Rita Moreno A memoir

THE next time you watch "West Side Story," don't believe every word Rita Moreno sings. In the 1961 film version, Anita (Moreno) begins the number "America" with "Puerto Rico,/My heart's devotion -/Let it sink back in the ocean." That is exactly not what Moreno, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for that performance, feels about her birthplace. The most poetic, affectionate parts of "Rita Moreno: A Memoir" are the author's descriptions, seen through a haze of childhood romanticism, of "the most sensual place in the world," near the ferns, breadfruit and palms of El Yunque, the Puerto Rican rain forest. Moreno's mother tore her away from that paradise and a little brother she never saw again when Rita, then Rosita Alverio, was 5. They landed in a dismal shared walk-up in the Bronx, a transition the author compares to "The Wizard of Oz" in reverse (from warm, glorious color to inhospitable black and white), and it was a whole four years before little Rita was performing professionally in a Greenwich Village nightclub, thanks to her dance teacher, who was Rita Hayworth's uncle. Talent agents were always spotting her, and at 16 she was a happy high-school-dropout breadwinner, performing and traveling on her own. Moreno's book is enjoyable, and not just because of the three chapters about Marlon Brando. The two had a long, emotionally draining (for her) affair that lasted through two of Brando's marriages. It ended after her 1961 suicide attempt and her psychiatrist's insistence that she never see him again. But she doesn't seem to be quite over him, half a century later, describing him as a "sensual, generous, delightfully inventive" lover and "more engaged in the world than anyone else I'd ever known." Moreno, now 81, offers few memorable insights into her life's decisions or her craft, but there are plenty of celebrity anecdotes, some quite intimate. Elvis Presley was disappointing sexually ("more like a baby brother who couldn't make interesting conversation"). The British critic Kenneth Tynan, she says, ended up stalking her. The handsome stranger who brazenly flirted with her at a hotel opening, with his wife right there on his arm, turned out to be a young senator, John F. Kennedy. ("I remember thinking Whooo, this guy don't waste no time!") At 33, Moreno married a doctor, and she lived mostly happily until his death in 2010. Men were always quite friendly. In her first movie, "So Young, So Bad" (1950), Moreno played a suicidal teenager. The '40s matinee idol Paul Henreid, she recalls, "used the scenes of cutting down my dead body as an excuse to run his hands over my breasts." At times, Moreno's authorial voice is painfully uninspired, and an editor should have slapped her hand, figuratively. Of the pioneering record producer Sam Phillips, she writes, "He released Elvis's first hit, 'That's All Right,' and it was a lot more than 'all right.'" Someone should also have told her that sentiments like "I always appear adorable and immaculate" are a little annoying, even as a description of her childhood self on Sunday promenades. She has plenty of other things to brag about When talk-show hosts introduce Moreno, they almost always mention that she is one of the very few performers to have won an Oscar, a Tony (for "The Ritz"), an Emmy (two, actually, for appearances on "The Rockford Files" and "The Muppet Show") and a Grammy (for PBS's "Electric Company" album). Moreno seems aptly proud but still shakes her head in disgust at the decades of typecasting she suffered - playing Hispanic "spitfires" (she was horrified when Bosley Crowther of The New York Times used that word to describe her in his "West Side Story" review) and smoldering sexpots of other nationalities (Thai in "The King and I," lots of American Indians). "I was offered degrading roles right through my 60s," she writes. But this memoir is a striking reminder of some of the parts she has played with distinction, among them a prison-counselor nun on "Oz" and a savvy prostitute who sees right through Jack Nicholson's character in "Carnal Knowledge." Way beyond stereotypes. Anita Gates, an editor at The Times, writes theater and television reviews for the paper.

Most famous as Anita in West Side Story, Moreno, now 81, shares her life story in this candid memoir spanning her unceremonious childhood arrival from Puerto Rico to her decades-long career in show business. Born Rosita Alverio in Juncos, Puerto Rico, Moreno gets a rude awakening when in 1936 her single mother moves her to New York City. She finds a passion for singing and dancing while her mother looks for a new husband. Soon, Hollywood knocks on her door. Moreno gives the "Old Hollywood" studio system a long, honest look: she receives her stage name from a studio executive, she is regularly sent out on arranged "dates" with young actors, is made to attend a "troll-and-starlet" mixer with studio funders, and romances several celebrities of her time. In an era when actresses were rampantly "pretending to be ethnicities they [were] obviously not," Moreno is cast again and again as the "hot Latin spitfire" when she was a "reliable, hardworking actor always in search of a better part." There is no question that Moreno's career wound its way through an interesting era; the memoir is a capably composed, entertaining read for anyone with a pre-existing interest in Moreno or 1950s Hollywood. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.