Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  When Maria would later talk about Natasha at this age, she described her as “always acting,” desperate to be in movies. According to Olga, four-year-old Natasha was a “natural” when she performed, but she was not movie-struck. Maria was the one stalking movie crews, seeking parts for herself and Natasha; Natasha “just went along.” Olga—who knew every star, studied drama in school, and got her Social Security card so she could work as an extra—was an after-thought. “I wouldn’t even come home from school. I’d know that wherever they’d be shooting, my mother and Natasha would be. So I’d walk over to some of the houses.” Olga was happy just to be included. “My mother made everything fun.”

  The Gurdins had been in town a few weeks when Maria heard about a ten-year-old Santa Rosa girl “discovered” by Hitchcock in July. Edna May Wonacott, the “Cinderella Girl,” as she was dubbed in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, was flown to Los Angeles for a screen test and given a part in Shadow of a Doubt. The end of October, Santa Rosa staged an “Edna May Day,” with a parade in her honor. Maria Gurdin became obsessed with Edna May Wonacott, following every nuance of her Cinderella story. Edna May, the bespectacled daughter of a grocer, had been downtown with two cousins, unaware Hitchcock was across the street, scouting for locations. She remembers: “We were standing on a street corner waiting for a bus—and him and Jack Skirball, the producer, were looking at the courthouse for angles. And then they turned around and started looking at me.” Maria read the front-page story in the newspaper, which reported that Hitchcock noticed Edna May because of her pigtails, asking her to sing a song for her screen test. Maria made mental notes, using Edna May as a role model for Natasha. The town went Edna May-mad. “People stopped by the market just to touch my dad.” Maria accelerated her efforts to get Natasha noticed by film crews. “She was a stage mother,” recalls a neighbor. “Push, push, push.”

  By Thanksgiving, Hitchcock and the crew from The Sullivans were gone. Natasha enjoyed simply being a child. She baked cookies outdoors in an electric play oven with her first and only friend, a neighborhood boy named Edwin Canevari. Edwin was small for his age, like Natasha, and fiercely loyal. “We played husband and wife,” he recalls. Maria trusted no one else to play with Natasha. “She was watching her all the time, even when we were playing out in the driveway.” Natasha was never a “physical” child, according to Maria: “She liked to play piano and do some artwork.” This was, to a degree, Natasha’s nature; the rest of her perceived delicacy came from being treated like a hothouse flower. The gypsy’s warning continued to haunt Natasha, further restricting her from physical activities. “Never did she go in the water,” pronounced Canevari. “She was deathly afraid of the water.” Maria encouraged Natasha to play the piano, taught her to embroider, and bought her the oven for her to sculpt with clay, heeding advice from Olga’s nurse in China, who told Musia that working with the hands “exercised” a child’s brain.

  Life in the Russian River Valley was an idyll for the two sisters, who played amid the apple orchards and redwood trees, gathering walnuts and sweet chestnuts. Nick made a swing for the backyard and the family acquired a puppy. Natasha, who loved animals, adored her German shepherd. Remembers Olga: “I used to climb the hills with our dog, and pick cherries on cherry trees. We had rabbits in the back, that later ran over to the Canevaris’ because they had radishes.”

  Inside the cottage on Humboldt Street, the spectre of the Russian Revolution possessed the Gurdin household like a sinister spirit. Canevari, who lived across the street, “heard about” Nick’s drinking problem, “but I never saw it.” He remembered Natasha’s father as a “nice guy, used to rub my head and call me Butch.” Nick’s drinking, violence, and disappearances were the family’s dark secret. Maria claimed Nick never hurt her in Santa Rosa, though she conceded it was better if he was “someplace else” when he was drunk. As a child actress, Natalie would confide in juvenile actor Robert Blake, who was an abused child. “She had a lot to recover from. They use those catch-phrases like ‘dysfunctional family.’ I know that to be the case. And I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘Well yeah, her father was a drunk that beat her up’ or ‘Her mother was an unloving rat,’ because I’m not gonna give you any of those things.” Who knows what Natasha experienced inside her netherworld?

  Maria imagined the mother of a neighbor girl was conspiring to poison Natasha. “I don’t know why, but she always had that in her head. It was just a superstition,” recalls Canevari, who heard his mother and Mrs. Gurdin talk about Maria’s escape from Bolsheviks. He linked that experience to Natasha’s mother’s paranoia. “I don’t know what she went through in the revolution, but she was afraid Natasha was going to get poisoned by this one and that one—just people in general.” Maria was “overprotective” to the point of “smothering” Natasha.

  Something about Natasha inspired others to want to take care of her. “Even the seventh- and eighth-grade kids loved her,” recalls principal Ethel Polhemus. “I remember we were doing the Virginia reel, and she got started the wrong way. I just took her by the arm and turned her the other way—oh, the youngsters were disturbed at me!” Natasha had a winsomeness that was endearing. “I can still see that little girl. Her eyes were dark. She was such a pretty little thing, a darling girl. She was just a doll… kind of dancing all the time, very sprightly.” Natasha was extremely tender-hearted, refusing to go fishing “out of pity for the fish.”

  That year, when Natasha was four, she and Olga took a walk for a root beer, their German shepherd puppy tagging along. On the way back from the store, the puppy and Natasha darted ahead of Olga to cross the highway. A truck suddenly appeared, crushing the puppy under its wheels as Natasha watched in horror. “I told her to look ahead and to never look back,” relates Olga. Natasha never made a sound, too traumatized to cry. It was to become a significant event in her life.

  In January, Santa Rosa’s movie theater, the California, held a special premiere for Shadow of a Doubt, attended by Hitchcock’s daughter and celebrating his discovery, Edna May Wonacott, who had signed a seven-year contract with producer Jack Skirball. Maria, a theater usherette, further fixated on Edna May as the precedent for Natasha’s impending fame. The Wonacotts sold their grocery store, moving closer to Hollywood. When the story broke in the Santa Rosa paper, “girls started standing on street corners in pigtails and glasses.” Maria was possessed that Natasha become the next Cinderella Girl, though how she hoped to accomplish that was unclear. Natasha was more excited about the kindergarten play than Hollywood. She came up with the idea of putting white powder on her hair to make herself look like her character, an old woman, saying later it helped her “get into the mood of the part.”

  That summer, as school let out, Maria Gurdin’s moment announced itself in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. “Movie Stars to Arrive in S.R. Today,” read the June 13, 1943, headline. By serendipity—this time there could be no calculation on Maria’s part—Irving Pichel, a Harvard-educated stage actor turned director, happened to see Shadow of a Doubt, concluding that Santa Rosa was the perfect backdrop for his next picture. The film was called Happy Land, a Capra-esque piece of Americana starring Don Ameche as a small-town pharmacist who realizes the value of his life through the loss of his son in World War II. The story came from a best-selling novel excerpted in the Saturday Evening Post. Fifty-two-year-old Pichel, known for his patriotic, anti-Nazi themes, had already cast a few Santa Rosans in bit roles in Happy Land, including Mayor E. A. Eymann, who was asked to play the mayor of the mythical Midwest town of Hartfield in a commencement scene. Mayor Eymann, the paper reported, was officially welcoming Pichel and actor Don Ameche, providing a schedule of the film crew’s locations around Santa Rosa, with the advisory that some of the scenes would “use upwards of 300 extras.” To Maria, the article was tantamount to a golden oracle.

  Natasha stood perfectly still the next morning as her mother brushed her curly hair, instructing her how to create attention so the Happy Land director would notice her,
coaching her on what to say so he would like her, reminding her to curtsy—repeating hypnotically the incantation that Natasha would someday be the most famous actress in the world. Natasha took her mother’s prophecy to heart, concentrating while Mud braided her gold-tipped hair into pigtails, observing herself in the mirror as she metamorphosed into a tiny Russian replica of Edna May Wonacott.

  Mother and daughter walked downtown in search of the film’s director, determined to create the fairy tale that had serendipitously occurred for Edna May. They spotted the Happy Land crew near the courthouse, surrounded by curious spectators. Maria, holding on to Natasha, asked whoever walked by, “How does this work? Which one’s the director?” When actors in army uniform began to assemble for a parade scene, Maria thrust four-year-old Natasha into the lineup. As Natalie would later describe it, “My mother made me go march with the soldiers. I really didn’t want to do all this. I was kind of scared…. Mother, of course, wanted me to attract attention.”

  After a few days, Irving Pichel began to notice a “quaintly pretty little child” with an “absorbed expression” who kept following the Happy Land company from location to location, watching them closely. The toddler seemed to be leading the wandering crowd. Natasha made such an impression on the director, he mentioned the tiny Santa Rosa girl with the “winsome smile” a few years later as a tragic example of children being pushed into movies.

  Pichel would have been chagrined to learn that what he observed was merely the prelude to Maria Gurdin’s plan to get Natasha a part in Happy Land. By the second week, when the film crew moved to the high school auditorium for the mayor’s scene, Maria had gleaned what she needed to know. “When she figured out that Irving Pichel was the director,” Natalie would later recall, “she said to me, ‘Natasha, go over there and sit on that man’s lap and sing him your songs.’ ” Pichel would remember the waif he had been feeling sorry for coming up to him one noon. “Mr. Pichel, can I be in the movies?” she asked plaintively. “You don’t want to be in the movies,” the grandfatherly-looking director advised. Natasha, unprepared for this reaction, reflected for a moment, according to Pichel. The moment was profound. If she had been capable of free will, Natasha’s response to Irving Pichel, and thus her life, might have been different. Instead she continued robotically, programmed by Mud to perform her piece. “She changed the subject by telling me that her name was Natasha Gurdin, that her birthday was July twentieth, that her parents were Russian and that she would like to sing me a Russian song, if I would like to hear it.”

  “I remember singing ‘In My Arms,’ with gestures,” said Natalie, years later. “ ‘Comes the dawn, I’ll be gone. Ain’t I never going to have a honey holding me tight…’” The Jewish director by chance understood Russian, according to Olga, “and he just fell in love with her.” Ironically, Olga had taught Natasha to sing “In My Arms,” and created the hand movements that charmed Irving Pichel. But it was Natasha with whom he was smitten, taken by “those eyes… she looks at you and you can read her thoughts.”

  Pichel was so enchanted with Natasha he offered her a small, non-speaking part in Happy Land. Mud’s improbable scheme to create the kismet that happened to Edna May had succeeded, establishing a precedent: if a formula worked, Mud copied it. The lesson for Natasha, from her staged encounter on Pichel’s lap, was more troubling. “I learned at an early age that if you are nice to men, you can get anything you want from them,” she said at thirty-one. After Natalie became famous, Maria would tell people Natasha was discovered by Pichel when he spotted her on the street, or that Natasha wandered away and impulsively jumped into Pichel’s lap—creating the deception thatNatasha’s first part, like Edna May’s, was an accident of fate. Natasha, Olga, Irving Pichel and Natasha’s friend Edwin knew differently.

  Nick, by Maria’s and Natalie’s later accounts, disapproved of his daughter being in the movie, though Olga recalls no such objection. Whether Nick objected to Natasha acting or not was of no real consequence, for as Maria baldly told a reporter in the mid-sixties, “I made all the decisions in the family.”

  Natasha’s cameo appearance in Happy Land required her to drop an ice cream cone in front of Marsh’s drugstore, where Don Ameche’s character worked as a pharmacist. The scene was to be shot in nearby Healdsburg, where the director had chosen a street with storefronts resembling middle America. An actress was hired to play Natasha’s screen mother, who was to pick her up after she dropped her cone.

  Natasha did not seem excited about being in the movie, according to both Olga and her chum Edwin. Her sister thought “she kind of took it in stride, she didn’t buck it or anything, she enjoyed acting.” Edwin’s impression was that Natasha was being pushed. “You could see it in her face when her mother would come out and say, ‘Natasha, come over here,’ or ‘Sit here,’ or do this, do that.” As an adult, Natalie seemed unsure how she felt, at four, about appearing in Happy Land. “Obviously I wasn’t shy, because I did what I was told.”

  It is perhaps revealing that she asked Edwin to go with her the day she was to shoot her scene. Pichel agreed to let Natasha’s friend appear in the movie with her, “playing a brother or something,” Canevari recalls:

  So my mother took me down to the set. When I got down there, there were all these big lights. And I was only about 5 years old—hell, I didn’t know what was going on. And I saw all these lights and they had these big sheets of metal making thunder and stuff, shaking them—and I took off running. It scared the hell out of me and I took off running and that was the end of me.

  Natasha, under pressure from Mud to do whatever the director asked, did not have the luxury of a child’s reaction. Upon hearing Pichel describe where on the sidewalk in Healdsburg he wanted Natasha to drop her ice cream and how to make it look natural, Maria asked the director: “With tears or without?” Musia even managed to get herself insinuated into the scene, walking behind Natasha—portending her role in her daughter’s life. “Like having a shadow following you around,” as Canevari put it. The genial Pichel included Olga in the background, pairing her with a young man from Annapolis.

  Maria made sure everyone would be looking at Natasha. She dressed her in a tiny frock, doing her hair in Shirley Temple ringlets with an enormous white bow, like Dainty June, the baby doll character in Gypsy, Natalie’s future film. Olga remembers dressing in the trailer with Ann Rutherford, the actress playing Don Ameche’s wife, who picked up Natasha and hugged her, one of the few memories Natalie would have of Happy Land. By the time she dropped her cone, precisely where she was asked, Pichel was beguiled by the little Russian girl who curtsied each time he appeared.

  Maria kept Natasha deliberately underfoot the rest of the Happy Land shoot, hoping to further ingratiate her to Pichel, “and I fell, I must confess, violently in love with her,” he wrote later. According to Maria, Pichel sent attorneys to the house with legal papers to adopt Natasha, a story that would become part of Natalie Wood lore. Natalie herself repeated it, as an adult:

  He said to my mother, “Oh, your daughter is so adorable, I’d love to adopt her. What would you think of that?” My mother thought he was joking. She speaks, still, with a heavy Russian accent and sometimes she doesn’t quite understand or make herself understood. So she thought he was joking and he thought that she was serious. The lawyers arrived at our house one day while the “Happy Land” filming was still going on… there was a big upheaval in the household.

  How much of the story is true, or Maria’s tall tale, is open to question. Olga, who was fourteen that summer, recalls Pichel visiting once, but there were no attorneys at the house. Her impression was that Pichel wanted a daughter because he only had sons, and that Natasha had requested a bunk bed if she moved into his house. But Olga is uncertain whether she heard this conversation, or if her mother told her about it later. “He wanted to adopt her, that I know. And Mother agreed, but then she told him of course it was a joke.” In a later, highly suspicious version, Maria told the author of a book on celeb
rity mothers that Pichel wanted to buy Natasha and offered his life savings. (“I said, ‘No, I don’t sell my children,’ ” she recounted with great drama.)

  Pichel, who was married with sons fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-two at the time, never mentioned to his children the possibility that Natasha might be adopted into the family. Nor did their mother. “It was probably folklore,” suggests the middle son, Dr. Julian Pichel, though he concedes his parents “did want a daughter—that’s true. I think that’s why I was called ‘Julie.’ ” All three brothers doubt that their mother, who resented the movie industry, would have consented to the adoption. Marlowe Pichel, who was fourteen, speculates his father may have wanted to help Natasha. “I do remember he was kind of smitten with her,” relates Julian. Pichel talked openly about his affection for Natasha in a magazine piece several years later, never mentioning wanting to adopt her. “I seriously believe it’s a complete fabrication,” declares Natalie’s younger sister, Lana, who heard their mother spin the yarn over the years. Natasha’s “memory,” at four, of attorneys creating an upheaval may have been implanted by Maria. Whether or not he tried to adopt her, Pichel’s fondness for Natasha was unique, according to Julian, who never knew his father to form an attachment to any other child actor. “There must have been something special about Natalie.”

  Pichel stopped at the Gurdins’ to say goodbye to Natasha when he finished filming Happy Land around her fifth birthday, which was on July 20, 1943. The story that would appear throughout Natalie’s later movie career is that Pichel promised, during this visit, to keep her in mind when the right part came along. This was a falsehood invented by her mother, for the truth would have too nakedly revealed Maria.