Her new memoir finds the 90-year-old singer-dancer hungry for acclaim, but generous to others on her way to getting it.
CHITA: A Memoir, by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco
How did Chita Rivera feel when she saw Rita Moreno, another actress of Puerto Rican descent, in the movie role of Anita that Rivera had originated on Broadway in “West Side Story”?
“How dare she?” she recalls thinking in “Chita,” her playful and history-rich memoir. “That is my dress, that is my earring!” The truth is she was already kicking it up with Dick Van Dyke on Broadway in “Bye Bye Birdie” at the time. So she got over it. Then, when that show became a movie, Janet Leigh took Rivera’s part of Rosie, even after Rivera killed with “Spanish Rose,” her stereotype-bashing number, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” (Look it up on YouTube, you won’t be sorry.)
Years later the steamy role of Velma Kelly that she originated in “Chicago” for Bob Fosse went to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for it. “She’s the perfect choice,” she responded when Rob Marshall, its director, checked in.
Cutthroat as the acting game may be, and even harder for talent with Hispanic names long before J. Lo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rosie Perez and Daphne Rubin-Vega hit the scene, Rivera comes off as thirsty for recognition — but not bloodthirsty — despite the urgings of her colleagues Gwen Verdon, Fred Ebb and others to up her diva game.
She occasionally takes a satisfying swipe (Paul Lynde gets a dressing-down for being nasty and so does John Lennon, of all people, when she appeared with the Beatles in 1964). But most everyone else gets a pass, including Tony Mordente, her first husband, a dancer whom she met in “West Side Story”; Lisa Mordente, their daughter; and the many loves of her life that she recalls with generosity — the restaurateur Joe Allen and Sammy Davis Jr., among them.
“There’s nothing wrong with ambition,” Davis once told her.
It took some time for Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero to understand that. A tomboy born in 1933 and raised in Washington, D.C., by a poised mother of mixed ancestry who worked for the Defense Department and a dapper Puerto Rican musician father who died when she was little, Rivera got a scholarship to the School of American Ballet when she was 16.
She moved in with relatives in the Bronx and describes a heady time of bodegas, subways, public school and intimidating ballet instructors. Overcoming her fear of singing, she got into the national tour of “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch, then on Broadway in “Guys and Dolls” and “Can-Can,” starring Verdon. With “West Side Story,” her career took off.
Broadway-loving readers will appreciate the play-by-play (pun intended) of this fizzy book, written in collaboration with Patrick Pacheco, a theater-savvy journalist and TV host. It doesn’t take much to make the pages fly when you have a scene of Stritch in rehearsals with Rivera, “blowing” on the Scotch in her coffee cup, or a pre-rehab Liza Minnelli playing her daughter in “The Rink.”
Essentially a good girl, despite her insistence that she has a fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores (who occasionally makes herself heard in the book), at 90, this national icon doesn’t seem to want to burn many bridges. If roles or songs were taken from her and given to others, all for the best.
She doesn’t get too political either, although she does unload about what it means to play Latina characters “subjected to racist taunts,” and on her defining early role as a street-sassy Puerto Rican. When Rivera was suggested for “1491,” one of his lesser-known shows, Meredith Willson, who wrote “The Music Man,” asked, “Doesn’t she speak with an accent?” She allows that while she bumped into ethnic stereotypes, the theater world was more relaxed than Hollywood. “I wanted to be considered for a range of roles and for the most part I succeeded,” she writes.
One role she never played, this upbeat memoir makes clear — the victim.
Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to The Times and the author of “Assisted Loving” and “Bobby Wonderful.”
CHITA: A Memoir | By Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco | Illustrated | 320 pp. | Harper One | $27.99
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
