There’s also a hint of Capra-esque whimsy when a friend of old Kringle’s remarks that even if he’s only pretending to be Santa, “he’s only a little crazy, like composers, painters, and some of those people in Washington.” Not so whimsical is the portrait of a psychiatrist who tries to account for the “illusion” of belief in Santa in Freudian terms. He’s put down with the comment that “there’s a lot of ‘isms’ floating around today”—a clear reference to the warming climate of anticommunism.
Miracle on 34th Street. Monkey business: Natalie, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn (illustration credit 2.4)
It had grown even warmer when Miracle on 34th Street opened in July 1947, and while the movie was still in general release, on October 20, the House Un-American Activities Committee opened its hearings in Washington. Ironically, the most ferocious witness for the prosecution was Sam Wood, the director who had supplied Natalie with her new last name, and a few months later had founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. His friend Ayn Rand, equally obsessed with the Red Menace, had written the Alliance’s book of rules, which included a list of “don’ts” that “patriotic” American filmmakers were morally bound to observe: Don’t Glorify Failure; Don’t Deify the Common Man; Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System, Success and Industrialists.
In a further irony, Irving Pichel was one of the Hollywood Nineteen that Wood accused of Communist sympathies. The committee investigated him as a case of “premature antifascism,” which it equated with communism, because he’d made an anti-Nazi film (The Man I Married, 1940) before America entered World War II, and had once played Joseph Stalin. Unlike many of the committee’s victims, who went to jail, were blacklisted or struck humiliating plea bargains and identified various colleagues as Party members, Pichel was cleared. But he developed a chronic heart condition soon afterward and was on medication until he died in 1954.
Like Maria in China, Natalie was too young to understand the ways of the great world. Although she couldn’t fail to appreciate the blatant celebration of “family values” in several of her movies from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the occasional subtext of anticommunism (and/or the Preservation of American Ideals) passed her by. But Maria had taught her the importance of flattering two powerful, implacably right-wing columnists. Both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons kept a hawkish eye on private and public lives. Hopper was the more dangerous, as she controlled a more efficient network of spies (doormen, waiters, chauffeurs, hairdressers, personal maids), and the FBI used her to leak names of suspected Communists due for investigation. During 1947, enraged by Monsieur Verdoux, she spearheaded a campaign against Charlie Chaplin’s personal, political and fiscal life that would end in his expulsion from the country. But she was also highly susceptible to cozying up, and on December 18, 1947, she wrote Natalie, on notepaper headed HEDDA HOPPER’S HOLLYWOOD: “What a darling you are, sending me that beautiful box of candy. But don’t you ever do it again. You added at least an inch to my waistline.”
Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, of course, was also Maria Gurdin’s Hollywood, as well as the Hollywood of literally hundreds of actors, directors, producers and agents who regularly sent the columnist a Christmas gift. And as a Star Mother, Maria not only had taken charge of supervising Natalie’s public relations; she reinvented herself in the process. The “Little Star Big Future” brochure noted that she was born Maria Kuleff, “a former ballerina of Franco-Russian descent,” and had taught her daughter “spiritual values.” (This information was accompanied by a “candid camera” shot by Madame Valeska of the Wonder Child at prayer.) In fact the most important “spiritual value” that Maria would teach her daughter was to mistrust anyone, especially a contemporary, who wanted to be her friend. Afraid that a true friend of Natalie’s could become her mother’s enemy, Maria insisted that neighborhood children were “no good,” and any child actor with a role in one of Natalie’s movies was “jealous” and trying “to do her in.”
Miracle on 34th Street earned Natalie another Blue Ribbon citation from Box Office; honorary membership in the Polly Pigtails Club; a trip to New York, where she appeared with Maureen O’Hara in Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade; and an offer of two more pictures from Fox. As Nick Gurdin was out of work at the time, with the usual consequences, the former-ballerina-turned-developing-businesswoman created another successful persona for herself. She instructed Natalie’s currently-in-favor agent to make the two-picture deal conditional on Fox adding Nick to its payroll as a studio carpenter and appointing her “in charge of Natalie Wood’s fan mail” at $100 a week.
Although the developing businesswoman Star Mother seemed firmly grounded in reality, she was projecting some dangerous new fantasies on her daughter. When she took Natalie to the movies, they often saw the RKO-Pathé newsreels that ended with a close shot of the camera lens aimed directly at the audience. It became the cue for Maria to whisper urgently: “Smile! You’re being photographed!” And when Natalie wondered why they always sat in back-row seats, she received a stern warning: “If you move any closer to the screen, Jack the Jabber will get you!” The Jabber, according to Maria, was a serial killer who crept up behind young girls sitting in movie theaters and knifed them in the back.
Maria also told Natalie a story that sounds like a fantasy, but according to Olga it actually happened. Out walking one day in Harbin with her half-sister Kalia, she encountered a Gypsy fortune-teller. “Beware of dark water,” the Gypsy warned Maria, and predicted she would drown in it.
The woman of her word implanted a lifelong fear of dark water in Natalie by relating the Gypsy’s warning; and the fabulist (who didn’t always know when to stop) also claimed that the Gypsy had predicted that Maria’s second daughter would become “a world-famous beauty.”
AFTER APPROVING the $800-a-week deal with Fox, Maria moved the family to a house in Northridge, fifteen miles west of Burbank in the San Fernando Valley. A year later, for reasons that Natalie never understood, she moved the family again, ten miles back east to Sherman Oaks. Each move sent Natalie to a different school, Burbank Public Elementary, Robert Fulton Junior, Van Nuys High. And each time she made a movie, her education was dislocated yet again by attending studio school at Fox, Columbia or RKO.
MEANWHILE, in June 1947, Olga had graduated from Hollywood High. With her mother totally fixated on Natalie’s career, and a studio job failing to prevent Nick from hurling insults and chairs around in one of his drunken rages, she decided to live with her father in San Francisco. By then he had a regular job with an upholstery company, and Olga returned to the city where she’s lived ever since.
The increasingly tense situation between her mother and Nick was another reason that impelled Olga to leave. Maria had recently confided that Nick “was having an affair with a Mexican woman,” which explained something that had puzzled Olga when the family was at supper one evening. The phone rang, Nick hurried to answer it, and she heard him tell the caller never to phone at that hour. Then he hung up abruptly.
On both sides, the saddest farewells were between Olga and Natalie. They had grown very close since the early days in San Francisco, when Olga used to baby-sit Natalie and change her diapers on the nights Maria and Nick went dancing. “I had taken a few baby-sitting jobs for pocket money and didn’t feel anything special,” she remembered. “But with Natalie it became something very special.” They grew even closer after Olga’s advice helped Natalie succeed in her second test for Tomorrow Is Forever, and when she drove Natalie to and from Paramount for The Bride Wore Boots during the final weeks of Maria’s pregnancy.
Olga Viripaeff: I felt really bad about abandoning Natalie when things were so bad between my mother and Nick, but I was in such a state of nerves that my hands were literally shaking, and I was in no condition to help or protect her.
With phone calls and visits to each other, the half-sisters remained close for the rest of Natalie’s life, unlike Maria and Nick with their respective families. The 1917 revolution, of c
ourse, had already splintered Zacharenkos and Zudilovs. Unlike their brother, Vladimir and Dmitri retained the family name, and visited each other more often than they visited Nick. Dmitri, increasingly reclusive in old age, reacted with a long silence when I mentioned Nick and Maria and was hardly more communicative about Natalie: “I knew her just to say hello and goodbye.”
Of the Zudilovs, Maria’s mother had died in the early 1940s, in the Russian church at Harbin. After making her confession, she knelt down to pray and suffered a fatal heart attack. Maria’s father died shortly afterward. The last news of her sister Zoya was that she’d married a Russian businessman and moved with him to Shanghai. After Japan invaded China and occupied the city, the rest was silence. The same ominous silence overtook her half-sister Lilia, who had remained in Harbin and was deported to Soviet Russia. Kalia, the only other Zudilov to leave China, settled in San Francisco with her husband; and their son Constantin remembered that the Gurdins and Liuzunies visited each other “maybe half a dozen times” in thirty years.
In the early San Francisco days, when Natasha was a baby, Olga became a target of Nick Gurdin’s drunken violence if she happened to be in the same room as Maria. Now, with Lana a baby and Olga gone, Natalie hid under her bed to avoid his outbursts. As well as fearing and dreading her father when drunk, she was confused by the Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast with his sober self. (When visitors were expected, he was always quietly charming. Constantin Liuzunie recalled that he never saw Nick drunk, and found it hard to reconcile the man he met on family visits with the stories about him.) Later, Natalie came to understand that Nick was a defeated man, humiliated by Maria’s taunts that he failed to support his family while she made Natalie Wood a star, and by the suspicion that he was not Lana’s father.
MARIA HAD ONCE hoped that Olga might become an opera singer or a pianist, and after her departure she decided that Natalie should resume the piano lessons she’d begun at the age of four and continued until she was cast in Tomorrow Is Forever. Playing the piano, her mother explained, could be even more important to an actress’s career than ballet dancing: yet another item of received wisdom in the “normal” childhood of the little trouper, who enjoyed the lessons but never found them as challenging as ballet or, most of all, acting.
Box Office editors (at left) present Natalie with the Blue Ribbon Award. Beside her, Maria, Nick and little Lana (illustration credit 2.5)
As Natalie couldn’t fit the man she believed to be her father into the pattern of what she supposed was normality, and also couldn’t help being afraid of Nick, acting became more and more a way of escape. The studio soundstage was her surest emotional refuge, where she pleased her mother (so warm and loving when pleased), was surrounded by affection and approval, and acquired the sense of pride so important to a child. And as an actress, Hollywood’s Blue Ribboned juvenile found herself living in a world where sorrows and dangers eventually dissolved, and tears were always fondly wiped away.
Between 1947 and 1949 Natalie appeared in six Fox productions, each a family picture except for the supernatural romance of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. At Fox, she also found someone whose affection and approval had nothing to do with her career. Among her teachers at the studio schoolhouse was Frances Klampt, small and trim, fortyish and God-fearing, unemotional but not unfeeling, who ten years earlier had taught Shirley Temple. As well as degrees from UCLA and USC in history, geography, math and education, Klampt had a sense of mission. She believed in the natural creativity of children, and encouraged her pupils to develop talents and interests beyond the world of the soundstage. Klampt’s extracurricular talent was for designing ceramics, some of which she kept on display in the schoolroom. When her sharp eye registered Natalie’s fascination with them, she not only encouraged her to design her own ceramics, but offered after-hours support.
Natalie gave several of her ceramics to the screen mother she called Mama Maureen. “They were small and really quite beautiful,” O’Hara remembered. “I kept them all, and took them to my house in the Caribbean, where they were blown away along with almost everything else by Hurricane Hugo.” But Klampt had aroused an interest that continued to develop after Natalie left the schoolroom.
SCUDDA HOO! SCUDDA HAY! was the first of two negligible movies Natalie made for Fox under the contract authorized by Maria. Filming began on February 24, two days after Miracle on 34th Street completed production, and the leading players in this down-on-the-farm “comedy romance” had names supposedly parodying Tobacco Road. Lon McCallister played Snug; June Haver, his girlfriend, Rad; and Natalie, his kid sister, Bean. The movie also featured Walter Brennan, two mules, and in the unlikely role of a stablehand’s girlfriend, the walk-on screen debut of Marilyn Monroe. But when the picture was released in October 1947, she’d walked off again in a twinkle.
McCallister remembered Natalie as “completely unaffected on the set, very bright but the opposite of a precocious child show-off. In a word, adorable.” In four more words, Maureen O’Hara (mother to Natalie in the 1949 Father Was a Fullback as well as Miracle on 34th Street) remembered her as “wonderful, very polite and serious.” Child actress Gigi Perreau, who worked with her twice, “liked her very much.” And Andrew J. Paris, who called himself the Bubble Gum King of America and first met Natalie on December 27, 1947, wrote her a letter that same day: “Thanks for the luncheon date that revealed to me the remarkable depth of character of a charming little girl.”
Maria, of course, was also at the luncheon, whose purpose was to make a deal for Natalie to star in a radio version of Alice in Wonderland, sponsored by the Paris Gum Corporation. It aired in late February 1948, on Mutual Broadcasting System’s Family Theatre, and President Paris expressed his appreciation by sending Alice in Radioland a case of bubble gum.
Fox hadn’t chosen Natalie’s second contract picture by the time she finished Scudda Hoo!, so Maria approved a deal to ship her to Republic Studios for a leading role in a B movie of mysterious provenance. It was her introduction to high-speed eighteen-day shooting schedules and penurious sets, and although the movie in question was homespun Americana, it had originated with two of the less fortunate emigré producers and directors from Europe, who never gained a foothold in the A world of 1940s Hollywood.
Arnold Pressburger, an emigré from Hungary by way of Britain, had managed to produce The Shanghai Gesture in 1941 for Josef von Sternberg and Hangmen Also Die in 1943 for Fritz Lang, masterly visual stylists who knew how to make the kind of picture that Variety labeled “definitely a budgeter” look relatively expensive. In 1945, Liberty magazine published Heaven for Jenny, a story set in the American heartland by Mary Loos (niece of Anita). Pressburger optioned it and commissioned a screenplay from Loos and Richard Sale, her writing partner and future husband. Did he pick such unlikely material in the hope of “Americanizing” his reputation? If so, he turned for help to the most unlikely director. Léonide Moguy (formerly Maguilevsky) was a Russian who fled to France soon after the 1917 revolution and made several films there before fleeing to America after Hitler’s army entered Paris. His work in Hollywood showed that he was no von Sternberg or Lang; its highest (or least low) point was Whistle Stop, a toothless and obviously frugal gangster movie with George Raft and Ava Gardner in her first starring role.
After unsuccessfully shopping Heaven for Jenny around for more than a year, Pressburger managed to unload it, although not himself or Moguy, on Republic. Among the directors under contract to the studio was Allan Dwan, a silent-movie veteran and a favorite of Republic’s owner, Herbert Yates. (He had directed Vera Hruba Ralston, Yates’s girlfriend and a former Ice Capades skater, in a couple of pictures that came reasonably close to turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse.) Dwan, who had also worked very amicably on a movie written by Loos and Sale the previous year, liked Heaven for Jenny well enough to accept Yates’s proposal that he direct it. It’s not known who decided to change the title to Driftwood, and no producer is listed on the credits, although studio worksheets name Dwan
as associate producer as well as director.
Dwan shot the picture between May 15 and June 2, 1947, and Republic’s chronic need for quick returns actually bundled it into general release a month before Scudda Hoo! All the same, it allowed Natalie to reveal more depth of character than in most of her major studio productions. Fiercely independent-minded, but at the same time eager to trust other people and consequently very vulnerable, Jenny was the childhood role closest to Natalie’s childhood self. But she didn’t realize it until she was an adolescent and had learned how to make the leap from “Let’s Pretend” to Stanislavsky during Rebel Without a Cause.
Working with Moguy, a refugee from the Russian Revolution like Natalie’s parents, would have been a strange coincidence with dire results. Luckily, another kind of coincidence preempted it. B-movie economics, combined with the good working relationships between Yates and Dwan, and Mary Loos and Dwan, placed Natalie in the hands of a shrewd and inventive craftsman. Dwan had been Gloria Swanson’s favorite director and, more significantly, had given thirteen-year-old Jane Peters (later Carole Lombard) and fourteen-year-old Ida Lupino their first screen roles. “Mary Loos discovered some information about a virus carried by squirrels that hits people … and that intrigued her,” he said twenty years later, discussing Driftwood in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich. “What intrigued me … was the ability of the child we found—little Natalie Wood. She had a real talent for acting, an ability to characterize and interpret, and … she was a natural.”
Orphaned again, from the backwoods instead of post–World War II Europe, Natalie’s Jenny is brought up by her grandfather, a hellfire preacher. But he soon dies, and she’s left on her own with her beloved collie (shades of Lassie), until they’re both adopted by an idealistic small-town doctor. A Little Miss Fix-It in the Shirley Temple mold, Jenny has acquired from her grandfather a repertory of judgmental biblical quotes for every situation. At first she finds almost everyone in the town insincere and hypocritical, but changes her mind after she almost dies from the squirrel virus. A wonder drug discovered by the doctor and the townsfolk’s all-night prayer vigil outside her window combine to save her. As a result, she fervently endorses small-town life: “It’s not Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s heaven. That’s what it is. It’s just heaven!” Miracle on 34th Street did good business by coupling faith with good business, and Driftwood did the same by giving its seal of approval to a merger of faith and pharmacology.
Natalie Wood Page 6
