Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  One early result of Lindon’s advice to Natalie was the emphatic commitment that she made one evening at a nightclub with Warren. President John Kennedy and a group of friends, including his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, were sitting at another table. After Kennedy spotted her, Lawford came over. “Number One would like to invite you to join his party,” he said. Natalie replied that she and Warren would be honored. Then Lawford explained that Warren was not included, and she declined the invitation. “But it’s Number One!” Lawford said with a mixture of astonishment and reproach that Natalie found so comic, she was barely able to hold her laughter until he turned away.

  IN THE SECOND week of May, Natalie accompanied Warren to the Cannes Film Festival, where All Fall Down was shown on the thirteenth. It was the first trip to Europe for both of them. On the seventeenth Natalie’s daybook recorded: “London. Stop the World, I Want to Get Off”—the musical starring Anthony Newley, with whom Joan Collins had just become involved. On the twenty-third: “Paris. Drinks Jules Dassin Raphael bar.” They stayed longer in Paris than anywhere else, and on the twenty-eighth (a busy day): “Go to Louvre. Habitation Victor Hugo (musée). Versailles-Trianon. Balmain, 5.30.” Pierre Balmain was not the only haute couture salon Natalie visited that week, but the French style never became a major influence. According to her friend Linda Foreman, “The perfect understated Chanel suit was never her style. But even when I didn’t like her style, I had to admit she looked wonderful.” Micky Ziffren, soon to become another important friend, agreed: “She had an instinct for chic. It wasn’t infallible, but it was always very personal. She had a very definite idea of herself as a star, and how a star should look—and how well she should be paid.”

  From June 1 to 6 Warren and Natalie stayed in Rome, where Natalie recorded visits to two famous villas, d’Este and Hadrian’s, and one famous director, Fellini. But she didn’t record an unplanned meeting when she and Warren went out for dinner at the Hostaria dell’Orso in Vecchia Roma. In the restaurant’s secluded back room, where visiting celebrities always sat, they encountered RJ and Marion Donen, formerly Marion Marshall, whom he’d first met when they played bit parts in The Halls of Montezuma at Fox.

  Robert Wagner: The conversation was stilted-conventional. “How are you? How’s your mother? Where are you staying?” That kind of thing. But there were strong vibes in the air. On both sides. And over the next eight years there’d be several more of those brief encounters, and each time the vibes would be stronger.

  At the time of that first encounter since the separation, RJ had been living in Europe for three months, and regular consultations by phone with his Los Angeles analyst “had already helped me a lot, through a period I would describe as not my finest hour.” He’d left California mainly because it was “time to get out,” but also with a career move in mind. The new wave in Britain (A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) had followed the new wave in France (Breathless, Jules and Jim) and he hoped to find better roles in so-called Swinging London.

  But his first picture there was a fairly routine assignment under the option clause in his contract with Columbia. A few notches above Sail a Crooked Ship, it did nothing to harm his career and little to advance it. The War Lover cast Steve McQueen and RJ as RAF pilots during World War II, both of them (surprise) in love with the same girl, and its fifteen minutes of aerial photography were far more dramatic than its ninety on the ground. Halfway through shooting, when he wasn’t on call for two weeks, RJ marked time in another World War II picture, Darryl Zanuck’s epic of the all-star Anglo-American invasion of Normandy on D-Day. In The Longest Day, he joined John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger and Roddy McDowall—and Zanuck himself as a five-star general.

  Also playing a small part was twenty-seven-year-old George Segal, who remembered RJ as “desperate that Natalie was with Warren.” But soon after RJ returned to London to complete The War Lover, he began what he described as “a serious affair” with Marion Donen, formerly married to director Stanley Donen. The divorce settlement awarded her custody of their sons, Josh and Peter, and visitation rights for Donen, a British resident at the time; and Marion, who lived in Rome, had brought the young boys over for a visit.

  While Josh and Peter stayed with their father in London, RJ and Marion took a trip to Paris, where she introduced him to Blake Edwards. The Pink Panther, which Edwards planned to start shooting in Rome that summer, was a comedy about a heroically inept police inspector (Peter Sellers) on the trail of an elusive international jewel thief (David Niven). After meeting RJ, Edwards cast him as Niven’s suave and devious young nephew. Niven had become a good friend of the Wagners soon after they first married. As an actor, his strongest card was not depth of character but casually elegant “presence,” and during the shoot, RJ noted the skill with which Niven played the same card in many different ways.

  Marion found RJ an apartment close to her own in Rome, but soon after The Pink Panther began shooting, he had a painful accident on the set. For a bathtub scene, a studio worker laced the bubbles with a strong detergent, and RJ’s eyes were burned so badly that he became almost blind and had to wear eye patches until the corneas healed.

  Fortunately, Mart Crowley had arrived to stay with him before the accident occurred, and “led RJ around Rome” for three weeks. But they were unaware, like Marion, that Stanley Donen had employed a private detective to shadow his former wife. To gain sole custody of their sons, he hoped to prove her an unfit mother, and the detective obliged by reporting that she was exposing them to moral corruption in the form of Marion’s homosexual houseguest, decorator Peter Shore (“a longtime friend of myself and my family,” according to Marion). The detective also cast a slur on RJ by reporting that his houseguest was another homosexual, Mart Crowley, who occasionally baby-sat Josh and Peter when Marion and RJ went out for the evening.

  According to Linda Foreman, the Donen divorce had been “very ugly.” Its aftermath threatened to become even uglier. The prospect of a public confrontation with her ex-husband had brought Marion to the verge of public breakdown when she arrived at a London court to answer his charges. But Donen failed to appear, the case was dismissed and the barrister hired to represent him later told RJ “it was probably the most ridiculous case he’d ever worked on.”

  While The Pink Panther was still shooting, RJ’s agent in Rome arranged a meeting with Vittorio de Sica, who offered him a role in The Condemned of Altona. Derived from French source material (the play by Sartre), with American, Italian and Austrian leading players (Fredric March, Sophia Loren, Maximilian Schell, Wagner), the movie was a product of “Hollywood on the Tiber,” the period of commercial and (sometimes) cultural exchange that began in the early 1950s. Quo Vadis had proved that spectacular sets could be built at a fraction of U.S. labor costs; Three Coins in the Fountain, that authentically gorgeous contemporary locations were another bargain. When RJ arrived in Rome, Hollywood on the Tiber was in high season, and “la dolce vita” an everyday expression in at least half a dozen languages.

  The Condemned of Altona began shooting at Cinecittà shortly after Rome Adventure (which Natalie had escaped) completed location work in and around the city. In spite of a mainly positive critical reception in Italy, the film was a commercial failure; but the U.S. release of The Pink Panther made RJ’s Rome adventure a professional and personal success. Although Peter Sellers dominated the reviews, RJ’s favorable notices encouraged him to return to Los Angeles.

  Wagner once said that David Niven helped him develop “a sense of style,” but in fact that sense was partly innate. He’d begun to find it by watching Cary Grant on the screen, begun to lose it after the divorce from Natalie, and begun to find it again not only with Niven’s encouragement and his role in The Pink Panther, but with his mutually supportive relationship with Marion Donen. She guided his “discovery” of Rome and Mediterranean Europe, and when they returned to California in 1965, the young man-about-town of Say One for M
e had become a man of the world.

  BACK IN THE HOUSE on Coldwater Canyon a week after the chance encounter with RJ in Rome, Natalie made a note to remind herself in her daybook for June 18: “Call Joe [Schoenfeld) re Sunday [in New York].” He had offered to propose a deal with MGM for Natalie and Warren to star in the movie of Norman Krasna’s Broadway hit, and although Warren appeared to favor the idea at first, he changed his mind when MGM expressed interest. Throughout the summer, the daybook contains various reminders to check with Schoenfeld on various possibilities for the “outside” picture allowed by her contract with Warners: The Unsinkable Molly Brown; Tony Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark; an unspecified role in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told; Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing; and Hitchcock’s Marnie. She decided against all of them, even though Mart Crowley had read and recommended Marnie. But Natalie had heard that Hitchcock’s treatment of Tippi Hedren on The Birds was a spectacular example of an artist failing the “kindness test.”

  In November, Gypsy opened to (undeservedly) favorable reviews and simultaneous release to more than a thousand theaters across the country. But after her experience with LeRoy, Natalie told Guy McElwaine, “I want to do things for myself,” and suggested they form a company. By then McElwaine had become an agent at ICM, and he made an appointment with Lew Wasserman, head of Universal. They agreed on a three-picture deal, and Wasserman immediately contacted Schoenfeld to discuss terms. Next day, Schoenfeld summoned McElwaine to his office. “I’ve been debating whether you should ever work in this town again,” he said, coldly matter-of-fact. “But I’ve killed the Universal deal instead.” McElwaine was outraged. When he demanded an explanation, Schoenfeld told him in the same tone of voice: “You didn’t come to me first.”

  APART FROM NOTING almost daily appointments with Dr. John Lindon, Natalie’s daybook for the winter of 1962–63 records a second wave of “Possible Pics,” including Robert Rossen’s Lilith (in which Beatty had agreed to appear); a remake of Alice Adams, the 1935 George Stevens movie with Katharine Hepburn (abandoned after Natalie decided against it); and a “René Clément Pic” (which eventually became Joy House with Jane Fonda and Alain Delon). The mention of Clément reflects her growing interest in foreign movies. Over the same period, Natalie noted that she saw Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim.

  Perhaps not coincidentally, the project she finally chose became the most “European” film of her career. Except for a final week at Paramount studios, it was filmed in black-and-white on New York locations as deliberately ordinary as the Paris of Breathless. And there was also a distinctly “un-American” element in the screenplay by his client Arnold Schulman that Abe Lastfogel sent Natalie. “It was her willingness to commit to the project,” Schulman recalled, that decided the producer-director team of Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan to become involved, and Paramount to provide financing.

  Robert Mulligan was immediately attracted to the basic situation of Love with the Proper Stranger, which he described as “falling in love in reverse—of having an affair, and then, through the stress and results of the ‘affair,’ falling in love.” In fact the “affair” began as a one-night stand with a jazz musician that resulted in Angie becoming pregnant; and the “stress” occurred, as Schulman commented later, when “a funny thing happened on the way to the abortionist.” At the seamy backstreet premises, the musician sees the fear in Angie’s eyes and realizes he can’t let her go through with it. “Morality” never intrudes on a scene that becomes a turning point in their relationship and that, when the movie opened, would provoke several American reviewers to take the moral high ground.

  Mulligan first met Natalie at Romanoff’s for lunch. He’d told Lastfogel that he preferred meeting actors “one to one, as a way of getting to know each other,” but while waiting for Natalie to arrive, he felt sure that she’d be accompanied by an “Assistant Somebody” or one of her agents: “Suddenly, there she was. Alone. Mike Romanoff greeted her, and escorted her royally through the place to our table. Heads turned. A real star entrance. Natalie seemed to love it. She looked very young, and literally glowed in a bright summer dress. As Mike seated her with a bow and a kiss of her hand, he murmured to me, “The Princess has arrived.” The moment he left, Natalie rolled her eyes at me, made a face, and laughed.” Mulligan liked her instantly for her humor, and the cool way she dealt with “the Hollywood game” of red carpets and hand kissing that always followed a star of three hit movies in a row. But work, he soon realized, “was serious. She had a quiet determination to grow as an actress. No declarations. It was just there.”

  At Lastfogel’s suggestion, Warren Beatty was approached to play opposite Natalie, but as he’d already committed to Lilith and didn’t care for the part anyway, Mulligan and Pakula got the actor they originally wanted. Both felt that Steve McQueen, whom Mulligan had directed years earlier in live television, would make an interesting partner for Natalie. She agreed, and so did McQueen, who “read the script overnight and committed the next morning.”

  Before rehearsals began, Natalie met several times with Arnold Schulman: “But not about the script. She knew I’d been in analysis, and wanted to know how it helped me. She talked about her own experience, and her progress in figuring out who she really was, what she really wanted out of life, with an almost sexual excitement. She also told me about her family situation, her fear of dark water, and how she hated playing ‘the Hollywood game,’ which I soon discovered she played quite brilliantly—but had been trained to feel that ‘I had to win and make people love me.’ ”

  Rehearsals for Love with the Proper Stranger began in New York in March 1963, and Mulligan soon discovered that “Natalie was always open to exploring her character or a scene. She was unafraid and would try anything. She never once said, ‘I can’t do that.’ ” And McQueen, he recalled, hadn’t yet acquired the mannerisms and temperamental “star personality” that he developed later. “He had a wonderful comedic talent, wanted to show it and let it come out.”

  Love with the Proper Stranger. Natalie and Steve McQueen (illustration credit 5.5)

  Schulman, who was present at rehearsals, noted that Natalie was very open in discussing the personal resonance of Angie’s conflict between the desire to rebel against her family and a fear of living on her own, as well as her need to find commitment in love. But although she never talked about Warren, “Their affair appeared to be almost over.” In fact Warren had recently left for Paris with Robert Rossen to interview Jean Seberg for Lilith, the actress he suggested after Natalie turned the part down, and from Paris he flew back to Los Angeles.

  By the end of Love with the Proper Stranger, Angie has succeeded in finding the commitment she needs, and Natalie has failed. Lilith began shooting on location in New York three weeks after the start of Love with the Proper Stranger, and the lovers saw each other several times before the Rossen unit moved to Maryland. Each time, Natalie reiterated her need for someone she could trust not to disappear without warning, and Warren his need to live a freelance life; and each time, the storm clouds darkened.

  When I asked Beatty about the final breakup, he was brilliantly evasive, and engaged me in a semantic discussion of the word “breakup.” But I soon realized that his evasiveness was strategic, a way of discovering what I knew, or thought I knew, which he could then confirm or deny. So progress was made when he denied the tabloid gossip du jour that Natalie burned his clothes after he abandoned her during dinner at Chasen’s and went off for the weekend with a hatcheck girl. He’d heard that fabrication many times before and was weary of it.

  But to get Beatty to say anything about the emotional temperature at the end of their affair, I had to give my own reading first. By the time he left for Maryland, I suggested, they both surely knew the affair had run its course and knew why, so the storm clouds had almost dissolved and the parting was relatively friendly. Yes, Warr
en said, it was friendly; and there’s no reason to doubt him. Natalie’s subsequent breakups were usually friendly, and her serious affairs always ended for one of two reasons: they were exciting, as in Warren’s case, but offered no security; or they offered security but were not exciting enough.

  Although Natalie never talked to Schulman about Warren, he suspected that she “used” him during Love with the Proper Stranger in the scenes with Steve McQueen, the jazz musician with a similar reluctance to commit himself emotionally. And during the shoot, Schulman recalled, “Natalie began to flirt openly and charmingly with Steve. But neither Steve nor his wife took it seriously.” With Natalie, as James Sikking remarked, flirting was a need for approval, but it could also be a game that allowed her to put deeper feelings (this time, about Warren) on hold, and also (this time) to relieve the tension of an ironic coincidence.

  Soon after Warren left New York, Natalie received an offer of commitment in the form of a marriage proposal from Jerry Robbins. Guilt about his sexuality had previously led to his unsuccessful proposal to dancer Nora Kaye, over the same “romantic candlelit dinners” that Natalie later described to Mart Crowley. “It made her very nervous, but she remained in control,” he recalled, and because of her tact and their genuine affection for each other, the friendship survived.