speculate on possible screen names: “Ruby Fontino? Marcy Miranda?”
I didn’t even have time to flinch. The names got worse. “Orchid Montenegro!”
I didn’t want to be Orchid Montenegro. Or any one of them. The truth was, I liked my name—Rosita Dolores Moreno. Hadn’t I already debuted as a vagrant reform-school girl in So Young, So Bad ? Would I lose whatever following I might have picked up? (I did not even have the time or confidence to consider: Would I lose myself?)
“I got it!” Bill Grady was saying. “How about Rita, after Rita Hayworth?” I trembled—at least there was recognition for me. Rita Hayworth/Margarita Cansino, my dance teacher Paco’s niece. She of the raised hairline and lengthened legs. A Spanish girl goddess with an English name.
“Rita Moreno,” Bill Grady decreed. “ That ’s who you are and that’s who you will be.” In that moment my old life would officially end.
STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS
T he first two films I made for MGM were The Toast of New Orleans and Pagan Love Song . Viewed today, in which even our movies are more cynical and realistic, their gaiety seems a demented delirium. Why is everyone so happy? Why are we leaping around, bursting into song without any excuse, with wild disregard for the actual musical traditions and culture of the native characters—Cajuns and Tahitians?
In The Toast of New Orleans the Cajuns sound like Italians, and the semiunderwater musical Pagan Love Song might as well be Oklahoma! Esther Williams and handsome Howard Keel take soaring tower dives between crooning out odes to Tahiti. In both movies, the plots are thin to nonexistent: In The Toast of New Orleans , a simple Cajun fisherman, Pepe (played by Mario Lanza), woos and wins an aristocratic opera star (Kathryn Grayson). Pagan Love Song revolves around an even flimsier plot in which Esther Williams plans to leave Tahiti (but of course she won’t), and Howard Keel seems about to lose his entire stock of coconut oil (but of course he doesn’t). In the end, everyone kisses, sings, dances, swims…without an obvious pause for breath or attempt at credibility.
There is a manic quality to both musicals—everyone is smiling and skipping and pretending to be ethnicities they are very obviously not. Esther Williams is supposed to be a Tahitian (okay, maybe a half Tahitian, but even with brown makeup slathered everywhere, she looks, at best, like a shapely Miami Beacher with a great tan). And in The Toast of New Orleans , the obviously Italian Mario Lanza is a Creole shrimp fisherman who bursts into operatic song. In both pictures, I play “cute” ethnics and employ my newly invented “universal ethnic accent,” which is a coy pidgin English of no discernible authentic origin.
In Pagan Love Song , as the native girl Terru, I wear a two-piece sarong and continually stand on tippy-toes to look up adoringly at Howard Keel (I have no choice but to look up—he was six-foot-four). Our big scene—which admittedly was a huge break for a teenage girl from Juncos, via Washington Heights—is “The House of Singing Bamboo,” in which Howard Keel sings a song originally created and sung by Judy Garland as “Hayride.” The song is an odd transplant to Tahiti, and I don’t actually sing, but bang rhythmically on the bamboo alongside Howard Keel as he croons.
In The Toast of New Orleans , as the Cajun girl Tina, I don’t really have a plotline, but I burst forth instantly—singing and dancing up a frenzy of swirling skirts and petticoats that presage my skirt-swirling turn in West Side Story. And I dance and sing with none other than the fantastic dancer James Mitchell. I had been terrified to dance with such a classically trained balletdancer (he was Agnes de Mille’s protégé), but I showed him one of my Spanish dances and he was agreeable—I danced for him and he approved. I assume that if he had deemed me not worthy, my dance number would have been cut. We do a wild number
I didn’t even have time to flinch. The names got worse. “Orchid Montenegro!”
I didn’t want to be Orchid Montenegro. Or any one of them. The truth was, I liked my name—Rosita Dolores Moreno. Hadn’t I already debuted as a vagrant reform-school girl in So Young, So Bad ? Would I lose whatever following I might have picked up? (I did not even have the time or confidence to consider: Would I lose myself?)
“I got it!” Bill Grady was saying. “How about Rita, after Rita Hayworth?” I trembled—at least there was recognition for me. Rita Hayworth/Margarita Cansino, my dance teacher Paco’s niece. She of the raised hairline and lengthened legs. A Spanish girl goddess with an English name.
“Rita Moreno,” Bill Grady decreed. “ That ’s who you are and that’s who you will be.” In that moment my old life would officially end.
STARLET DAYS…AND NIGHTS
T he first two films I made for MGM were The Toast of New Orleans and Pagan Love Song . Viewed today, in which even our movies are more cynical and realistic, their gaiety seems a demented delirium. Why is everyone so happy? Why are we leaping around, bursting into song without any excuse, with wild disregard for the actual musical traditions and culture of the native characters—Cajuns and Tahitians?
In The Toast of New Orleans the Cajuns sound like Italians, and the semiunderwater musical Pagan Love Song might as well be Oklahoma! Esther Williams and handsome Howard Keel take soaring tower dives between crooning out odes to Tahiti. In both movies, the plots are thin to nonexistent: In The Toast of New Orleans , a simple Cajun fisherman, Pepe (played by Mario Lanza), woos and wins an aristocratic opera star (Kathryn Grayson). Pagan Love Song revolves around an even flimsier plot in which Esther Williams plans to leave Tahiti (but of course she won’t), and Howard Keel seems about to lose his entire stock of coconut oil (but of course he doesn’t). In the end, everyone kisses, sings, dances, swims…without an obvious pause for breath or attempt at credibility.
There is a manic quality to both musicals—everyone is smiling and skipping and pretending to be ethnicities they are very obviously not. Esther Williams is supposed to be a Tahitian (okay, maybe a half Tahitian, but even with brown makeup slathered everywhere, she looks, at best, like a shapely Miami Beacher with a great tan). And in The Toast of New Orleans , the obviously Italian Mario Lanza is a Creole shrimp fisherman who bursts into operatic song. In both pictures, I play “cute” ethnics and employ my newly invented “universal ethnic accent,” which is a coy pidgin English of no discernible authentic origin.
In Pagan Love Song , as the native girl Terru, I wear a two-piece sarong and continually stand on tippy-toes to look up adoringly at Howard Keel (I have no choice but to look up—he was six-foot-four). Our big scene—which admittedly was a huge break for a teenage girl from Juncos, via Washington Heights—is “The House of Singing Bamboo,” in which Howard Keel sings a song originally created and sung by Judy Garland as “Hayride.” The song is an odd transplant to Tahiti, and I don’t actually sing, but bang rhythmically on the bamboo alongside Howard Keel as he croons.
In The Toast of New Orleans , as the Cajun girl Tina, I don’t really have a plotline, but I burst forth instantly—singing and dancing up a frenzy of swirling skirts and petticoats that presage my skirt-swirling turn in West Side Story. And I dance and sing with none other than the fantastic dancer James Mitchell. I had been terrified to dance with such a classically trained balletdancer (he was Agnes de Mille’s protégé), but I showed him one of my Spanish dances and he was agreeable—I danced for him and he approved. I assume that if he had deemed me not worthy, my dance number would have been cut. We do a wild number
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