Rita Moreno and Marlon Brando’s Tumultuous Eight-Year Relationship
Every is an icon in their very own proper: Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican-born American performer, achieved the uncommon coveted EGOT honor, being certainly one of solely a small cadre in historical past who’ve earned an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. And Marlon Brando grew to become a display screen legend for his roles in traditional…
Every is an icon in their very own proper: Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican-born American performer, achieved the uncommon coveted EGOT honor, being certainly one of solely a small cadre in historical past who’ve earned an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. And Marlon Brando grew to become a display screen legend for his roles in traditional movies like A Streetcar Named Want and The Godfather, incomes him the distinction of American Film Institute’s fourth best male film star.
And within the early days of their burgeoning careers, destiny introduced them collectively, fueling a steamy relationship that had as a lot romance because it did drama—so harmful that at one level Moreno’s life was on the road.
Even so, their magnetism was plain, and so they stored discovering their means again collectively, leading to a tumultuous eight-year relationship that was extra marked by scandal than love. Although Brando died in 2004 of pulmonary fibrosis, Moreno — who was married to Leonard Gordon in 1965 till his 2010 loss of life — nonetheless considers Brando a serious drive in her life.
“He was a giant love of mine in my life,” she advised People in 2017, pointing to a photograph of Brando in her bed room. “This one, it’s nearly looks like a vignette out of a film, in order that’s why it’s there. He was the lust of my life,” she mentioned, earlier than pointing to a photograph of Gordon and calling him the “love of my life.”
READ MORE: Rita Moreno Was Over Being Stereotyped in Hollywood, So She Stop Making Motion pictures for Seven Years
There have been sparks between them from the very begin
Born Ruby Dolores Alverio, Moreno moved to the Bronx together with her household when she was 5 and was found when she was 16, rapidly being signed by film producer Louis B. Mayer. By the point she was 22 in 1954, she discovered herself in a make-up room on the set of Désirée — the movie the place Brando, who was 30 on the time, was enjoying Napoleon.
“Simply assembly him that first day despatched my physique temperature skyrocketing as if I had been dropped right into a highly regarded bathtub, and I went right into a full-body blush,” she wrote in her self-titled 2013 memoir, based on The New York Post. “It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs.”
That was just the beginning, and Moreno was not short on details. “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,” she revealed in her memoir. “Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.”
She knew she was his type, telling People back in 1975: “Marlon has all the time preferred Latin girls… I don’t suppose he ever went out with a blonde. He has the status of being robust or chilly, however in actuality he’s a really mild, loving man.”
Moreno tried to make Brando jealous after his infidelities
However that degree of ardour got here with a darkish facet as effectively. Brando pursued different girls, marrying Anna Kashfi in 1957 and Movita Castaneda in 1960 and fathering kids with each of them throughout his “on and off” time with Moreno.
The ache was numbing for Moreno, who wrote, “He broke my coronary heart and got here near crushing my very spirit along with his bodily infidelities and, worse, along with his emotional betrayals.” Although she rapidly noticed his sample, she couldn’t deny the attraction. “I couldn’t keep away,” she continued. “The truth is, I used to be changing into hooked on the problem of profitable him time and again.”
One of the simplest ways she may determine to get his consideration was by relationship different males. First she tried with Dennis Hopper — after which, Elvis Presley. “I knew nobody may presumably make Marlon Brando extra jealous,” she wrote in her ebook.
Nonetheless, the fervour with Presley wasn’t even remotely on the identical degree because it was with Brando. She mentioned she had a second when she watched him eat a peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich and thought he may benefit from the meal greater than he did her, based on the Post. And with that, she went again to Brando once more.
Rita Moreno and Marlon Brando discuss whereas filming ‘The Evening of the Following Day.’
Photograph: Bettmann/Contributor
The ache of the connection started to meet up with Moreno
Not lengthy after their reconciliation, Moreno came upon she was pregnant with Brando’s baby, however the response was under no circumstances what she anticipated. “To my shock and horror, Marlon instantly organized for an abortion,” she wrote, recalling that he organized for another person to choose her up after the process, which was unlawful on the time.
However issues hadn’t gone easily — she quickly came upon the fetus was nonetheless inside her and needed to be eliminated surgically on the hospital. As an alternative of sympathy, Brando expressed anger that the one who carried out the abortion had wronged him.
Brando then took off to movie Mutiny on the Bounty, the place he fell for co-star Tarita Teriipaia. Moreno had just lately wrapped what would turn into her star-making position in West Aspect Story, however behind closed doorways, seeing him with yet one more lady was all an excessive amount of. When he returned dwelling, Moreno swallowed a bunch of his sleeping capsules in a single gulp.
“I went to mattress to die,” she wrote within the ebook. “This wasn’t a revenge suicide, however a comfort, an escape-from-pain loss of life.” And if it weren’t for his assistant discovering her and dashing her to the hospital to get her abdomen pumped, her destiny might have been fully totally different.
Trying again, she advised USA Today: “It was humiliating and I used to be letting him step throughout me… I wished to eliminate myself as a result of I did not suppose I deserved to dwell.”
A therapist requested them to not see one another once more, and the 2 agreed. Brando went on to marry Teriipaia in 1962.
They linked as soon as once more for skilled causes
About six years later in 1968, Moreno reached out to Brando once more, and he forged her as his love curiosity in The Evening of the Following Day, which filmed in France.
Waking up after a reunion dinner crammed with an excessive amount of wine, Moreno discovered Brando respiration on her neck, begging, “That’s all I would like, to sleep with you.” She denied him.
Again on the set, there was a scene when she needed to slap him, and it triggered previous recollections. “Because the synapses of my mind reconnected, previous wounds, hurts, resentment and disrespect coursed via my physique,” she wrote. “The festering decay rose like pond scum to the floor, and Rita Moreno emerged because the offended lover.”
It was a flood of feelings that she had buried deep. “It opened up this effectively of damage and rage, and disappointment, that had been clearly sitting there for years and years and years unexpressed,” she advised Vulture. “The pond scum just came right up to the surface. It had been sitting there all these years, and I went berserk. That was for real. I don’t even know what I was saying. It surprised the hell out of him, of course, and he kept trying to defend himself by putting his arms up and all that. The director could not have been happier, so he kept the camera rolling.”
Moreno and Brando eventually formed a friendship
Watching the scene back now, Moreno is still filled with pain. “I know what I’m experiencing, and it hurts me so much that it took me so long to express what I was feeling,” she continued to Vulture. “It breaks my heart, actually. And I feel so sorry for that girl on the screen. I really, really do.”
Yet despite the pain of it all, Moreno and Brando became permanent fixtures in each other’s lives. Brando became friendly with Moreno, as well as Gordon and their daughter Fernanda “Nandy” Gordon. “Nandy came home from school one day and found him playing the congas in our living room,” Moreno told People in 1975. “So she nonetheless calls him ‘the person with the drums.’”
She’s additionally grateful that Brando launched her to remedy, which has been so important to her life. “And at one level he mentioned to me, ‘You need assistance,’ which now makes me actually chuckle arduous as a result of it’s one loony telling the opposite loony that they need assistance,” she advised Vulture. “It turned out he was completely proper. It’s most likely the best favor I ever did for myself.”
By means of the tip of Brando’s life, they remained in contact, however Moreno by no means was the one to succeed in out once more. “We had a phone friendship after that,” she continued. “He did the calling, I by no means referred to as him.”
