Rita Moreno Recalls Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando Love Triangle

Rita Moreno had her reasons for dating Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando with a slight overlap.

“I’m going with Marlon Brando,” Moreno, 92, said on the Thursday, November 21, episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers, stressing it wasn’t a full-fledged relationship. “Well, going with because it was, like, eight years on and off. So, one time, I find a lady’s underwear in his house and I go home brokenhearted, hurt, angry [and] just destroyed.”

She added, “I should have known better, but I didn’t.”

The next day, Moreno received a phone call from Colonel Parker, Presley’s longtime manager.

“He says, ‘I handle Elvis Presley and he saw you in the restaurant of the 20th Century Fox and he liked what he saw,’” Moreno recalled, adding a fake Southern drawl as Parker had. “You know, he liked brunettes and I was brunette then, and I said, ‘Yeah?’ He said, ‘Well, he’d like very much to meet you. Would you like to meet him?’”

Moreno subsequently “thought of the underwear” she found at Brando’s house and decided to accept Presley’s offer.

“Marlon found out and went crazy because, of course, despite the underwear in his house, he was entitled, I was not,” the Oscar winner continued. “He asked me to come over and he was in a rage. … We’d been going out, at that point, for six years together and he said, ‘How dare you?’ and he’s carrying on like he’s completely innocent. The best part is he’s so angry, he started to throw chairs. It was wonderful.”

Moreno and Brando, who died in July 2004, were together on and off between 1954 and 1962.

“He and I had had a relationship for almost eight years. Ultimately, it was exciting to be with Marlon,” she previously recalled during a 2022 Actors on Actors interview for Variety. “Oh, my God, it was exciting. He was extraordinary in many, many ways, but he was a bad guy. He was a bad guy when it came to women. I was such a different person then. I had all the makings of a doormat.”

She added, “I could read him like a book and that’s why he loved me, and that’s why he mistreated me in so many ways.”

Three years after their breakup, Moreno married doctor Leonard Gordon and went on to welcome their daughter, Fernanda. They were together until Gordon’s death in 2010.

Presley, of course, has had his own star-studded dating history. He was also married to Priscilla Presley for six years and they shared daughter Lisa Marie. Elvis died in 1977 at the age of 42.