{"id":2445801,"date":"2019-06-27T21:05:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-28T03:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=308613"},"modified":"2019-07-01T07:50:12","modified_gmt":"2019-07-01T13:50:12","slug":"aspen-ideas-festival-resident-artists-rita-moreno-and-edmund-de-waal-on-their-lives-and-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspen-ideas-festival-resident-artists-rita-moreno-and-edmund-de-waal-on-their-lives-and-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen Ideas Festival: Resident artists Rita Moreno and Edmund de Waal on their lives and work"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Aspen Institute artist-in-residence Rita Moreno at Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday.<\/strong>
Courtesy photo\/Daniel Bayer<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Rita Moreno almost quit the cast of \u201cWest Side Story\u201d over a lyric disparaging Puerto Rico, she recalled this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter I got the role, which I desperately wanted, I suddenly realized that a verse in \u2018America\u2019 goes \u2018Puerto Rico, ugly island\/Island of tropical diseases,\u2019\u201d she said during a session Wednesday. \u201cI realized, \u2018I can\u2019t sing that. I can\u2019t do this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The lyric had been included in the original 1957 Broadway production. Before filming, as Moreno prepared to quit the project, lyricist Stephen Sondheim changed it to \u201cPuerto Rico, my heart\u2019s devotion\/Let it sink back into the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreno, now 87 and serving as an Aspen Institute artist-in-residence for 2019, told the story in an on-stage interview with Michael Eisner. The conversation detailed her early career and her experiences in what\u2019s often called the Golden Age of Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Of Oscar night in 1962, when she took home the Best Supporting Actress trophy for \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d she recalled Rock Hudson calling her name, trying to play it cool on the way to the stage and giving a famously short acceptance speech (\u201cI don\u2019t believe it, good Lord. I leave you with that.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the wings afterward, she recalled a drunken Joan Crawford holding her in a tight and extended embrace.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had to wrest me from her grip to get me into the green room,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Moreno is among the few performers to achieve the EGOT, winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. She playfully corrected Eisner, however, noting that she is actually a \u201cKPEGOT,\u201d having also earned a Kennedy Center Honor and Peabody Award.<\/p>\n

But the years after \u201cWest Side Story\u201d were trying, she said. Despite winning Hollywood\u2019s biggest prize, the only roles studios would consider her for called for dark make-up and cartoonish accents. She asked her agent to submit her for parts that would show off her full range as an actress, but she was shut out.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wouldn\u2019t even see me,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThe producers, the directors, the writers, they wouldn\u2019t even see me. \u2026 They\u2019d say, \u2018Oh no, she\u2019s too Hispanic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So she went into what she called a \u201cself-exile\u201d for seven years, doing \u201canything but films\u201d and working instead on television and on the stage, where she was allowed to play the roles she wanted.<\/p>\n

The period following \u201cWest Side Story\u201d also included the traumatic experience of dating Marlon Brando.<\/p>\n

\u201cI attempted to end my life because of Marlon,\u201d she said. \u201cI was with him for eight years on and off. We had a very tempestuous relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about the #MeToo movement and her experiences with predatory men in Hollywood, Moreno recalled being stalked by 20th Century Fox production head Buddy Adler and being abused by a litany of powerful men.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were terrible to me,\u201d she said, sharing a harrowing story of going to an afternoon cocktail party in Bel Air in the late 1950s, where Columbia Pictures co-founder Harry Cohn attempted to force himself on her. Another executive pulled her away, appearing to rescue her, only to attempt the same. She ran out of the home, planning to walk the 20 miles home to Culver City. Outside, she appealed to the mansion\u2019s Mexican gardeners for help.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got in their pickup truck and they took me home,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThose were the only gentlemen I saw that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreno had moved with her family to New York City from Puerto Rico at age 5. But even before they left the island, she knew she\u2019d be a performer.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt started with grandpa, abuelito, putting on records,\u201d she recalled. \u201cAnd I\u2019d shake my little booty and make him very happy \u2014 to see him laughing and clapping his hands, I thought, \u2018This is nice.\u2019 I loved the attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only English she knew was \u201cgood morning to you.\u201d But a dancer friend of her mother\u2019s noted that Moreno showed serious talent, and her mother took her to a dance teacher at age 7.<\/p>\n

At age 13, an audition led to a role on Broadway in the short-lived drama \u201cSkydrift,\u201d in a cast that included the legendary Eli Wallach. Moreno recalled how boring the play was, and how she watched the audience squirm. To break the tedium during a dinner scene, Moreno recalled, she made a slurping sound to make the audience laugh. One castmate did not appreciate the gesture.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe held me by the scruff of my neck and said, \u2018If you ever dare to so such a thing again I will find out about it, I will find you and I will kill you!\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cThat\u2019s my first experience with theater. I didn\u2019t understand. I thought I was helping.\u201d<\/p>\n

A talent scout spotted her in a dance recital and Moreno was soon moving with her family to Culver City, California, to start a career in movies, with a seven-year contract with MGM.<\/p>\n

Being on the studio lot as a kid was a dream come true.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the first time I saw stars,\u201d she said. \u201cClark Gable walks in. Elizabeth Taylor walks in. I just about passed out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of her early forays into activism, Moreno recalled the March on Washington in 1963 and the \u201cextraordinary afternoon\u201d when she was among a handful of stars to share the stage with Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial for his \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech. Moreno recalled watching singer Mahalia Jackson yelling to King to discard his prepared remarks and \u201ctell them about the dream!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe discards his prepared speech and goes into the \u2018I Have a Dream\u2019 speech,\u201d Moreno recalled. \u201cI was never the same after that. That really politicized me in a way that I can\u2019t describe to you. \u2026 I get goosebumps every time I talk about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreno is soon to begin filming her supporting part in Steven Spielberg\u2019s remake of \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d of which she also is an executive producer, bringing her career full-circle.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an extraordinary experience,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

EDMUND DE WAAL\u2019S \u2018LIBRARY OF EXILE\u2019<\/p>\n

Moreno\u2019s fellow artist-in-resident at the Aspen Institute for 2019 is the British ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal, who took the Ideas stage Tuesday to discuss his work with the New Yorker\u2019s Adam Gopnik.<\/p>\n

De Waal is a renowned British sculptor, ceramicist and author of the contemporary classic memoir \u201cThe Hare with Amber Eyes\u201d about his once-prosperous European family having all of their property, and all but a small portion of their art collection, taken by the Nazis.<\/p>\n

Gopnik noted that de Waal is among the rare breed of artists who are masters in two forms. De Waal said his work in both ceramics and in literature goes back to his earliest memories.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was always clay, always books, always poetry \u2014 the two things nudging each other all the time \u2014 one taking priority and then the other thing coming back,\u201d he said, recalling his first pottery class at age 5 in Lincoln with his father.<\/p>\n

In the age of conceptual art\u2019s dominance over craft, where many or most major artists don\u2019t personally make their art objects, de Waal still uses his own hand for his works, whether it\u2019s a household pot or one of his massive installations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still make my pots and it seems weird to have to say that,\u201d de Waal said.<\/p>\n

He is currently at work on two installations in Venice, one of which is an ambitious piece he\u2019s calling \u201cLibrary of Exile.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project will collect some 3,000 books \u2014 works \u201cfrom Ovid to present day writers\u201d \u2014 by authors who have been displaced. The pavilion is housed in a porcelain sculpture by de Waal that is inscribed with his written history of destroyed libraries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a huge thing for me,\u201d de Waal said. \u201cIt\u2019s me thinking about migration and refugees, it\u2019s about how books and languages work, it\u2019s about my life as a potter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The library will open in Venice, on the site of the city\u2019s 16th-century Jewish ghetto. From there, de Waal is taking it to sites of destroyed libraries throughout world history. It will stop in Dresden and at the British Museum in London before de Waal brings it to its permanent home in Mosul, Iraq. The terrorist group ISIS destroyed the university library there in 2014 after taking control of the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole idea is that it will be the foundation for a new library in Mosul,\u201d de Waal explained.<\/p>\n

On the divisive battle over Brexit in his homeland, de Waal said he was baffled by Brexit and the support among his countrymen to leave Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis painful moment of dispossession that\u2019s going on, the British attempt to dispossess from Europe, is so unreal to me,\u201d he said. \u201cThe whole of Britain is created by the endless migration of people coming and coming and coming. To me it feels like really bad storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aspen Institute artist-in-residence Rita Moreno at Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday.Courtesy photo\/Daniel Bayer Rita Moreno almost quit the cast of \u201cWest Side Story\u201d over a lyric disparaging Puerto Rico, she recalled this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. \u201cAfter I got the role, which I desperately wanted, I suddenly realized that a verse in \u2018America\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2445801","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 12:44:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2445801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2445880,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445801\/revisions\/2445880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2445801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2445801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2445801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}