Rita Moreno is no stranger to adversity. On Wednesday, she trended on Twitter for comments she made on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert regarding criticism of the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights for its lack of Afro-Latino and darker-skinned characters in central roles. “I’m simply saying, can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone?” Moreno said, regarding the discourse surrounding representation in In The Heights. By Wednesday evening, Moreno had issued an apology on Twitter saying she was “incredibly disappointed” in herself for her comments.
After watching Moreno’s documentary, Just A Girl Who Decided to Go For It, which premieres on June 18, it’s clear that Moreno has faced worse over the course of her 89 years than an angry Twitter mob. Over the course of the doc, we watch as Moreno leaves Puerto Rico with her mother for New York City—never to see her younger brother again—and, seemingly against all odds, make it big in Hollywood, earning the coveted EGOT status by winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony in competitive competition, and becoming a living legend in the process. Professionally, she confronts the racism and misogyny of Hollywood, toiling away in underwritten and offensive bit parts and going long stretches without work despite critical acclaim. Her personal life is no easier. She has an abortion at the behest of her long time, on-and-off again lover Marlon Brando, and survives rape at the hands of her agent, whom she continued to work with after the fact.
In a phone call with VF in early June, Moreno brushes off the idea that she found some personal catharsis in finally being able to share her full story with the public. “That wasn’t the idea,” she says. “That’s such a cliche, anyway.” For Moreno, it was about illuminating the schism between her perception as a celebrated icon and her lived experience as a Latina woman trying to make it in Golden Age Hollywood: “You have this woman who has won a whole bunch of awards and acknowledgements who’s telling you ‘Yeah, but there’s a lot to the other side that nobody knows.”
Moreno is still working through past traumas. She talks at length about her inner child—whom she affectionately calls “Rosita” throughout our interview—and makes clear that despite outward success, she continues to process the pain she felt as a child. “One of the hardest things in the world is to get rid of and do away with self loathing,” she says. “How does a little five-year-old react to the words—which no longer exist now—‘spic’ or ‘garlic mouth’? You remember being told bad things as a kid, but you don’t realize that that has affected your life in many, many ways.”
She connects Rosita’s trauma to the pain she felt in her marriage to cardiologist Leonard Gordon, whom she stayed with until his death in 2010, revealing in the documentary that the marriage had soured over time. “I’m not a person who leaves people,” Moreno tells me. “I come from an era where you didn’t do that. I come from an era where the man knows everything and you have to listen to the man and all that stuff. I just didn’t feel capable of handling that,” she says. Their child, Fernanda Gordon Fischer, also contributed to her decision to stay. “The thought of making her do without her daddy was anathema to me,” she says.
Moreno credits therapy with helping her overcome these regrets and demons and press on. “It’s probably the very, very best thing I did for myself,” she says, talking about her decision to see a psychotherapist. “I give full credit to the man who helped me through all this morass that I experienced in my life… He’s the guy who eventually got myself to say, ‘I like myself. I am a worthy person.’ And I remember bursting into tears when I said that aloud.”
Just A Girl Who Decided to Go For It details Moreno’s ascent from 15-year-old night club dancer who dropped out of high school to help support her family to her discovery by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer (who determined that Moreno looked like a “Spanish Elizabeth Taylor”) to Golden Age Hollywood actress locked in the studio system. “When you’re in a contract with a studio, they own you,” says Moreno’s friend and fellow Golden Age film star Mitzi Gaynor in the documentary. For Moreno, that meant being relegated to “Island Girl roles”—ethnic supporting characters often devoid of substance or purpose. Her skin was often darkened to play these parts and she adopted “a universal ethnic accent” that she employed time and again in roles like Tumptim, the Burmese concubine, in The King and I and Ula in Seven Cities of Gold, a chieftain’s daughter who falls off a cliff after being spurned by her white lover.
She found a way out in the part that would win her the Oscar for best supporting actress. “The ultimate role model became, to my surprise, Anita in West Side Story, a Hispanic girl who respected herself and had a sense of dignity about herself. I had never played a Hispanic girl who had those qualities, so Anita—very late in the day—literally became my role model,” she says.
However, even that career defining role was fraught, at times. Moreno tells me a story about a day on the set of West Side Story where she expressed to the makeup artist that she was uncomfortable with the makeup she was required to wear to play Anita, makeup that was considerably darker than her natural skin color. “The man literally said to me, ‘What are you, racist?” Moreno says, still wounded by the memory. She never brought it up again. Even after winning the Oscar, she didn’t work in Hollywood for several years, repeatedly turning down offers to act in films about violence in the Latino community.
“I couldn’t get a job,” she recalls, mystified. “I had just won the Oscar and the Golden Globe, and that didn’t help anything because I could not get a movie that didn’t have something to do with gangsters or gangs on a much lesser scale than West Side Story. It broke my heart.”
For all of the heartbreak, Moreno’s effervescent spirit shines through, both in the documentary and during our phone call. She talks fondly of “dancing for Grandpa” in Puerto Rico at age 4 and learning at an early age that she loved the attention it brought her. “Some people are just meant to be something that they are. They’re just wired like that.” Throughout our call, she often comes across as someone approaching 60 rather than someone who’ll turn 90 this December, quick-witted, sharp as a tack and bounding with energy. That energy is well on display in the doc everytime she takes a trip to the podium to accept another award. “I’m the loudest person you’ve ever met,” Moreno tells me proudly. “I’m raucous. I laugh loud. I think my hobby is laughing,” she says, and then laughs as if to prove her point.
I ask Moreno if there’s anything she wishes she could have done differently in her career. “Well, what could I do differently?” she replies. “I can’t think of anything, except persevere.” She credits her ability to persevere to her mother, Rosa María, who was “a lady in the sweat shop” by her account. “I really think that in some ways I’m built like my mother,” she tells me. “She just had this enormous amount of resilience.”
Resilience is something Moreno hopes people take away from Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It. “[The film] was meant to encourage people to, as it were, get over it,” she says. Still, she sometimes wonders what her career could have looked like without the various setbacks she faced along the way. “What might have been?” she says, wistfully. Through the power of therapy, however, she’s come to terms with her past. “Being a person who has learned how to accept that, I accept that. But not happily.”
Even so, looking back at her historic career, Moreno can hardly believe all that she’s achieved. “You know how you live your life and you think, God, I never thought of it as such a big deal,?” she says. “When I finished seeing [Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It] in a screening room a few months back, I remember getting up from the seat with my daughter and saying, ‘Wow, that’s quite a life. The word “just” does not apply.”
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