“Like all of us,” Mary Loos remembered, “Dwan fell in love with Natalie.” Under his direction she also gave Jenny a sharp edge of reality. When she quotes the Bible, she really means it; when the virus strikes, she looks genuinely sick and frightened; and with the “ability to characterize” that Dwan noted, she dominates a cast of strangely assorted professionals, among them two friends of the veteran director: H. B. Warner (Christ in DeMille’s 1927 King of Kings) plays the preacher, and Francis Ford (brother of John) replays his familiar role of town drunk locked up for the night in the town jail. Margaret Hamilton (wicked witch of The Wizard of Oz) appears as a vinegary spinster, and Charlotte Greenwood (eccentric cartwheeling dancer of Down Argentine Way) as an amiable one; Dean Jagger (Brigham Young) plays the doctor, and Ruth Warrick (first wife of Citizen Kane) the schoolteacher he’s in love with; Walter Brennan is the town’s cantankerous old bachelor, and Jerome Cowan (Bogart’s partner, shot by Mary Astor, in The Maltese Falcon) its mayor.
Mary (Loos) Sale: When any of those actors forgot a line, Natalie knew it and prompted them right away. Nobody took offense because they knew she wasn’t trying to be clever, she was just genuinely enthusiastic and professional. At that time Natalie was tremendously happy being an actress.
And at that time, when she was only nine, Natalie’s salary averaged $3,000 a movie, slightly less or more according to the number of weeks she was employed. Ten percent of her earnings went to the developing businesswoman, another 10 percent to Famous Artists, and 5 percent to Natalie herself; the rest was invested in government bonds, to remain in a trust fund until her twenty-first birthday.
In spite of her personal success in Driftwood, Natalie didn’t work for a year after its release. Maria, who refused to accept temporary unemployment as a fact of any actor’s life, bristled with disappointment and displeasure. Natalie couldn’t fail to notice this, but the idea that Maria’s love depended on her daughter going almost immediately from one movie to the next was too painful to admit. Although she banished it to the limbo of denial, like other painful realities of her family life, Robert Wagner feels sure it created “Natalie’s drive to work.” But her agent kept Little Star in the public eye. As well as becoming a poster child for the American Cancer Society, she attended several movie premieres with Maria in proud attendance. Famous enough to have autograph books thrust in her face, Natalie was photographed arriving at Grauman’s Chinese and the Carthay Circle, pigtailed and pinafored among Joan Crawford and Ava Gardner.
As Jenny in Driftwood (illustration credit 2.6)
Although fame itself became yet another part of “normal” childhood, Natalie was still too young to realize that she was now being marketed as a valuable asset in the celebrity business. She simply found it natural for people to recognize you in person after they’d seen you many times larger than life on a movie screen.
UNTIL FOX SHUTTLED Natalie back to the world of George Seaton for her second contract picture, she attended school at Burbank Public Elementary, and ballet class at Michael Panaieff’s studio on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood.
Since 1940, Panaieff had been the reigning exiled Russian ballet teacher in Hollywood, successor to Theodore Kosloff in the 1920s, who was equally in demand by show business. Kosloff, a former member of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, had choreographed dance sequences for several Cecil B. DeMille movies. Panaieff, a former member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, partnered the British ice skater and dancer Belita (Belita Jepson-Turner in her pre-Hollywood days) in an evening of ballet at the Hollywood Bowl; played the ballet master in Hans Christian Andersen; and appeared in several other movies as a sinister or volatile Russian. The Hollywood connection was catnip to Maria, and also to the mothers of Jill St. John and Stefanie Powers; and it’s one of the many ironies of Natalie’s life that her ballet classmates should have included the third Mrs. Robert Wagner and his TV wife in Hart to Hart.
Panaieff was an exceptionally handsome and accomplished dancer, whose classes attracted Alexandra Danilova whenever the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performed in Los Angeles, and Leslie Caron after MGM signed her for An American in Paris. At his studio Natalie became friends with Robert Banas, who remembered Maria as “a watchdog” there. He danced with Natalie in several student shows as well as a local TV program, Backstage with NTG, and at Natalie’s invitation joined her on a TV game show, where “the prize went to the guest who invented the best tongue-twister. As the winning twister was fixed in advance, and Natalie knew it, I won. The prize was a pair of skates, which I didn’t want. When I told Natalie I’d rather have a camera, she persuaded the show’s MC to make an exchange.”
The San Fernando Valley was still partly ranchland when the Gurdins moved to Northridge, where Natalie first learned to ride on a palomino. She quickly became an expert horsewoman, as Banas discovered when they went riding together in Griffith Park. He also admired her skill at leaping like a kangaroo on a pogo stick: as Nick Gurdin was not athletic, perhaps Natalie had inherited a Zepaloff gene.
“After high school,” Banas recalled, “our paths diverged,” but he visited Natalie a year later on the set of Never a Dull Moment, and they met again on the set of West Side Story. By then he’d worked as a professional dancer with Jerome Robbins, who created the role of Joyboy (one of the Jets) for him in the movie version.
When Panaieff was working on a movie, Tamara Lepko replaced him, until she joined the Buckley School in 1950. Banas described her as “a wonderful woman and teacher”; Jill St. John Wagner remembered “a rather stern-looking woman with blond hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun.” Evidently Maria kept her secret well, and Irene Lepko, in high school at the time, heard not even the whisper of a rumor, then or later. The Gurdins and the Lepkos continued to spend “family” evenings together, and Maria moved Natalie to the Buckley School when Tamara began teaching there.
Michael Panaieff’s ballet class. Center, Natalie on point. Bob Banas is on her right. (illustration credit 2.7)
This was typical of Maria, compulsive giver as well as taker of risks. “She loved giving presents,” Olga remembered, “even to the extent of giving away my ballet-class tutus before I finished ballet school.” And no one could have been so reckless so often, in her personal life or at the wheel of a car, without getting a rush of adrenaline to the head.
IN LATE AUGUST 1948 Natalie reported for work on Chicken Every Sunday, adapted from a Broadway play adapted from a best-selling novel. To play the father of a large family whose addiction to disastrous investment schemes kept him on the edge of bankruptcy, and the mother whose need for security led her to the brink of divorce, George Seaton had wanted Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara. When they proved unavailable, he settled for an unlikely pair of second-string contract players at Fox, Dan Dailey and Celeste Holm. In box-office terms, it seems to have made no difference. Although set in the early 1900s, the movie’s fortune-cookie wisdom about togetherness 1940s-style ensured a popular success. But while Mom and Dad realize they have all the security they need in “loving each other,” Natalie as their youngest daughter is less well provided for. The role was sketchy; for once reviewers found little or nothing to say about her, and in later life she couldn’t remember if she ever saw it.
Although Natalie was always grateful to Seaton for Miracle on 34th Street, she was personally fonder of Mama Maureen and Edmund Gwenn, the ideal grandfather figure. She visited the wily actor in 1958 when he was stricken with cancer; and after he died, she often told a story about his almost-last words to Seaton. The director saw his pain and said very quietly, “I know it must be difficult.” “It is,” Gwenn answered. “Dying is very difficult. But not quite as difficult as playing comedy.”
A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE may not be quite as difficult as playing comedy, but you remember it for the rest of your life; and it was Natalie’s very specific and fearful memory of the movie she made immediately after Chicken Every Sunday. The provenance of The Green Promise, like the movie itself, was biz
arre. “A Glenn McCarthy Production,” it was financed by the Texas oil tycoon of that name, whose worth in 1948 was estimated at between $200 million and $400 million. As well as oil and hotels, he promoted family values and the 4-H Clubs, youth organizations that educated children of farmers in the latest agricultural skills and encouraged them to develop a code of truth telling and self-reliance. The screenplay of The Green Promise was brought to McCarthy by Robert Paige, an undistinguished leading man of undistinguished pictures (Shady Lady, Son of Dracula), and Monty Collins, former gag man for two-reel comedies in the silent era. This odd couple had presumably heard through McCarthy’s friend Howard Hughes of his interest in producing a dramatic movie that would combine family and 4-H values. In any case, they struck a deal for themselves as co-producers, and Hughes agreed to distribute the picture through RKO, in which he’d recently acquired controlling stock. To complete the first eccentric circle, William D. Russell, director of a few routine comedies, was signed at the suggestion of his friend Collins.
Casting completed the second circle. As the pigheaded farmer who ignores a 4-H warning that if he cuts down a hillside forest, erosion and dangerous slides will occur when the next storm breaks: Walter Brennan. As the nineteen-year-old daughter of the family he tyrannizes: former child actress Diana Lynn, age twenty. (But she broke her arm ten days into shooting and was replaced by Marguerite Chapman, at thirty-two a veteran of more than twenty B movies.) As the two younger daughters: Natalie and a child actress soon to disappear from movies, Connie Marshall. As the son: child actor Ted Donaldson (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), by then fifteen, whose career also had not much longer to run. And as the 4-H representative, whose romance with the eldest daughter is vetoed by her father: co-producer Paige, age thirty-nine and starting to put on weight.
A hard man with a buck, McCarthy was determined to advertise his convictions as cheaply as possible. The Green Promise required a small cast, minimal sets, simple exteriors, and a very modest splurge on the climactic storm scene. Interiors were shot on the edge of Poverty Row at Monogram Pictures, home of The Wolf Man, The Ape Man, and Night Monster; but inexperienced producers, and the delay caused by replacing Diana Lynn, meant that the picture was twice as long in production as the usual cut-rate enterprise. It began shooting on August 23, 1948, and finished six weeks later, on October 2.
What was Natalie doing in such grungy company? In spite of Maria’s later protestations (“I didn’t want her money, I came from family with money”), she expected the offers to keep rolling in. And Natalie’s agent was shrewd enough to realize that her role was the best in the picture. As the only member of the family courageous enough to stand up to her father, she would stand out from everyone else.
Although her agent proved right, the personal cost to Natalie was unforeseeably high. The climactic scene of The Green Promise occurs after Susan is told at a 4-H meeting, “The thing you do for yourself always gives you the most satisfaction.” It’s too late for anyone to save the hillside when a violent storm breaks, but not too late for Susan to rescue her two pet lambs. Darkness has fallen by the time she reaches a wooden footbridge over a formerly dry creek that’s now a torrent, surging with the debris of uprooted trees and scrub. The screenplay describes what happens next:
EXT. BANK OF CREEK—NIGHT
SUSAN faces the bridge, then, plunging blindly, runs across the trembling waters. She has scarcely reached the far bank when, with a crack of fracturing wood, the bridge gives way and is torn out of the scene by the rushing waters.
Like the director, crew and special-effects team, Maria knew that the footbridge was timed to collapse; and she agreed that Natalie mustn’t be told, because it might frighten her. On Russell’s call of “Action!” Natalie started running, but the bridge broke in half too soon. She couldn’t turn back, as the first half had disintegrated. But immediately ahead of her, a plank was suspended from the remaining half, and by clinging to it she managed to stop herself falling into the torrent below and being swept to almost certain death. Fortunately the plank held firm while she clambered to safety in driving rain and wind, and so did the rest of the bridge until she reached the opposite bank.
Russell ordered the camera to keep turning, and the shot remains in the movie. It records an expression of terror on Natalie’s face that is clearly not acted, but a naked moment of “just being herself.” Physically, her only injury was a distended wristbone. When Maria learned that surgery might not succeed in resetting the bone, she wanted to sue the production company for negligence, but was advised it could harm Natalie’s career. And for the rest of her life, Natalie concealed the protruding bone on her left wrist with a bracelet, a leather band, a long sleeve, or (when wearing a swimsuit) a flesh-colored Band-Aid.
Psychologically, she suffered more than one permanent injury, and in retrospect 1948 was Natalie’s year of ironies. The fear of dark water created by Maria widened to any expanse of water apart from a swimming pool—a bitter legacy in view of the terrible circumstances of her actual death. And when she learned that her mother had known the bridge would collapse, it added to the feelings she wasn’t yet ready to confront: anxiety and confusion about the life she’d led, or been led into, from the day she thought of her dead puppy and won the part in Tomorrow Is Forever.
The Green Promise, after the near-death experience (illustration credit 2.8)
A SIX-MONTH DELAY occurred in distributing The Green Promise after it completed production, as Glenn McCarthy wanted the premiere to coincide with the opening of his new Shamrock Hotel in Houston. The hotel wasn’t ready until late March 1949, when a not-quite-A list of star guests (including Sonja Henie, Robert Stack, Pat O’Brien, Dorothy Lamour, Robert Ryan, Van Heflin and Joan Caulfield) boarded the Shamrock Special from Union Station and were treated to dinner and an overnight stay after the movie. Two weeks later, The Green Promise was coolly received by the press, although Natalie’s performance drew the usual accolades of “natural” and “exceptionally clever.” But the movie made good money in the heartland; and by taking the moral high ground, as well as adding useful tips on farming to yet another story of family problems resolved and true love finding a way, it gained public endorsements from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Girl Scouts, the Southern California Council of Church Women—and of course the 4-H Clubs.
ALTHOUGH MARY PICKFORD was twenty-nine when she played Little Lord Fauntleroy, the usual cutoff age for a child star is around fourteen, so Natalie had four years left after The Green Promise. During that time she made nine movies, all except one produced or released by major studios. Her new screen mothers included Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis. Among her screen fathers were Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, and Bing Crosby—actors with considerably more star power than the previous trio (Robert Cummings, John Payne, Walter Brennan). One screen father and one screen mother neglected her at first but made up for it later. Two screen mothers were divorced career women. A third died and was replaced by a (loving, not wicked) stepmother.
But only one of the nine movies allowed Natalie to display more than uncomplaining professionalism; and while she spent most of her screen life in a familiar unreal world, she had time offscreen for almost another year of regular school, as well as two trips to San Francisco. A photograph taken during the late fall of 1948, when the Gurdins visited Olga and the Liuzunie family, shows Natalie looking more like the lonely orphan of Tomorrow Is Forever than the girl joyfully converted to belief in Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. But on February 20, 1949, the Gurdins attended Olga’s wedding to Alexei Viripaeff, an insurance broker, at the same Russian church on Fulton Street where Maria had married Nicholas Gurdin eleven years earlier; and this time, photographed in her bridesmaid’s gown, Natalie looks as genuinely happy as she’s supposed to be at the end of her next movie.
Her contract with Fox entitled the studio to an option for two more pictures, and it was exercised after the
success of Chicken Every Sunday. The first, Father Was a Fullback, began shooting a month after Olga’s wedding, and starred Fred MacMurray as the coach of a successful university football team. When it hits a losing streak, the situation creates problems with his wife (Maureen O’Hara) and family; and the script, written mainly by Mary Loos and Richard Sale, reworks Chicken Every Sunday. (Mary [Loos] Sale: “When you’re under contract, sometimes you have to do as you’re told.”) Although both movies are equally insignificant, the later one has more attractive leading players and gives Natalie, in her first “brat” role, a few more opportunities. As well as a black eye for defending her father, she received favorable notices in the reviews that noticed her.
The very mild commercial success of Father Was a Fullback was probably due to a director less at ease with sitcom than George Seaton. John M. Stahl, a silent-movie veteran, had reached his peak in the 1930s and early 1940s with a series of pre–Douglas Sirk emotional melodramas that culminated in Leave Her to Heaven. But George Marshall, who directed Natalie’s next movie, was a more commonplace silent-movie veteran who had reached only one peak (Destry Rides Again, 1939); and Never a Dull Moment, which began shooting in May 1949, was one of his deeper valleys.
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