When Rita Moreno Slapped Cops Trying to Search Her Purse for Marijuana

UPDATE 2/06: Moreno is Star of the Month on Turner Classic Movies. Her films are being featured on Thursday evenings throughout February, including The King and I and The Vagabond King (2/9), West Side Story and Popi (2/16), and The Ritz and The Four Seasons (2/23).

Rita Moreno at age 91 remains the talented and sexy star she always was. Her movie in which she co-stars with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Sally Field as octogenarians who travel to the Superbowl, 80 for Brady, opens today. 

In the film's trailer, Moreno is shown to consume a "high dose" (presumably cannabis) drink, after which she has a bizarre "Being John Malkovich" moment wherein she wears a cat mask and imagines she is Guy Fieri. (Those are some pretty strong edibles.) 

The actress, who was the first Latina to win an Academy Award (for "West Side Story"), also consumed an edible in the rebooted series "One Day At a Time," as comic relief in Episode 5: "Nip It in the Bud," with a thoughtful script that addressed vaping, youth use, opiate addiction, and racism in the drug war. 

Turns out Moreno may have more than a passing acquaintance with marijuana. 

According to the 2002 Fordham Urban Law Journal article "Targeted Marijuana Law Enforcement in Los Angeles, 1914–1959" by Sarah Brady Siff:

In 1954, state narcotic inspectors made a high-profile arrest of jazz pianist George A. Hormel II, heir to a meat-packing fortune, who happened to be dating Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-raised actress Rita Moreno at the time. According to news reports, the agents stopped Hormel’s car in front of his house in Laurel Canyon and searched it, finding 13 marijuana cigarettes under the visor. 

Hormel then allowed the officers into his house, where Moreno was sleeping on a couch; when they woke her up and asked to search her bag, she refused, reportedly slapping and kicking one of them and demanding a search warrant. They searched her bag anyway and, finding nothing, took Hormel to jail. The following day the agents, Matthew O’Connor and John O’Grady, said they would seek to charge Moreno with impeding a felony investigation and assaulting an officer. 

Appearing at a press conference hastily arranged by her studio, the actress apologized and said the officers were not in uniform and did not show their badges. When they said they were O’Grady and O’Connor, “I thought it was a gag,” she said. The city attorney declined to file the charges sought against Moreno, but Hormel was facing up to 10 years in prison for marijuana possession, not to mention forfeiture of the “snazzy” car he had been driving that night, registered to Hormel, Inc.

At trial, Hormel testified that the narcotic agents had framed him by coercing the bassist in his three-piece jazz band, who was facing a different drug charge, to set up circumstances in which Hormel appeared to buy the joints; after Hormel’s arrest, the agents told him they would keep his case out of the public eye if he recited a confession that implicated a different man as the drug seller. Hormel was acquitted by a jury, but a few days later, someone shot a bullet hole in his living room window as he spoke on the phone.

Hormel, known as Geordie, was a rich and glamorous playboy, heir to the fortune his grandfather made with products like Spam. He claimed to have invented the corndog as a teenager, and was married four times, including to actress Leslie Caron. His brother James C. Hormel was the first openly gay man to represent the US as an ambassador.

Moreno testified for the defense at Hormel's 1955 trial, and reportedly was not permitted to answer a question about whether she had seen him smoke marijuana. In one photo from the trial, she is shown sitting next to O'Grady "dressed in a pair of tight-fitting slacks." In another (above), she seems to be posing in the witness box. The incident lead to the Pulp (Exposed?) magazine headline, "Why Rita Moreno battles the cops" featuring a photo of her cavorting in a bikini (above). 

In the excellent 2021 documentary "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It," Moreno describes how she was sexually assaulted by her agent, and nearly committed suicide over her affair with Marlon Brando. She emerges as a survivor, and an inspiration. 

Moreno's 80 for Brady co-star Lily Tomlin is a pot legalization proponent who smoked pot with Sam Elliot in Grandma. Jane Fonda, our Tokin' Woman of the Year in 2019, was great as a pot-smoking hippie grandmother in Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, and produced the 1980 film 9-5 in which she, Tomlin and Dolly Parton have an "old fashioned ladies pot party." Tomlin and Fonda toke in the Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" and are set to co-star in another old-lady caper film, Moving On. 

Sally Field recently explained that "The Flying Nun" was not filmed on LSD. Glad she cleared that up. 

The excellent article from Siff, a historian at the Drug Enforcement & Policy Center at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University cited above also covers the marijuana arrests of Lucille Armstrong, Anita O'Day, Lila Leeds, actresses Lorna Gray and Frances Faye, nightclub photographer Naomi Hunter, and models Carol Dunbar and Sandra Maazel, as part of LAPD's culture war on weed.