Rita Moreno: A Memoir by Rita Moreno

Author:Rita Moreno
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780451416377
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

MEETING MARLON

I am wearing a scent, Vent Vert by Balmain, as I write these words. It is a scent that Marlon Brando often wore. It’s a woman’s perfume, but Marlon often used women’s perfumes, and this was his favorite.

For more than fifty years now, I have been wearing Vent Vert (Green Wind). It is a fresh scent, clean and natural. When I inhale it, I inhale the memory of Marlon, and I can almost feel his smooth, polished skin and taste his sweet breath. I remember how he spoke to me, how he played the drums, how he made love…and how I almost died from loving him.

Not every woman has known a great love, but I have been lucky enough to have had two.

My first, Marlon Brando, almost proved fatal.

* * *

Marlon had initially spotted me on the cover of the March 1, 1954, issue of Life magazine, taken when I was twenty-two years old. It’s that famous head shot in which I am looking back over my shoulder. My teeth are bared and my eyes are widened in a classic come-hither expression that is both sweetly innocent and tantalizingly sexual. This was my Gypsy persona, complete with dangling earrings. After I knew Marlon, I understood why my image, as captured in that photograph, made me perfect Marlon bait, ripe for the taking.

I ended up in Life magazine completely by chance. Around that time, they were starting to do television pilots in Hollywood, and I had been cast in 1953 to do a television pilot with Ray Bolger. Ray, who is still probably best-known for his role as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, was a Broadway personality—not classically trained as a dancer, but what they called an “eccentric” dancer: He hoofed and he entertained people. When I did the pilot with Ray at Desilu studios for his variety show, Where’s Raymond? (later called The Ray Bolger Show), Life was covering it, and their photographer took some pictures of me as well as Ray.

Apparently, as the pictures were being shown around the Life office, one of the editors asked, “Who’s that girl?” when he spotted me. And when someone said he didn’t know my name, but that I had a part with Ray Bolger, he said, “Find her! She looks interesting.”

The people from Life came to me then and asked whether they could do a photo layout of me, and possibly a cover. Well, I happily agreed, and a photographer came to take me all kinds of places, where he photographed me in different outfits and various poses, from an innocent girl in a lacy blouse to a lipsticked wildcat in a plunging Indian dress.

The magazine’s editorial board loved the pictures and made up a whole story line about “An Actress’s Catalog of Sex and Innocence.” The article itself described me as a “Satirist of Sex,” and began this way: “Rita Moreno is a 22-year-old starlet who can sing, dance and even, to the extent this ever becomes necessary in Hollywood, act.

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