Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Mud’s desperation to keep Natalie working, and apart from Jimmy, led her to accept a supporting role for Natalie in a television pilot called Pride of the Family, a generic situation comedy starring Paul Hartman and Fay Wray (famous from 1933’s King Kong) as a curmudgeonly ad executive and his patient wife. Natalie was playing what she later called “the idiot teenager who gave everybody trouble,” and Bobby Hyatt, the child actor whom Mud had snubbed on the set of Miracle on 34th Street, was cast as “Junior,” her pubescent younger brother. Maria and Natalie made it clear to Bobby and his mother that a television series was beneath their dignity because Natalie was a movie star, but “nobody else would hire Natalie,” states Hyatt, who was thirteen to Natalie’s fourteen and a half (though they were playing twelve and sixteen). “She wasn’t gawky, but there weren’t really a lot of roles around for teenagers in movies. TV was kind of coming into its own and there was more work for kids.” Money was also an issue, according to Hyatt, who knew Natalie’s father was unemployed and she was supporting the family. “I don’t think they were applying for welfare, but there was no way Marie would have accepted this TV series for Natalie if they didn’t really need the money.”

  Before they filmed the pilot, Mud signed a contract with Revue Productions for a salary of $300 for the pilot episode, which billed Natalie and Bobby as costars. When ABC bought it, accepting Pride of the Family as a half-hour weekly series, Maria shrewdly renegotiated Natalie’s terms, refusing to let her do the show unless the producers increased her salary to $400 an episode and Natalie received top billing over Bobby Hyatt. The Hyatts got a call from their agent saying, “We’ve got a big problem. Mrs. Gurdin won’t let Natalie sign the contract unless it says, ‘starring Natalie Wood and featuring Bobby Hyatt.’ ” “Nobody could figure it out,” recalls Hyatt. “I was no competition, equal status on the show, blah, blah, blah. It actually came down to the series being dropped if this silly conflict was not settled.” Bobby and his mother capitulated. “We had to pay the rent. And I wanted to do the show because it sounded like it was fun, and plus I wanted to work with Natalie.”

  When they started filming the series that spring, Natalie was embarrassed that her mother had manipulated star billing over Bobby. She approached him guiltily, saying, “I want you to know I didn’t have anything to do with it, and I don’t feel that way. I hope you’re not mad.” Bobby had already forgotten about the incident, “but she hadn’t.” He was amazed at how nice Natalie was, and “from that point on, we became really good friends.” They made jokes about the silly plotlines, and how their sitcom parents looked more like grandparents. “I objected to it because I don’t think teenagers are dopes and idiots,” Natalie remarked a few years later, “and I didn’t think the show was at all funny… it was like being a traitor to my own class.”

  Natalie had to withdraw from Van Nuys High to film the series, further bonding her with Bobby in the studio classroom, where they were the only two students; whispering Maria stories, giggling at her Russian accent and squinted eyes as she dispensed career advice to Natalie. “Her favorite saying was, ‘Don’t be the eager beaver,’ when she wanted Natalie to hold out on a contract. We would just roll on the floor laughing.” Natalie eventually confessed to Bobby the reason their billing was changed. “My mother just wanted to have status over your mother at the studio,” she told him. “To know that her daughter is the star and you’re only a featured actor.” Mud wouldn’t let Bobby come to the house when Natalie invited him, because he wasn’t a costar. “Her mother only wanted Natalie to have friends who could advance her career,” a corollary to the show business commandment that had excommunicated Jimmy from Natalie’s life. Bobby had a grudging admiration for “Marie,” as Mud now called herself. He respected her barracuda instincts, and found her unintentionally amusing behavior endearing, despite the fact that he was near the bottom of her Hollywood caste system. “I remember Marie saying constantly, ‘We can’t wait to get out of this series. One movie and we’re out of here.’”

  Hyatt uncovered a family skeleton that spring while filming the series. One morning when Natalie and Maria stepped out of their studio limousine at Republic Studios, he caught a glimpse of Natalie’s father behind the wheel. Bobby found out through Natalie that Mud had negotiated a confidential clause in Natalie’s Pride of the Family contract providing her father a job as her chauffeur. “We were all sworn to secrecy, but that was really, at that time, his paycheck.” The hidden irony was that Revue Productions had hired, for its teen star, a driver with a drinking problem. Nick’s alcohol of choice, Bobby learned, was straight vodka, which he would later carry, by the pint, in his toolbox. “He wasn’t drunk at first,” notes Hyatt, “he was just ‘nipping.’ ” Bobby, who occasionally rode to the studio with Natalie and Maria, had great affection for her father, whom he considered an intelligent, genial man demonized by his wife. “He’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t even know he was there. He’d smoke a pipe, he’d read his newspaper and drink his vodka and that’s it. If you’d just leave him alone, nothing would happen. But Marie would just naa, naa, naa. What she was nagging him about, I have no idea.” Occasionally Bobby would hear Nick mutter the word “bitch,” “but he would always mumble it when he was drunk, never saying who he was talking about.” Bobby’s mother, Jeanne, whom Maria had befriended out of boredom at the studio, pitied Nick for his lowly position in the family hierarchy. “The mother ruled, Natalie came next, then the little sister, and the father comes last.”

  One night Maria provoked Nick, according to Hyatt, “and he just lost it when he was drunk and started throwing things around the house.” Nick left in a rage and “smashed up” his car. The next morning, Mud telephoned Jeanne Hyatt to come over and witness the damage, threatening to divorce Nick. Bobby “couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t put a hammer in her head years before.” Nick eventually sobered up, Mud simmered down, and Natalie’s parents continued their dark dance. Natalie never talked about Fahd’s drinking to Jimmy Williams, too embarrassed to disclose the family curse to the boy she adored. Nick was a cipher to Jimmy; an anonymous figure in a back room, someone he avoided. Natalie talked more freely about Fahd to Bobby, for he had witnessed his drunken transgressions, so she couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist. In Bobby’s view, “she loved her father, and she liked him as a really nice man.” Natalie downplayed the psychodrama in her family even with Bobby, who saw it firsthand. Everything was an illusion in Natalie’s world, he noticed, “everything except Natalie. Natalie wasn’t an illusion. The people around her were the illusion.”

  The saddest member of the family, to Hyatt’s mind, was Natalie’s little sister, Lana, then seven, who was like the urchin Natalie played in Driftwood come to life. Mud tried to manipulate the series’ producers into letting Lana use the studio tutor; when they refused, she simply kept her out of school and Lana wandered aimlessly about the set, carrying a starving hamster in a clear plastic purse. “Lana always looked like she just got out of bed and slipped one of those cheap cotton dresses over her and didn’t take a bath,” remembers Hyatt. “She was skinny, with stringy hair, and there were stains all over her teeth.” Natalie took Lana along if she and Bobby had lunch at DuPar’s, an industry hangout down the street. Lana brought her pet hamster, Hyatt recalls, “and she would place this poor, starving animal on the table in front of us. I insisted that she feed it and Nat joined in. Lana would pull a tiny piece of lettuce from her sandwich and place it in her plastic purse. She refused to give the poor little thing any water. I always felt Lana was showing us, through the hamster, how she felt.” Bobby and Natalie finally refused to eat lunch with Lana unless she took care of the hamster and left it at home. Maria’s solution was to keep Lana at home, with Nick, who became both chauffeur and babysitter. Natalie later told Bobby that when Lana got home, she put the hamster on her bed, inside the plastic purse, lay down beside it, and watched the hamster slowly die.

  Mud knew that she was neglecting Lana, and that Lana “was in t
he shadow of Natalie, I felt it,” she admitted. Not once did Maria feel guilty. Her favoritism was brazen and unapologetic. “If Natalie would tell me to,” she said later in life, “I would get the moon for her! I just loved her so much.” Lana’s feelings for Natalie were schizophrenic. She worshipped her movie star sister, and she envied her for taking their mother from her. “I was usually home by myself because Natalie and my mom were at the studio, or Natalie and my mom were someplace else… and I was home.” Natalie, by all accounts, treated her kid sister with affection.

  The household was a model of dysfunction. The family seldom, if ever, sat down for a meal. Natalie was not required to do any chores; in exchange for her lost childhood, Mud catered to her every domestic whim. Natalie reciprocated with blind adherence to her mother’s star-making schemes, staging embarrassing “sick-outs” during Pride of the Family whenever Maria wanted to coerce something from the producers. She loved her mother but she was god and monster to Natalie. “I wish she would just let me be a real person,” Natalie would say to Bobby.

  Jimmy was their battleground. Natalie crawled out windows to see him, possessed by infatuation, thrilled to defy Mud, who figured out what was going on and kept Natalie a virtual prisoner. “Marie was with her all the time,” remembers Hyatt, who became Natalie’s sole companion. “We spent a lot of time together, just her and I, especially in the classroom, when the teacher would leave.” When they were alone, Natalie started to quiz Bobby about male genitalia, sharing information with him about the female body. “I was thirteen and she was almost fifteen and we spent day after day together, so all this stuff came out. Natalie was totally naïve about sex. She was asking me, and I was younger than her.” After days of clumsy description, Natalie invited Bobby into her dressing room so she could see for herself. “She wasn’t being dirty, she was curious. We were just kids—‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ In fact, she was so shy that she said she would only show me her breasts.” The experiment was cut short by Mud, pounding furiously on Natalie’s locked dressing room door. When Maria peered in a side window, Bobby sneaked out the door. Mud apprehended him as he was leaving, calling him a pervert and advising his mother he could not be trusted with Natalie. “Marie had a radar. If Natalie was even thinking something, she knew it.”

  Maria eventually resumed friendly relations with Bobby, though she would not permit him to be alone with Natalie, and often spied on them. One day she took him aside, offering a strange bargain. “She said that if I would promise never to have any kind of physical contact with Natalie, then she would make it up to me in the future.” Bobby agreed to the pact, which he considered meaningless, never imagining how Maria one day would fulfill it.

  The reason for Mud’s crazed vigilance revealed itself to Bobby that spring. “Marie didn’t want Natalie to lose her virginity until she decided who was going to get it. If Natalie was going to go to bed with somebody, she wanted it to count.” Mud’s twisted control had already created a deep-seated fear in Natalie about having a baby. Maria wanted Natalie to remain childless so she would always be available to make movies. “I heard her mother telling her that if she ever got pregnant, she would die. She would say, ‘You’re too petite. You’re built too small.’ ” Natalie brought the subject up to Bobby in the classroom, begging him to tell her if her mother was right. “I used to say, ‘Well look at my mother. She had me, and she’s exactly the same size, height, and weight as you are.’ Natalie still doubted it, it was so in her brain…”

  The two teenagers continued their sex discussions on the set, while waiting for their scenes to be lit, knowing that Natalie’s mother was too far away to overhear. “She could see our mouths moving,” recalls Hyatt, “and she wanted to know what we were talking about.” Mud furtively approached the soundman one day, asking him to turn on the overhead microphone and lower it over Natalie and Bobby. “She then listened to our private conversation with earphones. Nat was asking me what my penis looked like when it got hard and that was that. Marie stormed onto the set, grabbed Nat by the arm and marched her to her dressing room, locking the door. She refused to allow the filming to continue until the executive producers came to her dressing room for a meeting. After their meeting, one of the producers took me aside and—with a smile on his face—asked me not to talk to Natalie anymore about sex.” To fool Maria, Bobby and Natalie devised code words for parts of the body, so they could continue covertly their teenage fascination with sex. Bobby’s code name for penis was “Clyde.” “In the morning, Nat would walk into the schoolroom and ask me, ‘How’s your Clyde?’”

  By the time Pride of the Family debuted on ABC on Friday, October 2, 1953, Mud mysteriously lifted the boycott on Jimmy, permitting Natalie, who had turned fifteen, to go out with him at night. On their first evening date, doubling with another high school couple, Jimmy and Natalie noticed a car with a lone male driver follow them into a drive-in movie and park nearby. “If we’d get out of the car and go to the snack bar, the son-of-a-bitch would get out of the car and follow us.” The same man trailed Jimmy and Natalie on subsequent dates to a pizza parlor, inside movie theaters, to drive-ins. “We knew he was there,” explains Williams, who ignored the stalker, assuming he was a private detective sent by Natalie’s mother. “We weren’t doing anything wrong anyway. We wouldn’t have done anything different if we didn’t know he was there.” By the sixth date, the Peeping Tom disappeared. Jimmy assumed it was because “there was nothing dirty to report, so her mother wouldn’t pay anymore.”

  A short time later, Jimmy and Natalie and the couple from their double date were playing canasta in Natalie’s living room, under the penetrating gaze of her mother, sitting in an adjacent chair. When Mud began to make small talk, mentioning details from the two couples’ earlier date, Natalie turned to her in mock surprise. “Oh Mother,” she asked innocently, “how’d you know that?” “This went on for several minutes,” recalls Williams, until Maria, in the spirit of fun, confessed to having hired a detective. She gave Natalie a mischievous look. “You didn’t know your mother had a dick in her, did you?” she grinned, unaware of the double entendre. Jimmy and his male friend forced themselves to keep straight faces. “Man, we didn’t even crack a smile. I thought Natalie and her girlfriend were gonna laugh themselves right out of their chairs. I’m not even sure her mother understood what they were laughing about. If she had, there’d have been hell to pay, I can tell you.”

  Jimmy wondered why Natalie’s mother allowed him to date Natalie at all, knowing how stridently she disapproved. According to Lana, her parents “detested” Jimmy, “but Natalie sure liked him.” He was the quintessential teen rebel, by the description of Natalie’s TV brother, who met Jimmy during filming. “Natalie insisted on bringing him to the studio, and he had motorcycle boots with chains, dirty jeans, leather jacket with a motorcycle club insignia on the back…” Jimmy was Natalie’s trophy in her contest of wills with Mud, a battle she waged in mother-daughter secrecy. As Bobby noticed, “Natalie never would display any public displeasure with a family member. I know that behind closed doors things went on, especially when she really wanted to get mad at her mother: she would excuse everybody, or excuse herself, and take her mother in the other room and in privacy they would go at it.” Natalie bleached her hair blond during her summer of love with Jimmy, a further statement of her restless youth.

  The fact that Mrs. Gurdin might have a hidden agenda in permitting him to date Natalie began to enter Jimmy’s mind that Thanksgiving when Natalie was invited to ride in the Santa Claus Lane Parade and her mother asked Jimmy to walk down Hollywood Boulevard, next to Natalie’s float. “It was almost like a command performance. I had to be there, and I had to walk that parade, until she got off that float.” Mud was aware that if anyone bothered Natalie with Jimmy around, “there wasn’t much of anything I wouldn’t do, honestly.” When Republic began to arrange publicity dates for Natalie to promote their new television series, Maria sent Jimmy along “as a third leg.” Aft
er Natalie and her studio date would arrive at an event, “they’d take some photographs and that was the end of it, and then Natalie and I went and did our thing.” One evening, the studio sent the limousine to pick up Jimmy ahead of Natalie. He got into the back of the car with Natalie’s escort, a handsome young actor being promoted as the next heartthrob. On the way to Natalie’s, the sex symbol to millions of girls moved in closer to Jimmy, running his fingers up Jimmy’s jeans. “I did a lot of hitchhiking, and these idiots would pick me up, and the instant they put their hand on my leg I’d say, ‘Stop the car.’ ” Jimmy kept his distance from Natalie’s “date” for the rest of the night, guarding himself more than Natalie; observing ruefully as photographers took pictures of the young Hollywood couple out for a “romantic” evening.