For Natalie, graduation was an achievement that had nothing to do with Blue Ribbon citations or acting with Dean. It was a matter of personal pride, and she naturally wanted her family to be present. What she didn’t want was any publicity connected with movies; but thanks to Maria, who alerted the publicity department at Warners, she came out of the school building in her white cap and gown after the ceremony and was confronted by a battery of reporters and photographers.
It wasn’t the only bitter moment. Earlier, Maria had warned Natalie not to expect her father to be there. Nick Gurdin (whom Warners agreed to employ in the property department when the developing businesswoman signed Natalie’s contract) had disappeared on a bender that day; and with Maria not only cornering a reporter and talking about a mother’s pride, but posing to kiss Natalie for the camera, the double betrayal became even more painful.
WHEN GEORGE ZEPALOFF returned from his five-year assignment on the East Coast, he’d saved enough money to build a place for himself and Maria. It faced Clear Lake, forty miles north of San Francisco, and followed his own architectural plan: main house with a large living room that featured an open fireplace in the center, guest cabin nearby. And a few days after Natalie’s graduation, Olga received one of her mother’s “highly emotional” phone calls. Marriage to Nick had become unbearable, Maria said, and she wanted to live with the Captain, whom she’d always truly loved.
“My mother came up to Camp Rose for the weekend, leaving Lana in my care, and went off to see Zepaloff. By then she’d almost made up her mind to leave Nick, but a few days later I had a call from his brother Dmitri to say that Nick had suffered a heart attack. Luckily Natalie was in the house at the time, and sent for an ambulance. My mother, who got back later that day, had a convulsion when she heard the news. Then she went to the hospital and stayed there every night with Nick.”
In another “highly emotional” phone call after Nick was released from hospital, Maria told Olga that she’d definitely planned to leave him until she learned about his heart attack. The only explanation she gave for changing her mind was to quote a Russian saying that translates, according to Olga, as “You get used to a dog.” At first Olga wondered if her mother “cared for Nick more than she was willing to admit.” Then she suspected that Maria had also weighed love in the country with Zepaloff against life as Star Mother, and tilted the scales in favor of Natalie and Hollywood.
But Olga had no idea that Maria believed Zepaloff to be Natalie’s biological father, and no way of knowing that her fear of scandal must also have tilted the scales. If she left Nick for the Captain, even though he never wanted to acknowledge Natalie, there was always a danger that Confidential with its network of “researchers” would discover the truth. Putting her daughter’s career at risk was out of the question; and so, finally, was the prospect of giving up the status in life that she’d worked so hard to acquire.
When Maria returned to Star Motherhood and a husband who aroused feelings that veered between angry disappointment and guilty fondness, the Captain evidently understood. He went back to his old ship, and their “great romantic love” continued as before.
AT THE END of June, Natalie left for Monument Valley to start work on her next assigment for Warners. Her role as Debbie, the niece of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in John Ford’s western The Searchers, was even smaller and only fractionally more rewarding than her role in One Desire. The story begins with a Comanche raid on the homestead of Ethan’s brother. They slaughter the entire family, except his eight-year-old daughter, and Natalie doesn’t appear during the movie’s first hour (eight years in actual time), until Debbie has become the Comanche chief’s squaw.
Maria had not only persuaded the casting department at Warners to let Lana play Debbie as a child, but cast herself as official location chaperone to both underage daughters. By joining Lana on the studio payroll for a month, she earned some useful pocket money, but Natalie was still rankled by the graduation episode, and the last thing she wanted at this time was an isolated life in close quarters with her mother. She began The Searchers in a dark mood, and the location experience did nothing to lighten it.
Like the rest of the cast (mainly Ford’s stock company) and crew, the family stayed at Goulding’s Lodge, then a fairly primitive compound of tents and cabins with dirt floors. Water was scarce, hot water available for showers three days a week, and Natalie waited two weeks for her first call “with nothing to do. For recreation you could walk to the dining room and back.” In fact she found something else to do, and occasionally flirted with John Wayne’s son Pat over a game of Scrabble. But as an outsider in the company, she told the AFI seminar, she was terrified of Ford himself: “Every day they’d go out on location and they’d come back with these horror stories of somebody changing one word of dialogue, and ‘Pappy had them put in the barrel’ is what they used to say. So I was terrified because I had a tendency to change lines, and thought I was going to get in the barrel.”
Ford had originally devised the barrel as a literal punishment: a barrel of cold water into which he ordered an offending actor to be dumped. In his relatively mellow later years, he made the actor assume various kinds of uncomfortable positions instead. And a day before she was finally on call, Natalie unintentionally risked the barrel. She felt her own skin was improbably pale for a girl who had lived with the Comanches since childhood, decided to get a suntan, and got badly sunburned instead. She fainted, was carried back to her cabin and put to bed, where the location doctor treated her burns. While he bandaged them, Pat Wayne came into the room. “Uncle John [Ford] says you’ve got to go to the dining room and rehearse,” he told her. Not only in pain, but “very irritable after two weeks of playing Scrabble in Monument Valley and hearing about everybody being put in the barrel,” Natalie told Pat to inform Uncle John that if he wanted to rehearse, he must come to her cabin.
First ethnic role: kidnapped by Comanches and brought up as a squaw. Left to right: Natalie, John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers (illustration credit 3.8)
A few minutes later Pat came back, looking very embarrassed, and told Natalie that he couldn’t repeat what Uncle John had said. “And I said, ‘Well, what did he say?’ And Pat said, ‘Well, he just gave a terrible message. He said to tell her to go shit in her hat.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be talked to that way, and screw him, and just put me on a plane and send me home. I hate it here. I hate my part. I don’t want to be put in the barrel. Send me home.’ And [the doctor] was saying, ‘Now calm down, calm down,’ and at this point John Ford appeared in the doorway. And when he saw that I was badly burned, and the doctor was wrapping me in bandages, he couldn’t have been more kind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t dream of making you work. We can easily shoot around you.’ ”
But this was Natalie recalling her experience with Ford almost twenty-five years later, at the AFI seminar, and after saying that he was never mean to her, discretion intervened. In fact she continued to hate her part and developed a strong dislike for Ford himself. Rightly convinced from the start that she was miscast in The Searchers, she’d hoped that working with the legendary director would bring some reward, but as she said in private, Ford did nothing to help her with an unclear and underdeveloped role. Like the romantic subplot featuring Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles, she’s a weak point in a movie that remains extraordinarily gripping as long as it concentrates on the story of Ethan Edwards. But in spite of his lack of interest in Debbie, Ford could at least have objected to the makeup department’s insistence on coating the face of a desert squaw with heavy eyeliner and orange-red lipstick.
When she made the The Searchers, Natalie hadn’t met the actor she would fall in love with and marry two years later, and was unaware how cruelly Ford had treated him. After he told her about it, she disliked the man even more in retrospect, but preferred not to air a personal grudge at the seminar, and remained characteristically discreet.
In 1951, Robert Wagner was under con
tract to Fox, and cast in its production of Ford’s What Price Glory? On each movie he made, Ford arbitrarily selected a whipping boy, and unluckily Wagner landed this role as well. Among other humiliations, the director invariably called him Boob instead of Bob; but when Ford offered to interview him for the part of Martin Pawley in The Searchers, Wagner accepted. Eager as any young Hollywood actor for a role in an important movie, he couldn’t know that Ford had privately decided to cast Jeffrey Hunter, and was in the mood for a sadistic game. “You’d like to play this part, wouldn’t you?” he asked, deceptively benign at first. “Yes, Mr. Ford, I would,” Wagner replied, and Ford changed his tone. “Well, you’re not going to.” Wagner abruptly turned away and started to leave, but turned back when Ford called after him: “You really want to play this part?” “Very much, Mr. Ford.” Ford stared at him for a moment, then went for the jugular. “Well, Boob, you’re not going to.”
BY JULY 13, Ford had finished location work on The Searchers, and Natalie returned to Sherman Oaks with her mother and sister. During the next four weeks, she worked on her few studio scenes at RKO-Pathé in Culver City, and her one remaining exterior near the end of the movie. When John Wayne picks Natalie up and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie,” they’re in a canyon area of Griffith Park, just a few miles away from the planetarium of Rebel Without a Cause.
In mid-July, coincidentally, Nick Ray had begun filming Hot Blood, a disastrous musical about American Gypsies with Jane Russell and Cornel Wilde; and by the time shooting ended on August 30, his affair with Natalie had ended as well. Partly because Nick was in a phase of particularly heavy drinking, it had started to wind down almost as soon as it started up again, and the end-all was an episode of black comedy when Natalie missed a period and feared she might be pregnant. On the night before her pregnancy test, she placed a urine sample in the fridge at Nick’s bungalow, but he woke up thirsty as well as fuddled in the small hours, mistook the sample for a glass of fruit juice and drank it down without realizing what he’d swallowed.
Fortunately the pregnancy test was negative, and Natalie had her delayed period the next day. By this time Nick had left for London, to confer with the Warner Bros. publicity department about the forthcoming British release of Rebel. And in the third week of September the studio sent Natalie, Sal Mineo and small-part player Nick Adams to New York for the usual round of publicity interviews before the movie opened there. (James Dean, who had just finished Giant, decided to enter his new Porsche Spyder in an auto race at Salinas instead.) Thrifty as ever, Jack Warner covered the studio’s expenses (and then some) for the publicity trip, with the fee he demanded for loaning Natalie to NBC for a bland supporting role in a live “all-star” musical version of Heidi (songs by Schumann, with new English lyrics). Alongside Jo Van Fleet, Elsa Lanchester, Wally Cox and Jeannie Carson as the orphan of the Swiss Alps, she was called for rehearsal the day after she arrived.
On the evening of September 30, Natalie, Mineo and Adams went to see Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, with Richard Davalos (Dean’s brother in East of Eden) in a leading role. They had dinner afterward with Davalos at a Chinese restaurant near the Warwick Hotel, where Natalie, Mineo and several members of the Heidi cast were staying. A few hours earlier (during the performance of the play, in fact) James Dean had died on the way to hospital after another car broadsided his Porsche at an intersection north of Bakersfield. But none of them knew it yet.
As Heidi was due to air next day and Natalie had an early call, Mineo and Adams walked her back to the hotel immediately after dinner. She went straight to bed, and the studio chaperone, who was waiting in the lobby, took Mineo and Adams aside to break the news about Dean, then ask them not to disturb Natalie. Next morning she joined Jeannie Carson and Jo Van Fleet outside the hotel entrance as the company limo drew up to take them to Brooklyn Studios. The driver got out to wish them good morning and open the rear door, then asked if they’d heard about James Dean’s death.
Jeannie Carson: It was news to us all. You can imagine what it was like for Natalie, and for Jo Van Fleet, who’d played his mother in East of Eden, to hear about it that way. They were absolutely stunned, and could hardly speak during the drive to Brooklyn.
As well as rehearsing for most of the day, Natalie faced reporters clamoring for a statement (“I remember him very fondly,” “He was wonderful to work with,” etc.) and asking about the rumors that they’d “been more than friends” (“Completely untrue,” she told them, truthfully and more wearily each time). In the early evening, the cast assembled for the live performance, and Natalie had her final the-show-must-go-on moment. As Jeannie Carson remembered: “Natalie was playing my best friend, and in one scene I had to sing a song to her at night, after we saw a shooting star outside the window. In a typical live-TV hitch, the star was late. So I started to ad-lib, and like a true professional Natalie calmly helped me out until it arrived.”
When the telecast was over, Natalie went back to the Warwick, sat alone in her room. Delayed reaction to the sudden death of someone still very young, and a major influence on her own young life, made the shock even more devastating. She remembered one of Dean’s favorite sayings: “Dream as if you’re going to live forever, live as if you’re going to die tomorrow.” Then Sal Mineo called, and in an ironic variation on the scene of Judy and Jim consoling each other over the death of Plato in Rebel, Natalie and Sal mourned the death of Dean together.
FIVE DAYS LATER, on October 6, Rebel Without a Cause opened to mixed notices, ranging from “strange and forceful” to “boring” and “appalling.” The most hostile reviewer of all, in the New York Herald-Tribune, condemned it as “turgid melodrama, written and acted so ineptly, directed so sluggishly,” that he declined to name anyone connected with it apart from Dean, whose talent he acknowledged. But young audiences identified passionately with the movie, and of course with Dean himself, who seems now to have anticipated the 1960s, with his anger at a world gone wrong tempered by a wistful longing for some way to set it right. Young audiences also responded, above and beyond her performance, to Natalie herself. As Jim Stark’s kindred spirit and first love, she became the girl that would-be Jim Starks dreamed of dating and would-be Judys dreamed of becoming.
“Actress, 17, Takes Pet to Sign New Contract,” the Los Angeles Examiner announced on October 27, after Famous Artists renegotiated Natalie’s contract with Warners in the wake of her success in Rebel. Still a minor, she had to appear in court to obtain approval of a salary increase from $250 to $400 weekly, but a courtroom entrance with her French poodle on a leash showed Natalie beginning to take stardom seriously, or half-seriously. (Soon she’ll be waving a cigarette holder.) Adept at handling reporters by now, she told them that as well as Fifi she owned another dog, a cockatoo and a pair of finches; that her career and her pets were the most important things in her life; and that she “wouldn’t even consider marriage” until she was twenty-four. Although Fifi proclaimed Natalie Wood a movie star, her love for animals was genuine. By surrounding herself with them, she created an illusion of family life, and when she created the real thing as wife and mother, animals were included.
But in spite of paying a higher price for Natalie, Warners gave no sign of appreciating her value. Determined to get their money’s worth during the first year of her contract, they loaned her out for two more TV shows, assigned her to an episode of a Warners TV series, and cast her opposite another contract actor in a terrible B movie.
In A Cry in the Night, directed by Frank Tuttle, a psychotic voyeur, played by Raymond Burr, is so obsessed with Natalie and her boyfriend that he kidnaps her. Its widely publicized sneak preview, advertising a personal appearance by the star of Rebel Without a Cause, was a display of misguided confidence that Natalie later recalled as “sort of traumatic. The whole audience was laughing and jeering and talking back to the screen.”
The first TV show was Feathertop for General Electric Theater, based on Nathanael Hawthorne’s fable about a scarecrow (Carleton
Carpenter) whom a good fairy grants a term of human life. He falls in love with a girl (Natalie), but when she meets her true love (John Carlyle), he has to become a scarecrow again.
Natalie, as Carpenter recalled her, was “terribly sweet but terribly sad, still distraught over the death of James Dean.” At the same time, she was “marvelous to act with, very quick and very responsive.” But when he also wondered at the way “she took live TV in her stride, and never seemed nervous,” she was surprised by his surprise, and explained that she’d been doing it since she was thirteen.
Carpenter, who lived in upper New York State, returned there after the show aired on December 2, but Natalie and John Carlyle had developed a rapport and met socially over the next few months. He described Natalie at seventeen as “a girl about to become a woman and desperate to do so. I’ve never seen anyone blossom so quickly”—so quickly, in fact, that just as they were about to play a scene in Feathertop, she suddenly asked: “John, do men like women to go down on their toes?”
Carlyle also remembered Natalie as “sometimes melancholy and sometimes horny. But always”—that word again—“adorable.” He thought she wore too much makeup, and once told her she’d look much prettier without it, then realized “it was part of her impatience to grow up.” Additionally, of course, it was the style of the Warners makeup department at the time.
By late 1955 Famous Artists had merged with Ted Ashley’s agency to become Ashley-Famous, and the agents assigned to Natalie were Dick Clayton and Henry Willson. Willson, formerly a talent scout for David Selznick, had a reputation for “discovering” young actors and seducing them, but “discovery” was never conditional on seduction. According to Carlyle, also one of his clients, “until his decline Willson was basically a very decent man. When a client he believed in didn’t seem to be catching on, he wouldn’t give up.” He was also very concerned about “respectability,” and pressured his gay actors to go out on dates with actresses; and since that concern extended to himself, he chose Carlyle “to go out on double dates with Natalie and Henry and Natalie’s mother.”
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