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?
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.
