Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Joan Evans remembers Natalie covering her left wrist, when she was off camera, with “a very small brace—maybe an Ace bandage, a small flesh-colored thing.” She understood that Natalie had hurt her wrist and it was “problematic” for her. “She was so tiny, and the wrist bone was very prominent.” Evans suspected “anything imperfect was threatening to her mother. At that age, only your mother or your father can give you that kind of psychological feeling about something as relatively unimportant as that.”

  Natalie went through the motions of life, drifting from Our Very Own into another smallish role as somebody else’s daughter. With her child stardom fading, Twentieth Century Fox let her option contract lapse. Though Nick was employed at the time building miniature props for one of the studios, Mud was possessed that Natalie continue to act, keeping her in pigtails to perpetuate what was left of her child-star image. Columbia put her in a tearjerker called No Sad Songs for Me, as the only child of a housewife dying of cancer, another of the weepy “woman’s films” of the forties. The picture was a showcase for stage actress Margaret Sullavan; Natalie was basically a backdrop. In later years, she would interpret the shift as a transition to “character” roles, but Mud’s plan was simply to keep her working any way she could. Taking smaller parts, Natalie said later, saved her from the tragic denouement of many forgotten child stars. “I was never a great, important child star like Shirley Temple or Margaret O’Brien. I was a child actress working regularly in films. There’s a difference. I was luckier than Shirley Temple. I did not have to carry the whole picture, and as I got older, I simply moved into older roles.” By comparison to popular child stars like Elizabeth Taylor, whose childhoods were played out in fan magazines, Natalie’s life was normal. “I never saw film stars at home. We had no maid, no cook, no swimming pool…” What she had was domestic violence, the Gurdins’ black secret. Lana recalls the Burbank years as a blur of fights with Pop drunk and her mother grabbing her and Natalie, “spending the night in motels, and spending the night at neighbors’ homes that you didn’t know.”

  Natalie submerged into her idealized movie family, where she could pretend to be Polly, the cherished daughter of noble cancer victim Margaret Sullavan, who “was so into her character that it was a little hard to think of her as Margaret Sullavan.” She made a friend of Ann Doran, a respected thirty-something character actress cast as a socialite, who by coincidence would appear in four of Natalie’s next films. The hard-working Doran admired Natalie’s work ethic, which she ascribed to her mother. Doran liked Maria. “She was teaching Natalie good manners, and she did it from the time she was a little girl. On the set, if somebody did something for her benefit, Natalie would say thank you. She was not one of those, ‘I’m a star so you do it for me.’ And she would accept anything. She’d say, ‘If that’s what you want me to do, that’s what I’ll do.’ ” Doran believed that Natalie’s kindness was a result of her upbringing. “She was raised to be polite, and politeness means being kind to other people.” Doran did not consider Maria Gurdin a stage mother. In Doran’s view, a stage mother was one who coached her child, “‘Be sure and do this, this’ll be cute…’ Jesus, it used to drive me crazy. Natalie’s mother was not, believe me, was never the Hollywood horrible mother. I’d worked with others that freely I would have smashed them flat. Her mother was very quiet. She never told Natalie how to act. She figured the director knew how he wanted her to act. Her mother never interfered. Never, never, never.”

  The self-supporting Doran was on the same treadmill workwise as Natalie, going from one supporting part to another with barely a breath between. She gave no thought to whether No Sad Songs for Me would be a success, or that it was the first motion picture about cancer. “What the story was didn’t mean a hoot in hell to me. I was only thinking who I was as a character in relation to the other ones.” She had the utmost respect for Natalie’s ability, at eleven, to get into character, which she watched her do in five films as a juvenile. “It was just her inborn talent. There are actors that spend their entire lives and don’t act at all, they’re just themselves. But Natalie was a different person on every picture she did.”

  Maria revealed to Olga, in this period, her secret plan to leave Nick and live in San Francisco with her Russian sea captain. Olga approved. “He would have been very good for her. He didn’t drink, was a quiet, nice guy, nice with her. They made arrangements to go off together to get married… he was going to build this house for her and they would go on trips.” The next communication Olga received was a phone call from Nick’s brother Dmitri telling her that Nick had suffered a heart attack and her mother was with him at the hospital. When Olga next spoke to her, Maria had dropped her plans to elope. “I asked her how come, if you don’t like Nick, why did you go to the hospital? She used a Russian phrase that means ‘You get used to a dog.’ She wouldn’t admit—I’m sure she liked Nick, and maybe George was just a flirtation.” The true reason was apparent to Olga. “She couldn’t leave the Hollywood stuff. Mother was very much in love with Hollywood stuff.” Fahd might have died if Natalie hadn’t been home. Mud fainted when he had his heart attack, as she had during any trauma since her childhood convulsions. When she revived, Natalie was the only one with the presence of mind to phone a doctor.

  Fahd’s slow recuperation placed excruciating pressure on eleven-year-old Natalie. “My father couldn’t work and the family depended on me,” she said simply in later years, as if that were normal. Since she wasn’t under contract anymore, Natalie had to compete for roles to bring in an income as her career was waning, at the most difficult age for child actors to find work: the preteen years. “I discovered the heartbreak and frustration of not getting parts… I was told on various occasions, ‘You’re too short. You’re too tall. You’re too young. You’re too old.’ It’s awfully difficult for an adult, much less a child, to accept rejection.” The rejection was more than personal for Natalie; she needed the job to support her parents. Mud’s ruthless ambition turned deadly. “They would do anything to get a part. Natalie and she both,” recalls a movie mother from that period. Maria thrived on the drama, recalls Lana. “The more dramatic life was for my mom, the better she liked it… the ups and downs—that was her bread and butter.” A child actress who competed against Natalie then remembers how, at auditions, Natalie would tell producers, “‘I’ll do anything.’ If they asked, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ she’d say yes, and ‘Can you tap dance?’ she’d say yes—and then be quick to learn. She just seemed to have no limits. I didn’t see any insecurity as to what she could do.”

  She and Mud, with Famous Artists, managed to snare her a role in a Fred MacMurray/Irene Dunne screwball comedy at RKO called Come Share My Love, later changed to Never a Dull Moment, which started shooting around Thanksgiving. Dunne was cast as a sophisticated Broadway star who impulsively marries a handsome rodeo rider (MacMurray) with a ramshackle ranch and two rascally daughters. Natalie was one of the daughters; Andy Devine, the famous cowboy sidekick, played MacMurray’s matchmaking pal. Dunne recommended Ann Doran for the part of her rival. “We had so much fun on that picture,” Doran recalls. “Everything about it was fun. The director, George Marshall, liked to do silly things on the set and Fred was a nut! Irene went along with it, and she loved it.”

  Doran was blissfully ignorant of the battle Maria was staging behind the scenes between Natalie and child actress Gigi Perreau, who was playing Fred MacMurray’s other daughter. Gigi (short for Ghislaine, with a hard “G”) was a cute, freckle-faced nine-year-old at the height of her popularity; Natalie was a gawky, aging child star of eleven-plus, all arms and legs and new front teeth. Mud schemed to edge out Gigi from the first contract negotiations, when “I got billing above Natalie,” recalls Perreau, “which just drove her mother crazy. Natalie, to her, was her little special jewel, and nobody could mess around with it.” Maria insisted on a clause in the contract guaranteeing Natalie an equal number of lines as Gigi. Gigi and her mother watched in disbelief as Natalie and Mari
a counted lines aloud together to make sure Gigi’s and Natalie’s came out the same. “I remember we had to stop filming at one point,” recalls Perreau, “because Mrs. Gurdin discovered I had two more words than Natalie did that day. She called the agent over and they had to do some re-writing to even things up.”

  There was constant rivalry, according to Perreau. “On my side I think it was a very healthy normal competition. On Natalie’s, it probably wasn’t as much. She was very, very ambitious, almost to the point sometimes of being very obnoxious—because of her mother.” Perreau noticed, even between scenes, how Natalie seemed to have “enormous energy… she was just all over the place,” the same manic energy Natalie had demonstrated in her comedy scenes in Our Very Own. Her need to please, to keep pace with Mud’s fanatical drive, had reached a level of desperation, particularly since she was responsible for supporting the family. “Natalie was a very good vehicle for her ambitious mother,” Perreau analyzes. “Any other kid who didn’t want to do what they were doing would have rebelled. They would have said, ‘No, I’m not going to do it anymore.’ Natalie didn’t fight it… her mother would say, ‘Oh, there’s Mr. So-and-So, go up and give him a hug.’ But she didn’t mind the pushing. I never saw her object to the pushing.” Natalie made an important friend on the set just before Christmas. Gossip Louella Parsons, whose daughter Harriet produced the movie, stopped by one day. Mud made a point of introducing Natalie, who promptly got a mention in Parsons’ column.

  Three days a week, Natalie studied ballet at a studio in Hollywood, which she and Maria took far more seriously than her schooling on the lot. The instructor was an elegant Russian named Michael Panieff, who had been a featured performer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. “The star system was still around at the time, and he was grooming those kids for anything and everything.” Natalie was the only one in the class of mostly preteen boys and girls who had acted professionally, a distinction Mud exploited by insisting she be the lead dancer at every recital. Natalie “didn’t flaunt it,” according to Don Zoute, who was in the class. “She didn’t put on airs by any means. She was just one of the kids.” The class “starlet,” in Zoute’s opinion, was a younger girl with curly hair named Jill Oppenheimer. “Panieff was old Russian school, where everybody was equal, no fancy costumes for the kids in the class. Jill’s mother dressed her in the little tutus with all the ribbons in her hair, and the jewelry and the makeup. She was gonna make a star out of her come hell or high water.” Another of Natalie’s classmates was a cute, slightly chubby redhead of seven nicknamed “Taffy.” By an odd coincidence, all three girls—Natalie, Jill and Taffy—would form lasting relationships as adults with actor Robert Wagner. Natalie would marry him, divorce him, and marry him again. Taffy, whose real name was Stefanie Powers, eventually would play his wife in the series Hart to Hart. Jill Oppenheimer, or Jill St. John, as she would call herself, would become Wagner’s wife after Natalie drowned. As ballet classmates, their only socializing was at Panieff’s Christmas party, when they lined up for a group picture.

  Natalie typically gravitated toward the boys in the class—Zoute and another teenager named Robert Banas, who was her dance partner. Maria took them all on a picnic in Griffith Park, inviting them to the house beforehand to watch Natalie’s movie Driftwood. Natalie and Robert regularly went horseback riding together. “I remember her mother would give me some money so we could go to the drugstore and I could buy Natalie an ice cream, and then we’d come back and watch Driftwood. It was kind of a routine.” Maria was like a shadow trailing Natalie, even in Panieff’s dance class, recalls Banas. Lana, who was nearly four, “was pushed in the background. It was kind of pathetic.” Both Natalie and her mother approached ballet with the same determinism as Natalie’s movie career. “I think at one time she really wanted to compete as a dancer,” relates Zoute, who became a professional dancer himself. “She was very dedicated. I think it came through the training and working in films, where you had to be prepared. She was very, very serious about it. And she had potential.” Her dance partner, Robert Banas, thought Natalie “wasn’t exceptional but she was good, she was on point.” The dance phase of Natalie’s life came to a sudden end when Maria and Panieff had a “falling-out,” according to Zoute. “Panieff had quite a little performing group of children at the time, and her mother wanted him to change the name from Panieff to the Natalie Wood Dance Company, and I think that’s where the falling-out came. Because she was a very pushy woman.”

  Mud’s competitiveness was even more cutthroat on the set of Never a Dull Moment. Andy Devine, the veteran comic actor, noticed that whenever he was in a scene with little Gigi Perreau and Natalie, Natalie would shove Gigi out of camera or sabotage her. Devine got so annoyed he would stop filming and ask the director to re-shoot the scene. “I later did a play with Andy,” recalls Perreau, “and he said to me, ‘How could you stand working with that little brat? Do you know that there’d be scenes where you would run in and the two of you were supposed to give me a hug, and she would deliberately put her hand over your face as she hugged me?’ ” Natalie invited her dance partner, Robert, to the set several times that winter. “It was very obvious what was happening,” he recalls. “Natalie was really upstaging Gigi.”

  Gigi was certain Natalie’s mother had put her up to it. “I really and truly feel it was [her] mom. Natalie had already been taught tricks to upstage. She knew all of the little things that people do to get attention: like when other children are bouncing down, you be up, or you use your left foot instead of your right foot—because then all of a sudden your eyes go to that one.” Gigi spent the rest of the shoot “on guard when we were doing scenes together. I had to be sure that I didn’t allow her to—she’d push you aside a little bit, things like that, little things. I don’t think those are things that an eleven-year-old does automatically on their own.” Gigi was correct, confirms Lana. “My mom was always really nasty about other kids. Brutal.”

  Gigi felt sorry for Natalie, despite their rivalry. “I remember feeling that I was so glad I had my mom, that my mom was normal. That I didn’t have her mom. I never thought her mother was mean… we just avoided her. She was just this little kind of witchlike creature.” It was clear to Gigi that Natalie was unhappy. She told Gigi she hated her braids. “She wanted to grow up, even at eleven and a half she wanted to grow up. There was no question but that she’d done enough things at that point and she was just very eager to be a teenager.” Natalie had a crush on actor Farley Granger, Ann Blyth’s movie boyfriend from Our Very Own, two pictures before. Gigi “got the feeling that she was very interested in boys.” Natalie’s oddly distended left wristbone was a source of increasing self-consciousness for her. She covered it with a western-style leather bracelet or hid it inside her sleeve in her scenes in Never a Dull Moment, telling Gigi there was a “scar” on her wrist. She was sensitive about what really happened, though “everybody knew that she did not like water,” relates Perreau.

  Gigi, who attended a Catholic school and had a conservative upbringing, sensed a longing in Natalie for a family like Gigi’s. “It would have been interesting to have been able to talk to her about it, because I’m sure she felt such warmth and love from my mother and my siblings… and then she saw the kind of strange relationship with her own mother. I’m sure there were all kinds of psychological things going on.”

  The director gave Natalie and Gigi western-style suede jackets when they finished filming. Natalie asked her costars to sign hers and started collecting autographs on the jacket. She related everything to Hollywood. She was her mother’s daughter.

  Natalie entered the fifties in gloomy confusion that contrasted with the sunny ambience of the new decade. She had spent the last six years as Orson Welles’ ward, June Haver’s sister, Fred MacMurray’s daughter… or simply “driftwood.” She looked her age, nearly twelve, pretended to be nine or ten onscreen, and felt thirty. “It’s not only that child actors lose their childhood, it’s that they use up their childho
od,” explains Natalie’s movie brother from The Green Promise, Ted Donaldson. “You have acted out much of your childhood. You use up a lot of the stuff that children only fantasize about, or maybe act out in games… so when you hit a certain age, a lot of changes start happening—girls have it before boys—and they don’t know who the hell they are.”

  Natalie’s distress at being forced to look younger, the pressure she felt to compete, and her increasing ambivalence about acting all coalesced that summer on a movie she did for Fox called The Jackpot. The picture was an expression of the era, a family comedy starring Jimmy Stewart as a hard-working husband who wins a radio contest of prizes that turn his household upside down. The movie, which was taken from a piece in the New Yorker, was surprisingly biting, with subtle, intelligent performances, Natalie’s included, though her part was too insignificant to be noticed. The screenwriters were the witty wife-and-husband team of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who drew from an experience of their daughter Delia’s to create a scene for Stewart’s movie children, played by Natalie and child actor Tommy Rettig (who would become famous as Jeff on Lassie). “My mother used to say, ‘Everything is copy,’ ” recalled the Ephrons’ oldest daughter, Nora, a screenwriter-director, “and she meant it. One day my sister Delia got her head caught in the banister rails while peeking through them and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. Nine months later… my parents wrote it into The Jackpot for an eight-year-old Natalie Wood.” Nora Ephron was mistaken on two counts: the head-stuck-in-the-banister scene was performed by Rettig, not Natalie; and Natalie was twelve by the end of filming. The age issue was one of Natalie’s tribulations about The Jackpot. She was playing eight, which meant that she had to endure another movie in pigtails and pinafores, white anklets and saddle shoes, pretending to be four years younger than she was. To add to her discomfort, the makeup department put temporary braces on her teeth to give her character an even more awkward appearance. Without the western bracelet from her last movie, Natalie’s protruding left wrist was exposed below childish puffed sleeves. She felt so homely and humiliated making The Jackpot, “I cried.”