Rita Moreno Will Give Herself a Workout at Appearances

You expect the trappings of Tinseltown when you arrive at the home of the only female star to have snagged the Fabulous Four: the Oscar, the Tony, the Emmy (twice) and the Grammy.

The gleaming awards will be poised on a mantel, no doubt, and photographs tracking her sensational career will be everywhere.

Bite your tongue.

In Rita Moreno’s home in Pacific Palisades, the trophies are tucked away in a dim alcove in the recreation room and family photographs are spread, helter-skelter, atop a living room cabinet.

Here, you get art--oils, watercolors, sculpture, pottery, hand-turned silver--and you get Moreno, dressed down in a black leotard and white denim jacket with a kerchief in her hair.

“I think it’s self-serving,” she says of celebrity homes crammed with self-portraits. “I get embarrassed when I go to an actor or actress’s home and it’s filled with pictures of them.”

It’s important to keep in touch with the inner voice, she says, the one that reminds you to stay tuned to reality--”that life is not a dress rehearsal,” she says.

Enter her first exercise video, the one she will bring to Newport Beach next month. She will appear at the Four Seasons Hotel on behalf of the Design Alliance to Combat AIDS and the South Coast chapter of the International Furnishing & Design Assn. (IFDA), which raises funds for the homeless.

“My video has a lot to do with the inside of a woman,” says Moreno, who will exercise in the hotel’s fitness center three times on Feb. 20 (the public is welcome at $45 per session). “Usually, exercise videos refer to exteriors only ,” she says. “They never talk to a woman where she lives--in her heart and soul. I do that at the beginning and end of mine.”

Moreno’s local workout is part of “With Style: A Collective Consciousness,” a fund-raising series coordinated by IFDA and the Design Alliance to Combat AIDS, says its chairwoman, Sandra Charbogne of Laguna Beach. The benefits, which have included a luncheon with manners expert Letitia Baldridge, will culminate in a black-tie dinner and fashion show at Bistango restaurant in Irvine on April 27.

“Raising funds for the homeless seemed like a natural for people in interior design,” says Charbogne, whose company, Furniture Fashions, uses fashion concepts to dress up furniture pieces. “Our local creative community has some dues to pay back.”

When Charbogne began to plan, she thought of the indefatigable Moreno, 59 now, and sent the performer a letter inviting her to become a member of “With Style’s” advisory committee. Moreno agreed. Then, Charbogne saw Moreno on television talking about her new video and invited her to help create a benefit that would showcase healthy people raising funds for people who may have lost their health.

Moreno said yes again. “If they think I can help, I’m their girl,” Moreno says, sipping hot peach tea in her newly renovated gourmet kitchen. “I was one of the first to do a benefit for AIDS in public seven years ago at the Hollywood Bowl--before Liz Taylor made it fashionable,” she says. “As a doctor’s wife, I am doubly aware of the dangers and tragedies of this plague that has beset us.”

Moreno has been married to Dr. Leonard Gordon 25 years now. “Twenty-six years in June,” she says, proudly. They have one daughter.

Recently, the couple went house hunting in Laguna Niguel.

“We went looking for a beach place,” Moreno says, huge brown eyes getting wide “but, prices are so high .”

“But that’s not going to keep us from visiting. I love Laguna Niguel. It’s the closest thing to Big Sur. You’ve got the cliffs, the sea. We stay at a bed and breakfast and go to the Ritz-Carlton for afternoon tea. I’m an afternoon tea maven. I can tell you who has the best tea in every country.”

Life is good, Moreno says. “I live in the moment. The moment is the most important thing. That’s my entire philosophy: Make the best of the good moments.”

And what bad moments could possibly have beset the actress/singer/dancer who has won everything? “I would love to have been Meryl Streep in terms of the performing side of me,” she says, almost in a whisper. “Not her , but her choices.

“Her career choices would have been wonderful. Not having those kinds of choices is one of those difficult things that happen when you don’t look like that.”

Meanwhile, there’s an occasional movie (watch for “Life in the Food Chain”), another exercise video in the works, and a steady stream of private concert engagements. “I do tons of corporate concerts around the country,” she says. “Just call me Rita Concerts Moreno.”