Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

On the afternoon of the third day, RJ still kept to his bed. “Tell him the children are wondering why he won’t come down,” Liz said to Willie Mae. “Tell him he must get up and talk to them.” As she hoped, it brought RJ back to “the land of the living.” He shaved and dressed, took Natasha and Courtney for a walk in the garden. “We’re going to be all right,” he told them. “We’re staying together.”

  And the house that had grown so eerily silent began to stir with the kind of noise that “Natalie always took as a sign that the children were happy.”

  Proverb: The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

  When RJ accepts an invitation from David Niven to bring his family to Gstaad for Christmas, there’s no way he can anticipate the chance meeting that will occur there. He takes Liz Applegate, Mart Crowley, Delphine Mann, Josh Donen and Willie Mae as well as Natasha and Courtney on the trip, and snow lies heavy on the ground when they arrive at the spacious chalet Niven has rented for them.

  Next day RJ walks alone to a nearby hotel bar and finds Ladislav Blatnik sitting there alone. He’s moderately drunk and looks moderately seedy. What a tragedy about Natalie’s death, he remarks to RJ, then says how much he loved her, Gstaad is where they first met, and so on. “The last things I needed to hear,” as RJ will recall later, adding that he made a polite but speedy escape.

  The afternoon also knows that the Shoe King’s empire is about to collapse, and that within a few years Blatnik will kill himself.

  ON DECEMBER 29, the Wagner family and friends leave for Whitebrook Farm in Wales, where Richard Gregson and his wife, Julia, live. They spend New Year’s Eve there, and RJ suddenly thinks: This is my first New Year’s Eve without Natalie since 1973, and there will never be another. Then he breaks down.

  Today, Courtney Wagner remembers her sister as “very sad, very depressed,” during and for some while after the trip. By that time, Courtney also remembers, she’s begun to hold imaginary conversations with her mother, like a child playing a game of hide-and-seek. “Where have you gone? When will you be back?” And once she left her a note: “Mother, where are you?”

  After Courtney was born, her mother’s attention had mainly focused on Natasha, “because she needed it then. But Natalie planned to get around to me very soon.” Then she died before “very soon,” and Courtney always felt closer to Willie Mae. During the trip, they sleep in the same bed. In one way, as RJ explains later, “Natalie’s death was harder for Natasha, because she was old enough to come to terms with it, and they’d been very close.” But in another way it will be even harder for Courtney. “It hit me at the age of fourteen,” she remembers. “Panic attacks. I didn’t wash. I slashed my wrists, nearly died in hospital. I’m still working my way through all that, but I think I’m almost there.”

  “I’VE LOANED LANA so much money and never been repaid,” Natalie had told RJ and Liz Applegate when she made her final will, “and I’m not leaving her any money. Just my clothes.” And a few days after the Wagners return to 603 North Canon, Lana Wood calls the house. RJ is filming Hart to Hart, and Liz answers. “I know I’m getting Natalie’s clothes and I want them now,” Lana says. Although Liz explains that the will is still in probate, and she must wait for the court’s approval, Lana continues to call almost daily and demand her “rights.” These include Natalie’s fur coats, which she knows are particularly valuable. RJ had planned to store the furs and give them to Natasha and Courtney later; and “in the hope of getting Lana off my back,” he tells Liz to have the furs appraised, send her the money and “let her take everything else.”

  Shortly afterward, a truck pulls up outside the house and Lana gets out with her current boyfriend, Alan Feinstein. She rings the front doorbell, and Liz leads the couple upstairs to Natalie’s bedroom. Natasha happens to be sitting on her mother’s bed when they enter. They ignore her completely, move straight to the huge walk-in closet and seize a first armful of clothes. “Something feels very wrong here,” Natasha tells herself as she watches them make a series of hurried journeys to load the truck. She remembers “the pride I felt when I saw Natalie all dressed up to go out for the night,” and Liz is aware of her pain: “When Lana grabbed an old bra, Natasha asked why she wanted it. ‘Because your mother wanted me to have it,’ she said curtly. No concern for Natasha, only for her own need of money. As RJ had put Natalie’s fur coats in storage, planning to offer them to Natasha and Courtney later, Lana also asked RJ to have them appraised and send her a check. RJ wearily okayed this too and his accountant sent Lana $11,000. Meanwhile, she sold almost all the clothes to a used-clothing store in the San Fernando Valley. Some items, including old bras and panties, were hung in the window and labeled ‘Belonging to Natalie Wood.’ ”

  THE AFTERNOON also knows that as the shock of Natalie’s death wears off for Maria Gurdin, so does the obsession that’s taken over much of her life. For a few weeks she wears black, then begins to revert to the colorful, exuberant Musia who first attracted Nick, and to the Maria that her friends in San Francisco remembered as a flamboyant dresser. Pendant earrings, elaborate brooches and rings festoon her again, and she particularly enjoys wearing orange or purple at her occasional visits to the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary.

  Maria is well taken care of, as RJ buys the condo that Natalie rented for her and makes her a monthly allowance of $2,000 for as long as she lives there. But as she no longer likes to drive a car, and Lana still lives in the San Fernando Valley, Maria asks Natasha Zepaloff to chauffeur her around. And to a lesser extent, Natasha replaces Natalie as an obsession, the last piece of unfinished business in Maria’s life.

  In June 1982, when Natalie has been dead for six months, and Natasha is driving her to a “Star Mothers Luncheon” at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in North Hollywood, Maria suddenly feels free to dispense with winks and nudges. “I have to tell you something,” she says. “Your father and I became deeply involved with each other before I married Nick, and our relationship has continued ever since.” Maria also confides that she was pregnant when she married Nick, explains why she felt certain that Zepaloff was the father and concludes: “So you see, Natalie was your sister.”

  Half-sister, she ought to have said; but Maria still retains her sense of drama. Soon afterward, she decides to phone the Captain while Natasha is visiting at Goshen Avenue: “They talked for about ten minutes; then she handed me the phone. My father was cordial yet cool, and I had the impression that he felt embarrassed because he knew Maria had finally told me about their affair, and that he was also Natalie’s father.”

  In 1989, Natasha divorces her husband of twenty years and changes her name legally to Lofft (adding a t to the last four letters of “Zepaloff”). Soon afterward she meets Richard Benson and goes to live with him in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where they open a health-food emporium. In 2001, after talking to her mother, Nina Jaure, I fly to Lake Havasu and am met at the airport by a woman who’s taller than Natalie, but whose face startles me by suggesting how Natalie might have looked at sixty. That evening Natasha tells her story, and Richard Benson contributes his impression of Zepaloff.

  Back in Los Angeles, I relate the story to the Wagner family, and RJ decides to invite Natasha Lofft to tell it again at lunch in Beverly Hills. At a secluded patio table, I listen while she describes to RJ, his daughters Natasha and Courtney, and Mart Crowley, her various meetings with Natalie over the years, the various hints thrown out by her father and Maria, the climactic scene in the car when Maria announces that Zepaloff is Natalie’s biological father. At this point, she’s overcome with very “Russian” emotion, and tears come to her eyes as she explains why she kept silent until I got in touch with her. “All I ever wanted,” she says, “was to be accepted.” Then she shows the pendant with an engraved medallion that Natalie gave her.

  RJ is alert but quizzical throughout. He leans back in his chair while the others lean forward. The girls and Natasha exchange anecdotes of Maria and, before they say goodbye, phone numbers. Afterward, Natasha Greg
son Wagner says that she’s very aware of a resemblance to Natalie: “Not just the eyes. The hairline’s the same.” Like Courtney, she wonders whether their mother “really knew, or guessed,” the connection that Natasha Lofft sensed; and if Mud actually confided in Natalie, did she believe or disbelieve the story?

  “Do you believe it?” Courtney asks me. On the flight to Lake Havasu City, I say, I wondered if I was going to meet another case of Anna Anderson–Anastasia. But after spending an evening and most of the following day with Natasha Lofft, I decided that although there was no way to prove the truth of the story beyond any doubt, there was no crucial reason to disbelieve it.

  Mart Crowley agrees, and it becomes the consensus. RJ has said little throughout the lunch, which he’s clearly found an unsettling experience. But now he remarks, “It’s really extraordinary to think about.” Then he adds: “Of course, when you think about Mud, it’s not so extraordinary.”

  By the time of that lunch, Mud had been dead for three years; and over the previous ten years, she had gradually been stripped of the various layers of her personality: Musia, Maria, Star Mother, secret inamorata.

  The bad times began after Lana Wood abandoned all hope of an acting and then a writing career. A year after Natalie died, she had published Natalie, a remarkably untruthful “memoir” of her sister. Its sales were modest, and when she failed to sell a movie story about “two girls growing up in a peculiar town,” she decided to live rent-free by moving into Mud’s condo with her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and several cats. But even though she’d received a check for $11,000 for the furs, in addition to money from the sale of the rest of Natalie’s clothes, Lana continued to write letters to RJ, claiming that her daughter was seriously ill and she couldn’t pay the medical bills, that her electricity was about to be cut off, or her car about to be repossessed. RJ never answered. “I’d promised Natalie that if anything happened to her, I’d look after her mother,” he recalled. “But after all the unpleasantness we’d both had with Lana, I couldn’t see my way to looking after her sister.”

  At the condo, Mud was evicted from the master bedroom and banished to the back room. When a neighbor called Liz Applegate to complain of bad smells caused by the cats, she asked the man who was checking the security system at 603 North Canon to investigate. As well as confirming the cat smells, he reported that the whole apartment was filthy, and when Mud appeared from the back room, “the daughter’s boyfriend ordered her to ‘get back in there. We’ll tell you when you can come out.’ ”

  RJ settled Mud in an apartment in nearby Barrington Plaza, but a few weeks later he received a call from the building superintendent that “a small fire” had broken out in Mrs. Gurdin’s apartment. Although it was not serious, and quickly extinguished, Mud’s account of what happened was disturbing. “I was looking for my jewels under the bed with a lighted candle,” she said. Although Mud had started to hide her jewelry in various places after Lana moved into the condo, the lighted candle was not her first aberration. In recent weeks, a series of memory lapses had made RJ suspect that Mud was developing Alzheimer’s, and he wanted to move her to the Motion Picture Country Home. As he’d made several large contributions to the home, the director agreed to accept her; but Lana, who’d moved back to a rented house in Thousand Oaks after RJ closed the condo, refused to give permission, even though Olga was in favor of the idea. She insisted on taking Mud to live with her; and this meant, of course, that her mother’s monthly checks from RJ would be readdressed to Lana’s house.

  Natalie driving the dinghy (illustration credit 6.17)

  Perhaps fortunately for Mud, the symptoms of Alzheimer’s soon progressed to a point where she no longer knew where she was living and had to be moved to a hospital. Simultaneously, in a northern California sanitarium, the Captain relapsed into senile dementia. Alone and apart in a deepening twilight zone of the mind, both of them lost control of the lives they’d controlled for so long on their own terms, as well as the shared memory of a “great romantic love.” Zepaloff recalled nothing of his two wives and three Natalies, only fragments of his young life in China; and although Maria held on to fragmented memories of her Captain, they finally became as elusive as the other scraps of her life that drifted in and out of consciousness.

  When Maria Gurdin died on January 6, 1998, a month before her eighty-sixth birthday, the Captain had become a figure who appeared very occasionally on the distant horizon of her mind’s eye.

  So had Natalie.

  7

  Something Extra

  You’ve got that little something extra. Ellen Terry, a great actress long before you were born, said that’s what star quality was—“that little something extra.”

  —NORMAN MAINE (JAMES MASON) TO ESTHER BLODGETT

  (JUDY GARLAND) IN A STAR IS BORN

  When the persona fitted the role, you couldn’t do better.

  —ELIA KAZAN ON NATALIE WOOD

  Ultimately film is the director’s eye. You can do your best take as an actor, and if the director doesn’t want to cut to you, or doesn’t want to use that moment, you’re out of luck. And if you disagree with a director, you’re out of luck too, because he’s going to cut it the way he sees it.

  —NATALIE WOOD

  By 1944, when Natalie Wood played her first screen role in Tomorrow Is Forever at the age of seven, eight-year-old Margaret O’Brien had made eight movies, most recently Meet Me in St. Louis; and twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor was on the verge of adolescence, playing her first leading role in National Velvet. In 1945 another twelve-year-old, Peggy Ann Garner, gave an exceptionally touching performance in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But she would never find another role even half as good, and like O’Brien would never make the transition to a successful adult career.

  O’Brien and Garner won special Academy Awards, and Mary Astor remembered the “serious, ‘dedicated’ look” in Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes on the set of National Velvet; but a year later, when Astor played her mother in Cynthia, “the look in her violet eyes was somewhat calculating, as though she knew exactly what she wanted and was quite sure of getting it.”

  In fact Elizabeth Taylor became the last of the iconic movie stars, occasionally stimulated to an impressive performance by directors (notably George Stevens and Mike Nichols) who knew what they wanted and were determined to get it. But in the long run she was most impressive as herself, star of a grand soap-opera life more riveting than Dynasty, and an eloquent, pioneering spokesperson for AIDS research at charity events. As a phenomenon, incidentally, she always fascinated Natalie Wood, less for her acting than for her resolute personal independence, unshaken even when the Vatican denounced her for “erotic vagrancy.”

  Did O’Brien and Garner fail to develop their early promise through bad luck, personal neurosis, or the fact that their promise ended when childhood ended? To some extent, probably, for the first two reasons, and certainly for the last. They showed little promise as adult actors. But for Taylor, whose early roles were less demanding, and whose exceptional beauty became apparent much earlier than Natalie’s, her later career (like her life) was a matter of choice.

  Temperamentally, these child stars were very different. O’Brien, too often wasted in shallow and maudlin roles, was a mischief maker who delighted in angering property men by changing the position of props between takes. And although her extraordinary technical assurance never depended on emotion memory to make tears stream down her face, the shrewd little minx seemed lost and bewildered as a woman. She even mythologized her childhood career to the extent of believing that when Natalie imitated a monkey in Miracle on 34th Street, she was imitating O’Brien doing the same thing in Meet Me in St. Louis. But O’Brien never imitated a monkey, not even her toy one, in that movie.

  To induce Peggy Ann Garner to cry in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kazan talked to her about her father, who was serving overseas in the air force. “Implicit in what I said,” he remembered, “was the suggestion that he might not come back.�
� The thought caused Garner to burst into tears, and a display of emotion so vital to the scene became “the real thing.” According to Kazan, she was still disturbed at the end of the day, but had forgotten about it next morning, “as children do.”

  Maybe. Roddy McDowall told me that Garner attempted suicide twice before she died (after two failed marriages and a period of near-poverty) at the age of fifty-three. And Natalie never forgot an occasion when she was about to play an emotional scene in Tomorrow Is Forever, and Maria made sure she would cry by describing how she once saw a boy tear the wings off a live bird. This, of course, is the dark side of the “Let’s Pretend” coin. When the adult Natalie attended a few Actors Studio classes as an observer, she found that Lee Strasberg’s use of “sense memory, emotion memories, where you sit and remember textures, sounds, feelings, reliving an unhappy experience to promote tears,” was very similar to the way she worked as a child. “What was called preparation, I used to call getting in the mood.”

  “Getting in the mood” for Tomorrow Is Forever, then, usually involved emotion memories by another name; and inevitably some of them were unhappy. All the movie reveals about Margret is that she’s an Austrian war orphan adopted by Kessler (Orson Welles). But Natalie’s imagination fills in some major cracks. Her Margret is always intently focused on Kessler, with a “daughterly” feeling almost obsessive in its neediness. Although Pichel no doubt explained the feelings of an orphan who hardly knew her father, Natalie would have needed little encouragement to draw on her feelings about Nick Gurdin, alternately too threatening and too closed off for her to respond to him as a father.

  Not surprisingly, Natalie’s performance has some technical rough edges: the dialogue that occasionally becomes incoherent when she cries, the Austro-German accent not uniformly sustained. But they’re overshadowed by her composure and dignity, and the way (always a sign of instinctive talent) she listens so attentively to the other actors. Welles provides the only other anchor to reality, in both performance and makeup. He ages convincingly while Claudette Colbert acknowledges the passing of twenty-five years by adopting a more “mature” hairstyle, and George Brent by adding a dash of silver to his temples.