Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Henry Willson, Wagner’s agent, was a powerful Hollywood veteran with cultivated tastes, and a well-known homosexual. He had acquired a reputation in the industry for “discovering” Adonis-like young men and sculpting them into stars, usually changing their names, often to something absurdly rugged such as “Rock” Hudson, Tab “Hunter,” or “Guy” Madison. Some of the would-be actors Willson represented were heterosexual, but a disproportionate number were homosexual, bisexual, or “cooperated” with Willson “to get gigs,” in the observation of Natalie’s costar Bobby Hyatt, who competed against them for parts. If a young, handsome actor had Henry Willson for an agent, “it was almost assumed he was gay, like it was written across his forehead,” recalls Ann Doran, one of Willson’s few female clients, who said, “Henry was a pretty boy.” Maria was suspicious of homosexuals, according to Hyatt, a voyeur to Natalie’s campaign to hire Willson. “Mrs. Gurdin thought that it wasn’t manly-if you’re going to be a man, be a man; if you’re going to be a woman, be a woman. She was from that school. Her nickname for Clifton Webb, who was a big character actor at that time and a friend of Wagner’s, was The King of the Faggots. She did not like Henry Willson at all.” Since Willson showed little interest in representing Natalie, and Mud displayed less in hiring him, Natalie’s scheme to meet Wagner was temporarily thwarted.

  She and her mother prowled for movie roles for the summer hiatus, hoping to get Natalie off Pride of the Family, which she considered “dreadful.” Natalie was too polite to reveal her displeasure to anyone other than Bobby, though Fay Wray, her mother on the series, sensed her “underlying restlessness,” and how much “she wanted to be thought of as older.” Despite the mischief she got into with Bobby, Natalie as always was the consummate professional. Wray would have “the very tenderest memories” of her from their scenes together, commenting on the same “delicate, vulnerable quality” that Orson Welles had perceived when Natalie was six, which Wray observed from “the look of her and her uncanny ability.”

  Natalie tested in May for a part in a Greer Garson movie for Warner Brothers called Strange Lady in Town. While she was on the lot, director Victor Saville and an executive named William Orr noticed her, struck by the fact that she was maturing. Both Saville and Orr thought of casting her in Saville’s next picture, The Silver Chalice, a big-budget Greco-Roman epic. Bobby auditioned for a role around the same time, mentioning to Natalie there might be a part for her. Virginia Mayo had already been cast in a leading role as Helena, a glamorous temptress. Saville hired Natalie to play Mayo’s character in her youth, as a slave girl. The fact that Mayo was a voluptuous blonde and Natalie a waif brunette did not deter Saville, or Natalie, who ambitiously dyed her hair ash blond, unconcerned that her character on Pride of the Family would inexplicably appear with a different hair color in the last few episodes. All that mattered to Natalie was that she was back in movies, even though it was a small role. Mud was scheming to upgrade that ranking.

  The two went to Warners off and on throughout May, fitting Natalie for her Grecian costumes, screen-testing her blond hair to match Mayo’s. One day while they were at the commissary, Frank Sinatra walked in, preparing for his next picture, Young at Heart. Sinatra either approached Natalie, or her mother sent her over to introduce herself. Maria lunged at the opportunity for Natalie to meet Sinatra, who had just won an Academy Award for From Here to Eternity, increasing his status in Hollywood. Sinatra was taken with Natalie, and got “a kick” out of Maria, inviting them to a party at his house. Mud eagerly accepted, whispering to Natalie afterward that she would let her go alone, urging Natalie to get close to Sinatra “because it would be good for her career.” Mud had no qualms that he was separated from his wife, the tempestuous Ava Gardner, or that he was thirty-eight to Natalie’s fifteen. “Her mother was a pimp,” as Scott Marlowe, Natalie’s later boyfriend, brutally assessed. Lana was too young to know about their mother pushing Natalie onto Sinatra, but “that wouldn’t surprise me. To my mom, if you were a movie star, then you were valuable.”

  Natalie returned to the classroom at Republic, spilling her amazing secret to her TV brother, who recalls, “Natalie herself could not even believe this permission,” jumping at the chance “to do something without her mother.” She shared the confidence with Mary Ann, who was astonished even Maria would send Natalie alone, at fifteen, to a party at Frank Sinatra’s house. “She literally threw her to the lions.” The day after the party, Natalie arrived at the studio school embarrassed, telling Bobby she had something to confess. Natalie had consumed quantities of wine at Sinatra’s house, and in the course of the evening, told Sinatra about “Clyde,” the code name for penis Bobby had coined to fool Natalie’s mother. Sinatra was so amused, he and his friends had incorporated “Clyde” into their hipster slang. Natalie felt guilty because she had taken credit for the word. “Here’s the kind of person Natalie was. She said that my friendship was very important to her. She was going to see Sinatra that evening, and if I wanted, she would tell Sinatra that I invented the word.” Bobby laughed it off. Some months later, he turned on the radio and heard Sinatra singing a tune called “Clyde’s Song.” The singer was quoted in magazines saying Clyde was his “code word” for someone he didn’t trust. “Sinatra and his Rat Pack gang started using the ‘Clyde’ word in their Vegas act. Even JFK was saying the code word. I should have copyrighted it.”

  Natalie became a regular at Sinatra’s that May and June, according to Hyatt, who saw her at studio school every day, keeping her secret. “I remember one Friday Natalie just couldn’t wait to get out of there. She kept looking at her watch, dancing up and down, saying, ‘I have to get to the hairdresser and look really beautiful tonight because—don’t tell anybody—I’m going back to Frank Sinatra’s house. They’re having a party and I can’t wait to get up there.’ It was a big deal to her. Everybody was up there—Dean Martin, the Rat Pack, all the big stars, all way older than her. She was probably the only person under thirty there except for maybe some of the dancing girls from Las Vegas. I guarantee you she was the only fifteen-year-old there.”

  There was a mysterious, illicit quality to Natalie’s relationship with Sinatra, from the point of view of Bobby, her brother-confessor. “When I asked her what was up between her and Sinatra, she said her mother told her not to say anything because if word got out that she was spending evenings at his house, it would ruin everything. I was sworn to secrecy.” Bobby believed that Natalie and Sinatra were having an affair. “There was something fishy, because her mother told her not to talk to anybody about it because she was underage. I knew something was going on, because this was the first time Natalie ever told me she couldn’t tell me something.” Bobby’s suspicions were confirmed in his mind when Natalie suddenly lost interest in their teenage sexual explorations. “All that stopped. No more questions about sex, no more discussions, no fooling around.” Natalie “became kind of distant—not as a joking-around friend, but if I would bring up sex, she would say, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to talk about it.’ Until the Sinatra thing, Natalie was completely naïve.”

  Bobby’s intuition about Sinatra and Natalie was probably correct, affirms her high school friend Mary Ann, who worried about Natalie. “Thank goodness, he was a nice guy… and you know, he was fun.” Sinatra, who was devastated over his doomed, fiery marriage to Ava Gardner, found tender-hearted Natalie a soothing balm, in Mary Ann’s view. “You know, he had his share of problems. Natalie always had an ear, and she could always listen. And when she said, ‘Can I do anything to help?’ she really meant it.” Natalie’s code words and teen giddiness were a distraction for the moody Sinatra. He said later, “She gave me the feeling that she was always glad to be alive. That she was a happy kind of a human being, and she exuded a lot of happiness when she was with you. She giggled a lot. She loved to laugh.”

  Natalie and Sinatra formed a fascination with each other from these early encounters that would persist for years, at times romantically, occasionally while they wer
e in relationships with other people. Sinatra would assume the role of Natalie’s “Godfather” protector the rest of his life—even after Natalie drowned, when he would intervene in classic Sinatra style.

  Mary Ann and Bobby, the friends who knew of Natalie’s teen liaison with Sinatra, held her mother responsible for setting her up with the married, nearly forty-year-old star. “Mrs. Gurdin was really pushing Natalie and the Sinatra thing,” as Hyatt recalls. Actor Scott Marlowe, who became Natalie’s boyfriend two years later, describes her then as “easily seduced,” suggesting the worldly Sinatra “probably taught her a lot.”

  Her mother’s willingness to do anything to advance Natalie’s career finally pushed the volatile Mary Ann to the breaking point the summer of Sinatra, when Mrs. Gurdin took the two high school girls aside, whispering that she could arrange abortions for them. Maria told her friend Jeanne Hyatt she had frightened Natalie into believing she would die if she had a baby, explaining to Jeanne why she did it. “That was Marie’s way of lying to Natalie, because… she wanted her to always be ready to make another picture. I don’t think Marie wanted Natalie to get pregnant no matter who Natalie was married to. I’m not saying that she didn’t love her—she did. That’s all Marie thought about, is promoting Natalie.”

  From that point on, relates Mary Ann, “her mother and I got into it regularly.” As a classmate recalls, “Mary Ann was like a grown woman in high school… you didn’t want to get into a verbal altercation with her, because she’d just tell you off flat in one second. Natalie was a softer kind of a person.” When Natalie needed to get away from home, Mary Ann was her hot line. “She would call me and whisper, ‘Please come over and we’ll go back to your house.’ ” Natalie acknowledged the debt in Mary Ann’s yearbook, dedicating a page to “the most beautiful gal I know,” writing, “Sometimes, when I’ve been sort’ve down in the dumps, ‘funny ol’ you’ has always kidded me out of it.” Almost wistfully, she added, “Maybe next semester I will be back at Van Nuys [High] and you and I will see lots more of each other then.” It was signed “Nat.”

  The effect of being thrown into the adult world of Frank Sinatra, with her mother offering abortions, manifested itself in a dramatic change in Natalie’s lifestyle. She smoked heavily and acquired a new adult habit, alcohol. Press releases that July from Warner Brothers, where she and Sinatra were filming their respective movies, quoted Natalie “wanting everyone to know she is ready to play sexy parts.” She was frustrated playing the younger version of Mayo’s sultry character in The Silver Chalice. “I had ambitions to don a frilly gown by Don Loper and a silver blue mink and embrace Cary Grant in my arms before the cameras.” Paul Newman, who was making his film debut as the lead in The Silver Chalice after an acclaimed performance on Broadway, would remember the “marvelous sense of mystery” that Natalie projected at fifteen. She was determined to appear as sophisticated as her life had unnaturally become, identifying herself as seventeen in Warners publicity, modeling in a bathing suit at a Gem Show to cultivate a sexier image. What remained of Natalie’s girlhood had vanished in a summer.

  She made several new friends, one of them the delicate actress Pier Angeli, who was in The Silver Chalice. Another was Margaret O’Brien, the legendary child actress whose look Mud had purloined when the Gurdins arrived in Hollywood. By an irony, Natalie, driven by Mud’s ambition, was now working more steadily than O’Brien, whose amazing popularity had dimmed in adolescence. Although Margaret was seventeen to Natalie’s fifteen, she had lived a sheltered life in the confines of her studio, MGM, and was kept further sequestered by her rigidly conservative mother. “Margaret was sweet and kind and very naïve about life and people,” as a girlfriend of Natalie’s recalls. An actor who spent time with them both then states, “Natalie had pizzazz. Margaret was more withdrawn. Very ladylike. If you were to say ‘pooey,’ it would be a bad word. Natalie was a little more loose and Margaret was—let’s say strung a little tighter.”

  What they had in common was a childhood lost to Hollywood, with their mothers controlling them every hour of the day—although they never discussed their child star pasts, according to O’Brien, who had enjoyed that period in her life and believed Natalie did too. Natalie had fully embraced her mother’s dream by the time she met Margaret, and was consumed with becoming a famous movie star. “She was very ambitious with her career and Hollywood, and I guess I had at that time experienced a little bit more stardom, so I wasn’t as gung-ho on it as she was. She was very driven. Even if we were out, or having a good time, if a call came to go on an interview, she’d drop everything and go.” Natalie never mentioned her TV series to Margaret, which was being considered for renewal that summer. “It was like it didn’t exist. She wanted to be a film actress.” Both of the dark-haired former child stars idolized Vivien Leigh. “She’s the only person I ever wanted to meet and get an autograph from,” states O’Brien. “We tried to copy her.” Natalie wore one of Leigh’s dresses from A Streetcar Named Desire to a masquerade party, arriving as Blanche du Bois, the role she desperately wanted to play. “I remember she went to the studio and got it,” said a chum, “and she was the exact same measurements as Vivien Leigh.”

  On July 13, a week before Natalie turned sixteen, Irving Pichel died under circumstances as murky as his purported attempt to adopt her. There were whispers within his family that the sixty-three-year-old director’s jealous wife, Violette, had procrastinated in getting his heart medication to him. After his death, his widow destroyed all of Pichel’s papers related to his films. Natalie did not attend her mentor’s funeral, which was private, though many years later when she met Pichel’s son Marlowe, “she made it clear she was very devoted to my dad and very grateful for what he’d done for her.” Maria took immediate advantage of Pichel’s demise by further embellishing the myth she had created of how Natalie became a child star. She told a periodical associated with Parents magazine that Irving Pichel had simply appeared at their door in Santa Rosa while he was directing Happy Land, offering Maria a small part and giving Natasha the nickname “Cinderella,” sending her a telegram two years later begging her to be in Tomorrow Is Forever. Natalie implicitly endorsed her mother’s tall tale about her and Pichel, posing for pictures with Lana in the same magazine, further blurring the hazy line between fantasy and reality in her increasingly make-believe life.

  The sense of illusion carried over to her sixteenth birthday, when Natalie was reported to be eighteen in Louella Parsons’ column, which now mentioned the names of whoever she was dating as gossip items. Natalie’s sweet-sixteen present from Mud and Fahd, paid for with her earnings, was a pink Thunderbird convertible. “She couldn’t wait to show that T-Bird to me,” recalls Jackie Eastes, a former student at Van Nuys High who was getting close to Natalie. “She picked me up at my house and we cruised Van Nuys Boulevard, ending up at Bob’s Big Boy, the Valley hangout. We used to go to Bob’s and she had bacon-tomato-avocado-and-lettuce sandwiches.” It was rare for Natalie to make a new friend from high school, where “most of the girls were thrilled when she left school to do another film,” intimidated by her fame. Jackie, a star-struck strawberry blonde, clung to her celebrity classmate like a trail of perfume, “living through her life vicariously.”

  To Jackie, Natalie was a goddess inhabiting a glittering world. When she spent a Friday night with Natalie, they would get up late and go out to lunch in Natalie’s T-Bird convertible. After lunch, Natalie would shop. “That was a major production. She’d go to the House of Seven and Nine and she’d spend eight hundred to nine hundred dollars in one afternoon buying clothes. That was a lot of money, when you consider I worked all week as an usher at a movie theater for fourteen dollars a week.” The instant Natalie got her unrestricted license, she became a fixture at every popular restaurant in Hollywood and the Valley, stopping first in her pink Thunderbird to pick up Jackie. “She would take me out, because she knew I couldn’t afford it. We had breakfast, lunch and dinners out.” Unlike Mary Ann, who had a healthy dis
dain for Hollywood, Jackie at times felt that it was “tough being with someone like Natalie, who was beautiful, famous—and thin, too. Who could eat anything she wanted and never put on a pound. I wore a size twelve, if I was lucky. She was perfectly proportioned, and very tiny—ninety-five pounds.”

  Jackie found it impossible to resent Natalie, even though she believed Natalie had it all. “You couldn’t know Natalie and not adore her. She was extremely warm and open. She was friendly, she was funny, she was witty. I’ll never forget her infectious laugh. It was probably the best time in my life, knowing her.” Natalie’s consuming obsession with her career fostered her new friendship with Jackie, who idolized movie stars and tacitly supported Natalie’s goal: “Achieving stardom was all she lived for.”

  The week Natalie turned sixteen, her family moved from Northridge to a cozy house set diagonally on a winding curve at the top of Valley Vista, “which at the time was the best address to have in the Valley.” The Gurdins’ new home was south of Ventura in suburban Sherman Oaks, closer to Van Nuys High, and to Hollywood. Natalie chose wallpaper with tiny pink roses for her bedroom, to match her T-Bird, choosing fabrics in shades of pink chintz. “She was going through her pink phase. The room was decorated in pink, the car was pink, everything was pink.”

  She appeared in public steeped in the sort of glamour she and Mud associated with movie stars, driving around town in her convertible T-Bird, secretly smoking Kool menthol cigarettes with Dunhill’s crystal filters, reeking of Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché, her new signature scent, cultivating the image of a Hollywood star. If there was a chance anyone might see her, “she always had to present herself in a certain fashion,” recalls Lana, who watched, fascinated, as her big sister transformed herself into the star, “Natalie Wood”: putting on her makeup, coiffing her hair, covering her imperfect wrist with a bracelet, dripping in borrowed mink and Jungle Gardenia. “I’m sure a great deal of it was perpetuated by my mom,” attests Lana, “who felt you had to look a certain way or you were unacceptable.”