Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  At the time, as he told her that night, Henry was already involved with a girl in New York. Although “Natalie accepted the situation,” he described her in his diary next day as “a very neurotic girl,” and believed he understood why: “She told me that ever since she was a seven-year-old actor in Tomorrow Is Forever, she’d been begging for love. She was constantly asked to cry, praised and admired when she did, realized that if she could cry authentically, everyone adored her, and she soon established a connection between love and pain.” Almost certainly Dr. Lindon had first pointed this out; but after four years of analysis, Natalie was still unable to break the connection. And Henry, privileged rebel, antiestablishment and anti–Vietnam War, moderate pot smoker, equally intelligent and accomplished as lover and self-lover, was not really able to help.

  Jaglom found Natalie “false” when she became “Natalie Wood movie star” in public or at parties, playing what she called “the Hollywood game.” But he apparently failed to understand that she’d been trained to play it, like most Hollywood stars, and knew she was being false. When she was depressed, a social occasion could intensify her depression, and she became the Natalie Wood that Richard Gregson saw for the first time. When she was happy, it amused her to “put on the badge,” as she called it, and play glamorous movie star. She also found “the badge” useful to avoid waiting in line for a movie, but Henry recalled that she always insisted on sitting in the back row, because she “didn’t want to be recognized.” He never knew that the movie star was still haunted by Jack the Jabber, and that the Natalie remembered by Dennis Hopper was still walking a tightrope between vulnerability and “being in control.”

  Henry himself never felt the need to play “the Hollywood game” because he never sought mainstream acceptance. When he became an independent writer-director in the mid-1970s, he was able to function very successfully long before “independence” became a movement (apart from his friend Orson Welles’s one-man movement) because of his access to private finance and his business skills in marketing his movies.

  For a while Henry was amused by the parties that he attended as Natalie’s escort, although an evening at the Daisy reinforced his doubts about “becoming part of her world.” Judy Garland and Mia Farrow joined their table, “Mia in a desperate period, either about to marry Sinatra or having just married him, Garland more desperate than ever.” Together they unnerved Natalie, who signaled that she wanted to leave. Driving back to North Bentley, Henry predicted that Garland would kill herself very soon, and Natalie confessed that she’d once attempted suicide, but refused to say why.

  On April 2, Henry left for New York and a reunion with his girlfriend. Although Natalie was “in tears” when he left, Richard Gregson arrived in Los Angeles a few days later, and when he called her, she proposed spending Easter weekend together in Palm Springs: “She couldn’t find a house available for rent, and rang Sinatra, who found us a house near his compound there, and sent his private plane. We visited the compound, where several Mafia honchos were staying, including Sam Giancana. He palmed Natalie a pair of ruby and emerald earrings, which she later gave back to Sinatra.”

  By then it seemed to Gregson that he and Natalie were equally “serious” about each other; and as he had to go back to London in a few days, he asked her to join him there. She declined because she was due to start work on a movie in a month’s time, but it wasn’t her only reason. Natalie was certainly “serious” about Gregson, but still uncertain about the kind of life she wanted to lead, and not ready to make a final commitment. Instead, she played for time by resuming the affair with Henry Jaglom; and Gregson, who was under the impression it had ended, became what he called “a long distance affair” for a while.

  WHEN HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S Harvard Lampoon notified Natalie that they had voted her the “Worst Actress of Last Year, This Year and Next,” they invited her to receive the award in person on April 23. She became the first actor to accept, because it appealed to her sense of humor; and TV coverage of the occasion records her charmingly tongue-in-cheek acceptance speech to a large undergraduate crowd.

  The presenter begins by asking Natalie if she realizes that the Lampoon’s is really “a lifetime award.” “Oh yes,” she replies with a deceptively innocent smile. Then why did she come? “Well,” she explains, clearly enjoying herself, “I thought you should accept any award that’s ever given you. They invited me and I thought it was only polite to accept.” She looks very demure and bats her eyelids. “It’s funny, last year I was nominated by the Academy for Best Actress, and this year I’m the worst.” Then she bursts out laughing. The crowd laughs and applauds, a group of undergraduates hoist her on their shoulders and parade her around the campus. The look of triumph on Natalie’s face reflects not only her sense of fun, but the confidence in herself as an actress that she’s acquired by now.

  Her success provoked a spokesman for the Lampoon, who evidently lacked a sense of fun. “It definitely wasn’t meant as an honor,” he insisted. “They wanted her to know that she wasn’t the best actress around.” But when Natalie appeared on What’s My Line? in New York next day, one of the regular panelists, Bennett Cerf, congratulated her on walking off with the game.

  To avoid complications with Henry’s girlfriend, Natalie didn’t contact him in New York and flew back to Los Angeles after the TV show. He returned to Los Angeles two weeks later, resumed their affair and noted in his diary: “I can’t feel totally real with her—ultimately this will keep us apart.” But Natalie, of course, couldn’t feel “totally real” with Henry, and he soon found that “the very instability of our relationship attracts me.” It also attracted Natalie, still weighing the possibility of committing herself to Richard Gregson.

  On May 16 she left for New York, where her next movie was about to start shooting on location, and to avoid complications with his girlfriend, Henry didn’t go with her. When he first read the script of Penelope, a feeble comedy about the neglected wife of a successful banker (played by Ian Bannen), who disguises herself as an old lady to rob her husband’s bank, Henry advised her to turn it down. Then he realized “she wanted to do it for Arthur Loew,” who had unwisely decided to produce the movie for MGM, and signed the unexceptional Arthur Hiller to direct. Although Henry respected Natalie’s loyalty to a former lover, he thought it a mistake to make a mediocre picture “just when her career as an actress was at its peak.”

  “Natalie visited my parents in New York,” Henry recalled, “and my father was very elegant and courteous, with an aristocratic manner. She fell hard for it.” She also admired his collection of paintings—German expressionists, a Cézanne, and particularly a Bonnard. “She seems to have found a home,” his mother commented later to Henry; and when Natalie returned to Los Angeles, she told him: “My life would have been very different if I’d had parents like yours.”

  He found her “analyst needing” after ten days away from Dr. Lindon, and alternating between “extreme connection and noncommunication. Unpredictable, yet maintaining appearance of normalcy.” They discussed a mutual desire to have children (but not by each other), and “she became very emotional about this, terrified she’d be like her mother.”

  In the second week of June, while Penelope was filming at MGM, Warren Beatty came to North Bentley to offer Natalie the role of Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde, which he was also producing. But she didn’t want to be separated from Dr. Lindon again, this time for a much longer location shoot; and although she liked the script, she felt (rightly, and perhaps with a backward glance at the early scenes of All the Fine Young Cannibals) that she would not be convincing as a girl from the Texas backwoods.

  By this time she was totally relaxed with Warren, even on a more charged occasion when Henry escorted her to a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. Warren was there with prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, successor to Leslie Caron, and suggested that the four of them drive to the Daisy afterward: “Warren sat in front with Plisetskaya, and they were very lovey. But she spoke n
o English, and Warren asked Natalie to translate his remarks to her in Russian. Everything he wanted her to translate was a declaration of love. ‘Tell her how you say, “I love you more than life itself,” ’ and so on. Natalie calmly agreed, and Warren clearly found the whole situation exciting.”

  On June 23, Natalie called Henry from the set of Penelope and asked him to meet her in two hours at the Beverly Hills Hotel, then escort her to the premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—tuxedo required, she added. When Henry arrived at the hotel in a borrowed tuxedo and bow tie, he found that Sol Hurok was hosting a party for the Bolshoi Ballet. Natalie was already there, still wearing screen makeup, and as the only Russian-speaking guest, “surrounded by the Bolshoi dancers, who had a great rapport with her and didn’t want her to leave.”

  On their way by cab to the Pantages Theater, Natalie removed her screen makeup and replaced it with her public movie-star face. When they arrived, hundreds of fans were waiting outside the theater. “Natalie Wood! Natalie Wood!” they screamed, and she gave them her beguiling public smile. The episode confirmed Henry’s dislike of “the movie-star world,” and he told Natalie afterward that he “couldn’t take it when you put on the movie-star badge.” But it’s impossible not to suspect that he’d grown restless at being upstaged, especially as he suggested, only a few days later, that they continue their affair but refrain from going out in public together.

  If he’d been aware of the situation with Richard Gregson, Henry would surely have realized that his attitude was tilting the scales in favor of London. And although Natalie agreed to keep their affair private, he invited her out to the Actors Studio West a week later to hear Lee Strasberg make a speech. When Strasberg remarked, “Talent is the most killable thing in the world,” Henry saw that Natalie was very moved. “She repeated it with tears in her eyes, but then Strasberg continued to speak for a very long—too long—time, and she got bored.” Later, at yet another party for the Bolshoi Ballet, he became irritated that nothing else in Strasberg’s speech had made any impression on Natalie; and as they drove back to North Bentley in silence, he sensed that he’d alienated her. She didn’t invite him to come in, “and although it was goodnight but not goodbye, I knew it was the beginning of the end.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Richard Gregson arrived in Los Angeles for a brief visit to Natalie. Unintentionally well timed, it marked the end of the beginning of their affair, and she agreed to join him in London in September.

  Before he left, Richard attended the June 30 Los Angeles premiere of This Property Is Condemned with Natalie. It opened simultaneously in New York, and in both cities the reviews were mostly tepid. But although the movie had flaws, it was not negligible, and as underrated as her performance. Three weeks later, a screening of the first cut of Penelope proved so disappointing that she turned on Henry Jaglom. “You could have stopped me,” she said, forgetting that he’d advised her not to make the picture. “You should have stopped me!”

  And in almost the last entry about Natalie in his diary, Henry noted: “She seeks help, but runs away from it.”

  WHEN NATALIE ARRIVED in London toward the end of September, she had booked a suite at the Carlton Towers hotel. “She didn’t want to stay at my house in Pimlico because my divorce wasn’t yet finalized,” Richard Gregson recalled, “and she was worried about the press.” (Especially the British tabloids, which Natalie had heard were even more ruthless than the home product.) But then she changed her mind and stayed with Richard, met his son Hugo and daughters Sarah and Charlotte, and made a new friend in Delphine Mann, who was married to one of Gregson’s clients, screenwriter Stanley Mann.

  “Natalie arrived with masses of luggage,” according to Richard, “as if she’d packed every piece she owned.” And when they decided to go to Paris for a few days, she asked Delphine for advice on what to pack. Delphine was astonished at first, then “realized that there’d always been someone to pack for her. But she followed my directions and, typically, she soon became a very good packer.”

  Anxious to get back to Dr. Lindon, whom she’d called frequently during her stay, Natalie left for Los Angeles in early November. On December 9, Penelope opened nationwide in the United States, a sure sign that MGM executives, like Natalie, feared the worst. They were right, but her third commercial failure in two years harmed her career much less than she’d feared. In Hollywood-speak, the star of Gypsy and West Side Story was still “huge,” and as Natalie had seen the first cut of Penelope, the shock of unanimously dismissive reviews was cushioned.

  WHEN NATALIE CALLED Olga to confide her feelings about Richard, she said that she wanted to become a wife and mother, and that she loved him (in that order). It made Olga suspect that “she wasn’t in love with him as deeply as she’d been with RJ,” and that she still needed time to think the situation over. Independently, Richard had suspected that Natalie would never agree to settle down with him in London, and as their affair threatened to become long distance again, he arrived in Los Angeles in mid-December and “one crucial evening” they went to a party: “Nicky Hilton was among the guests. We’d all had quite a few drinks, he made a huge pass at Natalie in front of me and his girlfriend, and on Natalie’s side it became a case of fatal attraction springing up all over again. In the early morning I reluctantly agreed when she wanted us to go back to Nicky’s house. I took a pee there, then came back to the living room and found Natalie and Nicky necking and dancing. I was outraged and insisted on taking her home. We had a huge row, Natalie became very wound up, full of guilt, and appalled at the way she’d behaved. Then she said she wanted to kill herself and grabbed a bottle of pills.”

  She had swallowed a couple before Richard was able to stop her. He immediately called Dr. Lindon, and around three-fifteen a.m. they drove to his office, where her analyst talked to both of them for an hour, then to Natalie alone. As they left, she told Richard that “she couldn’t figure it out, but was overcome with deep pain.” And he realized “the extent of Natalie’s dark side, how deeply she’d been wounded by life. She was charming, generous, beautiful—and haunted.”

  Within a few days Natalie seemed “back to normal,” and when Richard returned to London toward the end of February 1967, she joined him a week later at his house in Pimlico. This time she stayed longer. In the spring they took a trip to the Scottish border country to visit Richard’s father, “a retired army officer who drank too much when he got overexcited.” Natalie’s impending arrival had overexcited him, he alerted the tabloid Daily Express, and a group of reporters and photographers were soon knocking on the door of his house. After they left, he apologized to Natalie, “lying in bed, his false teeth in a glass on the bedside table. Although understandably nervous, she handled the situation with great tact.”

  By this time Natalie also felt secure enough about her career to reject several movie offers, among them Diary of a Mad Housewife, and to wait for a project that she genuinely liked; and until late August she continued to live with Richard without finding one. Five months was the longest time Natalie had ever spent away from her analyst, although she continued to call him frequently; and when she decided to return to Los Angeles, it seemed clear to Richard that she would never agree to settle in London. But as it was also clear that their feelings for each other had deepened, he decided to stay behind, sell his agency, then remake his career in Hollywood.

  Toward the end of 1967, the Grade Organization bought the agency. Six weeks later EMI, a larger conglomerate, acquired Grade and agreed to back Richard and his partner, Gareth Wigan, in a new agency with headquarters in Los Angeles. London International opened in January 1968, when Richard was living with Natalie on North Bentley. “She was totally supportive,” he recalled, and “at first everything was fine.”

  NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT was election year in the United States, and Natalie had never been interested in politics until Micky Ziffren, an active Democrat, took her to hear a speech by presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. “He got to her,” Ziffren r
ecalled, “and that was it. Later I changed my mind and supported Robert Kennedy, but when I tried to persuade Natalie to change her mind and do likewise, she stuck with McCarthy—typical of the way, once her mind was made up, she never faltered.”

  While celebrating his victory in the presidential primary on June 5, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Two months later, the Democratic Party nominated Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate. Admirable but not very dynamic, he lost to the far less admirable but more dynamic Richard Nixon. It was a close contest that reflected a deep split in the national mood; and the split was reflected in Hollywood, where two friends of Natalie reacted by moving respectively right and left.

  Although liberal Sinatra had been furious when Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, investigated the mob, he supported Humphrey against Nixon; but when Nixon won, ruthless Sinatra decided to court power. He became friendly with Vice President Spiro Agnew and, a year later, campaigned for Ronald Reagan’s re-election as governor of California. But Warren Beatty campaigned for George McGovern in the 1972 Democratic primary, went to San Francisco (accompanied by Julie Christie) and addressed two large crowds on the need for gun control. Both times, unfortunately, the crowds had assembled for sporting events and grew impatient. Undaunted, Warren supported McGovern when he ran for president, then lost to Nixon.

  Unlike Warren and Sinatra, Natalie never publicly supported a presidential candidate again, but remained (and voted) Democratic.

  TWO WEEKS after Robert Kennedy was shot, EMI acquired Associated British–Pathe, a major production/distribution complex; and as American anti-trust laws had made it illegal for production companies to acquire agency holdings, the Hollywood labor unions gave London International sixty days to go out of business.