (Actually, Griffith was certainly anti-Black but he made some surprisingly anti-racist films about other people of color, denouncing anti-Native prejudice in his 1910 short adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and anti-Asian prejudice in his 1919 feature Broken Blossoms.) The film mentions how Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball formed their own production company and took cuts in their own salary to get I Love Lucy made the way they wanted it, including using the three-camera technique common in situation comedies today (Ralph Edwards had shot his quiz show Truth or Consequences a year or so before but it had never been used in a scripted series) and shooting the whole show on film.

The reason they did that was that common TV practice in the early days was to do all TV live in New York and then fly out crudely shot kinescopes (essentially just sticking a film camera in front of a TV monitor and synching them to make up for the difference between the 24 frames per second of movies and the 30 frames per second of TV), so the West Coast got only a poor-quality version of what East Coast audiences got to see live. Desi Arnaz wanted the show on film so it would look as good everywhere in the country, and in so doing he created an object that could be replayed again and again, essentially creating the rerun. The program credits Desilu with producing The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, but all of those except The Andy Griffith Show were produced after Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball divorced and he sold out his share in Desilu Productions to her.) Naturally the show also covered more recent Latino representations on TV and film, including Freddie Prinze on Chico and the Man and George Lopez on his eponymous show, and the overall message of Lights, Camera, Acción! is that things are getting better but we’re still a long way away from seeing truly representative pictures of Latinos (and just about every other ethnic group) on screen.