Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  Nick’s friend Robert Ryan recommended his former voice teacher Nina Moise, a retired theater actress who had also coached Rita Hayworth. As well as exercises to develop vocal resonance, Moise gave her students a crash course in psychology: “Actors must learn to listen not just with their ears. Listening is the impact of mind on mind.” And if an actor only learns to look as if he’s listening, she explained, his voice will sound self-conscious.

  Although Natalie studied with Moise for only six weeks before shooting started, she was once again quick to learn. In Rebel Without a Cause her voice is more varied in tone than before; and although not always as expressive as her face, it avoids the occasional lapses of a Joan Crawford or a Lana Turner, whose elocution lessons caused them to fail the Moise test: “In the best speech, you are not aware that an actor’s voice is trained.”

  Essentially, Moise taught that speech and body language depend on more than external skill and that “the impact of mind on mind” involves an actor’s sense of his character’s inner reality. This was something very much in the current Hollywood air. “The early 1950s,” Stewart Stern remembered, “were an exciting time, with all those new young actors coming out from New York—from the Actors Studio, Stella Adler’s classes, theater, live TV. Nobody had talked about ‘truth’ and ‘preparation’ on a movie set before.” Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Julie Harris and Eva Marie Saint were among the new avatars. All had worked at least once for Kazan; Nick Ray had once worked as Kazan’s assistant. And nine years after winning an award as “The Most Talented Juvenile Picture Star of 1946,” Natalie had her first induction into the rites of that world.

  A MONTH BEFORE Rebel Without a Cause was due to start shooting, when Nick Ray had still not cast the role of Plato, several young actors answered a casting call for two minor roles. Among them was sixteen-year-old Sal Mineo, a former child actor on Broadway. Nick had considered only one other juvenile actor, Billy Gray (who’d played “Bud” in Father Knows Best) for the part; and as well finding that Mineo “looked more like a Plato than Billy Gray,” his looks and personality reminded Nick of his own son Tony, “a Plato of sorts.” After Mineo auditioned at the Chateau Marmont, and improvised a scene with James Dean, Nick tested him at the studio on March 16; and this time he played a scene with Dean and Natalie on the set of the deserted mansion.

  Rebel Without a Cause. Sal Mineo, James Dean and Natalie form a triangle in the deserted mansion. (illustration credit 3.3)

  James Dean and Natalie huddle on the deserted mansion set as Nick Ray watches. (illustration credit 3.4)

  At the suggestion of a Warner Bros. executive, Nick first tested another actor that day, and sixteen-year-old Richard Beymer remembered him as “gruffly unhelpful because he didn’t want me.” Nor did Beymer want the part, “because I was so much taller than James Dean, and we’d have looked ludicrous together.” But he vividly recalled the Nick Ray–James Dean–Natalie–Dennis Hopper “gang” on the set: “I was completely unfamiliar with the kind of improvisation they were into. Dean kept changing his moves; suddenly I couldn’t find him—he’d gone halfway up the staircase. And Natalie gave me no help either. Dennis Hopper was around, although not in the scene, and the four of them were always whispering together, schmoozing, whatever. I was the outsider.”

  It was “a disastrous experience” for Beymer, who left the studio determined “to learn how to deal with that kind of acting,” but a success for Sal Mineo, who began rehearsing several scenes with Natalie and James Dean in the living room of Nick Ray’s bungalow the next day. Nick had asked the art director (Malcolm Bert) to design the living room of Jim Stark’s parents as a replica of his own; and this enabled the three actors to work out their moves, as well as explore the script, as if they were on the actual set. Nick also encouraged them to improvise as well as rehearse, and recorded the results on audio tape. Then, as Natalie explained at the American Film Institute seminar, they listened to playbacks: “That was the first time I’d been exposed to that kind of work, because I had worked for many years as a child, and most directors never asked me my opinion, my thoughts. The less they heard from me, the better. And suddenly Nick Ray began saying, ‘What do you think?’ He would encourage me, and get annoyed if I didn’t bring in lots of notes or ideas, or even changes of dialogue, or I didn’t challenge certain scenes.”

  To rehearse the night scene in the deserted mansion, Nick moved his three actors to the soundstage at Warners and filmed the final rehearsal in black-and-white. A copy of it preserved by the studio reveals an almost exact blueprint for the scene as it appears in the movie. The actors reworked a few untidy improvised details, but duplicated all the important moves.

  Asked about Nick’s method of work with actors, Natalie said he never talked in “conceptual” or abstract terms: “He always felt it was important to know a lot personally about the actor, so that at a given moment, if he needed something in a scene, he might say something not totally relevant to it, but relevant to the person.”

  During rehearsals, Natalie also learned something important from Dean: “He told me to relax before playing an emotional scene. It seemed like a contradiction, but it worked.” She found the same contradiction in Dean as a person: “He seemed very introspective and quiet, but he was always very accessible and friendly.” And perhaps because she was so fascinated by his talent, or “perhaps because I was too young,” she was never aware of the “doomed self-destructive figure that many people see.” But she did become aware that he was an emotional loner, “intensely determined,” as Nick Ray said, “not to be loved or love.”

  Like everyone else connected with the movie except Nick Ray and the Warner executives, Natalie never knew that on March 25, five days before Rebel Without a Cause was due to start shooting, Dean suddenly vanished. He couldn’t be reached at his New York apartment (a one-room fifth-floor walkup); his agent and various friends claimed not to know his whereabouts; and the Warner executives began consulting with Nick about a replacement, as well as talking among themselves about suing Dean for breach of contract.

  A ritual of Stewart Stern’s friendship with Dean was that they always imitated an animal sound instead of saying hello when they met. Three days after the disappearance, Stewart’s phone rang, and a moo from a cow came over the line; he mooed a greeting in return. Then Dean said: “I’m not sure I should do this movie, because I’m not sure I can trust Nick.”

  Although East of Eden had not yet opened, Dean had seen it at a couple of private screenings, and compared his experience with Kazan, whom he trusted completely, with his doubts about Nick: “ ‘I have to trust who I’m with,’ Jimmy said. ‘Remembering Kazan, am I making a mistake to do this movie?’ I told him, ‘I can’t answer that.’ In fact I could understand Jimmy’s doubts, because I’d had my own problems with Nick. ‘But I can’t take the responsibility of saying you should or you shouldn’t,’ I said.”

  Stewart never told anyone at the studio about this, and heard nothing more from Dean until a day or two later, when he finally decided to take the risk and appeared at the studio in time for his first call. The reason for his doubts, he told Stewart, was that Nick kept changing his mind about the direction of a scene, but never explained why, unlike the highly articulate Kazan, always in charge and always sure of what he wanted. “I understood this all too well,” Stewart remembered, because he’d been disturbed by the way Nick would profess complete satisfaction with a scene in the script, then ask the actors to ignore it and improvise instead. This led to several changes that Stewart protested and a few more that he discovered too late. Unwilling to become involved in any problems between Dean and Nick, he stayed away from the set.

  Natalie and James Dean at play between setups (illustration credit 3.5)

  Natalie and James Dean at rest between setups (illustration credit 3.6)

  Perhaps no movie that communicated so directly with audiences, especially the young, emerged from so many conflicts in the making. To Dennis Hopper, it often
seemed that Dean was “the real director of Rebel, and controlled every scene he was in.” To Natalie it seemed that Nick got everything he wanted from Dean because “he absolutely understood him, and Jimmy reminded Nick of himself a great deal.” I remember Nick saying the same thing to me a year or two later; but similarities can create friction as well as rapport. Dennis remembered that Nick once called “Cut!” when Dean thought it premature, and the actor turned on him. “I’m the only one who says fucking ‘Cut’ here!”

  To arrive at the heart of a scene, actor and director both liked to explore it from different angles; and if Dean suddenly became unsure about the angle they’d agreed upon, he refused to shoot the scene until he’d thought it over. Nick understood this, and before calling “Action!” he always waited for Dean to signal that he was ready. In one way this validates Dennis Hopper’s impression that Dean “controlled every scene he was in,” but in another it confirms Natalie’s belief that Nick controlled Dean’s performance because “he absolutely understood him.”

  As deeply introverted loners, distrustful of all authority (but especially studio executives), hungry for love but wary of involvement, both Nick and Dean took refuge in self-dramatization. Nick liked to confuse and unnerve strangers with long, mysterious silences. Dean preferred to disconcert them by turning a cartwheel when he entered a room. But of all the misunderstandings that occurred before and during the shoot, the most ironic was that Dean felt he could trust Kazan, while Kazan had warned Nick that he’d found Dean surly and narcissistic on East of Eden and advised against using him on Rebel Without a Cause.

  AS WELL AS CROSS-PURPOSES, erotic crosscurrents developed on the set. The “threesome” situation described by Dennis began with “the three of us often having dinner together,” but soured when Maria “somehow found out about it. She knew about Natalie and Nick, didn’t like it, but kept quiet because he was the director. But she made a fuss about Natalie and me to an executive at the studio, and I was told to lay off.”

  After the tabloid magazine Confidential first appeared on newsstands in 1952, and proceeded to expose the alleged sexual intrigues and kinks of Joan Crawford, Frank Sinatra, Lizabeth Scott, Ava Gardner and beloved Lana Turner, Maria became increasingly alarmed by the power of scandal. Throughout her life she suffered from nightmares, and perhaps one of them was about an exposure of teenage Natalie’s simultaneous affairs with Nick Ray and Dennis Hopper. She certainly attempted to lessen that danger by eliminating Dennis.

  “Maria never mentioned Nick to the executive, and he came out pure as snow,” Dennis recalled. “I resented this, and showed it.” On the night that Nick shot the famous “chicken run” (drag race) scene, the tension between them neared breaking point when Nick impatiently dismissed a question from Dennis about the way he was being directed: “I accused him of taking it out on me because of the situation with Natalie, and warned him we were heading for a fight. Nick said it was time I started using my mind as well as my fists if I wanted to become a serious actor, and ordered me off the set. That’s when I stopped being aggressive.”

  Another crosscurrent developed when Sal Mineo echoed the character he played by becoming strongly attracted to Dean. Both Dean and Nick were aware of it; and Nick, who was also aware of Dean’s bisexuality, asked him to “use” it in their scenes together. Accordingly, Dean told Mineo “to look at me the way I look at Natalie,” and a subtle erotic tension develops when the screen threesome spend a night in the deserted mansion. Mineo’s Plato glances longingly at Dean’s Jim Stark, who gives him a quick smile with an undercurrent of flirtation, while Natalie’s Judy is too involved with Jim to notice.

  Natalie, like Mineo, was still a minor, legally obliged to attend studio school three hours a day; and she also continued her extracurricular education on and off the set. After working with Nick and Dean, making movies no longer seemed like drudgery. Later in life she often described Rebel Without a Cause as the experience that fired her to become a serious actress, an ambition that her Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress would endorse six months later. (Although Mineo was also nominated, the Academy inexplicably failed to honor Dean.) And off the set, Natalie even resumed the affair with Dennis Hopper—“without anyone knowing,” according to Dennis, who remembered that they continued the relationship as “great friends who occasionally went to bed together.”

  Natalie and Dennis Hopper at a studio screening of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring her favorite actress, Vivien Leigh (illustration credit 3.7)

  Evidently the studio never even suspected what was happening. Over the next twelve months, Natalie and Dennis played lovers in a Warners live TV show and were sent to New York to play lovers again on loan to The Kaiser Aluminum Hour and to attend the premiere of Giant, a Warners production. Newsreel coverage of the premiere showed them arriving at the theater, and while the commentator’s voice-over introduced Dennis as a supporting player in Dean’s final movie, Natalie made a private gesture of defiance by turning to kiss him, then turning back to smile brightly at the camera.

  “I never had a friend like Natalie again,” Dennis recalled. “She was a very important part of my life until we lost touch after I left Warners.” Then he gave a thumbnail sketch of the person he remembered: “Apparently very vulnerable, yet somehow in control.”

  In fact, although Natalie sometimes lost control, she nearly always managed to regain it. But otherwise the sketch exactly defines the tightrope that Natalie walked for the rest of her life.

  ALTHOUGH REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE was an extraordinary popular success, Warners barely acknowledged Natalie’s part in it. By the time the movie opened on October 6, 1955, James Dean had made an impact in East of Eden as great as Brando’s in A Streetcar Named Desire and Montgomery Clift’s in A Place in the Sun; and by dying a week before Rebel opened, he also became a legend-in-the-making and the focal point of the studio’s publicity machine.

  Nick had directed Rebel for only two days when Jack Warner and Steve Trilling viewed the rushes of the scene at the planetarium and ordered it reshot—but not because they were displeased. Sniffing a hit, they decided to promote the movie from black-and-white to color. (Incidentally, Nick had asked Dean to wear his eyeglasses for the planetarium scene. Now he changed his mind, and Dean took them off when it was reshot in color.) The studio also commissioned a promotional documentary on the making of the movie (in black-and-white, as Jack Warner always looked for costs to cut), and apart from the chicken run, it focused almost entirely on Dean in confrontation with his parents. Mineo was scarcely glimpsed, and Natalie’s interview outside her trailer at the planetarium lasted long enough for her to say a line that surely emanated from the publicity department: “In this movie I play a bad girl.”

  By the first week of May, Natalie had completed her major scenes, and Warners loaned Natalie to Universal for a movie already in production. It was an abrupt switch to another of the stereotyped roles that made acting seem like drudgery, and worst of all, it put her back in the dreaded pigtails. In One Desire, produced by Ross Hunter, directed by Jerry Hopper, and adapted from a best-selling novel (Tacey Cromwell) by Conrad Richter, she was only a subplot character in a 1910 romantic drama. Tacey (Anne Baxter), the manager of an Oklahoma City gambling house, and the faro dealer (Rock Hudson) fall in love. But soon after they start “a new life” in Colorado, he runs off with a rich girl, leaving her to bring up a homeless fourteen-year-old orphan (Natalie) they’ve unofficially adopted. Under Tacey’s wing the brat loses her pigtails, goes through a tomboy phase, becomes a cutely feminized junior miss, and witnesses the unsurprising reunion of Tacey and her lover after the rich girl dies in a fire. Released in late August 1955, six weeks before Rebel, the movie did well at the box office and nothing at all for Natalie’s career; but this, as she discovered later, was exactly what Jack Warner intended.

  In 1934 he had loaned Bette Davis (after sixteen movies of contract bondage) to RKO for Of Human Bondage. It was her first opportunity for a major su
ccess, and when movie reviewers rebuked Warners for wasting Davis in run-of-the-mill pictures, Jack took it personally. In the future he approved a loan-out for the sake of a profitable deal, but never if it threatened to offer an actor the opportunity to advance his career at a rival studio.

  Although the ever-developing businesswoman didn’t profit directly from Natalie’s loan-out, she found her way to an incidental perk. When she read the script of One Desire, Maria took note of a bit part for an eight-year-old girl. She immediately presented Lana to the movie’s casting director, who accepted the bait, and her daughters posed together for publicity shots.

  ONE DESIRE, but for a total of only two weeks, as Natalie was shuttled back to Warners for an occasional day’s work on Rebel Without a Cause. Rebel completed production on May 25, when the unit worked overtime until almost midnight on the studio back lot, filming pickup shots of James Dean, Natalie and Dennis Hopper for the chicken run sequence. And by June 16 Natalie was free to keep the promise she’d made to herself to graduate from Van Nuys High.

  Her last report card, noting her considerable number of absences while at work, awarded her B’s in every category and E’s (Excellent) for Work Habits and Cooperation in every category except one. In drama, the teacher noted that she was frequently tardy and graded her a mere S (Satisfactory). If it seems unlikely that Natalie really fell below her usual level of cooperation in drama, no doubt the answer lies in her memory of a teacher who disapproved of child actresses and looked even further down her nose when Natalie’s classmates wanted to know all about James Dean.