Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  The studio refused to loan Natalie out while she remained on suspension, and she was unable to accept the role eventually offered to Audrey Hepburn in John Huston’s The Unforgiven: not one of Huston’s best, as it turned out, but hugely superior to the “something modern” that would be waiting when the contract dispute was at last settled.

  For the rest of 1958, then, no movies for Natalie Wood, who became Mrs. Robert Wagner in public as well as in private when she accompanied her husband on a promotional tour for In Love and War. And her next (November 6) journal entry, a letter she wrote but didn’t send to RJ, reveals the depth of their feelings for each other:

  Dear R, we have just returned from a three-week very hectic tour. We have been to 12 cities, had 4 hangovers, met approximately 8000 people, had three fights, one upset stomach and a wonderful time. We have emerged with battle scars, but they only add to our characters (?).

  Sometimes you walk into a room after being gone only five minutes, and my heart leaps as though it were the first time we had ever met. I wonder how I could be so lucky—that you are my husband—that your worth as a human being is so great that it almost breaks my heart. And your indulgence with me when I am silly, or childish, or headstrong. You are my husband, my child, my strength, my weakness, my lover, my life.

  On February 25, 1959, Mrs. Robert Wagner reverted in public to Natalie Wood when Warners announced “the conclusion of amicable arrangements for Miss Wood to resume her contract with the studio.” The statement also mentioned “important plans” for her and expressed “confidence that with her talent, future roles would bring her to even greater heights.” Under the new agreement, Natalie’s weekly salary began at $750, and an annual increase of $250 would raise it to $1,250 in 1962, at the end of which her original contract was due to expire. She also gained a measure of independence by being allowed to make one picture away from the studio each year.

  In fact the “amicable” negotiations were as bitter as they were long, although Natalie and Producer always made a show of cordiality and affection in public:

  The arguments were all carried on through lawyers, and when we met at parties he was always very polite, and he’d say, “Hello, Natalie darling, how are you?” And I’d say, “Hello, Mr. Warner, how are you?” On my birthday he’d send me lovely flowers, and on his birthday I’d send him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and there were little notes back and forth, “Thank you so much for the lovely flowers,” and “Thank you so much for remembering my birthday,” and meanwhile the lawyers were saying that he was saying through them, “This child will only work again over my dead body, blah, blah, blah.”

  The first of the studio’s “important plans” was the “something modern” that Warner had instructed Steve Trilling to find for Natalie, but soon after she began reading the 168-page first-draft script of Cash McCall, she hated it so much that she decided “to read only the scenes I was in.” On March 19, her first day back on the Burbank lot, Jack Warner sent more lovely flowers and assigned her the two-room dressing-room suite with kitchen occupied by Joan Crawford for her triumphant comeback in Mildred Pierce; but Natalie disliked its yellow walls and champagne-pink curtains and insisted on a new color scheme of white and gold. (Her own taste in decoration would improve a few years later.) Although protocol demanded a grateful letter in return, she thanked Warner for the flowers but made no reference to the dressing room or the script, and ended: “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be working again.”

  He had given her nothing else to be happy about, and the truth of the letter lay in what it omitted. Tab Hunter, her best friend at the studio, had grown tired of asking “How can I learn my craft without good pictures to work on?” and bought out his contract for $100,000 (“Quite a lot of money in those days”). He’d already improved his situation by playing opposite Geraldine Page in Portrait of a Murderer on TV, while Producer had saddled Natalie with another workhorse director, Joseph Pevney, for a movie she agreed to make only because each month that she remained on suspension added another month to the duration of her contract, and she’d already served seven.

  A mixture of behind-the-scenes big-business drama and romantic comedy, Cash McCall was adapted (by Lenore Coffee and Marion Hargrove) from a best-selling novel by Cameron Hawley, whose Executive Suite had made a much better movie five years earlier. Natalie plays a fashion designer romanced by a tycoon (James Garner), but although the character has a profession, she has no character. When the tycoon breaks off their affair, he explains that he’s starting to feel “serious” about her and has “more important things to do than fall in love.” But instead of protesting or feeling insulted, she “understands,” and passively awaits the (inevitable) change of heart.

  In his first leading film role, Garner has an amiable screen presence, although he’s too lightweight to be convincing as a tycoon, or as the irresistible lover who persuades Natalie to take second place to the “more important things.” No need, of course, to ask what they are, after all the scenes of Cash operating his way to more and more $$$.

  But in spite of generally caustic reviews after it opened on December 10, 1959, Cash McCall was a commercial success. It did more for Garner than for Natalie, mainly because Cash (admiring nickname) was a hero for the times. He got the girl he wanted the same way as he made a deal, on his own terms; and as the reviewer for Time magazine aptly noted, “they lived wealthily ever after.”

  BY THEN the Wagners had bought a neo-Colonial house at 714 North Beverly Drive for $150,000. When Cash McCall opened, they were still busy with an ambitious scheme of remodeling and redecoration that had begun in June. It would cost them more than half as much again, even though most of the rooms would never be finished. A currently fashionable decorator, Dewey Spriegel, had provided as much rose-and-white marble flooring and as many crystal chandeliers as the traffic would bear—except in the den, which Mart Crowley remembered as “the only cozy room in the house, with a wet bar and poker table.”

  Upstairs, Natalie’s enormous marble tub in her “over-the-top movie star bathroom” eventually proved more than the traffic could bear. When the floor soon started to give way beneath its weight, an ominous crack in the ceiling of the room below shrouded it in dust. And although the floor was repaired and reinforced, hot water took so long to reach the tub that it was tepid on arrival.

  At the same time, Natalie and RJ were making a movie together that would prove equally tepid on arrival. Pandro S. Berman, a resident producer at MGM, had first offered Ever for Each Other to Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, who turned it down. In the screenplay by Robert Thom, based on Rosamond Marshall’s novel The Bixby Girls, the leading characters are two young lovers in the backwoods of Texas. The girl becomes pregnant, leaves for New York, has an affair with a wealthy young man from a socially prominent family and marries him after convincing him that he fathered her child. Then her former lover also arrives in New York, is “befriended” by a fortyish black singer, becomes a famous jazz trumpeter on the nightclub circuit and marries Hamilton’s sister.

  The only surprise was that Natalie and RJ were not ever for each other after all, but for staying married to George Hamilton and Susan Kohner. More interesting is the relationship between black singer and young white trumpeter. Three years after National Guardsmen had prevented black students from entering an all-white high school in Little Rock, and a year before the start of “Freedom Rides” to protest segregation on interstate buses and trains, no major studio production would have celebrated an overt interracial affair, but the scenes between wonderful Pearl Bailey and RJ manage to imply it.

  According to MGM’s publicity release for the movie, eventually retitled All the Fine Young Cannibals, the character played by Robert Wagner was “suggested by” the early life of Chet Baker. But their only points of resemblance are youth, good looks and playing jazz trumpet. The movie’s overheated dialogue was underdirected by the British Michael Anderson (presumably chosen on account of his Academy Award nomination
for Around the World in 80 Days), who seemed no more at home in backwoods Texas than in New York nightclubs, and the luridly emotional melodrama could only have been rescued from bathos by a dialogue rewrite and the sardonic touch of Douglas Sirk as director.

  Or Vincente Minnelli, who in fact directed two additional scenes that Berman ordered after viewing the rough cut. Wagner, who couldn’t identify them as he didn’t appear in either, recalled that “Natalie was excited about working with Minnelli.” One likely contender is the elegant stylization of her drunken soliloquy at night. Wearing a red dress, she sits at a long table littered with bottles, no other furniture visible in the room. The camera remains stationary while city lights glitter beyond a picture window, and she pours a shot from each bottle into her highball glass.

  Dramatically well photographed in this scene, and looking more beautiful throughout than in any of her movies at Warners, Natalie salvaged two object lessons of less-as-more from the wreckage: the understated skill of MGM’s makeup department and of Sydney Guilaroff, who designed her simple, shoulder-length hairstyles.

  Although she had misgivings about the project from the start, she went along with it, partly to recoup the expenses of North Beverly Drive and partly because RJ found his role more promising than any he’d recently been offered at Fox. Ironically, his reviews were almost without exception as negative as Natalie’s, in contrast to the positive ones for his most recent (commercially unsuccessful) contract movie, Say One for Me. The studio had first offered the part of a nightclub owner on the make for a young dancer (Debbie Reynolds) to Sinatra, who declined to recycle his role in Pal Joey. But as well as displaying a pleasant Sinatra-ish baritone, RJ proved such a lively hoofer that he won the 1959 Golden Taps Award for “Outstanding New Dancer of the Year” (previously won by Gene Kelly). The prize for this bizarre honor, voted by three thousand female instructors at the Arthur Murray dance schools, was a pair of gilded dancing shoes.

  Far from enough, of course, to revive Wagner’s stalled career at a studio whose president, Spyros Skouras, was infatuated with Cinema-Scopic spectacle. His determination to splurge on epics led to the ultimate folly of Cleopatra and the downfall of Skouras himself, but first to unsettling rumors for several leading contract players, Wagner among them, that their contracts would not be renewed.

  For someone accustomed to security, RJ’s first experience of insecurity was exceptionally disturbing; and at the same time, Natalie was struggling with her own anxiety attacks and sleepless nights in their unfinished showplace of a home. Although All the Fine Young Cannibals had not yet been released, it was no secret that MGM executives had written it off as a disaster; and in her personal life she had begun to suspect, as she said later, that “when the bathtub fell through the floor, so did our marriage.” From the start, fan magazines depicted the Wagners as the happiest and most glamorous young couple in movieland, and were soon exaggerating the movieland glamour of 714 North Beverly Drive. One saltwater pool became two, with antique statuary presiding over His and Hers; two live poodles kept company with Natalie’s “collection of stuffed tigers”; and “genuine old master paintings imported from Italy” decorated the walls, instead of side-by-side paintings of Natalie and RJ commissioned from Margaret Keane, specialist in portraits that looked like airbrushed color photographs, their subjects usually in pensive mood. But now the house had no need of Silver Screen and Datebook fantasies to become a set for a couple trying to escape from themselves by assuming movie-star lives.

  A few months earlier, the couple had still believed in their roles. “My first image of Natalie was pure movie star,” Asa Maynor remembers. “She was sitting by that famous saltwater pool in a wide-brimmed straw hat and huge dark glasses.” In July 1959, the Wagners were the star guests at a lavish party thrown by Frank Sinatra at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City, to celebrate his appearance at the 500 Club. (They never suspected that the event was under FBI surveillance, and its files would list “actress NATALIE WOOD” and “actor ROBERT WAGNER” as well as several notorious underworld figures “in attendance at this affair.”) On October 10, shortly before All the Fine Young Cannibals began production, Sinatra threw an equally lavish party at Romanoff’s, a dual anniversary celebration of Natalie’s twenty-first birthday and the fifteenth year of a movie career that had started with Happy Land. A band serenaded her, RJ and Sinatra toasted her, Spencer Tracy embraced her; but the marriage and the career that seemed so secure that night had become equally precarious by the end of the year.

  And by then two incidents had deepened Natalie’s fear of betrayal. Barbara Gould, shy and deeply insecure herself, abruptly ended her friendship with the Wagners. Being in their company, she said, made her feel that she had “nothing to contribute,” and as she felt the same way about Hollywood, Gould returned to New York in the (never realized) hope of a career in the theater. Even more wounding was the behavior of Nick Adams, at the start of a descent into drugs and alcoholism. He asked Natalie for a loan and threatened to blackmail her when she refused. “I know a lot of stuff about you that I could sell and get the money I need,” he said. RJ sent Adams packing, but the psychological shock magnified all her fears and anxieties, her sense of a lost self, of being unable to make decisions. And RJ, the one person she turned to for help, was unable to provide it.

  The twenty-first birthday party: Natalie and RJ, both happy. (illustration credit 4.3)

  Later during the party: Natalie’s “Russian” lapse into melancholy, RJ’s concern (illustration credit 4.4)

  For Natalie, the only solution was psychoanalysis, which RJ opposed because it implied that he’d failed as a husband; and she suspected that his parents, of whom she’d become very fond, would oppose it too. During a recent lunch at the Brown Derby, RJ’s sister had announced that divorce was the only solution to her unhappy marriage. “Mary,” said Mrs. Wagner, “I wouldn’t be interested in that,” and added that there had never been a divorce in the family.

  RJ also objected to the idea of marriage counseling. The couple’s increasingly violent arguments, always ending in deadlock, caused him to start drinking too much. Alcohol only increased his anger, as much with himself for being unable to handle the situation as with Natalie for creating it, and this anger drove her to the verge of hysteria. RJ always apologized the next day with flowers or a gift, but always emphatically refused to change his mind; and Natalie feared that if she went to an analyst against his will, she would lose him.

  Although they both knew the movie-star game was over, neither could make the next move. They were paralyzed by simultaneous but separate insecurities, a couple who still loved but no longer understood each other, or themselves.

  WHILE THE supposedly happiest young actress in Hollywood lay awake at night wondering why she was so unhappy, Mud was making one room of the Gurdins’ new house on Ventura Canyon Avenue in Sherman Oaks into a Natalie Wood temple. An enlarged studio portrait hung in a wall niche like an icon, lit by a row of candles on the mantel below; and a walk-in closet was lined with shelves of scrapbooks and photograph albums, all proudly assembled by the Keeper of the Fan Mail.

  At the same time, because Natalie had begun to distance herself from her mother, Mud attempted to create another star in the family, and fourteen-year-old Lana auditioned without success for the Elizabeth Taylor role in MGM’s TV series based on National Velvet. Later, although it became clear that Lana would climb no higher than a supporting role in the TV series based on Peyton Place and another as a James Bond bimbo, Mud frequently blamed Natalie for not doing more to help her sister’s career. In a “memoir” of Natalie, hastily written after her death, Lana claimed that she never wanted to be an actress, then proceeded to devote considerable space to her modest career from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. But she probably gave her most effective performance offscreen, as Natalie’s shy, neglected, unambitious little sister. It convinced Robert Banas and Gigi Perreau, among others, that “Lana was pushed into the background,” but never convinced
Olga Viripaeff. In her opinion, “Lana simply didn’t have what it takes,” and in private Natalie agreed. Finally, when Mud accused her once too often of not doing enough to help Lana, she hit the ceiling. “Why does everyone have to be a movie star?” she wanted to know. “Why can’t she sell silk stockings? Or something?”

  But in public Natalie remained brightly discreet about the jealous intrigues and tensions of her family life. “It’s amazing,” RJ would comment in retrospect, “how much she had to sit on and deal with. From the time she was a child.”

  THE FAILURE of All the Fine Young Cannibals made Warners unsure how to sell Natalie, and Producer made no definite plans for her next movie. Instead, he loaned her out for an appearance on The Bob Hope Show: scripted “spontaneous” comedy chat between Natalie and Hope, $10,000 and a plug for the studio’s forthcoming production The Sundowners.

  Meanwhile, Elia Kazan had been working for almost a year with William Inge on an original screenplay, Splendor in the Grass. After reading the first draft, Jack Warner agreed to distribute the picture, and Natalie first heard about the project when she was returning by train to Los Angeles with RJ after Sinatra’s party in Atlantic City. Inge, also on the train on his way to meet with Kazan, told Natalie that she’d be “ideal” for the leading female role. But Splendor in the Grass wasn’t scheduled for production until early 1960, as Kazan had contracted to start filming Wild River for Fox in September.

  In August, however, he discussed casting possibilities for the two leading roles in an exchange of letters with Jack Warner. For Bud Stamper, the male lead, Kazan strongly inclined to twenty-five-year-old Jody McCrea (son of Joel McCrea and Frances Dee), whom he’d interviewed in New York; but Warner asked him to consider the studio’s “new boy” Troy Donahue (“I feel he is great”) and offered to screen the hugely popular A Summer Place. For Deanie, Kazan’s first choice had been the talented Diane Varsi, who’d impressed him in the movie of Compulsion, but she suddenly decided to give up acting and left Hollywood. His next idea was Jane Fonda, whom he wanted to test, then changed his mind on Inge’s recommendation that he test Natalie Wood instead. Producer gave permission, but thought Diane McBain, another new contract star, a more promising candidate, “very vivacious, with a lot of ‘it,’ ‘that’ and ‘oomph!’ ”