Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  One day as she and Mud walked to the set, they encountered an exceptionally handsome young man with his hair combed to the side in a wave, dressed as a Marine for a Fox war movie called The Halls of Montezuma. As he passed, the actor said hello and smiled—a smile so blinding Natalie stopped to stare, in one of those moments, for a child, that crystallizes into permanent memory. For Natalie, an awkward eleven dressed to appear eight, the beautiful twenty-year-old with the dazzling smile represented all that was golden and glamorous and glorious, things that seemed unattainable to her in her braces and braids and ugly saddle shoes. “When I thought it was safe, I turned around and stared,” she said later, watching as her dreamboat disappeared. She lingered on the image, sighing to Mud, “When I grow up, I wish that I could marry him.” Natalie recognized the actor as a new Fox contract player named Robert Wagner. Wagner would have no recollection of his encounter with eleven-year-old Natalie Wood, his future wife. “I was just a staring kid as far as he was concerned.” (Wagner had also just met his second wife, Marion Marshall, an older blond actress playing a nurse in their scene together.) Natalie and Mud went to the Fox publicity department, asking for a head shot of the bit player from Halls of Montezuma. Natalie taped the picture of Robert Wagner to her bedroom wall, where she could gaze at the face of her fantasy husband, keeping her company beside forty-seven storybook dolls.

  Natalie’s misery was the catalyst for the family’s move to Northridge, a less populated area of the Valley where she could keep a horse. With dance class stricken from her schedule, she lavished her free time on her trick palomino, Powder, purchased from one of the studios. She wanted to be a veterinarian, grasping for things outside show business to satisfy the longing that Gigi, Ted Donaldson, and others had apprehended in her. Natalie yearned to be normal, pleading with her parents to let her enroll in junior high, an early example of the survival instinct that Natalie possessed. She was still afraid to go to public school, but “I wanted so much to be like the other kids, and have friends of my own. I guess my parents saw my point because they let me have my way.”

  Mud enrolled her in seventh grade at Sutter Junior High in Canoga Park, a Valley suburb, beginning September 11, 1950. Natalie spent the night before worrying that she wouldn’t fit in, that no one would like her, that she would seem “too Hollywood.” “I got the biggest shock of my life when I saw the other girls. They were dressed in pretty sweaters and straight skirts. When I looked down and saw my frilly dress and long pigtails, I felt like crying.” Her movie image, frozen at seven, made twelve-year-old Natalie appear freakishly juvenile. “I noticed how much older the other kids looked, how much more sophisticated they were. They had lipstick and tight skirts.” A few seventh-graders wearing falsies laughed at her. The humiliation went deeper than adolescent angst for Natalie. She was so driven to be perfect, to please, her self-esteem derived entirely from the approval of others. She went home traumatized. “It took me one day to get a costume change, but it was years before I got over having made such a fool of myself. I think I was a senior in high school before I began to realize that every other girl in the school felt as much like an orphan in the storm as I did.” Mud consented to the new clothes, but the Pigtail Kid’s braids were money in the bank.

  Even in straight skirts and sweaters, Natalie still felt she was “on the outside looking in.” After a few days, the other girls seemed immature to her despite their padded bras. Natalie was accustomed to movie stars, in an adult world. “I made the earthshaking discovery that I didn’t belong.”

  One weekend shortly after Natalie started seventh grade, Rosalie Infuhr and her son Teddy stopped by the Gurdins’ house in Northridge. While the movie mothers talked shop, Natalie and Teddy went outside to saddle Natalie’s palomino. Lana, who was four and a half, tagged along. “We decided to put her little sister on the horse,” recalls Infuhr. Natalie walked Powder through the neighborhood while Lana sat in the saddle, thrilled to be alone on a horse at four. As Lana was riding Powder down the street, with Natalie pulling the reins, some neighbor children tore past them on bicycles, shooting cap guns and screaming. The horse reared, throwing Lana onto the street. As she hit the pavement, a horrified Natalie watched as Powder kicked her baby sister in the head, knocking her unconscious. “Everybody was all upset,” remembers Infuhr. Lana had multiple skull fractures and fell into a coma. The superstitious Mud refused to take her to a hospital, demanding that medical equipment be sent to the house. She canceled a trip to San Francisco to see Olga, who had just had her first child, a son named Lexi. Maria lied to Olga, telling her that Lana had measles, so she wouldn’t have to implicate Natalie in the horseback riding accident. Natalie was tortured with guilt, blaming herself for Lana’s concussion, sick with grief over her sister. She sold her horse and kept a vigil at Lana’s bedside, holding her hand. When Lana regained consciousness after a week, “it was Natalie who was sitting beside me… tears streaming down her cheeks.” Lana’s concern was that she had distracted their mother from Natalie’s career for seven days.

  Natalie fell into further turmoil that October when she was transferred to a newly constructed junior high called Robert Fulton, less than a month after enrolling at Sutter. Paramount immediately put her in a movie called Dear Brat, though the part was so small she missed less than two weeks of class. Dear Brat was intended to be a sequel to a pair of successful family comedies called Dear Ruth and Dear Wife, starring William Holden and Joan Caulfield. But as screenwriter Devery Freeman recalls, “Paramount said, ‘The only thing is, Dev, we can’t get Bill Holden. Oh and another thing is, we can’t get Joan Caulfield… but we want it to feel like they’re still in it…’ ” (Norman Krasna, who wrote the play on which the characters were based, requested that his name be removed from the credits, even though the film made money for Paramount.) Natalie’s character, described in the script as a “charming and earnest” girl of twelve, was so incidental she wore a dress from her own closet during filming. Her salary for six full days of work was $2333.

  She was hoping her minor roles in mostly B pictures in recent years would allow her to assimilate at Fulton, but “everybody went gaga when Natalie showed up,” recalls an eighth-grader from 1950–51. One of the girls in Natalie’s class admits, “All of us were sort of in awe of her.” “She was already an established star,” as classmate Rochelle Donatoni explains, “and so it wasn’t like you would approach her and say, ‘Oh hi, I’m so and so…’ ” Other girls avoided Natalie because they were jealous. “They didn’t understand that I was dying to do their things, but they never asked, presumably because they figured I would automatically turn them down.” “I look back now and I realize how much she wanted to be accepted,” remarks a classmate named Helen MacNeil, who sensed Natalie’s longing by “her look. The way she looked at you.” Natalie was too shy to strike up a conversation and fell out of rhythm with the class, going to and from auditions. When she was at school, another Fulton student relates, “she seemed warm and she’d always smile—but she was out a lot, so you never felt that she was quite as much a part of the school as the people that were there on a daily basis.”

  Natalie experienced a breakthrough when she met eighth-grader Mary Ann Marinkovich, a big-boned, tall brunette who wore pixie pink lipstick and was fearlessly extroverted. Mary Ann’s parents were immigrants from Croatia with a chicken farm in the Valley. “That was one of the common things we had going,” she assesses. “People that don’t come from foreign-born families sometimes don’t understand a lot of the things that go on, but we both did.” Mary Ann was brazenly confident and enough of a character to be unimpressed by Natalie’s fame. “I never bugged her about things, I never asked her about things. If she was here today, good; if she wasn’t, that’s fine. There was no pressure on her, where kids at that age are very cliquish and they demand loyalty et cetera, and she couldn’t. They didn’t realize she went to work, she wasn’t going to just play around. I had a little older attitude.”

  Mary Ann was with
Natalie at times when other junior high girls whispered jealously as they passed her by. “Natalie was really a very tender soul, and when people would rebuff her—and young girls are just the worst, they’re vicious—she would take this to heart and I would say to her, ‘Honey, you just can’t please everyone… the hell with it. Forget about that.’ I was a little harder, and I think it helped her to get over worrying about, ‘Gee, this one didn’t even smile at me when I walked by.’ She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. Believe me. There were times I wish she had been a little stronger, but she just would never dream of offending anybody. And believe me, there were times when she should have, but it wasn’t in her.”

  Mary Ann was the first girlfriend Natalie ever had, the first friend she was permitted since Edwin. “The moment I met her mother,” recalls Mary Ann, “her mother said to me, ‘Oh, I want you to be Natalie’s friend because you’re very pretty.’ ” Mrs. Gurdin continued to scrutinize her, adding, “And because you’re strong, and you’re always thinking.” In Mud’s Machiavellian mind, Natalie’s life was a movie and she was the director. She cast Mary Ann as Best Friend, though Mud really didn’t want Natalie socializing with anyone who couldn’t advance her career. If she gave a party for Natalie, Mary Ann noticed, Maria only invited girls who were blond, so they weren’t in competition with Natalie. Though Mary Ann was dark, “I was bigger, totally different looking, so in her mother’s eyes, I wasn’t a threat. That’s why her mother fostered and really harbored the friendship.” Mary Ann used to tease Natalie about her tiny, five-foot frame, saying, “You actresses all look alike. Little paper dolls. You’ve gotta get somebody that wears a size ten shoe!” Natalie was sensitive about her size, which she worried made her seem even more juvenile. “She seemed poised, which you might consider more mature,” a classmate observes, “but because of her looks I did not get the feeling she was older. She had this really cute, darling face that made her seem if anything younger than her years—almost a baby face, like a doll.”

  Natalie’s personality flowered under Mary Ann’s gregarious influence. They both attended Friday-night sock hops at the junior high, where the girls who weren’t too jealous to talk to Natalie found her “very down to earth. I don’t think any of us would ever say that she acted like a star. She was very sweet.” Natalie never mentioned the movies she was in unless “you asked her about it,” observes a classmate. “She wanted to be part of the clique.”

  Natalie (“Nat” to her classmates) savored her first taste of freedom. She went to the beach with Mary Ann without mentioning her fear of the water, though as Mary Ann recalls, “We both got reactions to the sun, and sun lotion, and blew up like balloons, so we never went again.” They created code names. Natalie called herself “Mac,” and Mary Ann was “Boo Boo,” for reasons no longer clear to Mary Ann. The friendship liberated Natalie for brief intervals from the tyranny of Mud, and Hollywood. “It was a little relief of pressure being with me. There was no having to be ‘on.’ We could just sit in jeans and talk. And I think we all need that, and especially in the situation she was in, because she really didn’t have a chance to have girlfriends, or a lot of friends, so the time we had together was really very special.”

  The only slumber parties Natalie attended were in her living room, with girls who met her mother’s casting requirements. Maria still wouldn’t let her go to anyone else’s house, for fear of kidnappers. Natalie had not been alone in the daytime since she became a child star at six. “I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone,” she once told a friend. “My mother and a social worker always went with me.” In bed at night, the only time she was by herself, Natalie was terrified someone would kidnap her, or that she would have another drowning nightmare. Her bedroom was a shrine to her paranoia, with storybook dolls atop the furniture, crowded onto the bed, spilling over to the floor, squeezed amid toy animals and her caged parakeet, Gregory Peckwood, helping her to pretend she was not alone. “All this stuff! Jesus Christ, nobody else could sit in there!” recalls Mary Ann. “She had all kinds of stuffed animals, and those dolls… it was just spooky.” Natalie had names for every doll and still talked to them, at twelve, as if they were real. “They always had to be in order,” remembers Mary Ann, “like they were taken care of. I thought about that every once in a while… because then it wasn’t the thing to do, and we were really kind of beyond that. But it was important to her… they had to be there. They were her friends.” Mary Ann was astute enough, even at thirteen, to understand the underlying cause of Natalie’s neuroses. “That stupid mother of hers did that—goddamn her.”

  Mud’s disturbing dominance over Natalie became apparent to Mary Ann as she gained further entrée to the Gurdins’ inner sanctum. Mud (“Mother Superior”) kept Natalie physically and emotionally cloistered. Athletic activities were off-limits because “she might break a fingernail or something.” The obsession with Natalie’s health, appearance, and acting was “all Mama. Natalie didn’t care. She wanted to make babies and walk off into the sunset like all young girls do.” The dangerous element, in Mary Ann’s view, was Natalie’s pleasing nature. “That was the mother’s feeding ground. Natalie would never raise her voice to her mother or say no ever.” Natalie, according to her friend, was unaware of what Mud was doing, or the damaging effect it was having on her. “She really didn’t have the time to sit or think about it, because her head was going in so many directions—if it wasn’t school, it was scripts. Her mother had that all manipulated to keep this kid’s head really cranking, and it worked.”

  Natalie auditioned for casting directors and producers throughout the fall, winter and spring of seventh grade, doing everything she could to make herself appealing. Robert Banas, her former ballet partner, has a vague recollection of Nick working as a studio guard, but it was Natalie’s acting that kept the family solvent during Fahd’s convalescence. The rumor at Fulton Junior High—sadly true—was that she bought the family’s house in Northridge. Natalie got good notices for Never a Dull Moment when it came out that winter, but the picture “wasn’t a great success,” admits costar Ann Doran. The Jackpot also under-performed, and Natalie got mixed reviews. When Dear Brat came out that spring, her bit performance wasn’t even mentioned. The pressure on Natalie to find work was almost unbearable.

  Gigi Perreau, who was several years younger than Natalie but kept encountering her at auditions, describes the tension between them while vying for the same child’s parts as unnervingly intense, “Her mother was ruthless.” If being a child performer had ever been fun for Natalie, it wasn’t anymore. “I didn’t like it all so much,” she admitted later. Acting, which had come naturally for her as a little girl, seemed “very difficult” now that she was almost thirteen. “I suddenly became self-conscious. I felt awkward.” Worse, she was imprisoned in her movie childhood, a captive of the braids the public associated with “Natalie Wood.” “The point was that the studio wanted me to stay looking young. That was the image.” Whatever the studio wanted, Mud made sure Natalie provided. When she started junior high, Natalie “looked exactly like she looked in Miracle on 34th Street,” a classmate recalls, “except she was bigger. Same face, same pigtails.” A producer from this period convinced an executive from one of the studios not to sign Natalie to another long-term contract “because he thought I was going to turn out very homely.”

  Her ungainly self-image was exacerbated by the fact that Natalie was being raised by a mother who worshipped glamour and the illusion of perfection as photographed in movie magazines. Maria had transferred her fascination with the Romanovs to Hollywood royalty. Making a star of Natalie became an alternative way for Maria to position herself as a member of aristocracy. Beauty was the key to this kingdom. “Looks were everything,” asserts Mary Ann. When Mud saw an unattractive child, she would tell her daughters, “If that was my kid, I’d drown it.” “My mom had to have a special child,” declares Lana, “she really wouldn’t accept anything else.” The pressure to look beautiful at all times imbedded it
self in Natalie, who wouldn’t leave the house unless she was stylish enough for a magazine layout.

  “Natalie was very concerned at how people would perceive her,” remembers Lana, who had her own problems as a child dealing with their mother’s perfectionism. “I was a mud fence. I didn’t have that ‘special’ thing, I really didn’t. I was incredibly introspective, very quiet and overly sensitive and I kept to myself.” Gigi Perreau felt sorry for Lana during the filming of Never a Dull Moment, when Natalie and Gigi costarred as sisters. “Little Lana was dragged along and kind of given things to do by the studio teacher. She was kind of like this little waif that wandered around while Natalie was getting all the attention.” Natalie was the star of the family, Natalie could do no wrong, was Maria’s mantra to the press. If she talked about Lana, it was pejorative. Lana felt overshadowed by her sister, Lana was high-strung, Lana was shy. Mud even told one reporter Lana “has a tendency to stoop—we are trying to correct that.” According to Mary Ann, Lana was cute, an opinion borne out by photos of her at five, revealing a spindly but appealing little girl. “It was sad,” comments Mary Ann. “She was not even the also-ran. Natalie’s mother structured her whole life around Natalie. It was almost like when anybody came into the house, she would put Lana in the back room—really, physically.”

  To Natalie, Lana was still a “twerp” sister she teased by locking her in the closet and other “stupid and fun things,” though she was becoming aware that Lana “had a hard time of it because… our mother’s attention was focused on me, because I was the one working.” There was an unexpected blessing to Lana’s neglect, one Lana would discover, much later, through years in therapy. “We’re all shaped to a certain extent by our parents, and I’m sure a lot of that carried over for Natalie. It didn’t for me, because I wasn’t really raised by anybody. I wasn’t around our parents as much, and my personality being the way it is, I don’t think I really listened. Because I was left to my own devices I learned to rely upon myself, and what I believed was correct, and not what I was being told. Natalie was so coddled and watched over, that my mother had a much greater impact on her. Much greater.”