Rita Moreno: A Memoir (16 page)

It had
the speed and intimacy of a vaccination. The hurt of the penetration was quickly numbed by fear welling up within me. I ran out of his apartment crying and terrified. He caught me by the arm at the elevator door and professed his love for me as I pulled away and ran into the elevator. I don’t think I breathed again until the elevator reached the lobby and I left the building. I never told my mother.

But I had to work with him. He was the source of my work. And I had to work. I couldn’t quit. I would have to acknowledge it happened, buck up, try to forget it, and move on. That’s when, I suppose, selective amnesia set in—until now.

*   *   *

I willingly lost my virginity several years later on a movie location—an arid Western ranch in Utah. It was freezing, especially when I was dressed in buckskin. Out on that desolate set, I always seemed to be running across the scrubby terrain with buckskin fringes in full swing, playing those clichéd Indian maiden roles that I so loathed, in which I murmured submissive lines such as, “Yes, my chief,” “I was captured,” “I can take you to the gold,” or, “I’ve never known a white man….”

That part was almost true. For years, I believed the handsome crewman I chose to be my first real lover
was
my first. He was gentle, sweet, expert—and married, which I didn’t know initially. When I found out, I’m sorry to say that I had no compunctions about making love with him. At that point, you could say I was hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed it, because I had so much pent-up passion and no place to put it. I wasn’t in love, but in lust.

After that, a number of well-known men passed through my life with varying degrees of intimacy, as I began to date and have occasional lovers. But there was a veil of secrecy at that time over sex,
as gauzy as a slave maiden’s dancing costume. It still was not okay for an unmarried woman to be sexually active—not even in Hollywood.

*   *   *

Whenever I wasn’t working on location, I would return to my cheap apartment. I was now living on my own, practicing independence and trying to advance my career. My apartment was next to a Shell station on Sunset Boulevard and Doheny Drive, ground zero for “the Strip.”

Traffic was constant: insomniac red lights, the blare of horns, blasts of exhaust, and screeches of brakes. I was living in a squealin’-tire, permanent red dawn. Decades later, when I saw the movie
American Graffiti
, I was taken back to the Strip, remembering those street scenes with the cars cruising and the cross-car flirting. It was like being there again.

The place felt apocalyptic—and it was. I lived right up the hill from Marilyn Monroe. I still lived in that neighborhood years later, when she was found dead of an overdose. That intersection was a dangerous place to be both physically and psychologically. It was here where the American movie-star dream met reality.

The heart of Sunset Strip was Schwab’s, the drugstore where Monroe was ostensibly discovered. Schwab’s was the famous, or perhaps infamous, soda fountain where many young wannabe actors hung out, nursing sodas for hours. I was a champion soda nurser. I could make that soda last more than an hour while I was chatting with all of the other aspiring young things, particularly the good-looking young men. I was doing the “starlets’ dance.”

Between jobs, I visited museums or libraries to tax my limited little mind. I also faced reality for weeks or even months at a time, squeaking by on unemployment insurance. Those were the
bitters that I downed after I drank my sweet strawberry shakes at Schwab’s. Leading our perilous lives without a clue, we starlets were the glamorous characters in our own made-up plays.

Yo-yoing between the condescending movie roles I was offered and the occasional good parts, I maintained an uneasy balance. I did the public “dating” that was required of me as a young starlet, but I refused to play the game any further than that, no matter what it might do for my career. In that way, I was very principled.

I remember one close call, though. I was under contract with 20th Century Fox when Darryl F. Zanuck was replaced by Buddy Adler, a rather tall, handsome, slender man with striking white hair and a lascivious look in his eyes. I was living with three other girls in a small house, and Mr. Adler, who had first spotted me in the commissary, must have called our answering service every day for three weeks.

Somehow I would evade him. If I answered the phone and heard his voice, I’d say, “Oh, I’m so sorry; Rita isn’t here right now! This is her roommate. Can I help you?”

Finally, the third week that he called, one of my girlfriends answered and he said, “Just tell Miss Moreno that I tried,” and hung up. It was a very scary time for me, because I was newly under contract. I thought,
Well, I guess that’s the end of that, because I’m certainly
not
going to take up with that man.

Fortunately, compared to the other endangered starlets, I did well. I did get work, and I had a love affair with a major star who happened to be a great actor, and whom I really did love. For every girl as “lucky” as I was, there were a hundred wannabes who had to pack their bags or stay in LA as waitresses, “whorelets,” or worse.

There was a death toll, a nervous-breakdown toll. But this was
lotus land, City of Angels, Hollywood—and no one kept a body count.

*   *   *

One of the oddest encounters I had during those early years in Hollywood was with Howard Hughes. At the time I was only a nineteen-year-old starlet; Hughes was in his mid-forties, and infinitely rich and powerful. I don’t know how he decided that we should meet. Had he seen me in a film? In person from a distance? Was he interested in me for a film? I never did find out. It didn’t matter.

I had never seen the mysterious billionaire, but even before meeting him I knew that he was famous in several arenas. Hughes owned RKO Studios and had produced a number of films. He was also well-known as an inventor, a designer of things as diverse as brassieres and airplanes. One example: He engineered a bra for Jane Russell’s breasts in
The Outlaw
. (She refused to wear it.)

Hughes was both more and less successful with his airplanes. He created some exciting planes, but also crashed two of them. He almost died in one crash, which clipped two houses and destroyed a third; he also burned a hole in the roof of a Tudor dwelling occupied by the foremost interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. Hughes was seriously injured in that crash and afterward suffered from a lifelong addiction to intravenous codeine and other painkillers. The narcotics partly explained his numerous “eccentricities,” but not entirely, as he had shown some very odd obsessions long before the crash.

Perhaps the part about him that interested me most as a young starlet was that Howard Hughes was known to be not just a lover of movie stars—he was a famous seducer of actresses—but a star maker. Hughes proposed to Joan Fontaine several times and lived with Katharine Hepburn, who wrote that they were
both “dedicated loners.” His other involvements included Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, and Jean Harlow.

What I didn’t know about Hughes was that he had been an oddball for many years. As early as 1938, he had been known to count the green peas on his plate and separate them by size. He gave a manual to his employees on how to open a can of peaches; the instructions involved removing the label and scouring the can several times. He was famous, too, for not letting anyone hand him food unless their hands were wrapped in several layers of paper towels.

When Hughes wanted to ask me on a date, I received a summons from Kane, the emissary to Hughes who performed all of his personal tasks. Mr. Kane approached me, looking very mafioso, and said, “Mr. Hughes wonders if you would like to join him for a private movie screening.”

On the designated night, a car arrived at eleven p.m. to whisk me off to a Goldwyn studios screening room. I hadn’t yet moved to an apartment; Mami left the light on in the cottage, and I knew that she would sit on the sofa until I was returned to her.

My first meeting with Hughes seemed to occur in synthetic crepuscular dimness, with a low murmuring sound track in the background. When I think of him now, I picture Howard Hughes in shadowed profile. The famous man sat in the screening room wearing earphones around his neck.

“Hello,” he greeted me in a high, thin voice. “I’m about to watch this movie.”

It was a foreign film, the opera
Pagliacci,
starring Gina Lollobrigida, and it wasn’t very good.

Hughes wore his earphones the whole time we were viewing the movie. After it ended, he asked, “What do you think of her?”

I had been reduced to a state close to rigor mortis brought on
by a combination of boredom and anxiety throughout the entire picture. Now I managed to say, “I think the girl was awfully pretty, but not a very good actor.”

That was it for our first date. Two weeks later, Mr. Kane, whom Hughes described as his “man who did everything,” called again. “H.H. would like to take you to dinner,” Kane said. Mr. Hughes had been nice enough before. Maybe now we would talk about a film for me.

So once again, a limousine arrived to shuttle me to an unknown destination. It turned out to be LAX. As the chauffeur opened the door, I was dwarfed by the garish steel structure that sported the flying saucer–like restaurant on top. And it didn’t stop there. When the elevator beamed me up to the mother ship, its doors opened to reveal the payload…me. I could see Hughes through the harried crowd, sitting at a table across the ship’s bay. I walked toward his perch to the cadence of the flashing colored lights that sent their beams as signals everywhere, as spaceships are wont to do. He didn’t notice my approach as he sat hypnotized, staring out one of the many portals that adorned every arc. What was this place? What about Romanoff’s? Chasen’s? La Scala? Couldn’t we go somewhere normal?

I sat obediently, trying to eat but mostly moving the peas around my plate and not really tasting anything. I labored to look interested as Hughes explained radar to me. “Oh, my…uh-huh…my, my…that is so interesting.” We never did talk about a movie role for me.

After that debacle, Hughes took me home in his own car and walked me to my door. “Good night, and thank you for a lovely evening,” I said.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Good night, and thank you—’”

“Speak up!”

Oh, my God
, I thought,
he’s almost deaf
.
“I said, ‘Good night.’”

Four windows lit up. My goodness, I was waking the entire neighborhood!

We shook hands and he spoke in his high, aspirating, reedy little voice: “You are a beautiful child.”

I never saw him again.

*   *   *

In 1957, only a few years after I “dated” him, Hughes went more deeply into his personal hygiene routines. Again, he was sequestered in a screening room, this time a studio, the Martin Nosseck Projection Theatre. Martin Nosseck was his projectionist, and in a way his significant other. Hughes needed him to project the films, which he watched for hour after hour, day after day, in his continual synthetic twilight…which that time lasted for four months.

Hughes never left the room in all that time. He lived on take-in chicken, chocolate bars, and milk. He urinated into bottles and stored his bowel movements in containers. Needless to say, he also let his grooming go. He wrote instructions to all of his aides saying, “Don’t look at me.” They were spared the sight of him that way, though I guess someone peeked, as there is quite a bit of reportage on this phase.

When he emerged in the spring of 1958, Hughes reeked. His hair hung long and matted, and his fingernails and toenails were curved like talons. This was a coming attraction to his last decade, when he settled into this condition as a permanent state. He did, however, see a lot of film—reel after reel after reel.

Hollywood is an incestuous place. I never saw Hughes again, but we remained connected in ways neither one of us could have
predicted after our two dates. Hughes eventually married the lovely Jean Peters, who costarred in
Viva Zapata!
with both Anthony Quinn, another of my Hollywood dates, and with the first great love of my life, Marlon Brando.

In his paranoid style, Hughes had Jean guarded night and day. This incited Marlon’s passion for Jean. Marlon literally tried to climb in through her bedroom window. As I was to discover for myself, he couldn’t stand to let a woman go unseduced!

But, in this rare instance, Hughes proved to be more than a match: Marlon was thwarted. He never got her, a rare defeat.

*   *   *

One of my more pleasingly normal dating relationships while I was at 20th Century Fox was with Geordie Hormel, the scion of the Hormel ham family. Thank God he wasn’t an actor. He was, in fact, a fine pianist and a sensitive, attractive young man who was a bit eccentric. He was very wealthy, but didn’t use his money in the usual ways. For instance, he collected old Packards at the time.

Geordie and I had been enjoying our romance for more than a year—although I wouldn’t have said I was in love with him—when our relationship was rudely cut short by the police, who I believe wrongly accused him of possessing a large amount of marijuana.

One night the cops came bursting into Geordie’s house, where I was asleep on the couch; they said they had found a “stash” in Geordie’s car and arrested him right then and there.

“Get up, Sleeping Beauty!” they yelled at me, and grabbed my purse to start rifling through it. When they went for my overnight bag, I just went crazy. I was going to die of embarrassment. In those days you didn’t sleep with men, and in that bag were personal
things that you bring when you’re sleeping with a man, like underwear and a negligee. Sex was a normal enough activity, but it would have been a scandal in those hypocritical times.

I fought very hard with them not to open the bag, but the cops pushed me down on the sofa and said if I didn’t let them open it, they’d charge me with obstructing justice. I just started to cry and cry, I was so humiliated, as they upended my bag and everything in it fell on the floor.