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Chita Rivera catapulted to fame playing Anita in the 1957 musical “West Side Story” on Broadway.
But please don’t confuse the 90-year-old diva with the actress Rita Moreno, who played the same role in the 1961 film.
When people tell her that they loved her in the movie, “I straighten them out,” Rivera writes in her new memoir, “Chita” (HarperOne).
“Then [I] politely say, ‘I was the original Anita.’”
Still, she admits she felt a “pang of resentment” when she saw Moreno on screen in a replica of the ruffled purple frock that Rivera made famous.
“How dare she?” Rivera seethed. “That is my dress!”
Kissing her “cute” co-star Dick Van Dyke on stage every night in the Broadway smash “Bye Bye Birdie” helped lessen the pain.
“Those sorts of things can be a perk of acting,” she writes.
“But you can’t get carried away.”
Rivera sometimes did get carried away, although never with Van Dyke (they were too busy cracking each other up).
Fortunately, the wildly entertaining “Chita” — which she wrote with Patrick Pacheco — does not scrimp on the love affairs (most notably with Sammy Davis Jr.), the struggles (acting alongside a troubled Liza Minnelli in “The Rink,” at the height of the younger actress’ drug problems) or the celebrity anecdotes (Judy Garland was wonderful; John Lennon, a jerk).
Rivera, after all, is a performer who consistently gives her all on stage, whether wailing over her slain boyfriend in “West Side Story” or tangoing with Antonio Banderas in “Nine.” (About that: “I blindfolded him with a purple scarf and at one point whipped my leg up on his shoulder — and left it there. Then he kissed it. At each performance, I would turn to the audience with a look that said, ‘Eat your heart out!’ ”)
It’s only fitting that the three-time Tony winner would throw herself into writing her memoirs as well.
She knows what her audience wants.
Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero — stage name: Chita Rivera — was born in 1933, in Washington, DC.
Her beloved father, a Puerto Rican jazz musician who played saxophone and clarinet, died when Rivera was just 7.
