Maria and Bette Davis despised each other ever after, a loathing Mud claimed began the morning they met in San Pedro, when Davis invited her for a drink and Maria, a teetotaler, ordered a 7-Up. “Oh, it’s ridiculous! How ridiculous!” Davis supposedly sputtered, walking away in disgust. Sterling Hayden’s wife spent most of her time during The Star with Davis, much of it in bars. “We were just like two women that laughed and probably drank more than we should.” Betty Hayden adored Davis. “When somebody says something bad about her, I’m very defensive because I thought she was just magnificent.” Natalie’s friend Mary Ann, who visited the set, found Davis very businesslike. She amused Natalie and Mary Ann. “What a mouth she had! Boy, when somebody did something, oh my goodness. We, of course, would just giggle and laugh and had fun with that whole thing.”
Natalie had dispensed with the cuff bracelet for her work in The Star, which was particularly vulnerable. She wore no makeup, playing Davis’ sweetly affectionate daughter with a yearning that brought out a tenderness in Davis. “I remember for some reason a scene on the staircase in which she was particularly good,” Davis said once, “and I remember telling her, you know, how much she helped me in the way she played the scene.” The scene Davis was referring to was one in which a humiliated Davis tries to slip out of her ex-husband’s house without being seen by her adoring daughter. As she opens the door to exit, Natalie suddenly appears at the top of the stairs in her pajamas, her sincere brown eyes seeking out Davis’ with a wounded expression. “Aren’t you going to come up and say goodnight, Mother?” she asks, with such longing it breaks Davis’ heart. Such moments were Natalie’s gift as an actress. As Ann Doran, her costar in five films, explains, “There are people that you can’t stand immediately and learn to like, or there’s people you can’t stand and never do like, and there are people that you like immediately. That quality was in Natalie. Natalie reached out to her audience. She brought them into her world. She reached out and she got you and brought you right into her—you understood her.” Davis would receive an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Natalie’s mother, the washed-up star.
Bette Davis got her second revenge on Maria Gurdin at the end of the shoot, when Tom Irish received a telegram from Davis inviting him to bring “his fiancée Natalie” to a wrap party for the cast and crew of The Star at the Captain’s Table. When Irish arrived at the Gurdins’ to pick up Natalie, “the mother kind of looks at us both and says, ‘No, I don’t know, I think I’d better go with you,’ and I thought, ‘Oh damn!’ So she puts on something and away we go.” It was the only occasion Maria accompanied them on a date and it was odd, according to Irish. “She didn’t say anything. She just sat in the back of the car.” He continues, “So we get to the Captain’s Table, the three of us, and Bette Davis is standing in the front door, with one of the dresses that she wore in The Star, a navy blue taffeta dress. And she was standing there with her legs sort of apart, smoking a cigarette and greeting the people that came in, like ‘Oh John, how are you, darling, do come in,’ ‘Oh Tom, Natalie darling, do come in,’ ‘Tom dear, so glad you could make it.’ And then she swung around and all of a sudden there’s the mother. And she just stopped dead in her tracks and goes, ‘Oh…’ and takes a long drag off her cigarette, and looks at her right in the eye and just puff—I mean she blew smoke in her face!—and says, ‘I don’t remember sending you an invitation.’ Then she just swung back into motion and said, ‘But I’m so glad you could come anyway. Do come in.’ ” As Irish stood between the two women, riveted by the drama, Maria strode past Davis into the party as if nothing had occurred, “water off a duck’s back.”
After The Star, Natalie’s phobia of dark seawater grew increasingly morbid. She began to believe her recurring dreams of drowning were prophetic warnings. She became simultaneously obsessed with covering the wrist she broke on The Green Promise as if she were hideously disfigured, when it was a minor imperfection: the bone had grown slightly below the natural position with a larger than normal bump. Natalie would not let anyone see it. “She wore big bracelets and big cuffs always, never without, never,” declares Mary Ann. “And there was a period when she’d wear long sleeves all the time.” When Irish noticed Natalie’s penchant for bracelets, he bought one for her as a gift “and she never wore it.” He eventually found out why. “This was a thin bracelet, and it wouldn’t cover that deformed bone. I didn’t realize that she even had a problem.” Natalie spent hours searching for bracelets that concealed her imperfection, getting Fahd to make some for her.
Famous Artists’ plan to transform her image from Pigtail Kid to ingénue-in-the-making overnight proceeded with a seamlessness that was disturbing. When Natalie took the much-older Tom Irish to a Lake Arrowhead hotel for the weekend to promote the Bing Crosby musical, her first film not in braids, it was accepted as a natural evolution. One movie magazine reported chirpily how Natalie had “changed her type,” graduating to her “first grown-up role” and her “first premiere date,” failing to disclose that her “date” was twenty-one and accompanied her for the weekend. The resort was swarming with reporters, lured by a two-day festival of stars including Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, performing magic tricks from Houdini. The inappropriateness of Natalie’s romance was lost in the carnival atmosphere of the weekend, which Mud attended, hobnobbing with her favorite movie gods and goddesses. A female reporter interviewed Natalie while she was at Lake Arrowhead, referring to her in the subsequent newspaper article as “that ‘baby star’ in pigtails,” now “a growing up beauty of 14” with a boyfriend. She reported Irish’s age and the fact that Natalie attended Fulton, as if there were nothing unusual about an eighth-grader “going steady” with a twenty-one-year-old. “Natalie could easily pass for 16 or 17,” wrote the reporter, pointing out that Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Deanna Durbin had all “tied the knot at tender ages of 16 and 17—and untied them shortly thereafter.” Natalie told the reporter she didn’t want any divorces, “When I get married it will be for keeps.” She was quoted as saying she wanted to be like other girls and go to school, or go on dates, “determined she won’t wind up in divorce or unhappiness like the other child celebrities.”
Natalie’s candor, and her wisdom, contrasted with Mud, who lied to the same reporter, telling her she chaperoned all of Natalie’s dates, “tagging along” with Tom Irish. Maria wanted to create the illusion, for publicity purposes, that she was a strict parent, to camouflage the unsavory reality that she could have been in effect prostituting her junior-high daughter for a chance at more mature roles. She had no idea what Natalie and Irish were doing on their dates, and according to Mary Ann and others, Mud didn’t care. “My mom would privately condone everything that was going on, and publicly denounce you,” confirms Lana. “Which really, really hurts. She did it to me as well—I was like thirteen, fourteen years old when I started dating. She was a chameleon. It depended on who she was talking to, and who my mom thought they wanted her to be.”
DESPITE HER AGENTS’ AND MUD’S EFFORTS TO push her past the awkward age on-screen by sophisticating her prematurely, Natalie’s career foundered when she returned to Fulton in ninth grade. She said later it was “the worst time of my life,” a period of self-consciousness in which she found herself suddenly undesirable in movies, the medium that had courted her since she was four. At fourteen, she was forgotten.
She found work in television, appearing in August 1952 on the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse in Playmates, as a young girl who befriends a ghost. She performed live in another television drama, Quite a Viking, for Hollywood Playhouse, a radical experience for Natalie, who was accustomed to shooting scenes out of sequence, with multiple takes. One-Take Natalie was “cool as a cucumber,” remembers Tom Irish. “I said to her, ‘Aren’t you nervous?’—because it was a live show. And she said, ‘No, not at all. Why? Should I be?’ I was nervous for her, thinking, ‘Oh God, a live show! What happens if you goof or something?’ ” “I loved the feeling of beginning at th
e beginning and going through to the end,” Natalie later told an interviewer. Her career came to a standstill that October. “There were no parts,” recalls a school chum. “She was too old for some and too young for others.”
Natalie embraced normalcy, leading the typical life of a girl her age for the first time since kindergarten in Santa Rosa. Jimmy Williams, the renegade who had eluded her since seventh grade, suddenly noticed Natalie that fall. The two of them “just kind of came together,” by his elliptic description. “Maybe I started realizing that she was something special… it just come a time that I decided that I wanted to be with her. I’m talking kid stuff.” “It took me two and a half years,” Natalie said later of her conquest, proud of the fact that “all the girls had a terrible crush” on Jimmy. Her main rival, Jacqueline Eastes learned something about Natalie through their competition for Jimmy’s affections. “When Natalie wanted something, it would happen.”
She faced formidable opposition from Mud, who banned Natalie from dating Jimmy, a tenth-grader, until she was in high school, permitting her to see actor Tom Irish, who was twenty-three, anytime. Natalie’s dates, under her mother’s house rules, were calculated stepping-stones to stardom. “Jimmy wasn’t in the business,” as Mary Ann explains. “His folks owned a huge dairy farm that he worked on… very unpretentious, nice people.” Natalie was frantic to see Jimmy, who was equally possessed with her. The only time they could spend together was at parties at Natalie’s house, under the hawkish gaze of Maria, who was as threatened by Jimmy’s Hell’s Angels persona as Natalie was exhilarated. He staged a drag race one night after cruising by the Gurdins’ in his father’s pickup, making a sharp right turn to avoid a police car and smashing into a telephone pole. “The kids I was drag racing with made a left turn down a street that dead-ends at the Van Nuys Airport. The police assumed they ran me off the road and started chasing them. The kids went through the fence and by that time the police had an all-points on these guys. The police had a roadblock set up, stopped them, made them get out of the car with their hands up, then one of the policeman shot this kid in the back. That was a real incident, it was all over the Van Nuys newspapers, and it cost me my driver’s license until I was eighteen.”
Natalie found Jimmy’s hellion heroism dangerously romantic. She was drawn to dark personalities, in the opinion of a later beau, but there was more to Jimmy than a black leather jacket and jeans with the cuffs rolled up. Underneath the machismo, Jimmy was “a prince of a fellow,” in the appraisal of Mary Ann. He was fiercely protective of Natalie (“She was like a child”), and had a cowboy’s code of honor. “I got along with the teachers marvelously. When I did something, if they called me into the office and said, ‘Did you do it?’—if it wasn’t too bad, I’d say, ‘Yeah, I did.’ Now if it was something that was a little more serious, I’d deny it, even though I did it—and they’d let me go, because they knew I’d just tell the truth. So I worked that pretty hard.”
Natalie was intoxicated by Jimmy. She invited friends to the house regularly just to include him, “So we started to become closer, becoming closer and closer.” Natalie begged Mud to let her go to events with kids from high school so she could at least see him. In desperation, she dragged Maria along to a party, “because Natalie wanted to show her mother that all the kids were nice kids, and we weren’t losers, and we certainly weren’t smoking dope and things like that, we were just kids.” Natalie’s ploy worked. Mud loosened the sexual reins, permitting her to see Jimmy in a group setting.
Maria’s trust was not misplaced. Van Nuys High School, in 1952, was a relatively innocent venue, even for self-proclaimed rebels such as Jimmy. “We were all good kids,” as one alumna of the class of 1955 vouches. The San Fernando Valley, back then, was a flat wilderness of ranchland populated by “a few old retired movie stars, cowboy stars, and that was about it.” It had been infiltrated by new subdivisions after the war, coaxing families from Los Angeles to the other side of the mountains for affordable housing. Actor Robert Redford’s family was one of them. Redford, then fifteen, transferred to the class ahead of Jimmy’s at Van Nuys High in 1952, just before Natalie arrived. As he recalls, “Those mountains were much more of a demarcation point as a kid in the fifties. Once you came to the Valley, it was just a wasteland, there was nothing there, and at night there were no lights out there. People spilled into the Valley, so it drew a polyglot, an eclectic mix of mostly immigrant families who could afford to live out there because it was now cheap… but the trade-off, for me, was horrendous: sterile, flat, boring, cookie-cutter homes in neighborhoods that had no character.”
By contrast to Hollywood, Jimmy and his Van Nuys High clique were a wholesome breeze blowing through Natalie’s life. “Some of us came from the ‘Ronny Howard families,’ the boy-next-door/girl-next-door families,” remarks a classmate who went to sleepovers at Natalie’s. “They were just good parents, nine-to-five parents. And then some came from celebrity families, so we were all a mixture of kids, just being kids.”
Natalie fit in comfortably dating a dairy farmer’s son. She had no social pretensions, according to Williams. “She was just about as down-to-earth as you could imagine.” Their romance progressed sweetly, hand-holding on campus, at parties. Natalie credited Jimmy, later, as her first “genuine kiss,” occurring on her living room sofa with Mud skulking nearby, swooping into the room to pull them apart, growling under her breath in heavy Russian intonations that they were “still babies.” “I felt so bad that I burst into tears,” recalled Natalie, confused by her mother’s sexual double standard, offering her to a grown man, but pronouncing sex as something wicked with a boy her age for whom she had genuine feelings.
Natalie seldom talked about the people she met in Hollywood, or her movies, with Jimmy. “That was her job, and she wasn’t overly impressed with it. She didn’t carry a lot of airs with it.” Becoming a movie star in the future, to Natalie, was “part of her life,” reflects Williams. “I don’t think it was a goal, I think it was just a given… she didn’t know any better.” Mud’s fervid whispers into Natalie’s ear from infancy that she was destined to become famous had implanted themselves into Natalie’s subconscious and she was carrying out the prophecy as if under a hypnotist’s trance.
Her overpowering attraction to a daredevil like Jimmy Williams suggested that Natalie wanted to break free. Once they started going together, he noticed, she “liked to do things that were a little risky.” When they went to the amusement park at the Santa Monica Pier, Natalie pulled him onto the wildest ride, called the Pike. “They had this big drum, and you’d get in it and you’d stand and whirl, and they’d drop the bottom out of it and the centrifugal force keeps you up on the wall. And she loved it. She’d ride that thing all night long if you stayed with it.” Natalie flung aside her arsenal of inhibitions in Jimmy’s presence, as if his fearlessness gave her power. “She was always wanting to do a little more, go a little further, get a little more risky. I mean, she wasn’t afraid.”
Natalie told Jimmy she knew that she was going to drown. The premonition first came up in their conversations when Olga and her husband Lexi visited with their young sons, and invited Natalie and Jimmy to the ocean. “She’d put her toes in,” he recalls, “and we’d hold hands and walk the beach and she’d let the water get on her feet, but she would not get in the water, because she was afraid of drowning. We talked about it—or I shouldn’t say we talked. She talked about it and I listened. I tried to be a friend to her for this kind of thing.” Natalie mentioned her recurring dreams of drowning and “believed that’s the way she was going to die.” She was haunted by it for as long as Jimmy knew her. “If she told me once, she told me a hundred times she loved to go to the beach, but she knew she was going to drown if she ever got in the water.”
Natalie shared other confidences with Jimmy. How fond she was of her sister Olga, that Olga didn’t like Fahd, because he used Natalie’s money and didn’t have a job. Jimmy held a similar view of Natalie’s father, sayi
ng, “All the years I knew him, he never turned a hand doing anything.” In his opinion, Nick was comfortable being supported by Natalie and pushed her to act, just like Mud, though Natalie never said a critical word to Jimmy about her father. “She felt like that’s the way it was supposed to be, I think, and I guess they made a pretty good case that they were taking care of her, and it was because of their taking care of her that she was making this money—therefore it wasn’t hers necessarily, but it was family income.”
In the middle of the school year, January of 1953, Natalie skipped the last semester of ninth grade and transferred as a sophomore to Van Nuys High, though she was only fourteen. She would modestly attribute the acceleration to years of studio tutoring, but Natalie was intellectually gifted in the view of those close to her. Lana saw her report cards, nearly all A’s, and described her sister, posthumously, as “quite brilliant.” Mary Ann considered Natalie’s intelligence her defining quality; more so than her acting, or her beauty. Jimmy was awed. “She had to have an IQ of close to 200. She was just a whiz-banger. I showed her my agriculture book one day and said, ‘I’ve got to get a book report out of that,’ and she just grabbed it out of my hand, and the next morning, I had a book report on the entire book. I didn’t ask her to, I was just complaining. And I got an A+. They put it on the wall. And she didn’t know anything about agriculture. She was just absolutely the smartest thing I ever met in my life.”
Since Natalie was in high school, Mud reluctantly permitted her to date Jimmy under less monitored circumstances that winter. The teenagers’ intense pull to each other had an urgency, suggesting something out of control. It surfaced when they spent an afternoon in the mountains around Big Bear Lake with Jimmy’s brothers and Natalie’s stunt double. The resort was crowded, so Jimmy’s brother searched for a remote spot to ride toboggans. “He found this canyon, with good snow down and up, and I took Natalie up about thirty feet and we came down that hill. And that wasn’t enough. She said, ‘I want to go higher.’ So we went up higher, did the same thing. And she wanted to go higher, and higher, and higher.” Natalie goaded Jimmy until he took her to the top of the mountain. “I’d have never went to the top of that hill.” Natalie was dangerously reckless; testing the boundaries of Jimmy’s love, making up for a lifetime of fear and Mud’s restrictions. “We started down,” recalls Williams, “and she got scared, and she wanted off. And of course it was going so fast that I couldn’t get her off. I tried to get her feet out, and her foot got stuck.” Natalie panicked as the toboggan careened down the icy slope. Jimmy used his body to shield her, preparing to crash, “and when we hit the bottom it was going so fast, I crushed my nose—absolutely crushed it—on my knee.” Natalie was hysterical. “I looked horrible,” admits Williams. “I splattered my nose all over my face.” When Maria saw him, dripping blood at the Gurdins’ front door, “she had a hemorrhage.” Jimmy’s wrecked face was of no concern to Mud. She was furious that Natalie could have gotten hurt and forfeited an acting job. “I thought her mother was going to kill us,” reveals Williams. She refused to let Natalie see him and “it was kind of bad for a long time.”
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