[Whitfield:] The Screen Actors Guild Awards are tonight and Rita Moreno will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, presenting her with the honor, her long time friend and former electric company alum, Morgan Freeman. I had the chance to talk to Moreno about her life and the discrimination she faced early in her career.
[Rita Moreno, Actress:] I found out very quickly when I came to this country and it was New York, about 5 years old, that I was a spick according to the kids on the block and a garlic mouth and pierced ear, all the words you hear on the "West Side Story," by the way. Even though at the time, I didn't even speak English. The way in which those words were spit out at me, even as a very little girl, I knew something was wrong with me. And when I began to understand the words, it was even worse. And you know, if you're young enough and you're told often enough that you have no value, you believe it. Children are very tender and very vulnerable and very believing. They'll believe anything you tell them. And I carried that with me for far too many years. It's the thing that sent me into psychotherapy many, many years later when I was finding I was really miserable in my life, that I didn't like myself too much and my friend then, Marlon Brando, who was then my lover, said, this man who was seriously disturbed said to me, you need to see a therapist. I love the irony of that. He was right, of course. I'm a very stubborn person. I hang on to my neurosis like nobody's business, but I know a lot of people like that. It's comfortable even though it's scary.
[Whitfield:] Because it's comfortable for most people to live with a facade. The person that everyone thinks they know and then there is of course the person. Sometimes, it takes a lot more courage, most time to take a lot more courage to reveal exactly who you are and what you're thinking and feeling, whether it be you know, revealing your strengths our your weaknesses, especially.
[Moreno:] You are so smart and you are so right and you know, what really was shocking to me, because the book covers something you rarely get to see anymore. It covers the early Hollywood that no longer exists, and the bias and the prejudice that I lived with for years and years and years in Hollywood when I was a young woman. That was a shock and it was sad because I really felt when I went to MGM under contract at 17 that I was going to be a star. I could be like Lana Turner or Elizabeth Taylor, and then it turned out that I could only play roles that required accents. And that begot something kind of rather amusing in a way because whether I played a Polynesian girl, I was always the house ethnic. When I played the Polynesian girl, an Arabian girl, an East Indian girl, I always had the same accent.
[Whitfield:] Did it always bother you? Was there a point that you said, I'm going to do this? I accept it, but then you write it became very demeaning.
[Moreno:] It always was demeaning, but somewhere inside of me, I always felt there was a stubborn streak that said, you are talented. Even when I was a little girl, you have talent. Somehow, if I persevere, somehow, some way, someone will see that in me and give me a break and it happened in west side story and of course, the king and I, but "The King and I," yet again, I was talking like this, you know, and beautiful role, fantastic movie. But there I was doing the same thing, only with more beautiful costumes.
[Whitfield:] So, if you had an opportunity to kind of reach back to you teenage years, the early part of your career and you would be able to advise yourself, given your life path, your odyssey, what would you have advised that young girl about to embark on a life in entertainment?
[Rita Moreno, Actress:] I would have said to Rosy, to Dolores Alverio, don't go to Hollywood. Go to the theatre where people were still allowed to play different kinds of roles. But my thinking, my what's the word for that, my set, my take was that in order to be a famous star, you had to go to Hollywood. I had never done theatre unless I was, my gosh, much, much older. So Hollywood was the answer for me. It wasn't the best answer. In the meantime, however, it made me very strong. In the meantime, I met someone like Marlon Brando, who ultimately did me one of the greatest favors he ever did any woman, which was to say, you need help.
[Whitfield:] She is remarkable and congrats to her for the big SAG Award.