#Rita moreno husband jewish Patch#

“Maybe Elvis was inhibited by inbred religious prohibitions or an Oedipal complex, or maybe he simply preferred the thrill of a denied release. He liked to cuddle with his teenage fans or watch girl-on-girl action. According to other girls, it seemed to be his modus operandi. I could feel him thrust against my clothed body, and expecting the next move. nearly always concluded in a tender tussle on my living-room floor, with Elvis’ pelvis in that famous gyration straining against his taut trousers. (Ironically, Presley was “obsessed” with Brando and even styled himself after Brando’s “The Wild One” character.)

#Rita moreno husband jewish Patch#

“I knew no one could possibly make Marlon Brando more jealous,” she writes.ĭuring a particularly bad rough patch with Brando - she had discovered a woman’s nightgown in Brando’s closet - Moreno read a gossip item about Presley wanting to meet her. Moreno took up with a disappointing Dennis Hopper, then with “a human missile. Often the way to win him over was to date other men. In fact, I was becoming addicted to the challenge of winning him over and over again,” Moreno says. “He broke my heart and came close to crushing my very spirit with his physical infidelities and, worse, with his emotional betrayals,” she writes.ĭuring their relationship, he married twice and fathered children with his wives.īut “I couldn’t stay away. Possibly as an outgrowth of this, he had “insatiable sexual needs,” which he unabashedly pursued with droves of other women. He seemed to have a darkness, a deep well of need, stemming from his childhood with an alcoholic mother. Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known,” she writes.īut it wasn’t all roses.

“To say that he was a great lover - sensual, generous, delightfully inventive - would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul.

“It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs.” “Just meeting him that first day sent my body temperature skyrocketing as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath, and I went into a full-body blush,” she writes of meeting the 30-year-old icon-to-be. Then, in 1954, in a makeup room on the set of Brando’s “Désirée,” in which he played Napoleon, a 22-year-old Moreno met the man who would rock her world. Weeks later, she sees her admirer in Life magazine - the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. “I have no doubt that this man would have sent someone over to my table to escort me upstairs. “His hairline moved back an inch, as when a predatory animal spots his prey and paralyzes it with ‘that look.’ It was obviously lust at first sight, and I remember thinking, ‘Whooo, this guy don’t waste no time!’ ” she writes. Her voluptuous beauty caught the eye of many older men, including one “very handsome redheaded gentleman” at a hotel opening who was sitting next to a regal companion. “I got it! How about Rita, after Rita Hayworth?” “Ruby Fontino? Marcy Miranda?” The names got progressively worse. She was calling herself Rosita Moreno, using her stepfather’s last name, when she met with powerful casting agent Bill Grady, who tried some options out. The second order of business was getting a Hollywood-friendly name. Mayer took one look at the teen - who had painted herself up to look like Elizabeth Taylor - and in a matter of seconds said, “Sign her!” She started taking dance lessons a year later and by 16 was discovered by a talent scout, who recommended her to famed producer Louis B. Ruby Dolores Alverio arrived in The Bronx from Puerto Rico as a 5-year-old. “We were locked in the ultimate folie à deux, a crazy love that lasted for years, until one day I quite literally was forced out of a coma and had to choose life over him,” she writes. and how I almost died from loving him,” Moreno, now 81, writes in her new memoir, “Rita Moreno.”Īlthough Moreno’s life story is fascinating on its own - she’s one of the only people, not to mention the first Hispanic, to receive an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony - a sizable chunk of the book, about one-third, is devoted to her torrid love affair with Brando. “I remember how he spoke to me, how he played the drums, how he made love. Her obsessive love for the Method actor “almost proved fatal.” During their eight-year affair, she endured chronic philandering, emotional abuse, a botched abortion - and that’s only the beginning. She was fiery and formidable on screen, but off screen, and in the arms of her lover Marlon Brando, Oscar-winning actress Rita Moreno, best known for her role as Anita in “West Side Story,” was reduced to a withering, suicidal mess.