Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  The movie itself has a few sharply written scenes that survive blunt direction; effective when she holds back, Davis verges on self-parody when she lets rip. And Natalie’s insipid role is apparent from her first line of dialogue, when Davis pays her a surprise visit: “Oh, Mother, Mother! I have the most beautiful mother in the world!” But by now she can fall back on more than uncomplaining professionalism. The awkward age over, a swimsuit reveals her perfect figure, and although not yet a beauty, she’s more than pretty, with the “elusive” and “insidious” grace that Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert found in his Lolita.

  Friedlob had raised money for The Star on a distribution guarantee from Fox, whose publicity department devised a slogan for its release during Christmas week of 1952: “She Was a Star from Start to Finish When She Finally Became a Woman.” In the 1950s, of course, becoming a woman meant becoming a wife and mother, so Margaret Elliot surrenders her fantasy of a glamorous comeback to marriage with her patient, down-to-earth lover, and grants her daughter’s wish for security and a normal family life.

  LIKE HER FIRST MOVIE, Natalie’s education in the actual world had begun as a test of strength. At Burbank Public Elementary, Maria had made sure that she maintained her “Little Star Big Future” image, and in a new pinafore dress, with new ribbons in her pigtails, Natalie seemed absurdly out of date. Nine-year-old girls in her class were wearing sweaters or blouses and skirts; prepubescents in higher grades styled their hair; a few teenagers wore lipstick; and most students were as impatient to grow up as Maria was determined that Natalie remain an eternal Child of the Year.

  Although not unfriendly, her classmates kept a distance from the strange little girl taught by her mother to curtsy when introduced to her teachers; and her first sustained contact with life beyond a studio stage made the strange little girl realize, as Natalie said later, that she and her mother had been “living on an island,” and that kids in the actual world behaved very differently from kids (and parents) in her movies.

  By the time she transferred to Robert Fulton Junior High in the winter of 1950–51, Natalie had persuaded her mother to let her wear a sweater and skirt. Less than a month later, her agents transferred her to Paramount for ten days’ work as a supporting brat in Dear Brat and added almost $2,000 to the Gurdins’ bank account. And toward the end of 1951 she developed a crush on the son of a dairy farmer, a student named Jim Williams.

  After Natalie died, more than one man cast himself as her first love, but only Williams claimed the role of her first lover. In the Williams version, their affair began soon after Natalie transferred as a sophomore to Van Nuys High in January 1953; and toward the end of the year, when Maria discovered that he’d taken her daughter’s virginity, she made Natalie desperately unhappy by insisting the lovers must never see each other again. The reason for a lack of credibility here begins with Olga’s denial that the affair had become so “intense” (as Williams claimed) that Natalie phoned her for advice: “Natalie never told me that she was in love with any boy at this time. I had one call from her to say she’d decided to break up with a boy she’d been dating called Jim Williams, wanted to give him a ring as a parting present, and could I lend her the money as she’d spent her allowance that month. I sent her about twenty dollars.” Olga was equally certain that Natalie and Williams were never lovers: “After I went to live in San Francisco I stayed in close touch with my mother, who called regularly and often very dramatically with family news. If she’d found out Natalie had lost her virginity, the call would have been very dramatic indeed. Besides, Natalie made it very clear to me that it was her own decision not to see this boy anymore.”

  DURING HER SOPHOMORE YEAR, Natalie had two experiences (neither of them with Jim Williams) that would affect her whole life. The first was her discovery of various gaps in her education. Eager to catch up on any subjects that interested her (art, drama, history), she learned quickly, and would never lose her appetite for knowledge. And because learning, like acting, appealed to her sense of pride, she made a private resolution to graduate from Van Nuys High.

  The second experience was the mutation of a child star into a former child star, who knew that the Gurdins had never been on the same planet as the happy-ever-after families she’d pretended to belong to in so many movies. Another warning signal flashed in 1953 when Famous Artists sold her to TV for Playmates, an episode of Schaefer Century Theatre. Nineteen-year-old Bonita Granville, a former child star (These Three) with a foundering adolescent career, got solo top billing. Fourteen-year-old Natalie, her career on the brink of foundering, was featured in smaller letters below.

  Another thing she knew: all those Children of the Year and growing girls she’d played, and believed in, and won praise for making so “natural,” now felt like somebody else. As for her real self, with all those false selves accumulating inside her over the past eight years, she had never been allowed the time or opportunity to discover it.

  But she couldn’t know, of course, that she was just two years away from the movie role that would introduce her to herself. If you accept Jung’s belief that coincidence may be more than a chance event, this movie becomes a startling example of screen life and personal life making instant and far-reaching contact. Most obviously, Natalie will play a high-school teenager who rebels against her family at the same time as Natalie the high-school teenager begins to rebel openly at home. Less obviously, by introducing Natalie to her first two lovers, the movie will release a sexual drive that colors the rest of her life; and its director and leading actor will unlock the door to her future as an actress.

  Meanwhile, although Natalie also knew that ambition had deformed her mother’s life, she didn’t yet know how to deal with the situation. Their relationship was already tragic, with Natalie aware of how much she owed to a mother who could be wonderfully loving and formidably angry; and she was torn between a need to love her and a need to repress the reasons for not loving her. It was the kind of relationship that could only become more tragic, until her mother’s urge to control (which Maria herself was unable to control) would force Natalie to put a terminal distance between them.

  The situation with Nick was less complex, in spite of his sometimes terrifying physical violence. At least she had witnessed his other side: his love of reading, the emotion in his voice when he talked about the suffering that the Russian Revolution caused his family, the look of mingled respect and sadness on his face when he showed her the iconic portrait of Tsar Nicholas II.

  But Maria’s emotional violence was the more dangerous, to herself as well as to Natalie. It gradually overpowered her other side; and like anyone with consuming obsessions, Maria could never let go—not only of her daughter, but of her romance with the Captain and the life of intrigue it obliged and excited her to lead. And when she thought it important, the “con artist” could also put on a great show of charm, respectability and distinction as the “former ballerina of Franco-Russian descent,” and even convince Maureen O’Hara that “she wasn’t a stage mother at all.”

  Until her memory began to fail, Maria would tell anyone willing to listen that her own unswerving determination was mainly responsible for making Natalie a star. It’s one of her claims with more than a grain of truth; but Maria could never admit (and never understand) that she was also mainly responsible for Natalie’s deepest, most persistent fears.

  3

  Growing Pains

  One day, at Big Sur, we sat looking at the ocean, and I told Natalie: “The ocean’s always seemed to me like a huge rocking chair or a cradle. It always soothes me.” And Natalie said: “Don, I’ve never been able to make friends with the ocean.”

  —DONFELD

  ON THE LAST WEEKEND of August 1981, MGM chartered a private bus to take director Douglas Trumbull, producer John Foreman and three members of the cast of Brainstorm from Los Angeles to the Esalen Institute near Big Sur on the Pacific coast. The cast members were Natalie, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson (but not Christopher Walken, who wa
s detained in New York), and Natalie had asked her friend Donfeld, costume designer on the movie, to accompany her.

  Near the end of the journey she glanced out the window at a solitary house overlooking the ocean and suddenly remembered herself as a child of eight playing Gene Tierney’s daughter in a hoop skirt. “I’m sure that’s the house they used for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” she said. Now forty-three, Natalie was about to play the wife of a scientist who invented a “sensory experience” machine that enabled its user to relive, and be transformed by, a key personal experience from the past.

  Trumbull, who had devised the special effects for 2001 and Star Trek, was interested in a seminar at the institute on the “death and rebirth” experience, and hoped to get some ideas from its slide-show illustrations of images from ancient Greek, Egyptian and Mesoamerican cultures. The seminar also included supervised group exercises in accelerated breathing and deep meditation, which Natalie didn’t attend. In fact, she had been unsure what to expect, as a visit to Esalen twelve years earlier had provided Paul Mazursky with a point of departure for his comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, his first feature film and Natalie’s last successful one.

  Another ideal screen mother, gravely but bravely ill: Margaret Sullavan, with ideal husband Wendell Corey and daughter Natalie in No Sad Songs for Me (illustration credit 3.1)

  But Stanislav Grof and his wife, Christina, who created the seminar, and the illustrated lecture that she attended with Donfeld, made a deep impression on her. A former assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and researcher for the U.S. government into LSD as a therapeutic drug, Grof had also explored the spiritual disciplines of Zen, Siddha Yoga, and Native American and Mexican shamans. By the time he became scholar-in-residence at Esalen, he was no longer interested in drug therapy, and like Christina he disassociated himself from the current fads of New Age, a phrase that she pronounced to rhyme with “sewage.”

  The slide-show images, according to Stanislav, “reflected the night journey of the self to the underworld, and its return.” For Natalie they proved an unexpectedly helpful experience, not only on account of a scene that she’d have to play in Brainstorm, but because of her own personal night journeys over the years, and of the death of Nick Gurdin a few months earlier. The images also stirred thoughts of “facing mortality,” and she told the Grofs that when the movie began shooting in a month’s time on location in Raleigh, North Carolina, she would like to invite them to visit her for a private talk.

  Although the ocean had always seemed unfriendly, as Natalie told Don when they took an afternoon walk before the lecture, then sat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, a swimming pool never aroused the same fear. But during that weekend at Esalen, he remembered, she not only had the pool lights turned on an hour before sunset while she exercised in the water to firm her waistline; she asked Don to hold out a small brick and clutched it tightly with one hand.

  Fear of dark waters, of course, had haunted Natalie since the age of ten, and extended to the ocean after Maria confided that the Gypsy’s warning made her so afraid of it that she refused to learn to swim. But lately both these fears had intensified, like the fear of betrayal that was first aroused by Maria’s complicity in the secret of the bridge timed to collapse during the storm scene in The Green Promise. Also more pronounced now was the occasional flicker of anxiety and unrest in Natalie’s eyes. As an actress, it had always given her a touch of mystery; as an adult, it became a secret warning signal from the buried child, whose need for love was in perpetual conflict with the fear of love betrayed.

  Or lost. The child had occasionally made a friend on a movie set, but friendship ended when shooting ended. The closer you got, it seemed, the more you had to lose; and as Natalie the adolescent grew increasingly wary of getting too close to people, she was left with no long-lasting relationships outside her far-from-happy family.

  Maria always acted on her feelings, but Natalie often kept them to herself, partly because she had no close childhood friend to confide in, partly because her feelings about her mother would have been too troubling to confide. Not surprisingly, after years of inward solitude, adult Natalie found it difficult to express her deepest emotions. When they were too strong to hold back, they could emerge in an outburst of hysteria, and when she felt betrayed, the wound and the anger were correspondingly, unforgettably deep.

  Another fear that haunted Natalie for many years was Maria’s warning about the serial killer who prowled movie theaters and knifed young girls in the back. As a teenage actress under contract to Warner Bros., she only felt safe watching movies in one of the studio’s screening rooms, or at premieres with armed security guards in evidence. But fear as a reproductive organism is often indiscriminate. After psychoanalysis helped Natalie exorcise Jack the Jabber, a relatively trivial danger connected with movie theaters replaced him. When Natalie Wood the star wanted to see a movie during its regular run, she feared the humiliation of being turned away at the box office if the house was full, and either notified the theater in advance to reserve seats or asked the friend she was with to notify the manager that he was escorting Miss Wood.

  In her late teens she also developed a fear of flying, although it wasn’t until 1970 that she actually refused to board a plane for a few years. And another serious fear lodged in her mind after Natalie became a wife and mother. On Halloween, many of the privileged children of Beverly Hills were only allowed to tour the neighborhood in their trick-or-treat costumes under the protective supervision of armed security guards, and sometimes a police car cruising alongside. Returning home one evening to the house on North Canon Drive where she lived with her husband Robert Wagner, Natalie witnessed one of those bizarre processions. It aroused an immediate fear that her own children might be kidnapped, and she acted on it right away by ordering the latest, most elaborate security system for the house, as well as bulletproof walls and windows for the children’s bedrooms upstairs.

  In seeking assurance that the world of her marriage and family was safe, whatever dangers might exist in the world outside, Natalie was responding to another signal from the buried child. It’s now a commonplace that popular movies have a unique power to absorb and transform reality. But for the child actor as opposed to the audience, their power is even greater and more insidious. During her earliest, most impressionable years, Natalie spent much of her time on studio sets that were wonderfully convincing facsimiles of the world outside, populated by equally convincing facsimiles of ideal mothers, sisters, fathers and father figures. It was in their company that she felt most secure, admired and loved, until she grew up and never entirely forgot the shock of discovering a world outside that only looked uncannily like its studio facsimile. It might not be Sodom or Gomorrah, but it certainly wasn’t heaven; “success as a human being” was not everybody’s idea of the most important kind of success; and even if “the thing you do for yourself always gives you the most satisfaction,” there was no guarantee that you’d be allowed to do it.

  An adult movie star has at least two selves, a private one (if he or she is in touch with it) and a public image created by the roles he or she plays. In Natalie’s case there was a third image, imposed on her by Maria. By supervising Natalie’s publicity, especially in relation to her family background, Maria succeeded in fabricating a persona (former ballerina, exemplary mother) for herself; and Natalie felt obliged to validate it. In public, Maria’s eye was always on the photo opportunity to pose lovingly beside her daughter; and when interviewed about her childhood, Natalie kept up the pretense by thanking her parents for making it so wonderfully “normal.”

  But by the time she lay in the pool at Esalen, lights switched on although there was still an hour of sunlight left, one hand clutching the brick held out by Donfeld, the old fears and denials, some half-remembered or half-forgotten, a new fear about the state of her career, grief over the death of a supposed father she had come to love, overdependence on alcohol and sleeping pi
lls—all these things had sent Natalie on one of the longest night journeys of her life. In the past those journeys had been interrupted by stopovers of great happiness; and the memory of them allowed her to retain a zest for life, as well as her sense of humor, even on that late afternoon at Esalen when she was secretly fighting a state of panic almost as extreme as the never-forgotten moment when she clung for dear life to a shattered bridge above a raging torrent.

  IN THE ABSENCE of any movie offers by May 1953, several months after The Star opened, Natalie’s current agent again sold her to TV; and in a deal approved by Maria, the fourteen-year-old former child star would earn $400 an episode for twenty-six episodes of a sitcom. Back in the best of all possible domestic worlds as a cute airheaded teenager, she completed the entire series of The Pride of the Family during the summer, rehearsing and recording each episode in two days. The show premiered on October 2, and although no copies appear to have survived, its reviews (like those of Playmates) suggest that there’s no reason to send out a search party. But at least Natalie found another congenial screen mother in Fay Wray, unjustly relegated to a footnote in film history as the beautiful screamer in King Kong’s paw, instead of acknowledged for her touching performance in von Stroheim’s Wedding March. Wray not only admired her screen daughter’s “uncanny ability,” but sympathized with Natalie’s restless impatience to be allowed to grow up.

  In fact, there was another reason for the teenage veteran’s impatience. The idea of acting as escape had begun to give way to the idea of acting as drudgery, and her next chore did nothing to change her mind.

  The TV series was not renewed for a second year, and in the spring of 1954 an offer from Warner Bros. returned Natalie to the big screen, now bigger than ever before. The success of Quo Vadis?, with a script officially blessed by Pope Pius XII, had inspired a revival of the religious epic on a scale of DeMille-times-ten; and although each epic was publicized with sanctimonious references to the importance of faith, its true faith lay in the anamorphic CinemaScope lens as a way to aggrandize spectacle and recover audiences lost to TV. Warner Bros.’ first entry in the Christian sweepstakes was The Silver Chalice, adapted from Thomas B. Costain’s best-selling novel. Paul Newman made an unhappy film debut in the leading role of the silversmith who designed the cup that Christ passed to his disciples at the Last Supper, and that subsequently disappeared; and Natalie (with fourteenth billing) played Helena, a teenage slave girl who grows up to become Virginia Mayo.