Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  There were about four or five doors going all the way around the oval-shaped auditorium, and each door had an alphabetical sequence over it—A through F, G through L. There were two guys at each door, and of course, we were kind of competing with each other to see who would get people into the auditorium fastest because as soon as you got them in there and shut the door, you were free to split, and we were headed to the beach or the pool hall.

  So we were rushing to get through it, and we were all ready to shut the doors and this little girl comes running down—tiny little thing—and wants to come in the door. And I just was a complete jerk. I said, “Hold on. What’s your name?” I didn’t have a clue who she was. First of all, she had her hair very blond because she was doing a movie—though I’m not sure I would have recognized her [anyway]. I said, “Hold it,” and then it becomes sort of this machismo bullshit: “Where are you going?”—giving her a hard time. She says, “Please let me in. Please.” And I said, “What’s your name?” She said, “Please. Let me in the door. I’m embarrassed.” And then she says, “Wood,” and I said, “That’s W’s. That’s all the way around the other side.” And she said, “Please. I don’t want to cause a scene going in there.” I said, “Well… you don’t wanna cause a scene, huh?” And the guy with me started to hyperventilate. He’s trying to send me signals that it’s Natalie Wood.

  Anyway, I just continued to just be a jerk, and give her a hard time. I said, “Sorry! Name is Wood? All the way around.” I said, “Does this give you permission to change your name? Go around to the other side.” And then she just let me have it. Got madder ‘n hell and says, “You son-of-a-bitch” and sped off. And the guy with me goes, “Ho ho! I guess she told you! That was Natalie Wood.” I said, “Are you kiddin’ me?” And then I was glad I had pushed her around to the side… because I had a dim view of movie people.

  Robert Redford would not see Natalie for another ten years, when ironically, she would help launch his career as a movie star.

  Natalie blended in gracefully when she returned to high school that fall, accelerating to become a senior, like Mary Ann. Phoebe Kassebaum, who was in a choral group Natalie joined, was amazed at how friendly she was. “I never got the feeling that she was braggadocious, or wanting to impress me. It was rather me being impressed by her. She had this very exciting life outside of high school, and to us that was a very unbelievable, glamorous thing. I earned twenty-five cents an hour babysitting, and here’s this beautiful girl who has everything—the look, the voice, the figure—and she’s in movies. I didn’t know anything about the Hollywood scene, I just knew that this girl was famous, and that she was a very nice girl.”

  Natalie was proud of her decision to go to Fulton, and then to Van Nuys High, telling Margaret O’Brien she “would have been really unhappy if she hadn’t gone to regular school.” As ferociously as she pursued her inherited fantasy of becoming a movie star, Natalie paradoxically longed for a real life.

  She and Mud reacted to the cancellation of the TV series with relief, escalating their dogged search for a part that would make Natalie a famous movie star, the quest that had occupied Maria daily since Natasha was five.

  Natalie interviewed for what would be the Leslie Caron role in Daddy Long Legs in October, but had to content herself with guest appearances on Studio 57 (The Plot Against Mrs. Pomeroy) and NBC Ford Theater, where she starred as a teenager who finds a dream date for the prom in a comedy with the ironic title Too Old for Dolls. Teen actor Robert Kendall, who played her date, a young Arab prince, found Natalie fresh and natural, without the pseudo-sophistication she donned to appear glamorous. He wrote later how “her heart shone through her big brown eyes, electric with excitement.” Natalie’s hair had grown back to its natural shade, light brown, and on television she looked like a typical teenage girl, though as her friend Jackie would observe, Natalie was no longer a teenager “in the true sense of the word.”

  She returned to campus in late October, sharing her experiences with the shy Phoebe, who couldn’t believe that Natalie Wood was talking to her. Natalie would listen with compassion as Phoebe talked about her recently deceased father. “She had those really warm brown eyes, and that sweet little set of lips—she was just a sweet person, and she carried that presence about her no matter where she was, I think. Certainly when she was with me, in that class, she couldn’t have been any nicer.”

  Natalie was more consumed than ever with her scheme to hire Henry Willson, so she could meet and marry Robert Wagner, her dream husband. She asked Rad Fulton, who was represented by Willson, to help convince the agent to sign her. As Robert Hyatt recalls, “Natalie went on a strike with her mother that if Henry Willson wasn’t her agent so she didn’t at some point meet R.J. [Wagner], that she wouldn’t work.” Natalie signed with Henry Willson on November 10, 1954.

  Maria had grave reservations. She was concerned about Natalie associating with the homosexual Willson, known for representing gorgeous young men whose careers, lives, and names he created. Fulton had met Willson as a teenager while he was working as a model under his real name, Jim Westmoreland. Willson changed Westmoreland’s name to Rad Fulton while getting him started in movies. Fulton worshipped the powerful Willson as “a guide, [who] made sure you met the right people at parties, met the right girls.” The dark side for a young actor in Willson’s stable in the conservative fifties was the stigma of being presumed gay or bisexual. “I was called all kinds of names,” acknowledges Fulton, who later reverted to Jim Westmoreland. “I thought I was going to be able to shake it off, but it did haunt me. I wanted a good agent and a power agent and I couldn’t really say much. At that time everybody was in the closet—today it’s wide open, so homosexuality really doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Natalie’s objective upon signing Willson was to arrange a date with Wagner, certain it would lead to marrying him. Mud held as dim a view of this as she did hiring Willson, mumbling under her breath to Bobby Hyatt, “I don’t want Natalie to meet this Robert Wagner. He is with Henry Willson and you know what that means.” Natalie campaigned Willson relentlessly. He finally agreed he would set up the date with Wagner, then twenty-four, once Natalie turned eighteen in a few years.

  In the meantime, Willson began taking Natalie to high-profile Hollywood restaurants with his young male discoveries, making sure the arranged dates were photographed for fan magazines. According to O’Brien, who sometimes went along, set up with one of Willson’s actors, the young men were Willson’s dates. “He’d take us out as a front… Natalie would say, ‘It’s a free dinner with Henry, we might as well go out.’ We’d go to a club, or maybe see a wonderful show. Henry would have the boys sitting with us, escorting us—and they were really good-looking young actors—and then Henry would bring us home, or he’d have the boys bring us home early, and then they’d go out. Natalie and I would huddle and try to figure out which one was Henry’s [boyfriend] and which one wasn’t: ‘Is this one all right? or ‘Well, we don’t think So-and-So is…’”

  The month she signed with Willson, Natalie was cast in a CBS live half-hour drama for General Electric Theater called I Am a Fool, based on a Sherwood Anderson story about a drifter who falls in love with a small-town beauty and lets her slip away. Eddie Albert narrated the story, told in flashback, with Natalie cast as the ingénue. “That was my first love scene, and I remember my agent saying to me, ‘It’ll either be with actor John Smith or else they might use this new young kid, some guy from New York… some kid named Jimmy Dean.’ ” Natalie later told actor Dick Moore that the producers were disappointed when they found out they were “stuck” with James Dean, who was rumored to be avant-garde.

  Natalie, who had chased Dean into Googie’s three months earlier, was excited and nervous to work with the unconventional rising star. He arrived late for the first rehearsal, roaring in on his motorcycle, dressed in jeans, a dirty T-shirt, and a large safety pin holding his fly together. “He was exactly what I expected. A junior version of Marlon Brando. He mum
bled so you could hardly hear what he was saying, and he seemed very exotic and eccentric and attractive.” The producer worried that Natalie, at sixteen, “didn’t quite know how to deal with” Dean, who “could be alternately jolly, charming, and funny, then twenty minutes later off by himself ‘sulking.’ But he only appeared to be sulking—he was actually inside of himself.”

  Dean barely spoke to Natalie that morning, but trailed her out the door during the lunch break, inviting her on his motorcycle. “I was thrilled. We went speeding off to some greasy spoon.” When Dean turned on a portable radio, Natalie expected to hear bongo drums. Instead, “he played beautiful classical music.” Dean chatted with Natalie about the script at lunch, relaxing her. Suddenly, he put down his sandwich. “I know you,” he said challengingly. “You’re a child actor.” Natalie, who sensed he was testing her, responded, “That’s true. But it’s better than acting like a child.” Dean “didn’t get it for a moment,” she later recalled. “Then he started to laugh. Then I started to laugh, and that’s how our wonderful friendship began.”

  Natalie was encountering James Dean on the precipice of fame, in the final few months before the release of East of Eden. The public had never seen Jimmy Dean in a movie, but he was acquiring a mystical status in Hollywood, where word was circulating that his sensitive performance in Eden was certain to make him a star. The Dean with whom Natalie had lunch was a broken man, reeling from a breakup with Pier Angeli, whose mother had objected to Dean not being Italian, or Catholic.

  Dean’s shattered emotions brought out Natalie’s gift for empathy. As they left the café, strolling past a newsstand, his eye drifted toward the covers of a few movie magazines, reporting Angeli’s new romance with Italian-Catholic singer Vic Damone. Natalie would recall Dean picking up a few of them and reading them:

  Since Pier was a big star, her picture was on all the magazines, with articles about how her mother had broken up the romance between Pier and some eccentric kid from New York. Jimmy… was very upset, because he was obviously in love with her. He was fascinated by her stardom, and he was fascinated by the fact that he was becoming a celebrity—yet not wanting it, not wanting fame.

  According to Mary Ann, when Angeli unexpectedly married Damone the next week, a few days after I Am a Fool aired on CBS, Natalie spent the evening consoling Dean. “He almost OD’d that night—oh God, that was terrible—and Natalie babysat with him and stayed with him. It was awful, poor guy.”

  Natalie was struck as if by lightning performing live with Dean, whose intensity as an artist ignited her. Up to that point, she said later, acting was something she had taken for granted, “like being a girl.” Dean inspired Natalie to be a serious actress, in addition to a movie star. If there was more to the attraction, it had not surfaced yet.

  Within days of Natalie’s creative awakening, Henry Willson sent her to audition for the part of a twelve-year-old in a far-fetched Universal-International costume drama called Tacey, later changed to One Desire. Louella Parsons, the Hollywood scribe, reported the following Monday:

  Natalie Wood returns to Universal-International after an absence of 10 years. She was a little girl of 7 when she was called one of the most promising child stars in Hollywood.

  Natalie gets an important role in Tacey with Anne Baxter, Rock Hudson and Julia [sic] Adams… she got the job by putting her hair in pigtails and proving to producer Ross Hunter that she could look that young.

  Natalie was humiliated. A year later she wrote, “I’ve been the Pigtail Kid in Hollywood for so many years nobody thought I would ever grow up—least of all me.”

  FOR NATALIE, THE HIGHLIGHT OF ONE DESIRE was hearing Rock Hudson wolf-whistle at her as she walked on set in a wasp-waisted hoopskirt, hair upswept, for a scene as a late teenager. Throughout the rest of filming, Thanksgiving to Christmas 1954, she suffered the ignominy of pretending to be twelve, another movie waif-child in braids.

  Natalie was impatient to grow up, bursting to express the artistic impulses stirred by playing James Dean’s lost love. She got a mink stole for Christmas, the essence of Hollywood in Mud’s Modern Screen mentality; for Natalie, wearing a mink symbolized sex and sophistication; the antidote, she believed, to her child star stigma.

  In her eagerness to appear older than sixteen, and to project the image she and Mud considered starlike, Natalie tended to wear too much of everything. “There were some times she didn’t have the best taste in what she’d put together. She’d wear prints and plaids all at the same time.” A dancer who knew her recalls, “Natalie loved clothes, but she didn’t have real fashion sense at all.” When Max Factor hired her to do print ads, Natalie took home boxes of makeup, overpainting her face with a little girl’s idea of glamour. She appeared blond in ads for Lustre Crème, promoting The Silver Chalice, which came out at Christmas. She still presented herself in the guise of the movie star alter ego Mud had created for them both, but Natalie aspired to something more. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” she said later, “except to be a great actress.”

  Around the time she started her last semester at Van Nuys High, January 1955, Natalie got a call from Bobby Hyatt that seemed an eerily answered prayer. Bobby had just met with the director of a modestly budgeted film in development at Warner Brothers about teenage alienation. He was reading for the role of a high school boy named Plato, and noticed there was a teenage character named Judy. Bobby suggested Natalie get a copy of the script from Henry Willson. The movie was called Rebel Without a Cause. The creative elements were a confluence of everything Natalie was hungry for as an actress: the director of the film, Nicholas Ray, was a protégé of her idol, Elia Kazan; James Dean, her muse from I Am a Fool, had just been cast as the lead; and the story was dark and provocative.

  When Natalie read the script, she wept. As a friend recalls, “She said there was actually a little voice buzzing in her head saying, ‘You are Judy!’ ” The story mirrored themes from Natalie’s rebellious teen years. The screenplay opened with Judy and several friends under interrogation at a police station, as Natalie and Margaret O’Brien had been the year before. The title character, who becomes Judy’s boyfriend—a sensitive youth in rebellion against authority—was a prototype of Natalie’s fugitive love Jimmy Williams, down to the rolled-up jeans. His name was even Jim, as was the actor who would play him, Jimmy Dean. The Judy character came from a cold home with a remote father and yearned to create a utopian family with Jim.

  “I felt exactly the way the girl did in the picture toward her parents,” Natalie said later. “It was about a high school girl rebelling, and it was very close to home. It was really about my own life.”

  The story was the brainchild of avant-garde director Nick Ray, who was intrigued by the idea of a film about juvenile delinquency in Eisenhower-conservative America. He had hoped to collaborate with his mentor, playwright Clifford Odets, but Warners assigned the commercially successful Leon Uris to write the screenplay, and suggested that Ray adapt the story from a published case study written by psychiatrist Dr. Robert M. Lindner called Rebel Without a Cause: The Story of a Criminal Psychopath. Ray rejected the case study in favor of his own plotline but kept the main title, eventually replacing Uris with screenwriter Irving Shulman, who was superseded by Stewart Stern. Stern had come into the project via composer Leonard Rosenman, an East Coast friend of James Dean whom Ray hired to create the score.

  The quasi-intellectual, sociological background of the film enthralled Natalie, who desired an entrée into this rarefied circle. Her reaction to the script and the concept of Rebel Without a Cause was visceral. She said later, “I felt an instant communication with the role, an absolute necessity for playing it. I just had to have that part, in order to express something inside of me that I had never felt before… because I had been playing ingénue roles up to then and here was a sensational part that had to be played by an ingénue but wasn’t one of those sweet-young-thing roles—it was a real, gutty character part. I loved it.” In future years, she would describe
her response as the moment when she made the decision to be an actress, as opposed to following a path chosen for her by her mother. It would also establish a precedent of Natalie gravitating to film characters with whom she could identify.

  She phoned Hyatt to thank him, sharing a giggle at the similarity between herself and Judy; then she called Mary Ann, telling her she had to have the part. “Oh, she wanted that s-o-o-o-o-o-o bad.”

  Natalie’s first obstacle was Mud, who was suspicious of the gritty Nicholas Ray school of filmmaking; Maria’s idea of Hollywood was klieg lights, studio limousines and red-carpeted premieres with stars in sable coats. She was nervous that a movie about teenagers fighting with their parents would tarnish Natalie’s image and jeopardize her destiny as a movie star.

  “She did not want Natalie to take that part,” recalls Natalie’s friend Jackie, who heard the details of an incendiary argument between Natalie and her mother over the role. Fahd disapproved as well, though his approach was to reason with Natalie. As Mary Ann explains, “It was rather an iffy film at the time… it was really very controversial. There were a lot of people who said, ‘Don’t get involved with this.’”

  Margaret O’Brien’s mother had dissuaded her for that reason. O’Brien, ironically, was the first actress Nick Ray had in mind to play Judy. Unknown to Natalie, Ray had approached Margaret and her mother at Romanoff’s that autumn, before James Dean had been cast. “He said, ‘I have the perfect movie for you.’ ” Mrs. O’Brien vetoed it after a first meeting with the unconventional Ray. “My mother loved this film called Glory, which I hated, about a horse, so that’s what she was steering me toward.” Ray himself had misgivings after the meeting, worried that O’Brien was too respectful to play Judy. She also lacked Natalie’s adoration of James Dean. “I thought he was weird, to be perfectly frank.”