Rita Moreno Found Lingerie At Her Boyfriend Marlon Brando’s House, So She Took A Dramatic Step

Moreno is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and she’s still working today. Astonishingly, she executive-produced and starred in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 version of West Side Story at the age of 89. It was a poignant job for her, of course: she starred in the original 1961 musical as Anita and won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in the process.

Moreno, who grew up in Puerto Rico, has always been a trailblazer for people of color in Hollywood. In 2011 she told newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle, “I would call my story an American story. It’s really so much about pursuing the American dream. I mean, can you imagine a little Puerto Rican girl going up to the stage and being handed an Oscar?”

Now, let’s travel back to 1954. At this time Brando was one of the hottest properties in Hollywood. In ’51 he starred as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and his iconic performance won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. The following year he played Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! and landed another nomination.

Incredibly, he received his third Best Actor nomination in a row for playing Mark Antony in 1953’s Julius Caesar, then birthed another icon in The Wild One, a movie widely credited with being the first outlaw biker picture. Brando’s Johnny Strabler became a genuine cultural touchstone of the ’50s, and while he didn’t get a nomination for this one, he would be back in the conversation before long.

Following its release in 1954 On The Waterfront finally saw Brando win Best Actor on his fourth nomination. In fact, the film was a phenomenon — out of 12 Oscar nominations, it took home eight. The wins included Best Picture, Best Director for Elia Kazan, and Best Supporting Actress for Eva Marie Saint. In three short years, Brando had established himself as the fiercest talent in the business.

Next up for Brando? Playing Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée. It was during this shoot that he first came into contact with a 22-year-old Moreno. When the 30-year-old superstar first caught a glimpse of her backstage in hair and make-up, the attraction was instant. And very mutual. In fact, it sounds like it was lust at first sight.

“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,” revealed Moreno in her 2013 memoir. “It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs.” The pair were soon engaged in a whirlwind romance.

On their first date, Brando took the wide-eyed young actress to a Hollywood party filled with superstar method actors including James Dean, Joanne Woodward, and Paul Newman. She felt out of her depth, but also excited to be there on the arm of a legend. She wrote, “From the moment we met, I felt that a web had been spun between us, drawing me to Marlon.”

“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,” wrote Moreno. “Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.” Sounds intense.

Well, in reality, being with Brando was intense — in both good and bad ways. Even though he and Moreno shared such a passion for each other, he had a nasty habit of showing that same passion to other women. In fact, while they had their eight-year on-again off-again tryst, he married twice and had children with both wives.

In truth, this wasn’t even the half of it — Brando reportedly had relations with scores of women in this period. Moreno wrote, “He broke my heart and came close to crushing my very spirit with his physical infidelities and, worse, with his emotional betrayals.” Despite this, she found herself coming back to him time and time again.

“I couldn’t stay away,” admitted Moreno in her memoir. “In fact, I was becoming addicted to the challenge of winning him over and over again.” In the 2021 documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, she added, “He was the daddy that I couldn’t please… he was the one I wanted to please, he was the one I wanted to be married to.”

Unfortunately, there was a cloak-and-dagger aspect to the relationship upon which Brando insisted. In 2017 Moreno told website Vulture, “People for the longest time didn’t even know that Marlon and I were seeing each other. He was an absolute lunatic about that. And we went out very little. We were always going to little obscure restaurants.”

This secrecy can’t have been easy, and over the years the tumultuous relationship wreaked havoc on Moreno’s mental and physical health. It all came to a head shortly after the filming of West Side Story. Amazingly, her therapist pleaded with Moreno and Brando to cut off their relationship — and they did.

With Brando seemingly out of her life forever, Moreno moved on. She married cardiologist Leonard Gordon in 1965 and they had one child — Fernanda Gordon, now an actress — in 1967. The couple were married right up until his death in 2010 at the age of 90. Unfortunately, not unlike her relationship with Brando, Moreno’s marriage was troubled.

In the 2019 documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, the actress admitted her husband was a controlling man. She even indicated that she should have left the marriage, rather than stay for the sake of Fernanda. She then told newspaper USA Today, “He was a wonderful person: it was just that our marriage didn’t work out.”

That same year, Moreno also admitted to People magazine, “I come from that era. I come from an era when you were supposed to obey the man in the family. I didn’t know how to write a check for the longest time. I couldn’t even tell you when that was. But it was more recent than you might think.”

The star added, “I also feel that people who are in love very often collude. It’s a silent pact that people very often make in the sense that — in my case, it was, ’I’ll be the little girl, and you be the daddy.’ And that stopped working, of course, cause the little girl wanted to grow up and that’s when the trouble started. So, I wasn’t happily married for a very long time.”

Two years later, Moreno told newspaper The Irish Times, “I was with him to the very last, including a month in hospital where I slept on a cot and was with him 24/7. It’s what you do when you love and respect somebody.” But, when Leonard passed on, she admitted to feeling a sense of freedom she hadn’t known for quite some time.

“I got up, cut a lock of his hair, which I still have — beautiful silver hair — and as I left I stopped at the door and I looked at him,” explained Moreno. “He was so small and slender and white, and I thought, ’How is it that little wizened person made me so unhappy? Where did he get that power?’ It was a mystery to me.”

“He didn’t like the raucous side of me, and I love that side of me,” continued Moreno. “I think I’m funny as hell and I think I’m cute and I think I’m mischievous. I know I’m mischievous. And that’s the kind of thing he discouraged, and that makes me very sad, because he was missing out on something pretty wonderful about me.”

All in all, Moreno’s outlook on marriage is now crystal-clear and without nuance. She told People, “Someone asked me recently if I would countenance… being married again and my answer was simple. I’d rather eat glass. I don’t want to get married. No, no, no, no, no.”

Ultimately, then, Moreno’s marriage wasn’t a bed of roses, and it’s tempting to wonder what might have happened if she’d taken a different path in 1968. This was when she was struggling to find work, so she went against her therapist’s advice and contacted Brando. He jumped at the chance to see her again and she was cast as his leading lady in The Night of the Following Day.

In her memoir, Moreno admitted things got up close and personal again one night after a few too many drinks. She fell asleep from the wine, and when she woke up, Brando was lying close beside her. She protested, “Marlon, we can’t do this. You know we can’t,” and claims he begged, “Just let me sleep with you. That’s all I want, to sleep with you.”

Moreno cut Brando off at the pass, but it was clear there was still a fire that existed between them. This fire then exploded in an unexpected way as they shot a scene in which she was required to slap him. Years of frustration boiled over for Moreno, and she unleashed a torrent on Brando.

In 2017 she told Vulture, “It opened up this well of hurt and rage, and disappointment, that had been obviously sitting there for years and years and years unexpressed. 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,” admitted Moreno. “It surprised the hell out of him, of course, and he kept trying to defend himself by putting his arms up and all that.” Naturally, the raw emotion made for a great scene, with Moreno adding, “The director could not have been happier, so he kept the camera rolling.”

These days Moreno finds it difficult to watch the scene, though. She confessed, “I know what I’m experiencing, and it hurts me so much that it took me so long to express what I was feeling. It breaks my heart, actually. And I feel so sorry for that girl on the screen. I really, really do.

In 2021 Moreno appeared on TV chat show The View and reminisced about a time she tried to make Brando jealous by dating another man — Elvis! It all began when she found evidence of Brando’s latest infidelity in his home, and it proved to be the final straw. She admitted, “I was heartbroken, and I went home in tears — really, I was naïve — and I was angry too, just furious.”

“The next day, the phone rings, and I hear ’Miss Moreno?’” remembered the smiling star. “I said, ’Uh, yeah?’ ’This is Colonel Parker, my client is Elvis Presley, and Elvis spotted you at the 20th Century Fox commissary, and he liked what he saw.’” Parker wanted to know if Moreno would be open to meeting Elvis.

“I thought of those panties, and I said, ’Yes, I would!’” laughed Moreno. She and The King subsequently went on a few dates, and she admits it was 100 percent designed to aggravate Brando. She wrote in her memoir, “I knew no one could possibly make Marlon Brando more jealous.”

In the end, there was very little passion between Moreno and Elvis. For one thing, their short-lived relationship was entirely “PG” — not the steamy R-rated experience she had with Brando. She claims that she decided to end things when she saw the King devouring a peanut butter, bacon, and banana sandwich — and he looked more interested in it than her!

All in all, as Moreno told The View, she found Elvis to be a sweet man, if a little boring. But their quick dalliance at least did what she wanted it to do — it drove Brando into a rage. She claimed, “He started to throw chairs. He was so angry. It was wonderful. And I just sat there as he threw chairs and carried on.”

In the end, Moreno and Brando’s relationship mightn’t have worked out, but they did stay in each other’s lives. For example, in 1975 she told People magazine, “Nandy came home from school one day and found him playing the congas in our living room. So, she still calls him ’the man with the drums.’”

After this, their relationship was conducted exclusively over the phone. In 2021 Moreno told The Irish Times, “There was always this attachment between us till he died. Every now and then he’d call me, and he would say to me, ’You were the only woman in my life who was able to make that right turn.’”

When asked what this cryptic phrase meant, Moreno replied, “That I didn’t need him anymore. That I found a sense of dignity about myself.” She was the only woman the superstar actor had been with who chose to leave him and focus on her own life, and it sounded like he respected her for it.

Moreno continued, “I know now that he did actually love me. And when I realised that I was so happy. It meant so much to me.” The One Day at a Time star claims, though, that she only truly came to this conclusion after Brando passed. She said, “If I needed proof, it was in the newspapers that there was only one picture of a woman in his bedroom, and that was me.”

This was, of course, a reference to the fact that, when Brando died, there was only one solitary piece of memorabilia from his career in his home. It was a photo of him and Moreno passionately kissing in The Night of the Following Day. To have such a storied career and yet keep no other reminders of it is unusual — so that picture must have meant a lot to him.

In 2017 it was discovered that Moreno also kept a reminder of Brando — a picture of him from The Godfather in her bedroom. When asked by People magazine why she had it, she replied, “Because he was a big love of mine in my life.” She added, “He was the lust of my life,” before motioning to a picture of her late husband, adding, “and that over there is the love of my life.”