Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  Before they left, the Wagners had agreed (after some hesitation) that Mud could move into the Palm Springs house and look after Natasha during their absence. Natalie knew that her mother was genuinely fond of children, and believed she could be trusted with them, as long as they weren’t her own. “She also felt guilt about divorcing my father,” according to Natasha, and by allowing Mud to stay in the house, hoped to maintain a semblance of family life.

  Instead, she created an opportunity for disruption. Mud convinced three-year-old Natasha that she was in mortal danger if they didn’t stay close to each other at all times, because neither Natalie nor RJ could be trusted. “And in other subtle ways,” Natasha remembered, “she tried to turn me against my mother.” When the Wagners returned, they found the locks had been changed on most of the doors in the house, Mud had locked Natasha in her room, and RJ had to break down the door.

  This explosion of resentment at being sidelined in Natalie’s life was the last occasion when Mud became, in RJ’s words, “as close to certifiable as you can get.” It was also her last attempt at asserting control, and left her more sidelined than ever. Natalie continued to invite her to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, but not to the New Year’s Eve parties that became the Wagners’ most important celebration. Mud also got to play Star Mother when she was included on the guest list at a reception honoring her daughter’s charitable activities. Always quick to seize a photo op, she was recorded not only cheek-to-cheek with Natalie, but bestowing a kiss on Cesar Romero.

  THAT SUMMER, after RJ heard that Colditz would not be renewed for another season, the Wagners accepted an offer from producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg to appear together in a TV movie for ABC. In The Affair Natalie plays Courtney, a songwriter crippled by polio, who’s never trusted herself to fall in love until she meets an unhappily married corporation lawyer (RJ). He reciprocates, but their love doesn’t last, because they come from different worlds, etc., and after the pain of breaking up, Courtney consoles herself with: “He touched me. I touched someone. We knew each other—for a while.”

  A soap opera tastefully underwritten to the vanishing point by Barbara Turner, The Affair was soberly directed by Gil Cates, and the Wagners received better notices than the movie when it aired on November 20. Thirteen years earlier, in All the Fine Young Cannibals, the Wagners had seemed to make little connection with each other or the material. In The Affair, they find a between-the-lines connection with each other. It’s as if they’re making their own private movie, and the movie on the screen is only a pretext.

  RJ and “nucleus” wedding guests Norma Crane, Howard Jeffrey, Mart Crowley (illustration credit 6.4)

  It’s also a pretext for Natalie to use her own voice to record Courtney’s undemanding song “I Can’t See You Anymore.” By this time her persistence with singing lessons has resulted in a voice that’s at least acceptable, a long way from the playback for West Side Story.

  TWO WEEKS before The Affair began shooting, Natalie discovered she was pregnant. It was one reason that she turned down a leading role in an all-star big-screen disaster movie, The Towering Inferno. The other reason was that she found the script mediocre. So did RJ, who accepted a supporting role for the money. He might have turned it down if he’d known that The Affair would deliver an unexpected bonanza for himself and Natalie, as Tom Mankiewicz explained: “Part of their deal was that they’d get 50 percent of the next TV series produced by Goldberg and Spelling. It turned out to be Charlie’s Angels. RJ thought the script was terrible and the series wouldn’t make a penny. So did everyone at ABC, and they finally aired the pilot in a non-prime-time slot. It was a huge success, and made a lot of money for everyone involved.”

  THAT FALL, while filming Fiddler on the Roof on location in Dubrovnik, Norma Crane discovered a lump in her breast. Rather than jeopardize her first major role in a movie, she waited until the unit moved to a studio in England to consult a doctor; and he diagnosed cancer. As surgery was out of the question before Norma finished the movie, she began radiation treatment. A close friend, Sue Barton (formerly a publicist in Rupert Allan’s office), drove her from Pinewood Studios to the hospital every day after she finished shooting. But the treatment had started too late, and shortly after returning to Los Angeles, Norma died at the age of forty-two.

  When she was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park, Howard Jeffrey took charge of the funeral arrangements, and Natalie was one of several friends who spoke at the ceremony. She recalled how Norma “always made me feel what it’s like to be alive, how you have to take the bad with the bad, and in spite of everything, never lose your capacity for enjoyment.”

  ON MARCH 9, 1974, Natalie gave birth to her second daughter. Her doctor in Palm Springs had warned her to expect a cesarean delivery, and RJ drove her to Los Angeles, where she checked into Cedars of Lebanon. Due to the baby’s misplaced umbilical cord, the operation lasted several hours. They named her Courtney, after the character Natalie played in The Affair, and once again motherhood became the focus of Natalie’s life. “Look at this beautiful thing!” Mart Crowley recalled her saying when Courtney was only a few weeks old. “Who needs movies?”

  Natalie Wood, for one. In July she began filming Peeper, a clone of the Black Bird film-noir parody that she’d turned down a year earlier. She accepted the role of a glamorous femme fatale partly for the chance to act with Michael Caine, whom she liked and admired, and partly to test the practicality of combining marriage and motherhood with a career. Before the movie started production, the Wagners had decided to move to Beverly Hills, and Peeper would be shot in the studio at Fox and on location at the nearby Harold Lloyd estate.

  When she brought both daughters to the set or the location, Natalie was still breast-feeding Courtney and completely unselfconscious about it. But it made five-year-old Natasha very curious: “ ‘You can taste if you like,’ she said to me. So I did, and hated it.”

  But although Peeper succeeded as a personal test, it failed as a movie. Low-grade direction (Peter Hyams) met low-grade script (by W. D. Richter), and Natalie was uncomfortably miscast. Fox held up its release until December 1975, but no amount of tinkering in the cutting room could save it from what Caine bluntly described as “a disaster.”

  Never seriously involved with her role or the project itself, Natalie was not seriously disappointed. She took refuge in motherhood, domesticity and bonding with other mothers, notably actress Juliet Mills. “We’d first met when I was rather lonely and between marriages,” Juliet remembered. “Natalie was incredibly kind, and when I married again and gave birth to a daughter, she suggested to RJ that they send over a special dinner to the hospital. It was catered by Chasen’s and served by two Chasen’s waiters.”

  By this time RJ’s lawsuit had been settled, and he’d started filming a new TV series. Switch, which would run for three years, cast him as a reformed criminal who operates a detective agency in partnership with a retired cop. He always enjoyed being the provider and welcomed Natalie’s return to “Who needs movies?” The Wagners’ two-story, nine-room neo-Colonial house at 603 North Canon Drive also marked the return of Natalie as decorator; and the change from the showplace grandeur of their first home was as great as the change from the emotional climate of their first marriage: floral-patterned upholstery and needlepoint pillows instead of satin drapes and chandeliers; no marble bathtub adjoining the master bedroom with its quilted floral bedspread and wicker armchairs, but a dressing room on one side and an alcove that served as Natalie’s office on the other.

  Upstairs, connected by a playroom, were bedrooms for three children. The third was Kate Wagner, who planned only to stay temporarily at first. She needed to establish residence in Beverly Hills to attend Beverly Hills High, but Josh Donen had moved into the garage apartment, and “there was a real family feeling, Natalie’s warmth and directness brought us all together, and I wanted to stay.”

  When the Wagners decided to buy the house, Mart Crowley remembered, the decid
ing factor for Natalie was its huge walk-in bedroom closet. For the dressing room, she decided that she must have “one of those expandable 1930s makeup mirrors, that you could see yourself reflected in at various angles, and remembered that her makeup man on All the Fine Young Cannibals at MGM had used a mirror of this kind.” She asked Mart to go with her on a foray to MGM, where “the guard at the studio gate recognized her at once and waved us through. Then we stole one of those mirrors from the makeup department during the lunch break, when no one was about.”

  This was not Natalie’s first commando-style studio raid. When Fox announced it was selling off its back lot for developers to raze and turn into Century City, she asked Mart to accompany her on a last nostalgic tour of the suburban street with its false-fronted houses where she’d made so many movies as a child. As they drove down the western street, she spotted an old-fashioned shoeshine stand outside the Last Chance Saloon. “That would look great in RJ’s study,” Natalie said, so they loaded it into her station wagon and drove out past a smiling, waving guard.

  She ordered the stand covered in leather to match the leather furniture in RJ’s study, “and like all the dogs and cats,” Mart recalled, “it became one more example of the total family feeling in that house.” According to Asa Maynor, Natalie’s need for “family atmosphere” increased after her estrangement from Mud and Lana, “and it was especially noticeable at Christmas, when she invited the nucleus (except for Norma, of course) and a few other close friends to trim the tree. Babies and small children were always welcome too.”

  But when Richard Gregson came to visit, there was still residual tension. Sarah remembered Natalie’s “frozen smile” and her too-polite “How are you?” So did Sue Barton, who accompanied Richard on one visit during their brief marriage. “Natalie was truly friendly and charming, but you couldn’t miss the undercurrent.”

  It was an undercurrent with an intensity as variable as El Niño’s, and sometimes Natasha decided to risk swimming against it. One day she ran away from home with her friend Tracy, whose house was “very casual and free in contrast to Natalie’s,” and where they used to sing Billy Joel’s song “My Life”: “this is my life … leave me alone.” After leaving notes for their respective parents, they went to the house of a mutual friend. Tracy’s mother guessed where they’d gone, and informed Natalie. “She drove up in her Mercedes, wearing tight boots and jeans, and was furious, thought I’d betrayed her and made her feel a failure as a mother.”

  “But what made Natalie feel like a failure made Natasha feel how much she was loved,” according to Elizabeth Applegate. “I remember her triumphant smile when she told me, after Natalie brought her back home, ‘I’ve been grounded for a week!’ ” And as Natasha came to realize, “My mother was really fine in expressing feelings, whether she was angry or loving or afraid. ‘If you’re scared, explain,’ she would say. She always wanted Courtney and me to have opinions. She used to tell me, ‘You’re so smart,’ and because I looked like her, ‘We’re the same.’ She’d write me letters and say, ‘I’m thinking of you.’ ”

  Natalie also wrote RJ when she was thinking of him with a special love, on his birthday, on the anniversary of both their marriages, at Christmas and Easter. February 10 (his birthday), 1974: “This is always my happiest day, too—because of you. I love you.” December 28 (date of their first marriage), 1974: “This was the happiest day of my life in 1957—but I didn’t know you’d make me doubly happy in July of 1971.” February 10, 1975 (when she had a fig tree planted in the garden): “This fig may look bare now, but soon it will bear fruit—as we have. I love you with all my heart and I hope this tree grows as beautifully as my love for you does every single day.” Easter 1976: “I love you more than love.”

  In the summer of 1974, the Wagners acquired a new housekeeper, Willie Mae Worthen, who became a trusted friend (like Elizabeth Applegate) and still works for RJ today; and after a three-year search, RJ bought a new boat that he and Natalie decided to call Splendour, in honor of the Kazan movie. Large enough to sleep eight, it had a spacious deck, saloon and galley, and a motorized dinghy (called Valiant in ironic homage to RJ’s star-making movie) attached to the side. But to Guy McElwaine, the boat had two curious features. “The master stateroom was aft, and close by it, two steps led down to the dinghy, the only way off and on the boat when it was offshore. And the lower step, that they called the swim step, became very slippery when it was below the waterline.”

  Natalie helped decorate the boat, installing French doors to the aft deck and Early American furniture in the master stateroom; and when guests stayed over the weekend, Delphine Mann recalled, “the galley became the only time Natalie ever spent in any kitchen. She enjoyed cooking huevos rancheros for breakfast.” In spite of her fear of dark water, “Natalie loved being on the ocean but not in it,” according to RJ. They also spent many weekends “with the Newport Beach boat crowd”—Claire Trevor and her husband, Milton Bren; Rock Hudson; Mary and Richard Sale.

  One eye on the camera at a charity event in the late 1970s, Maria creates a photo opportunity with Cesar Romero. (illustration credit 6.5)

  In those years, Karl Malden recalled, “Natalie looked more beautiful than ever,” and the Wagners were “a golden couple” in public: “Charming, glamorous, in love—and it was real. The first time around, you sometimes got the impression they were playing it. But this time they just enjoyed letting people see how happy they were.”

  From a private angle, they made the same impression on George Segal. He came to know Natalie when he resumed the friendship with RJ that had begun on The Longest Day, and remembered spending a day on the boat, along with David Niven and Arthur Loew. “RJ couldn’t join us because he was filming, but he talked with Natalie on the phone about every forty minutes.” It also made no difference to the Wagners that they were “establishment” and Segal was “new”: “When my wife and I gave a party and invited them, RJ would joke, ‘We’ll provide the glitter.’ And they did. Nobody else had Natalie’s pizzazz, and the Wagner parties were really an extension of the George Cukor times, with the same mix of younger and older people, the same intelligence and glitter.”

  IN 1977 RJ first noticed a “change” in Natalie. “Natasha was seven years old and less dependent, Courtney was three and had become very attached to Willie Mae, and I could see the career demon starting to take over.” He believed that Natalie’s career was “her only security, and apart from her daughters, she considered it her only real accomplishment.”

  But the “change” was preceded by three events that almost certainly acted as subconscious preparation. The first, a televised American Film Institute tribute to Orson Welles, occurred on February 9, 1975. Welles’s longtime friend Frank Sinatra acted as master of ceremonies, and Natalie joined Ingrid Bergman, Peter Bogdanovich, Joseph Cotten, John Huston and others in honoring the man who played her guardian in Tomorrow Is Forever.

  A clip is screened of six-year-old, blonded and pigtailed Natalie crying hysterically on Welles’s lap; then Sinatra welcomes thirty-seven-year-old Natalie to the stage, and movies become a time machine. Dark-haired, at the height of her beauty, she smiles at the director who made The Trial when she was starring in Love with the Proper Stranger. Thirty years have passed since they acted together; he’s grown considerably heavier and wears a genuine beard instead of glued-on whiskers.

  Natalie’s speech is brief and graceful. “That was a scene with me on Orson’s lap,” she tells the audience. “Of course I’m a little bigger now, and so is Orson’s lap.” Welles laughs; then she addresses him directly: “It was as delightful to sit on your lap then as it’s been to sit at your feet now. I’d like to thank you from both angles.”

  Welles had hoped that the occasion would result in an offer of completion money for his current project, The Other Side of the Wind. (He got a standing ovation but no offers.) In Natalie’s case, a reunion obviously aroused memories of the past; but her last substantial role had been in Bob & Carol six yea
rs earlier, and listening to Bergman, who’d won two Oscars, and Cotten, who spoke of the excitement that Welles communicated to actors, was bound to arouse thoughts of the future as well.

  The next event occurred in October 1976, when Natalie herself was the subject of a tribute at the San Francisco Film Festival. Although excited by the recognition of her work, she wondered apprehensively how a program of clips from her film career would hold up, especially as Jack Nicholson was also being honored and she feared he would seem more “contemporary.”

  For moral support at the tribute, she had RJ, Mart Crowley, Howard Jeffrey, Peggy Griffin, me and her new agent, Arnold Stiefel, who replaced Freddie Fields after he dissolved his agency to become a producer. A compilation of clips from Natalie’s performances (as child star, adolescent, and adult actress) made a strong impression; her entrance onstage for the question-and-answer period cued a standing ovation, and when it was over, another for the way she handled herself—charming, poised and funny. Leaving the theater, she was literally besieged by fans with one more question to ask, one more congratulation to offer, one more autograph book to sign. It was an example of how, in RJ’s words, “people gravitated to Natalie. She always seemed to be at the center of whatever was going on, not because she sought it, but it just seemed to be her natural place. And of course she enjoyed it.”

  The night before the tribute, Mart Crowley had checked into the same hotel as the Wagners and witnessed a different kind of “change” in Natalie. He told her that a rent boy would be coming to his room after dinner, and toward midnight she made an unannounced drunken entrance, wearing a nightgown, went straight over to the boy and castigated him. “You’re not good enough for my friend!” Mart was stunned and asked her “not to be rude.” “I’ll give you rude!” Natalie shouted, ran to a table set with sandwiches and chocolate cake that Mart had ordered for the boy, and whipped off the cloth. Food flew across the room; then she ran out and slammed the door.