Bonus Clip: Rita Moreno’s "Bizarre" Golden Girls Audition [0:00-4:09]

Welcome to the Television Academy Foundations, the Interviews podcast. In a segment we're calling Golden Nuggets, we share bite-sized stories from the archive that didn't quite make it into a full episode. In this bonus clip, we hear from Egot winning legend of the stage and screen Rita Moreno. Moreno has left her mark on virtually every corner of the entertainment world. In 1987, she gets starred in the Season 2 finale of The Golden Girls. In an episode called Empty Nest, a backdoor pilot where a potential spin-off is tested inside of an existing show. That episode was later retooled into the long-running series Empty Nest. Here she takes us through her epic journey to get to that audition room and what she describes as the most bizarre audition experience of her career. She was interviewed by Marla Miller in 2000. Can I run a couple of other TV shows that she gets to don by you, such as Golden Girls? That was a spin-off. That was Empty Nest. That, another disaster, my life is filled with these things. Hindlets and I do not get along, they had to read for it. And they said, okay, you're the one, but there wasn't one smile in the room. It was the most bizarre experience. I never had an audition like that in my home. Where everybody after the reading said, thank you. And I said, oh, oh, you're welcome. Is there anything else to be said? No. Oh, dear God, well, they hated this, they hated this. I had gone through heaven and hell to audition. I was on a cruiser doing my show when this audition offer came up. And I went through the rain and sleet and snow at all kinds of stuff just to get to Hollywood, California to do this reading. Well, that's what made it so really insane. And I flew on airplanes and I took boats and I was exhausted. I came in the next day and did this reading where everybody said, thank you. So my husband calls up, but he was still in St. Thomas, where I left the ship. How did it go? I said, it was just one of the most awful experiences in my life. I got the part and I said, what is that? The kind of enthusiasm I'm going to see you want to do this thing? And what happened is that Susan Harris, the head writer, got frightfully ill during that one week we were putting the pilot together and couldn't do rewrites and it really, really, really needed rewrites badly. Paul Dooley was playing my husband and I was the lady. And every day they kept changing my character to the extent that by the time we got to do it in front of an audience, I couldn't remember line one because the attitudes had changed so many times. That was the most embarrassing experience. It was so embarrassing because the audience would start to laugh. And I was trying to make light of it. And I could not remember my lines. We must have done. I would guess about 15 takes in front of an audience who then begins to root for you and that makes it worse. And the actresses you know be and all of them are in that scene with me. And you can see the tension, the thing you can do this for you, you can do this. And nobody understands why I can't remember my lines. And it's because, and this is a peculiar actor's problem that nobody in the world but an actor can truly understand. If they keep changing your attitudes, not you, but your characters' attitudes about things, you no longer know who you're playing. And if you don't know who you're playing, the lines don't come out. Just the line of dialogue does not come out naturally. Therefore you forget them. That's what happens. I will never forget that as long as I live because Susan wasn't there to fix it. The TV is all about the fixes. Really. You can find Rita Moreno's complete interview at televisionacademyfoundation.com slash interviews. Keep listening for more stories from the archive this season on the Television Academy Foundations, the Interviews podcast.