Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  On Sunday, July 11, 1982, nine days before Natalie’s birthday, my mother wrote me a letter:

  Dear RJ,

  You are very much in my thoughts and prayers as I know this is a sad time for you with Natalie’s birthday and an anniversary just ahead—but although it’s hard to do—you must tuck these days away and only have happy memories—these you will always have—yours alone.

  Have no regrets, RJ, as there was no one who loved their wife, children and home more than you did—and you were always so in tune together and you were so good to Natalie, so do not have any unhappy moments.

  Natalie had a very full life for her age—much more than many actresses ever achieve at a much older age. She had a happy home life—beautiful children and a husband who adored her—so what more is there in life?

  I feel very sad that she was taken at such a young time in her life, but there are things one has no control over—[so] remember only all the happy times you had together.

  I love you dearly, RJ, always and always will until the end of time.

  Love,

  C.

  Thank God for Hart to Hart. The show kept going, although it always gets harder the longer a show runs. The writers get bored and want to move on to something else because the characters are set. Besides that, relationships are the toughest things to write for television—or, for that matter, for any media. The nature of our show meant that we couldn’t spice things up by inventing domestic squabbles or kitchen-sink drama. But it was a wonderful company; Tom Mankiewicz and Mart Crowley ran the show and did a wonderful job, and the entire cast and crew were a pleasure to work with. The fact that we were a success meant that we were always able to get good actors, which keeps the regulars on their toes.

  After our fifth season, our ratings were still good, and we had eight scripts ready for our sixth season. We were going to take the Harts to France, then shoot a couple more episodes in other European spots. And then a new regime at ABC canceled us because they wanted to make room for their own programming.

  We were all totally shocked; Aaron and Leonard came out to the house while we tried to figure out a way to keep things going. The problem was that the network canceled us very late, and the other networks had already set their schedules. Today a show that was as successful as ours would be easily moved over to cable or one of the other networks, but in 1984 those alternative venues didn’t exist.

  Once again, I was an actor at liberty.

  I had always promised Natalie that if anything happened to her, I would take care of her mother, which I did. At first, Mud handled my fan mail and would come by the house to see her granddaughters. I bought the condo that Natalie had been renting for her and gave Mud $2,000 a month for her expenses. But it was gradually growing apparent that she was getting a touch forgetful and could no longer live alone.

  Lana moved in with Mud and brought her boyfriend with her. Lana and her boyfriend were in the big bedroom, and Mud was in the small bedroom, and in between were about ten cats. (Lana has always been an animal collector.) The neighbors finally demanded that we do something about the smell. The drapes were shredded from the cats, there were droppings everywhere, and rolls of toilet paper littered the floors. Basically, they were living like derelicts.

  We moved Mud into her own apartment at Barrington Plaza, and we cleaned the old place up. For a time, Katie lived there. Then I got a call that Mud had set fire to her apartment. When we asked her what had happened, she said that she had been looking for her jewels under the bed with a lighted candle.

  It was clear that Mud required constant supervision and needed to go to the Motion Picture Home, which, since it began in the 1920s, has provided a wonderful, nurturing refuge for elderly people from all branches of the industry. I called up Edie Wasserman to arrange it. Natalie and I had raised a great deal of money for the Home over the years, and I’ve continued to do so. Arranging residency for Mud would have been very easy.

  But Lana didn’t want her mother to go to the Home, largely, I believe, because if Mud lived with her, she could live off Mud’s Social Security and my monthly check. Olga, Natalie’s older sister, is a wonderful woman and was very much on my side in this entire unfortunate business. Olga and I tried to pry Mud away and get her into the Home, but without Lana’s permission Mud couldn’t be admitted. It wasn’t long before Mud’s carelessness accelerated into dementia, and she had to be moved to a hospital. She died in January 1998, a month before she would have turned eighty-six.

  About two years ago, I received a letter from Lana’s daughter asking for help for her child—Lana’s grandchild.

  As I sat there thinking, I remembered how her husband at the time sold the pictures of mine and Natalie’s second wedding to the tabloids. I remembered all the misleading stories about Natalie she gave to the tabloids. I remembered how she ran up her mother’s credit cards. I remembered the way she ransacked Natalie’s clothes. And I remembered the last time I had given her money. She had come to me for help with her house and the water bill and so forth. I had given her a check for $25,000. A month later she was back for more.

  I remembered all this, and I said no. To paraphrase Walter Huston in Dodsworth, “Family has to stop somewhere short of suicide.”

  Then Lana appealed to the kids, and Natasha gave her some money. “It will never be enough,” I told her.

  We stored all the paraphernalia from the Splendour in a facility in the valley. There was a great deal of memorabilia—wonderful photographs that we’d had framed and mounted, all the silver and china and clocks and barometers from the boat. In 1994 the Northridge earthquake hit, and a bridge collapsed onto the storage facility. There was nothing left. A bulldozer came in and loaded the shards onto a truck. Everything was carted away to a landfill.

  Gone, all gone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “A GIFT FOR LIFE.”

  The first time I met Jill St. John, on a soundstage at Fox in 1959. (© TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

  Like me, Jill St. John is a Hollywood kid. Her dad ran a very successful bar and restaurant in Westwood, and Betty Lou Oppenheim, her mother, created the Screen Smart Set, a program through which people donated clothes and furniture to the Motion Picture Home in return for a tax deduction. The Home raised more than $8 million because of Betty Lou’s idea.

  Natalie and Jill knew each other, but not well. Nat and Jill were kids in daily ballet class together, both with ferocious stage mothers. (Stefanie Powers was in the same class!) Jill’s mother got her into radio by the time she was six, and she was making movies when she was a teenager. When we were married the first time, Natalie and I would say hi to Jill and Lance Reventlow, her husband, and as my career at Fox slowed down, hers was heating up. Jill was a leading lady to some major stars: Sinatra, Dean Martin, and, of course, Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever. We had worked together in How I Spent My Summer Vacation, and Banning, not to mention the pilot for Hart to Hart, and the association had been pleasant but purely professional, despite the imaginings of my wife, Marion.

  Jill and I first went out for dinner with Tom Mankiewicz and my daughter Kate about six months after Natalie died. A few days later, I called Jill and asked her out. She got flustered and said she’d call me right back. Then she immediately called Tom Mankiewicz.

  “RJ asked me out,” she said. “Should I go?”

  “Well, if you don’t, someone else will,” he replied.

  You can’t argue with logic like that, so Jill and I started seeing each other.

  I don’t particularly like being alone. I’m one of those men who likes being in a relationship—it centers me. As we spent time together, I realized that Jill brought many things to the table. There was a sense of kismet in what happened between us. Whenever we’d run into each other in the past, one or both of us was in love with somebody else, so neither of us ever particularly contemplated the other’s potential. But now we seemed to be finding each other at a time when we were both alone. Besides
that, we were at similar stages of our lives. I’m ten years older, but we’re both old enough to have loved and lost, so we valued each other all the more.

  I found that Jill was remarkably empathetic; she understood what I was going through, perhaps better than I did. She had lost Lance Reventlow, with whom she was always close even after they divorced, in a plane crash. She had known and liked Natalie. We knew a lot of the same people, we were from the same era, we understood the same music.

  From the beginning, we were comfortable with each other, and that is something that only gets better with time. From the beginning, both my mother and my sister also thought the world of her, which served as a confirmation of my own instincts.

  While Jill and I were slowly discovering each other, the uproar over Natalie’s death continued. The promise I had made to Paul Ziffren—to not acknowledge anything that was written or broadcast about Natalie’s death—was immensely valuable. Of course, I was aware of what was being said, but I tried to ignore it.

  There was only one thing that truly enraged me: the stories that I had somehow conspired to kill Natalie. That was the last straw, and I wasn’t going to take it quietly. Finally, Jill called Henry Kissinger, whom she’s known for years, and Henry called me. He explained that, legally speaking, I had little recourse. He talked about the things that had been written about him, some of which were nearly as crazy as the things that were being said about me. The sense of the conversation was “this too shall pass,” and it helped me get past my reflexive outrage.

  Jill never pressed me for any kind of definition in our relationship. She was there, with her hand under my arm. She let me vent and be what I needed to be. She didn’t try to put lights on the Christmas tree, she was just there for me and the kids, with no expectation of return. She loved me, or she wouldn’t have stayed, because at this point I was lugging enough baggage to fill a 747 to Heathrow. I was a heartbroken man who was drinking too much and just trying to get through the night, every night. I had three kids who were also reeling. I wasn’t exactly a catch.

  Although we started going out about six months after Natalie died, it probably took two or three years before I could look at her and really see her. I do not believe I would be alive today without her. There’s a reason my pet name for her is “Magic.” Jill is very bright, very caring, and has what I can only call a gift for life. She is, for example, a wonderful gardener. She tends things. She’s also a superb Cordon Bleu–trained chef. Soon things started happening for us together.

  It was Jill who helped me find the house the kids and I moved into. The belief had been growing in me for some time that the Canon Drive house was too permeated with Natalie for the girls and me to ever be able to make a fresh start. I started looking for an alternative.

  Cliff May was a developer and architect who had basically invented the California ranch house, with the sliding glass door leading out to the backyard. Because of my father’s interest in California real estate, which he passed on to me, I was aware of the community of houses Cliff had built near Will Rogers State Park. Cliff had started building the houses in 1936 or so, and the house Cliff built for himself was the one I bought.

  It’s a long ranch house on two and a half acres. The living area is in the center of the house, and the seven bedrooms and the office spike off from the center. There was room for the kids as well as Willie Mae, and there was plenty of room to build a perfect cottage for my mother. And there was a stable for horses—the most therapeutic of all animals. The house is just minutes from Hollywood, but it feels rural; around the corner, there’s a neighborhood riding ring for working with the horses. It’s not pretentious, but it is comfortable. From the beginning, it felt like home, and for more than twenty-five years that’s what it was.

  The house had been featured in Architectural Digest in 1946, when Cliff May was still living in it, and those photographs show nothing but forest around the house. The magazine categorized it as a “Modern Ranch House” in “Riviera Ranch, West Los Angeles,” which is fair enough, although now it’s just Brentwood. But ranch houses didn’t have some of the beautiful rounded adobe features of the entry, or the rural feel that the land gave the house.

  Unfortunately, the house had been altered over the years, and some of its charm and beauty had been lost, but Cliff was still alive when we bought it, and I asked him to restore it. Cliff was a fascinating man, very romantic, in love with Mexico and women, some of whom he married. I’m glad I got to know him.

  In late 1982, the girls and I moved in…slowly. It was another wrenching experience. Natalie had decorated the Canon Drive house so very carefully, so very beautifully. I couldn’t bear to just pull up stakes all at once, so we moved out gradually. We would drive over to the new house, perhaps paint a room and move in a few pieces of furniture. I told the girls that they could take any furniture they wanted from the old house for their new rooms; if there wasn’t room in the new house and they still wanted it, I told them I would keep things in storage until they had houses of their own and could reclaim the pieces that carried such memories of their mother.

  And if the Brentwood house wasn’t enough, Jill opened up Aspen for me. Jill had lived in Aspen since the mid-1960s, when it was a slightly down-at-the-mouth silver mining town in the process of becoming a world-class ski resort and you could pick up lots for $750. The people who lived in Aspen were highly educated, although most of them didn’t have a lot of money. But they loved the arts and they loved the mountains, and long after everybody became quite wealthy because of the skyrocketing value of their land, they continued to be devoted to the extraordinary environment and atmosphere.

  I fell in love with the town at the same time I was falling in love with Jill. Finally, in 1995, we bought property there, and three years after that we completed the house we’d planned and built together.

  The house that had been on the seven and a half acres was small, almost Bauhaus in style, and it had nothing to do with its surroundings. We built a different structure, higher, more open, with a lot of windows that brought the house into the world of the mountains that lie beyond our veranda. The house has bare timbers and is surrounded by trembling aspen trees and spruce. You can’t see any other houses from ours, so there’s a feeling of splendid isolation in the view, and the atmosphere is serenely western. Surrounded by the trees, Jill’s collection of Russell Chatham paintings, and the twelve-foot Tiffany window, I am at home.

  I think that Jill and I found each other at the right time. There have been none of the tensions that arose in my other marriages, and I think that’s because when you find someone at our stage of life, you’re much less likely to do anything to derail trust. Jill is a man’s woman, and I’m lucky she chose me to be her man. And whenever we have to go somewhere, she’s packed and ready before I am, and with fewer bags. Unfortunately.

  Our favorite times together have been on fishing trips or the various times we’ve gone to Europe. There have been driving trips through France and four or five trips to Paris, where we love walking around the Ile St. Louis or the gardens of the Rodin Museum—my favorite place in France. These times together contain nothing fancy, nothing pretentious. The hotels are out of the Michelin Guide, the food is bread, cheese, and wine, and it all fills my soul.

  My friendship with David Niven never weakened. We spent many happy days on his sailboat, the Foxy, around Cap Ferrat. We’d fish for sea bass and dive for sea urchins, which he ate as if they were popcorn. For liquid refreshment, David hung bottles of white wine over the side of his boat so that the Mediterranean would keep them cold. He also had a taste for loup de mers and would tell me, “We have to catch them here before they go across the border and become bronzino.” The secret to David’s personality was that he loved life as much as he loved to work; the secret to the love that people had for David was not just that he was quick, clever, and witty; it was that he had a gift for friendship like few people I’ve known.

  David’s house at Cap Ferrat was ca
lled Lo Scoglietto, and it was near a little medieval village called St. Paul de Vence. Niv adored his house, and he adored the sunshine and the flowers that grow in such profusion around Cap Ferrat. He was so sentimental about living things that he would walk around his pool fishing out bees and wasps so they wouldn’t drown. He ordered his life around summers at Cap Ferrat, and he flatly refused to take any film that would interfere with his lifestyle.

  His personality never changed, not even after he was struck by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. Despite his weakened physical condition, he retained the wonderful joie de vivre that always came through in his acting. Jill would say that even after he could no longer speak intelligibly, he could still make her laugh, because his eyes were still alive with his personality and she could tell what he was trying to say.

  On one level, I don’t think he ever got over Primmie’s death. By the time David was diagnosed with ALS, Hjordis was a total alcoholic, and not a quiet one. They had adopted two girls, Kristina and Fiona, in order, I assume, to try to give the marriage more of a foundation, but it never seemed to me that Hjordis had any feelings for David at all. Why he stayed with her, I’ve never understood. I thought a divorce was in the offing at one time, around 1977, but then one of the girls had a very serious auto accident, and he felt that he couldn’t leave his family. The woman he had been seeing was English, about thirty-five, and loved to sit at his knee and listen to the uproarious stories David could tell so well. She adored him, and to see David with her, as opposed to Hjordis, was to see a flower open to the sun.