But one night at North Bentley, another party for the girls became a psychological test for Natalie. Someone suggested a skinny dip in the pool; they all stripped enthusiastically and ran down the lawn. Then Natalie switched on the pool lights, explained that she never swam in dark water, and the game was over. Cries of protest as bodies are exposed to the harsh glare, a quick retreat to the house, the girls put on their clothes, and the party was over as well.
Although psychoanalysis had helped Natalie in many important ways, it would never erase that fear of dark water; or the habit, when the party’s over and she’s alone, of taking a sleeping pill, and sometimes, when she still couldn’t sleep, a final glass or two of white wine. And sometimes, when she arrived alone at a party, she lacked the heart for games, and remained profoundly alone.
Richard Gregson: I have one vision of Natalie before I met her. A party at [producer] Ray Stark’s house, lots of people. Late in the evening I saw this beautiful young woman in a sherry-colored dress, standing all by herself and looking so lonely and unhappy. I asked who it was. When I was told, I was astounded that someone so beautiful and so famous could look so miserable and so alone in the middle of so many people. I was naïve in those days, I guess.
Natalie with costume designer Edith Head at one of Dominick Dunne’s parties (illustration credit 5.6)
Natalie with David Hockney (left) and writer George Axelrod at a party given by Marguerite Littman in London (illustration credit 5.7)
But psychoanalysis and humor were not Natalie’s only antidotes by now. With Dr. Lindon’s help she had also started to conquer her fear of betrayal and developed several passionate friendships. They included, beyond the nucleus, Donfeld, Hope Lange, Guy McElwaine, Arnold Schulman and Tom Mankiewicz, who described her as “the best friend you could possibly have”: “Natalie helped me decorate my house as soon as I bought it. I had very little money at the time, but she had a decorator’s license and terrorized dealers into selling me stuff at cut prices. Then she threw a housewarming party and invited some famous stars I hardly knew or didn’t know at all, ‘because they’ll have to bring housewarming presents.’ ”
When Norma Crane set herself up in the decorating business to earn money in the intervals of unemployment as an actress, Natalie obviously didn’t have to worry about unemployment, but her eagerness to learn was aroused. She decided to follow Norma’s example and, according to her mentor, “developed a good eye for furniture. And I think I helped Natalie out of her white-and-gold period.”
Mart Crowley, out of a job when Cassandra at the Wedding was canceled, was eventually hired to rewrite a few television scripts, but then began drinking heavily, and “my career went on hold.” Once he got very drunk at a party given by Natalie, and a guest aroused her anger by criticizing him. “Don’t you dare criticize Mart! He’s not your friend, he’s my friend, and that gives me the right to criticize him if I want!” But what she really wanted was to help. “ ‘You’ve got to get your life in order,’ she told me, and offered to pay for my first six months with an analyst. Coincidentally, our mutual friend Diana Lynn and her husband, Mortimer Hall, were going to Europe, and she offered me their house while they were away. And that’s when—thanks to Natalie, my analyst, and sobering up—I started writing The Boys in the Band, a play I’d been thinking about for some time.”
As for self-help, one way that Natalie found to relieve a low was to reclaim her lost childhood for an hour or two. Lastfogel had a contact at the Disney studio, who loaned her 16mm prints of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio and Dumbo. And if she knew Tom Mankiewicz was also feeling low, she used to invite him over. “Together,” he recalled, “we lost ourselves in that wonderfully simple, unreal world of tears and laughter, where laughter and a happy ending always came out on top, and brought out the child in Natalie.”
She developed a good eye for painting as well as furniture with the help of Micky Ziffren, who guided her first steps as an art collector: “I liked the house she bought, but not the paintings on the walls. Most of them were chocolate-box sentimental, like those Keane portraits she commissioned. ‘So how do you find out about art?’ Natalie asked, and I advised her to start going to the best galleries and look at a lot of paintings. Very quickly she built up an original and personal art collection, a Matisse lithograph, a Giacometti sketch, a Bonnard, a Courbet.” And in a memory flashback to her studio schoolhouse days with Frances Klampt, Natalie also built up a collection of pre-Columbian ceramics, all from an archaeological site recently excavated in Guanajuato, Mexico. Later she placed them on indefinite loan to the Ethnic Art Galleries at UCLA, and at a reception after the preview, she recalled how she learned to work with ceramic materials. Then she added that she had always “liked to sketch”—an interesting aside in view of Zepaloff’s avocation for painting, and Olga Viripaeff’s memory of him as “something of an artist. He painted a landscape with snow on the mountains so real that it made you cold to look at it.”
Cutup time for former child stars and current friends: Natalie and Roddy McDowall (illustration credit 5.8)
ALL THESE NATALIES, the light and the dark, contended with each other during the twenty-seven-week shoot of The Great Race; and by the end of it, 1964 had become one of her darkest “terrible years.” From the start, she made no secret of her dislike for the prospect of working on a movie “that my contract forced me to do. I was in analysis, and the picture was going to be made mainly on location, and I didn’t want to be away from my doctor.” Additionally, the “outside” movie that she wanted to make, Inside Daisy Clover, had been set up at Columbia, and Producer threatened not to release her for it if she refused The Great Race.
Like Natalie, the production was troubled from the start. The Mirisch Brothers originally planned to produce it for United Artists, with Paul Newman as the Great Leslie and Burt Lancaster as the malignant Professor Fate, rivals in an auto race across half the world during the early 1900s. After Newman dropped out, he was replaced by Charlton Heston, who later dropped out, and Tony Curtis finally stepped in. After Lancaster dropped out, he was replaced by Jack Lemmon, and the project transferred to Burbank as a Blake Edwards production for Warner Bros., on a fifty-fifty basis of cost and profits.
Edwards’s first choice for the role of Maggie DuBois, the feminist reporter who covers the race, was Jane Fonda. After she preferred to make Cat Ballou instead, his second choice was Lee Remick, currently starring on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. She wanted the part but was committed to a run of the play and couldn’t guarantee that she’d be available. It didn’t improve Natalie’s mood to learn that she was third choice; or that, because the movie was a co-production with Warners, Producer had economized by charging the Blake Edwards company only $15,000 for loaning her out and that under the fifty-fifty agreement, she would receive only $7,500.
Her relationship with Blake Edwards soon deteriorated, although not before he learned how Warner had shortchanged her, and gave her 1 percent of the company’s share of the profits. Jack Lemmon, who had his own profit-sharing deal, did the same; the antipathetic Tony Curtis refused. But Natalie’s open complaints about the deal, and the script, evidently inspired an act of revenge from the studio. Donfeld, who was engaged to design the female costumes, remembers that Martin Jurow, the co-producer, showed him a memo from Steve Trilling: “Do not overestimate the importance of Natalie Wood on Prod. #476, THE GREAT RACE.” Unfortunately, Donfeld’s relationship with Natalie deteriorated when she arrived for her first day of fittings (May 6) in the company of Edith Head: “Not coincidentally, Edith was a William Morris client, and she’d lobbied unsuccessfully to have Orry-Kelly removed as Natalie’s costume designer on Gypsy. As I knew that Natalie had liked her Edith Head wardrobe on Love with the Proper Stranger, I wasn’t altogether surprised when Martin Jurow informed me that I was to design all the female costumes except Natalie’s. ‘Edith feels terrible about this,’ he added. ‘She’s such a great fan of your work, but Natal
ie asked for her.’ ”
Surprised and offended that Natalie had never spoken to him directly about the situation, Donfeld made a point of ignoring her when she emerged from her trailer after a conference with Edith. In return, “she looked at me as if looking through glass.” For someone so sensitive to betrayal, it was a curious lapse on Natalie’s part to act as if a friend had betrayed her; and as well as creating a long estrangement, it marked the beginning of a downward spiral in her life.
The Great Race, she said at the AFI seminar, had “the kind of sense of humor that didn’t appeal to me.” Her resentment increased as the movie went and remained considerably over schedule, and “[William] Wyler had asked me to do The Collector, which I had to turn down to be allowed to do Inside Daisy Clover.” What Natalie didn’t mention was that Blake Edwards reacted to her open dislike of the project by concentrating his attention on Lemmon and Curtis, and she retaliated by attempting to play an offscreen role in addition to Maggie DuBois.
Her first attempt at imitating Joan Crawford ended in humiliating failure. Because Donfeld had to supervise the costuming of several hundred dress extras, as well as create costumes for the saloon entertainer played by Dorothy Provine, he was frequently on the set. His presence made Natalie uncomfortable, and she marched into Trilling’s office to complain about it. But he was unresponsive. “You created the problem,” he said, “and now you’ve got to live with it.”
A few days later she learned that Edwards had commissioned Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini to write a special number for Dorothy Provine, and Hermes Pan to choreograph it. A further turn of the screw was that Provine, an accomplished singer, would record the number herself, and Natalie reacted by making an ostentatious entrance on the set midway through Provine’s rehearsal for the camera. Donfeld recalled: “Right before the take, she carried her folding canvas chair closer to the action, alongside the camera’s dolly tracks, and directly in Provine’s sightline. Provine began strutting her stuff on the stage of the saloon, then headed along the proscenium runway straight toward the camera. And there, instead of the offscreen audience, was Natalie clapping her hands in rhythm to the song.”
The Great Race. Wardrobe test for an Edith Head costume (illustration credit 5.9)
When Donfeld saw this, he blocked Natalie and Provine from each other’s view by quietly placing himself in front of her chair. After Edwards called “Cut!,” Natalie got up, glared at Donfeld, then headed for her portable trailer. Later, as Provine began rehearsing the next shot, the overture from Funny Girl resounded at full volume on Natalie’s record player, followed by Streisand singing “I’m the Greatest Star.”
This was “the child in Natalie” coming out with a touch of the bad seed, and although it gave her satisfaction at the time, the tables were turned later. When Edwards commissioned Mercer and Mancini to compose a love song for Maggie, Natalie had to lip-sync to a prerecording of “The Sweetheart Tree” by Jackie Ward.
BEFORE THE GREAT RACE unit moved to Europe for location work, Natalie’s mood on the set had been lightened by the start of a friendship, and the downward spiral of her life temporarily arrested by a romantic adventure. “We became good friends, but never close,” Jack Lemmon recalled. “But it was typical of Natalie that she knew Felicia [his wife] and I loved antiques, and when we came back from location in Europe she presented us with a fine antique inkwell she’d bought over there.”
The romantic adventure began in the third week of May, a few days after Natalie shot her first scene. Her makeup man, Bob Jiras, invited David Lange to visit the set and introduced him to Natalie. “On both sides, a tremendous infatuation sprang up almost at once,” David Lange remembered. “But I couldn’t sustain it. I was going with the most popular girl in the biggest high school in the world, and I didn’t have the ego or the means.”
The brother of Hope Lange, David was working as personal assistant to her husband, Alan Pakula, and “one thing I did have going for me was that I was a Harvard graduate.” He noted that Natalie was “very chameleonlike with her lovers,” and his Harvard background, combined with Pakula’s plan to produce a film of The Wapshot Chronicle, meant that “she began reading a great deal, especially John Cheever—and even wore reading glasses.” One Saturday night, when the infatuation was at its peak, they had dinner with Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, and his wife, Sally. “ ‘You two are obviously crazy about each other,’ Jim said. ‘Why don’t I arrange for a plane to take you to Las Vegas to get married?’ Natalie and I looked at each other as if to say, ‘Who’s going to stop this first?’ Luckily, fate stopped it. Jim couldn’t get us a private plane.”
The competition that finally proved too strong for David came in the form of Natalie’s occasional lover Frank Sinatra. “One night during the third week of our affair, she said she had a date with Sinatra that she couldn’t break, and I should come to the house later. I got there around eleven o’clock, and Sinatra’s limo was still outside. I waited in the bushes until midnight—until two a.m.—until four, and then the voice of self-protection told me to give up and go home.” By the time Natalie left for Paris at the end of June, the affair had “wound down,” but they remained close friends for several years, and today David remembers her as “funny and kind and beautiful.”
The night after the unit arrived in Paris, the French production manager took the stars, Blake Edwards, Martin Jurow and Donfeld on a nightclub tour that ended at the transvestite cabaret Elle et Lui. The house lights had started to dim as they arrived, and a line of not-very-young chorines appeared onstage, wearing flamboyantly tacky costumes and wigs. Natalie applauded each number loudly, but when they began dancing and stripping to a playback of her own voice singing “Let Me Entertain You,” her hands freeze-framed in midair. Once over the surprise, she bounced up and down to the music, and when the performers came over to pay their respects, she congratulated them warmly and even pretended to admire their cut-rate costume jewelry.
The rest was downhill all the way. The Great Race shot for almost four months in France and Austria, and Natalie wasn’t always able to phone Dr. Lindon when she felt a need to consult him. Throughout the shoot she struggled with a mainly passive role, and throughout the race disagreeable things happened to Maggie. The first occurred on location in California when her automobile broke down in the Mojave Desert. Later she was kidnapped by Professor Fate in his “Hannibal 8” and hoisted on a hydraulic lift above his contraption that contained a hidden machine gun and a fire-breathing cone to melt Arctic icebergs. She was stranded on one of those icebergs with a polar bear, chased through a Bavarian forest, and (for two days of filming) chained to a medieval dungeon door. Finally, by the time of the barroom brawl that culminated in a custard-pie fight, Natalie’s relations with Edwards had become so sour that he personally aimed the pies at her face and made sure they smacked the target. She retaliated by playing diva again. In Salzburg, she demanded to stay at the Hotel Imperial, in the suite favored by Hitler when he visited the city. But it was already occupied, and on August 3 a memo to the Austrian production manager records Natalie’s terms for staying at the Goldener Hirsch instead: she requested a two-bedroom suite on the top floor, for herself and secretary Mona Clark (who had replaced Howard Jeffrey when he found work as a dancer again); a single room for her makeup man, Bob Jiras; a double room with twin beds for her wardrobe woman, who had brought her daughter along; a single room for her hairdresser; and a room for “Miss Wood’s wardrobe.”
On September 3, a production report by Martin Jurow mentioned “an extremely irritating morning in view of the fact that Natalie Wood, concerned about what she was going to wear, resulted in a hold-up of work.” But the delay of a few hours was trivial. The Great Race had run twenty-four days over schedule by the time the unit returned to Burbank on November 10, for five weeks of further work in the studio.
The Great Race. Blake Edwards (by camera) right on target (Natalie) with a custard pie (illustration credit 5.10)
“On
Monday, November 23rd,” a memo from Jack Warner informed the production manager, “Natalie Wood advised the Assistant Director that she would not be able to work in the scheduled Ext. Lake sequence as the action required her to go in the water and her menstrual period had begun.” Menstruation was sometimes acutely stressful for Natalie, partly no doubt on account of the trauma of that first periodic flow at the age of thirteen, and the stress increased when her mood was low. But she returned to work for the lake sequence on November 25, and seemed in good spirits on Friday, November 27, when she asked Mart Crowley to join her for dinner at La Scala.
This time, when they entered, it wasn’t RJ but Warren whom they saw at a table with a group of friends. He came over, “light, polite, and charming,” as Crowley recalled, and they exchanged a few words. Although Crowley was unaware that signals had also been exchanged, Natalie’s radar had picked them up; and as he drove her back to North Bentley, she mentioned that Warren would be coming by the house for a drink. Then she added that her live-in housekeeper, Frances McKeating (known as “Mac”), was away for the weekend, and asked Mart to sleep over in the downstairs den, as she didn’t want to be alone in the house that night. Soon after they arrived, the doorbell rang. Crowley answered it, let Warren in, and after a few minutes of social conversation, he said a tactful goodnight. Around two a.m. he was woken by a series of weak but insistent knocks on the door. When he opened it, he found Natalie on the threshold in her nightgown. She looked very pale, took a few uncertain steps into the room, then fell to the floor. “What’s happened?” Crowley asked, still only half-awake, but there was no answer, and he realized she was unconscious.
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