Maria’s fantasies of becoming a movie star had successfully transferred to Natalie. “She loved everything to do with stardom,” relates Margaret O’Brien. “She just loved the life. The glamour and the going to premieres and all that.” Jerry Eastes, Jackie’s handsome older brother, escorted Natalie to a movie premiere that summer. “She wore long white leather gloves and a white mink stole, and her hair was done up in a French roll,” recalls Jackie, who watched out the window, wishing that she could be Natalie, stepping into a limousine sent by Warner Brothers. “She was beautiful in a full-length, strapless ice-blue satin sheath with a peplum that formed a train to the floor.”
Natalie drew Margaret O’Brien out of her shell, coaxing the reserved actress, who had seldom been anywhere without her mother or a chaperone, to go dancing at trendy nightspots like Peter Potter’s, taking Margaret to jazz clubs to hear Al Hirt. “She kind of got me going out,” credits O’Brien, who remembers Natalie being “all excited to see a movie star.” Natalie had taken on other characteristics of her star-worshipping mother. When she went to a movie with Margaret, “she would go up and say, ‘We’re in the movies and I’m Natalie Wood,’ and she got us in all the movies free.” Her celebrity status provided Natalie an entrée in restaurants to smoke and to drink alcohol, infractions that would have gotten her expelled from Van Nuys High School.
O’Brien’s lasting image of Natalie at sixteen is in a nightclub, a mink stole thrown over her shoulder, smoking from a long cigarette holder, balancing a cocktail in a gloved hand, laughing gaily, the center of attention of every male in the room.
Natalie reminded her school friend Jackie of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind—“Boys followed her around like puppy dogs.” Natalie’s boyfriends ranged from high school football players like Jackie’s brother Jerry, to fun-loving “All-American young men” such as Sonny Belcher, a sound technician at Fox, or Bob Allen, a college student preparing to go into the Army.
One beau, Rad Fulton, a darkly handsome aspiring actor of nineteen, gave Natalie the nickname “Squirt.” She exuded effervescence and the promise of a good time, like bubbles in a glass of champagne. “All she wanted to do is laugh,” he recalls. “We never talked about careers, we just had fun with each other.”
Natalie generously passed her old boyfriends to Margaret, encouraging her demure friend to break away from her dominating mother. “Mrs. Gurdin didn’t have much control over Natalie. When she wanted to go out, she went out, if she wanted to meet a boyfriend, she met one. Natalie could never understand my mother. She’d say, ‘We could be better friends if your mother wasn’t so strict.’ ” O’Brien eventually became serious about one of Natalie’s hand-me-down beaus, Bob Allen, marrying him in 1959. She acknowledges, “Natalie kind of helped me grow up.”
As teens, Margaret marveled that Natalie had negotiated her freedom. Bob Allen, the boyfriend they shared, was witness to a “scene” between Natalie and her mother over a curfew, during which their arrangement post-Jimmy was revealed. “Natalie said something about, ‘I make the money in this family so you be quiet.’”
Her girlfriend Jackie, who spent a lot of time at the Gurdins’, thought Natalie’s relationship with her mother was strange. “I never, ever saw them fight in the house. It was like there was no emotion whatsoever. If they did have screaming, hollering fights it wasn’t in front of me. The whole family revolved around Natalie, because she was the breadwinner. That was a very strange position for a young person to be in.”
Despite Natalie’s personal liberation, Mud retained some control, for Natalie occasionally asked Jackie to act as a “beard” while she went on dates. “Her mother would think that she was out with me, and she wasn’t of course. I would leave with her and do my thing, and then come back and pick her up.” Mud continued to keep Natalie under her surveillance. “I tried to stay out of Mrs. Gurdin’s way,” Jackie asserts, “because she was always nosing into everything. And she always had to know where Natalie was and what she was doing. She was like a police person.”
Rad Fulton, Natalie’s actor boyfriend, found Mrs. Gurdin “so tough she was like nails” when he picked up Natalie. “I never spent more than two minutes around her mother. She was very, very difficult. Very protective.”
Mud’s true stronghold over Natalie was psychological. Even when Natalie was out of the house, Jackie noticed, “she’d check with her mother ten times a day.” Maria had woven herself into her daughter’s persona so intricately, neither could exist without the other, a co-dependency even Natalie’s teen anarchy could not extinguish.
Late in August, Natalie spent the night at Margaret O’Brien’s house, an experience she found unsettling. As she later told former child actor Dickie Moore, “I was in a very rebellious phase, feeling that my parents were too strict. And then I saw Margaret’s home life and I was absolutely astonished… Margaret had this extreme overprotection, which I had been rebelling against for a couple of years.”
Though Margaret’s mother liked Natalie, she viewed her as a potentially disruptive influence. When the then sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girlfriends decided to see a matinee in Hollywood, Mrs. O’Brien insisted on dropping them off in front of the theater and made arrangements to meet them in the lobby after the movie.
While they were buying their tickets, Natalie and Margaret found out that actor Jimmy Dean and a few of his pals had driven up on motorcycles to Googie’s, an industry hangout down the street. Natalie was instantly intrigued, having heard a buzz about the talented, eccentric actor that summer at Warner Brothers, where Dean was making East of Eden, his first film. Margaret was curious more than interested, but she was up for an adventure. “We snuck out and walked over to Googie’s, and Jimmy Dean was there with his roughy-toughy, offbeat young fellows that would hang around there with their motorcycles.”
As Natalie and Margaret approached Dean’s table, Mrs. O’Brien happened to drive by, spotting them through the window. “She got really mad and yanked us out of there, in front of Jimmy Dean and everything,” recalls O’Brien. Natalie was mortified. “My mother drove Natalie to my house and called her mother and there was this big argument and everything.” As Natalie told the story later, “Margaret seemed to accept it, but I was absolutely horrified… I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my parents that they weren’t so bad after all. I was driving way too fast in my desire to get home, and I got into a terrible car crash.”
According to the papers, Natalie was almost killed. She took a curve too fast on a mountain road on her way back to the Valley, spinning out of control and flipping over her T-bird, knocking down forty feet of guardrail. Louella Parsons reported a second time in less than a year when Natalie walked away from a demolished car:
Natalie Wood, former child actress and currently a teenage favorite on TV, narrowly escaped death yesterday… her car careened, went over an embankment and hit a tree, which saved her from falling into a ravine.
Natalie’s chief concern as her car flipped over the embankment was how she would look at an audition the next day. “She had presence of mind enough to put her hands over her face,” wrote Parsons, adding that Natalie went into shock, emerging with only bruises.
Mrs. O’Brien’s disapproval of Natalie stemmed from a deep fear—that Margaret, her star-child, would fall in love and leave home. “My mother wasn’t worried about drinking. She was worried that we would get in trouble with boys, and that Natalie was leading me to do it. She was having a hard time, like Natalie’s mother, of letting go. And I think she thought, ‘Well, Natalie’s the one that’s taking her away.’”
The two stage mothers maintained a vulture’s vigilance over their daughters’ boyfriends. Jackie Eastes was at the Gurdins’ house for a double-date with Natalie when Bob Allen arrived, surprising Natalie with a sheath dress lined in mink, “and her parents were really upset that this guy had bought her this, because it was obviously a very expensive gift, and their first reaction was, ‘What does he want for this gift?’ ”
Maria even resented Jackie. “Looking back, I don’t think she liked anyone that took up Natalie’s time.”
Natalie empathized that year when Margaret O’Brien fell in love and her mother tried to block the romance, just as Mud had with Jimmy. “This was my first love, and Natalie would help me sneak out to see him. We’d pretend we were going someplace, and then I’d go over and see him, and she’d go over and see somebody she wanted to see. Bob Allen would be a go-between, poor Sonny was a go-between. I’d pretend I was out with Sonny, and then I’d go see this other fellow.”
One night when Natalie was covering for Margaret, Mrs. O’Brien called the chief of police. Natalie was brought to the police station, along with Margaret and her boyfriend, all minors. “It was just a mess for Natalie at the time,” relates O’Brien, who was pressured to stop seeing the boy she loved. “My mother ruined that romance.”
There was a dangerous momentum building around Natalie. From the outside, she appeared to be living every teenage girl’s fantasy, bubbling with happiness like her nickname, Squirt. The boyfriend who gave the name to her, Rad Fulton, “never heard Natalie complain about anything—she had it made.” No matter what the circumstances, Jackie noticed, Natalie was “on.” “I don’t remember her ever being depressed or unhappy about anything.” In time, Jackie recognized Natalie’s perpetual cheerfulness as a performance, part of the image Natalie believed a star should project. “She always remained the actor—always on stage and in control.”
Lana could see their mother exerting tremendous pressure on Natalie to create movie star glamour, pressure that Natalie, the perfectionist, internalized. “My sister was very concerned about how the public would perceive her at all times—the makeup, the clothing, behaving a certain way, saying the right things, being liked.” As a result, Lana noticed, Natalie became “very controlling of her feelings and emotions,” suppressing her real self to enact the part of a star. “She would never walk out of the house without her face made up to look perfect,” observed Jackie. Mud instructed her never to gossip. “To Natalie, everyone was wonderful. She said her mother used to tell her, ‘If you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing at all.’”
Natalie’s identity was further lost to her. She had already confused Natasha—her true self—with the movie characters she played. Now her mother was creating a glamorous persona for “Natalie Wood,” Movie Star, that was an amalgam of Natalie and Mud. “She never really allowed Natalie to just be herself,” declares Lana. “To see if people would accept her or not, which is really, really, really sad. That’s just devastatingly sad to me.”
The strain on Natalie was already evident. Actress Steffi Skolsky Sidney, then a college student, remembers being shocked to see Natalie in a tight dress, drinking Zombies at the bar at a fraternity party in the Hollywood hills. Steffi, who was the daughter of a well-known Hollywood gossip columnist, Sidney Skolsky, thought, “Uh-oh, this is not good,” aware that Natalie was only sixteen. “The next thing I knew, I went downstairs to use the ladies’ room and Natalie was passed out on the bed.” Steffi searched the house in alarm for Natalie’s date, demanding he take Natalie home. “I didn’t know her at all, but suddenly, all the motherly instinct in me came out and I felt very protective.” Steffi kept the incident a secret from her columnist father, protecting Natalie from possible scandal, remaining mum when she and Natalie became acquainted the next year on Rebel Without a Cause. “I didn’t say anything. It was none of my business.”
Natalie was in trouble if she consumed more than a few drinks. “She was only ninety-five pounds,” Jackie points out. “She couldn’t drink a lot of liquor without getting smashed.” Margaret O’Brien noticed Natalie had a difficult time holding alcohol when they were at clubs together, or if their dates used false I.D.s. “It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t like she was falling down or things like that. She’d just get a little tipsy.” Margaret, who was permitted wine at home, seldom drank. “But Natalie I don’t think was allowed to drink in her family, so this was like a rebellion.” “Not a lot of teenagers were drinking at that time,” recalls Jackie. “It was a different era. Drinking was chic, it was ‘in,’ it was the thing to do.”
A part of Natalie regretted her already spent youth. Years later she said, “I wanted to do all the things the other kids were doing. The life of the average teenager was something I read or heard about, rather than experienced. While they were at the senior prom, I was sipping drinks at Ciro’s with older men. This made me look like a flaming rebel, even though it wasn’t unusual for movie kids to act this way.” The irony, Margaret O’Brien points out, is that “although movie children are worldly-wise, it takes them longer to emotionally mature.” Natalie’s teen costar from The Green Promise, Ted Donaldson, estimates that child actors tend to be four to five years behind their peers emotionally, creating a warped imbalance between their adult lifestyles and their childlike emotions. Natalie, in O’Brien’s view, fit that pattern when they went out together. “She’d be real mature one minute, and then she’d be real childish.” Natalie’s sophistication, like so much in her life, was illusory—“a feint, a look, an attitude… the cigarette holder, dragging the fur.”
Natasha, the real Natalie, was submerged inside the star persona of “Natalie Wood” as if she were an alter ego, a personality created by Maria to present if anyone was with her. Behind the façade of forced gaiety and glamour, Natalie was a mass of insecurities and neuroses. Being alone made her increasingly anxious. As Jackie recalls, “She always had to have tons of people around her. There were never enough people.” Natalie started to take sleeping pills as a nightly routine, unable to fall asleep on her own, haunted by fears of kidnappers or nightmares of drowning, despite her contingent of storybook dolls. Eight-year-old Lana watched her sister’s drill: “It’s time to go to bed: you wash your face and you brush your teeth, you put on your pajamas and you take a sleeping pill.”
The tortured Fahd’s drinking worsened. One night, Lana remembers, “I saw him broadside Natalie with a record player.” Mud’s midnight flights from the house, taking Natalie and Lana to the safety of a motel room, or to a neighbor’s they barely knew, were becoming almost as regular as Natalie’s pills to put her to sleep.
She was desperate to break away from this harrowing existence, yet unprepared psychologically or emotionally to live by herself. She saw boys, or men, as her salvation—and her means of escape. The line of suitors at Natalie’s house, one beau wryly observed, went around the block. “She wouldn’t stick with one boy,” Natalie’s friend Margaret witnessed. “She’d want to go see one here, then she’d want to go see one there, and one at the other place—four or five in one day.” The handsome young actor James Darren, who was selling shoes then, was an infatuation. “I remember,” O’Brien laughs, “we walked over to the store in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where he was working, and we tried on a lot of shoes!”
It was easy for Natalie to develop a crush on someone, and she would have more than one crush at the same time. “She loved flirting, and was young,” explains O’Brien. “I don’t think there was anything terrible about that or anything.” Margaret did not consider Natalie promiscuous. “Not from what I could see. But she did like to flirt, and I think she liked the attention. She liked attention, and a lot of it was that.”
Actor Rad Fulton saw a great deal of Natalie at that time. They frequently went to parties, or restaurants, sometimes to the beach, occasionally to Rad’s bachelor apartment in Silver Lake, near downtown. He and Natalie were secretly photographed making out on the sofa at a friend’s party; the picture suggests a furtive, reckless sexuality, as Natalie puts her head back submissively and Rad leans into her with a forceful kiss. “I will say she was a hot little girl, but she was a nice little girl… adorable and sweet and lovely.”
Natalie’s desperation to leave home was tragically apparent. She suggested marriage to Rad, a struggling actor of nineteen to her sixteen. “I said no. It wouldn’t have happened with her m
other, and she was only a kid—I knew all that. I was too young myself. I told her, ‘There’s a whole life out there. Don’t miss it.’ I said, ‘Wait until you’re twenty-one.’ ” Rad found Natalie “naïve in a lot of ways.” She didn’t smoke with him, and drank very little—sharing a beer. His feeling was that Natalie asked to marry him because she “wanted to get into a dream world.”
ABC chose not to renew Pride of the Family for the 1954–55 TV season, freeing Natalie that fall to return to Van Nuys High, where she had missed over a year. She was still determined to maintain the normalcy of public school, and had registered the previous spring on a break from screen-testing as a blonde for The Silver Chalice. During registration, she crossed paths with graduating senior Robert Redford-an athlete regarded as friendly, though not one of the “cool kids,” evincing “no sense of what he was to become.” Redford, who would have embraced that description, was eager to get out of Van Nuys High and Los Angeles, displaying his maverick streak in his brush with Natalie Wood at registration. As he recalls:
Bunch of the ballplayers were spared the ordeal of having to go through registration day in the auditorium if they would man the doors. Kind of a “duh” job, which was fine with us, because we didn’t want to have to sit through this stiff indoctrination ceremony where people make speeches you’ve heard before in a very unspectacular way. I was a total goofball in school, just a worthless student, always looking for a way out of going to class or a way to have more fun than I was having, or to escape—to hooky out. That was my chief modus operandi.
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