Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Mud’s restrictions, and the absence of school, isolated Natasha. Her sole companion, apart from Olga and a cat named Voska, was a three-year-old boy who lived next door. Natasha called him “Father,” for reasons she didn’t tell. She lived in her imagination, inventing stories, identifying with the dark Russian fairy tales in Fahd’s books, envisioning when she would travel to the Russia of Mud’s romantic description, cloaked in ermine, riding through snowdrifts on the trans-Siberian express. Her reality was a childhood so lonely she named “Mr. Pichel” as her best friend when asked by a reporter from Motion Picture, referring wistfully to Edwin, her “boyfriend” in Santa Rosa.

  Natasha’s first day on Pichel’s new movie was July 20, her seventh birthday. Mud and Fahd gave her a party, inviting all the neighborhood children with whom she was forbidden to play. They wore colorful hats and ate cake, bringing presents and singing “Happy Birthday.” Natasha, who had never been to a child’s party, was so overcome she cried. She told Mud afterward when she grew up she wanted to be a mother and have a hundred and fifty kids, “and they’re all going to have to give me presents on my birthday.”

  Natasha’s kiddie party was a brief diversion from her real life, acting in movies. The war ended a few weeks after she turned seven, and Pichel’s new picture reflected the changing times. The Bride Wore Boots was a daffy comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as an equestrienne married to a citified writer comically inept around horses (Robert Cummings). Natalie Wood and a cherubic six-year-old named Gregory Muradian played their children, given little more to do in the film than provide background scenery and play appealingly with a goat. Off camera, Gregory was “quite enamored of” his movie sibling, Natasha, whose Aryan blond braids as Margaret Ludwig had been replaced by a halo of golden brown curls. Most of the children’s scenes were shot on location at a horse ranch, where Natasha and Gregory romped. After her demanding bilingual performance opposite Welles, Natasha essentially had to show up and look adorable. Her enduring memory was of Stanwyck’s perfume. The Bride Wore Boots also introduced Natasha to horses, a passion of Stanwyck’s. The film itself was a pallid imitation of Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn screwball comedies, though it was pleasant and Natasha was beguiling. Pichel, borrowing from Hitchcock, appeared briefly in a scene.

  Natasha finished shooting her part in September and returned to school, where she continued to be shadowed. Olga walked her to class every day, under instruction from Maria, who was still convinced that kidnappers lurked around every corner.

  Tomorrow Is Forever would not be out until after Christmas, but “Natalie Wood” was already getting attention. Her profile in Motion Picture hit the newsstands, predicting she would be a candidate for a child Oscar and proclaiming her a prodigy. Maria controlled every aspect of her daughter’s emerging persona and Natasha followed orders like a good little soldier. “I want to be a movie star,” she “bubbled” to Motion Picture, repeating the mantra Mud chanted to her since birth.

  In November, Life magazine sent a reporter and a photographer to the Gurdins’ cottage in West Hollywood to prepare a story on the seven-year-old actress who had Orson Welles at her feet. They took pictures of Natasha, tanned and topless, on the backyard swing; lying on the grass stroking her cat. Mud, hoping to glamorize Natalie’s image, lied to the reporter, telling him her husband, Nick, was an “engineer,” constructing an intricate tissue of falsehoods about how “Natalie Wood” got into the movies. She told the reporter that Pichel stumbled onto Natasha shooting Happy Land and sent for her to star in Tomorrow Is Forever. Then she fabricated an elaborate story that Natasha’s father disapproved, so she “tricked” him by pretending to visit a friend in Los Angeles and “sneaking” Natasha to a screen test. Natasha begged to do the movie, said Maria, so she returned to Santa Rosa, convinced her husband, and sold the house.

  When the Life pictorial came out at Thanksgiving, Maria Gurdin’s outlandish lies were printed as fact, creating a Hollywood myth concerning the discovery of Natalie Wood that would crystallize, with time, into legend. Even Lana, who was born after the Life article, believed her mother’s propaganda that Pichel sent for her sister from Santa Rosa to star in Tomorrow Is Forever, repeating it over the years as “the story that I have been told my entire life.” The image of a movie star is illusion, a concept Mud, the ultimate fantasist, instinctively grasped. “Marie Gurdin was a highly imaginative genius,” an industry friend once observed. “She managed to form, to invent, to chisel this image of Natalie Wood.” In an irony, Life pronounced Natalie “stiff competition” for Margaret O’Brien, whose look Mud had brazenly copied. Life also reported that three studios were trying to buy Natalie’s contract from International. Whether this was true, or more of Maria’s hyperbole, is unsubstantiated.

  Mud would do anything to get a foot in the door for Natasha. She read and re-read the trades, enrolling Natasha in ballet and classical dance with Tamara Lepke, hiring a piano instructor so she would be prepared to play any role. “They put a lot into her—piano lessons, dancing lessons—always to further her.” Olga, who sang in Hollywood High operettas, had her voice lessons suddenly discontinued by Maria, who was insensitively oblivious to her elder daughter’s talent. “I just decided to work and pay for my own lessons,” relates Olga. To earn money, she babysat after school, “and I would work at department stores on Hollywood Boulevard.” The Gurdin household was like a miniature studio dedicated to the training of just one star: Natalie Wood. Recalled Natalie: ” My mother used to tell me, ‘No matter what they ask you—“Can you sing, dance, swim, ride?”—always say yes. You can learn later.’”

  For all her gurgling to magazines about wanting to be a movie star, Natasha didn’t seem excited about being in movies, her sister remembers. What compelled Natasha to act was not the desire to perform; it was a compulsion to please. She defined “acting,” at six, as “doing things for people.” Natasha, by nature, took pleasure in bringing joy to others. When Maria was in her seventies, she told this story about Natalie:

  I remember when she was, I think, in first or second grade in school. And there was a teacher—very homely, nobody liked her, and she was kinda strict, too. And when Natalie see person like that she just loved them—and want to make them happy. And she was old maid, that teacher. Her name was Grace Loop. And when it was Valentine Day, Natalie said, “Mother, let’s go and get the biggest Valentine box with the candy for my teacher.” And the teacher start to cry. She say, “Nobody give me…” She loved Natalie.

  And then when Natalie go back to the studio school and she was not her teacher anymore, she would send Grace Loop present for Christmas. Present for her birthday, too. And then one time suddenly it was stopped. Was car thrown Grace Loop. To the end, she have contact with Natalie.

  It was this innate sensitivity to other people’s feelings that made Natasha such an affecting child actress, and explained how she remained unspoiled. Singer Lena Horne’s daughter Gail attended grammar school with Natasha that year as fame struck, and she remembers her fondly as “tiny, pretty Natalie, our resident movie star.” Olga, who had every reason to resent her, considered it a treat to take Natasha to the movies.

  Maria’s driving ambition and Natasha’s urgency to please were a dangerous cocktail. “I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt,” she said later. Olga would observe her sister at ballet recitals “concentrating so hard she put her tongue out the left side, biting her cheek.” At seven, Natasha was playing Chopin. She studied Olga’s movie scrapbook like a textbook, memorizing details of the ninety-four stars’ lives, repeating them in interviews. When she watched movies, Natasha got so emotionally involved, once at a cinema with Olga, “she was watching the movie and I guess had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know it, so she must have been letting it out very slowly… and I was just so proper, I took her home right away. But she wet her pants!” When she wasn’t in a movie, taking ballet or piano to prepare for a movie, or going to th
e movies, Natasha played “making movies.”

  Nick, according to a brother, was proud of the fact that his daughter was acting. If it bothered him, as Natalie and Maria later maintained, he was too passive within the marriage to exert any authority, or to buffer Natasha from Mud. The fact that his wife had gotten him a job through his six-year-old daughter’s connections underscored his impotence; the word in the Gurdins’ Russian circle in San Francisco was that Natalie was the breadwinner in the family. Nick was “miserably unhappy,” according to his younger daughter, Lana, who was conceived that June, between Natasha’s films for Pichel.

  Maria consequently dominated Natasha, inflicting strange paranoias to sculpt her into stardom. She refused to let Natasha go “on toe” too soon in ballet class, concerned that her calves would look too large on the screen. “After each exercise, I rubbed her with oil—the whole body I rubbed, not just the legs, so she wouldn’t get the bulging muscles ballerinas usually get.” When Natasha told her mother she wanted to be a ballerina and a movie star, Maria “said no. Ballerinas don’t live very long, and it’s bad for the heart.” Mud repeatedly told Natasha she was frail. Both parents refused to let her run or play outside, for if she got hurt, she wouldn’t be able to work. “I was so overprotected, I used to think I was as delicate as people said I was.” Natasha began to imagine she had various illnesses, acquiring new fears—fast cars and earthquakes—to supplement her existing ones, dark water and being alone. “Natalie had a lot of fear in her,” states a childhood friend, “all misplaced fear.” Natasha’s refuge was animals. Besides her cat, she had three turtles. Mud and Fahd bought her a German shepherd that year, to replace the puppy she saw killed. Natasha called him Rusty.

  She needed a haven. Her sister Olga remembers walking into the house that winter to find Nick, drunk, holding a knife to Maria’s pregnant belly. Olga created a diversion so her stepfather would come after her, deciding it would be better if he stabbed her than her pregnant mother. Though no one was hurt, it was a harrowing incident; a signal, to Olga, she should leave Nick’s house. She stayed, but warily, forming the opinion that her mother was partially responsible because she could provoke Nick. It was a strange, complex marriage. Maria was still in romantic contact with the sea captain from San Francisco’s Russian colony, where the gossip was that she was pregnant by a Hollywood producer. She told Olga the reason she didn’t leave Nick was that “she was always afraid of him.”

  Whether Natasha was present when her Fahd held the knife to Mud’s stomach that winter is unclear, though she certainly experienced violence. “She had a very tough, troubled life,” reveals Robert Blake, a confidant from their years as child actors. “The things that she told me about her childhood, which are nobody’s business, but they were tough. In today’s world, Natalie would have been in child abuse groups… the courage and the strength that it took for her every day to get out of bed and pursue her life—she spent her life rowing upstream.” Lana, who was born late that winter, described her father as “a mean drunk. He wasn’t actually an alcoholic. He didn’t drink all day long. He would get drunk probably once a week. He was just a really unhappy man.”

  Because Mud was nearly eight months pregnant with Lana, she sent Nick with Natasha to New York for the January premiere of Tomorrow Is Forever, possibly the only occasion when Lana would come before Natalie for Maria. It was a medical necessity, or Mud would never have missed the public unveiling of her creation, Natalie Wood. It was the first time she and Natasha had been apart. Mud must have been histrionic, sending her star-child on an airplane, across the country, without her. One of Natalie’s crippling fears, later in life, was flying on planes, a fear that probably originated with this trip. The stress of the separation from Mud was evident in Natasha in other ways. While she was in New York, the studio sent her to children’s hospitals and F.A.O. Schwarz, the famous toy store, for publicity shots for Tomorrow Is Forever. A mob of people clamored around International’s new child star, tugging at her pigtails, which Fahd did not know how to braid correctly. “Fans pulled the ribbons off my pigtails,” she would remember. “I was terrified.” Pictures from the event reveal Natasha clutching her “mama doll,” Gabriella, like a life preserver, masking her terror with an overanimated smile, prattling manically about wanting to be a movie star when she grew up. “My goodness!” she exclaimed, between flashbulb pops. “That time I didn’t blink!” As an adult, Natalie would seldom make a negative remark in public about her child acting experiences, not wanting people to think she didn’t enjoy it, saying that it was “a bore to complain”—still the consummate trouper. She revealed her true feelings indirectly, telling interviewers she would not want her child to act, as she had.

  Natasha did experience one genuine thrill while promoting her movie in New York that January: snow. Although Tomorrow Is Forever would not be released until the spring, Natalie Wood was praised by New York newspapers, whose critics had attended the celebrity premiere.

  Svetlana Gurdin’s birth, on March 1, coincided with Natalie’s first flush of fame, where the spotlight would lopsidedly, at times cruelly, remain. Giving birth was Mud’s first, and last, maternal act toward her third daughter. As soon as she got home from the hospital, she relinquished Svetlana to Olga so she could devote herself to Natasha. Olga had already dropped out of school to babysit Natasha while Mud was in the hospital, inciting rumors at Hollywood High that Svetlana was her baby. “Natalie was under contract to the studio, and it was the law that I had to be with her,” rationalized Maria. In truth, Mud believed she had a calling. Years later, she happily cooperated with a fan magazine for an article called “I Neglected Lana So Natalie Could Be a Star.” “I was a non-person,” observes Lana. Maria, who hand-selected the wealthy Loys as Natasha’s godparents, saw no reason to choose a godmother for Svetlana, nor would she bother to teach her to curtsy. “I think I lived there, I’m not sure,” remarks Lana.

  Olga, who was a conscientious student, began to worry about missing class and returned to high school. Maria hired a nanny for Svetlana and accompanied Natasha to San Francisco the middle of March. International arranged a luncheon at the St. Francis and a press conference at the Warfield to “present” Natalie Wood to reporters, certain that her performance in Tomorrow Is Forever would attract even more attention when the film was released. “Natalie,” under Mud’s scrutiny, performed with mechanical animation. Reporters remarked on her poise, dutifully noting the vital statistics of her young life as she “rattled off facts,” including her mother’s fabrication that Pichel brought her to Hollywood to star in the movie. The accompanying articles must have thrilled Mud, announcing Natalie Wood as “the Margaret O’Brien of tomorrow.”

  Natasha and Mud returned to West Hollywood to read her first major review. Look magazine was only mildly complimentary of Tomorrow Is Forever, calling it old-fashioned, but the magazine extolled Natalie as a “real prize” and a rival to Orson Welles, with whom she was pictured in a nearly full-page close-up. Inside the Gurdin home circumstances were less sanguine. When the nanny fed Svetlana a banana and she choked, Maria fired her and commandeered her husband to quit his job and stay home with the baby. Irving Pichel’s warning—that a child star upset the family balance of power—had sprung disastrously to life. Becoming a babysitter to Svetlana was the final indignity for Nick. His days, Lana would recall, consisted of drinking, reading and playing the balalaika. “There was nobody for him to talk to, there was nobody who understood that he was leading a life that he detested.”

  The pressure on Natasha from this turn of events was overwhelming. At the age of seven, she was supporting the family. She also felt guilty that her mother was sacrificing her life and creativity for her career. “I think if she had been able to express herself in some way… she would have been much happier,” Natalie would remark after giving birth to her own children. Lana believes their mother had to have been unhappy. “But I don’t think she ever knew it. Not consciously. How can you live your life for one pers
on and have nothing else in your life?” A companion of Maria’s in the last years of her life posits that Maria had everything she ever wanted, “her dream of being an actress, her dream of having wealth—but she had it through Natalie.” From the time Mud saw her cameo cut from Happy Land, she transferred her dream of stardom to Natasha, living the fantasy through her creation, “Natalie Wood,” the composite of mother and daughter. When Natalie received an invitation that spring to the Hollywood premiere of Tomorrow Is Forever, Maria, her alter ego, was beside her, strolling down the red carpet under the spotlight, gaping at Gary Cooper, Greer Garson, Gene Tierney, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, the movie stars whose pictures she cut out of fan magazines. Natasha, who had memorized their faces and life stories, found it enjoyable; Mud reveled in it. Natalie did her acting when she was given a part to play; Maria was an actress in her everyday life. As Lana recalls, “You couldn’t take her anywhere, go anywhere, with anybody, because she would sing and dance at the drop of a hat and drive you crazy.”

  Tomorrow Is Forever received mixed notices when it opened at the Pantages in early April, though it would become a box office success. Louella Parsons, the influential gossip columnist, singled out Natasha before the movie came out, writing in her column: “Little Natalie Wood, as a tiny refugee, gives a remarkable performance for a child. She eats your heart out.” It was the official Hollywood seal of approval.