"America," from a West Side Story novice
Rita Moreno, then Rosita Dolores, was just 17 when she was scouted at a dance recital and set up for the meeting that would change her life, with the legendary MGM executive, Louis Mayer. She wore a dress made by her mother and a corset to give her a “wasp waist,” to make her look more like her idol, Elizabeth Taylor. It worked like a charm–Mayer declared her a “Spanish Elizabeth Taylor” and she was given a contract on the spot.
But first there was business to attend to. In her early days on the studio lot after moving to Hollywood, hobnobbing with stars, her wildest dreams miraculously coming into focus, a casting director called her to his office and said her name just wouldn’t do. Rosita was, astonishingly, “too Italian,” he said. How about Ruby Fontino? Marcy Miranda? Or Rita, like Rita Hayworth? And so, Rita Moreno was born.
The bargain sounds almost Faustian–your name for riches and fame–but even after that, for the next decade, Moreno would have to dutifully play bit “ethnic girl” parts in MGM movies. “No, no. I got Native girls. I got Pacific Island parts. I got Egyptian girl parts–anything but just acting roles,” she said in a Fresh Air interview earlier this year (at 90, Moreno gives no more fucks and the interview is candid and delightful). Usually, she wore thick, muddy makeup to darken her face and often, the part called for an accent. Moreno only knew how to do one so all of the characters ended up sounding vaguely Puerto Rican.
I’m a musical theater rube so I didn’t know much about the lore of West Side Story–not the 1957 Broadway show or the 1961 film, with music composed by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics from a young Stephen Sondheim–until I saw the most recent Steven Spielberg reincarnation a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a stroke of destiny it was that Moreno was cast as Anita in 1961, even in a story as flawed and deeply polarizing to Puerto Ricans as this one.
Tony and Maria, the star-crossed lovers/horny teenagers, do a fine job of making dopey eyes at each other for two and a half hours and watching the Jets and the Sharks pirouette-joust is strangely mesmerizing. But it’s Anita, the outspoken, charismatic girlfriend of Shark leader Bernardo, whose arc from exuberant optimism to devastating betrayal feels like the heart of the story. Art is funny that way: Bernstein, Sondheim and their collaborators, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents, were just looking to fill in some details in their Romeo and Juliet retelling so they picked “New York” and “gangs” and “Puerto Ricans” as if filling out Mad Libs. Yet, with Anita, they created a character who has endured for 60 years. And who better to understand the uneasy pacts you’re forced to accept to make a life in America than the actress compelled to give away her own name.
Spielberg’s newest West Side Story rehabs it, scrubbing it of its most outlandish stereotypes while underscoring the themes that are relevant today–the virulent racism, the struggles of recently arrived immigrants and an entirely new dimension added by screenwriter Tony Kushner, gentrification and displacement.
“America,” Anita’s signature number, is a cheeky but heated argument between Bernado and Anita about the trade-offs implicit in American life for Puerto Ricans: the comforts and the consumerism trumpeted by Anita, soured by the reminders of marginalization and bigotry that Bernardo airs (Buying on credit is so nice/One look at us and they charge twice; I'll get a terrace apartment/Better get rid of your accent; Free to be anything you choose/Free to wait tables and shine shoes).
Is it a little cheesy? Well, sure. A little simplified, a little saccharine? Yeah, it’s a musical!
In 1961, Moreno was thrilled to finally be playing a dignified Latina woman, but she was still forced to put on the fake accent and cake her face in muddy make-up. She was most aghast at the prospect of having to sing the opening lines of “America,” as they were in the musical: “Puerto Rico/You ugly island/Island of tropic diseases,” followed by a series of other offensive insinuations about poverty, crime and overpopulation. Lest you think this didn’t read as an outrageous caricature at the time, here is a letter from a New York City doctor published in the New York Times in 1957 protesting (“Today Puerto Rico has no significant disease problems related to its tropical climate”). To Moreno’s great relief, Sondheim changed the lyrics in the movie to the hardly much better: “Puerto Rico/My heart's devotion/Let it sink back in the ocean.” Spielberg’s “America” gets a further update, jettisoning all the nastiest lyrics, casting the exceptional Ariana DeBose, an Afro-Latina actress, to play Anita, and staging it on the thrumming streets of New York.
For some, the bigger problem is that the whole foundation of this debate–and in fact, the story of lovers straining to overcome tribal animosity–is too shaky, too devoid of context. Andrea González-Ramírez writes in The Cut:
For the most part, the film struggles to engage with the elephant in the room: Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and most of what the Sharks experience is directly linked to imperialism on top of your classic American racism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
It’s true, none of the West Side Story’s, none of the America’s are built to address how American colonialism helped create the conditions that Puerto Ricans were fleeing in the first place. Still, “America” rings true to the arguments I’ve heard play out in my own diaspora. You can covet your new washing machine and keep the fucked geopolitics of your homeland’s predicament in your head at the same time.
Anita’s optimism about America is a survival tactic–take the good, do your best to withstand the bad, be brave enough to want better. It’s her dreams—of marrying Bernardo, a terrace apartment, a shop of her own—that feel the most real, sweaty and alive with desire. And so when those dreams start to collapse, it feels all the more crushing. Her beloved Bernardo killed, Maria in love with his murderer, Anita still goes to Doc’s Pharmacy after that night of bloodshed to deliver a message from Maria to Tony. And then, she is harassed, humiliated and nearly raped by a pack of Jets. It’s the final straw and Anita tells the lie that sets the final tragedy of West Side Story in motion. Its most durable message might be that those who most wholeheartedly believe in the idea of America are the ones most in danger of being leveled by it.
Moreno thought that West Side Story was really, this time, going to change her life, especially after she won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance. In fact, she continued to be offered small, offensive parts. “It was the heartbreak of my life,” she said. “I really constantly believed everything was going to be good until it wasn't.” She wouldn’t do another film for seven years. There were other, more unthinkable horrors in her life. As revealed for the first time in her memoir, she was raped by her agent, and continued working with him because she believed he was the only one who would champion her. Her tumultuous affair with Marlon Brando ended in a botched abortion and a failed suicide attempt.
The respect that she so craved, both from the industry and for herself, accrued slowly and painstakingly, over the course of decades. Eventually, she became one of only 16 people to earn the distinction of winning an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony. In Spielberg’s West Side Story, her stature was reflected in her executive producer credit and the role that was created for her, as Valentina, Doc’s widow and Tony’s confidant. To savor it, at long last, Rita Moreno just had to survive.