For Natalie, winning the part in Rebel set up a complex of emotions, some of which were destructive. It led her to believe she could get anything she wanted, and it sent the message that Mud had been right to push her onto Pichel’s lap. Robert Blake, her occasional confidant, recognized how vulnerable Natalie was underneath the mink and the makeup. Blake believed that being cast in Rebel gave Natalie “the only confidence and security that she ever had—knowing that as a young, frightened teenager, she went in and she got it.” The fact that she successfully used her “aura of sexuality” to achieve it at the tender age of sixteen was a commentary on the legacy her mother began for her at four.
Once Natalie got the part, her insecurities came out like evils from Pandora’s mythic box. “She was scared to death, because she felt that James Dean could act circles around her, and this was either make it or break it from being a kid actress to an ingénue.” The fact that Natalie had to grow up too fast was obvious by the disguises Ray and the wardrobe department devised to make her appear more sexually mature: cushioning to create the illusion of hips, a “butt pad,” and a special bra to enhance her childlike bust, which still caused Natalie great anxiety. “That was the era of Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. If you didn’t have big boobs, you were nothing.”
Nick Ray masterminded every detail. “He was always looking for ways to make Natalie more seductive, kind of the Pygmalion thing.” Ray told Natalie he had created his ex-wife Gloria Grahame’s sexy onscreen pout by stuffing cotton under her top lip. He hired a voice coach to work with Natalie to lower her girlish timbre, and found someone to teach her to walk more provocatively. At the same time, he toned down her makeup, and darkened her hair, advising her to cut it below her ears in soft waves.
Natalie’s makeover was essentially complete by the time Ray gathered the cast in his bungalow the last week of February to begin night rehearsals. He spent his days polishing the script and looking for an actor to play Plato, the troubled boy who shares Judy’s idolatry of Dean’s character. Ray would later assert that he spotted swarthy, sensual Sal Mineo in a lineup of actors trying out for the gang. Jackie, Natalie’s school friend, recounts that it was she who suggested Mineo to Ray, after noticing the teen actor in Six Bridges to Cross that month with her parents. According to Jackie, Ray was so grateful, he took her to lunch at Romanoff’s with Natalie, “and he put two hundred dollars down on the table and he said, ‘I want you to buy yourself something.’”
The nighttime rehearsals at Nick Ray’s bungalow had a loose, “family atmosphere,” with Ray a sort of bohemian patriarch to his largely youthful cast, including Jimmy Dean, who had arrived from New York. “Jimmy trusted Nick a great deal,” Natalie observed, “and I think Nick was very fatherly towards Jimmy. I mean he was to Sal and to myself as well.” For Natalie, who had been rigidly disciplined from age five to memorize everyone’s parts, show up on time, and hit her marks, rehearsing with Ray—who encouraged actors to improvise—was a journey to an alternate creative universe.
“No director that I’d ever worked with had ever improvised. And Nick’s bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where he lived—the set was built from that, so that when we rehearsed, we really rehearsed as though in a set. And we improvised most of the scenes.” Natalie wanted desperately to be brilliant, to earn the respect of Ray and Dean, but she felt naked without a script. “Natalie liked structure,” according to Lana. Ray, recalls actor Corey Allen (who played Buzz), “just said, ‘Read, and see what you want to do.’ He didn’t lay anything special on us. He just said, ‘Take it easy and explore.’”
When they were working together, Natalie and Ray were “all business,” thought bubbly ingénue Mitzi McCall, who was cast as a carhop in a scene that was cut before filming, knew during rehearsals that the director and his teen star were romantically involved, as did composer Leonard Rosenman. McCall, who was in the midst of a brief romance with James Dean, considered the much-older Ray “sexy.” Rosenman, who was a more mature thirty, took a dim view of Ray’s conduct. “He was having several affairs, with different people… I liked Nick, but I didn’t like him, too. He was a weird guy.”
A few years earlier, Ray had been part of a love triangle that scandalized Hollywood. He told Natalie he found out that actress Gloria Grahame, his second wife, was having a secret affair with his teenaged son Tony, her stepson (whom Grahame would marry in 1961). “It was a strange situation, because Tony was around us at the Chateau… it was bizarre.”
Mary Ann felt that Natalie could cope with the complexities of her involvement with Ray, and that he would not hurt her. “It’s part of the business, and you go with it or you get out. And if you’re going to roll with it, you’ve got to be grown-up.”
Natalie left the first rehearsal in the thrall of Jimmy Dean, her actor-god. She revered the way he worked as a new thespian gospel, saying later, “He was serious about his acting. He felt a deep responsibility about his role in Rebel.” When Dean told her they had to “live their roles,” Natalie found his words to be an aphrodisiac.
The next day, she and Jackie went to see Dean in East of Eden, which had opened at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. “She walked out and said, ‘I’m gonna marry him.’ ” Natalie later admitted she had “a big crush” on Dean. “I remember going with my school girlfriends to see East of Eden like fifteen times, sitting there sobbing when he tried to give the money to his father. We knew every scene by heart.”
Natalie was infatuated with what Dean represented—a higher form of cinematic art, the same attraction Nicholas Ray held for her. She was also confusing her own identity with Judy, her character, who falls in love with Dean’s character, Jim Stark. “I didn’t have a strong sense of my own self,” she later analyzed, recognizing that she often took on the emotional characteristics of her characters. The parallels between herself and Judy further blurred the line between fantasy and reality for Natalie, powerfully so in what Dean embodied. Not only did he play her character’s boyfriend Jim, Jimmy Dean was an icon for Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s own rebel love.
A few nights before filming began, Ray called the entire cast to his bungalow to do a read-through, an event memorialized in photographs. The actors can be seen sitting on folding chairs in a circle around Ray, looking down at their scripts in fierce concentration. Natalie is a tiny figure in a too-sexy dress, her face rapt in thought. The feeling from the photograph is one of collective intensity; it was a “weird night,” describes one participant. Marsha Hunt, a veteran stage actress cast as Dean’s mother, found the reading fascinating. “The cast sat around and mumbled. Nobody was audible but me!”
Natalie entered what she later would call the “golden world” of Nick Ray on March 30, 1955, the first day of shooting. She developed a ritual: at 5:30 A.M., she would pick up Jackie and they would go to breakfast, where Natalie ordered egg yolks; then she drove to Warner Brothers, going straight to the makeup department. Her ritualistic breakfasts at 5:30 “were the only time Natalie was ever without makeup.”
On set, she gave the appearance of being self-assured, but the actors playing gang members, who were older, could tell that Natalie was nervous about working in Ray’s loose style, in her first mature part. “It was palpable, and it came out in the role,” Corey Allen, who played her boyfriend in the early scenes of the film, recalls. “She didn’t seem to me to be familiar, or particularly comfortable, with exploring the things which are awkward for any adolescent… and not only sexually.” Natalie, in Allen’s opinion, had a hard time exposing herself emotionally. “Nick had a wonderfully nurturing effect on Natalie, which enabled her to go much deeper than she otherwise would have gone. I don’t mean that she didn’t have it. I mean that she hadn’t attained it yet.” Natalie seemed hungry for Ray’s input, “[like] a novice, who was really willing to work, and who was responsive to Nick’s direction.”
Ray’s influence can be seen to startling effect by comparing Natalie’s textured, emotional performance as Judy to her more facile p
ortrayal of a teenager in The Wild Bunch a month earlier. His Pygmalion-like suggestions to darken and cut her hair brought out Natalie’s sensitive brown eyes, and the more subdued makeup revealed her natural beauty. “The camera loved her,” observed Debbie Reynolds, the studio’s choice for the role. “She had features for the camera like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. They were so beautiful, and the camera loved their faces! It was a love affair with the camera, and Natalie had that, with those big brown eyes, little nose, little mouth.”
While Natalie hero-worshipped Ray, she was in awe of Dean. A few months later she said reverently, “Great directors Elia Kazan and George Stevens said that Jimmy was the finest of young actors, and I knew how right they were when I had only worked in one or two sequences with him.” Sal Mineo observed, “He was all she could talk about. Every night for weeks in a row, she went to see East of Eden—she must have seen it over fifty times. She even taught me to play the theme song from the picture on the piano.” According to Natalie’s tutor, “She would hang around him as much as possible… she was very flirtatious with him.”
By nearly everyone’s accounts, Dean at times treated the adoring Natalie perversely. “He would do things to her off-camera. He would taunt her… Natalie would be in a close-up, and he’d get on a ladder behind Nick Ray and the camera, and Jimmy would say, ‘Woo-woo-woo-woo’ and imitate a train.” Dean’s disciples considered it a form of “Method” acting: that Dean was staying in the character of Jim Stark, the alienated outsider, between scenes. “Natalie was schooled that when the scene is over, you drop it and you go away and become ‘Natalie Wood’ again. But Jimmy was Jim Stark all the time. It was a different kind of atmosphere for her.”
She said later, “I kept hearing about the Method, and just about everybody on the set was carrying a copy of Chekhov’s book, To an Actor, and using phrases like sense memory, and emotion memory.” They were techniques invented by Stanislavsky, taught at the Actors Studio in New York. Natalie idealized Studio devotees—Kazan, Brando—as gods of drama, embarrassed by her child star past. “Natalie and I took acting as a job,” observes Margaret O’Brien. “We went in to do our best, we had responsibilities. When I left the job, I didn’t think about it anymore, and neither did Natalie.” O’Brien considered the Method “a lot of hooey,” and believed it destroyed actors’ lives by instructing them to become their characters. Natalie was “fascinated” by the Actors Studio methodology, concedes O’Brien. “She loved the Brandos and the Deans. These were people that were like from another planet, you know?”
Dean, a costar observed, would “toy” with Natalie in the guise of Method acting, occasionally crossing the line to cruelty. She would defend his behavior passionately, saying that it was part of Jimmy’s “brilliance,” though later, Natalie privately expressed disappointment about a few of Dean’s taunts. She yearned to measure up to his standards, to emulate the mysteries of his genius. “I think she was a little scared of him, too,” assesses Bev Long. “Or more like, ‘wow.’ He was extraordinary as an actor, but he was very weird as a person. He was very moody and all that stuff.” Long’s heart went out to Natalie during her scenes with Dean. “She was so vulnerable. She was really ‘right there,’ all the time—really working, and really trying to do something. Working with Jimmy was quite a feat, because he would behave so badly sometimes… and it was hard, I think, with her, to get close to him.”
Natalie’s access to a deeper part of herself in her scenes with Dean was evident. Reynolds, who might have played Judy, noticed “a lot of depth and soul” when she saw Natalie’s performance. “She was not just a little cute thing… she had a lot of courage, and she fully fulfilled the role and brought to it color and unexpected moments, which is what makes a star.” Natalie’s feelings of inadequacy were unfounded, assesses Robert Blake. “She didn’t need the Method—she was instinctual.” Hopper, who was there, concurs. “She did it without a lot of baggage, without having to go through a lot of great metamorphosis to become Judy.”
Natalie lacked that confidence or insight. She felt inferior to anyone with Studio training and embarrassed by her ignorance of Stanislavsky. Her insecurity manifested itself in a jealous fixation on actress Susan Strasberg, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio, who represented everything Natalie felt she was not. On set, Ray would whisper encouragement to Natalie before a scene, or pull her aside to suggest how to do it differently. He used his sexuality to bring out the young actors. “He would come up to Jimmy or Sal or Natalie, and he put his arm around their shoulders and walked them away from the crowd, and then he would say, ‘Well, what I want to see…’ and be very vague and strange and moody and mysterious… very sensual. That’s how he made the connection.”
However, it was Dean—not Nick Ray—who was the dominant presence. According to Corey Allen, “Nick told me that he made an agreement with Jim not to rush Jim. And so sometimes we would wait thirty or forty minutes for Jim to come out of his trailer.” Dean wanted to “prepare” until he felt ready to shoot a scene.
Marsha Hunt, the actress signed to play Dean’s mother, left the picture the day Ray was to shoot the opening sequence at the police station (“I was already committed to a play… and I finally had to make a choice”). The no-nonsense character actress Ann Doran got a call at five in the morning from her agent, telling her to drive to Warners to replace Hunt in a Nick Ray picture. “I thought ‘Nick Ray? Who the hell was Nick Ray?’ I didn’t even know what I was going to be doing.” Ray had cast comedian Jim Backus against type as Dean’s tortured father, which meant that Doran and Backus would be portraying husband and wife, as they had three years earlier in The Rose Bowl Story.
Backus stuck his head inside Doran’s dressing room door. “I hadn’t seen Nick Ray yet. I hadn’t even been on the set yet. And Jim [Backus] came in and said, ‘Good to see you,’ and all that kind of stuff. And then he said, ‘Natalie’s on the picture, too.’ I said, ‘But I haven’t met this boy who’s playing my son,’ and Jim said, ‘Whoo! Wait’ll you meet him!’”
The old-school actors decided to get a closer look at James Dean. “So we crept up to the set, and sat way, way behind the camera to watch him in a scene.” Once the camera was in place, Doran and Backus waited for Ray to call for action. “All of a sudden everything got quiet and [Dean] got down in this fetal position. We waited and waited. Finally he stood up, and they said, ‘Action!’ Jim [Backus] and I practically fell on the floor laughing. We had never seen such a bunch of crap in our lives. We snuck out, because we broke up the scene by our laughing.”
Doran considered Ray “a wimp” as a director for giving his star such license. By the end of filming, Doran’s opinion of the youth-oriented Ray had not changed. “He said, ‘Turn ’em over,’ ‘Action,’ and ‘Cut,’ and that’s about all he did. Jimmy [Dean] just took over the picture,” an opinion seconded by Hopper, Rosenman and Steffi Skolsky, who was cast as a gang member. Doran came to admire Dean, once she figured out what he was doing. “Jimmy and I kind of squared off. He was not too sure of me. The first scene we did together was at the police station, where he was rattled—rattled as a person, rattled as a character. So he was fighting back at anybody… that’s just the way he worked. And I tried to play it to him, to give it to him, to be a little too sweet… it gave him something to bump off of. And as I watched him work, and worked with him, it was wonderful, because there was this wonderful giving to you, and giving it back.”
Doran could tell Natalie was in distress the first day. “When we worked before, she had been fourteen, and now she was gonna play a grown-up, and it scared her to work with Jim, this weird thing! Very difficult for her to get into that mood.” Doran, who had been in five pictures with Natalie by then and admired her acting “tremendously,” recognized that Natalie had a completely different approach to acting than Dean. She observed of Natalie, as Orson Welles had when she was six, “Whatever she did, she did it from the heart. From the heart firs
t, and from the mind second.”
Natalie had a panic attack just before the emotional scene when Judy bursts into tears at the police station. Long found her in the bathroom. “She was saying, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t, I just can’t… I can’t cry,” and then she started crying. I said, ‘Natalie, yes you can. Look—you’re crying now. Just stay in that moment, that feeling, whatever it is.’”
“It” was Natalie’s past: the pressure, at six, to cry on cue; envisioning her dog killed; seeing Mud tear apart a live butterfly.
“I told her, ‘Let’s go back to the set, quick, while you’re crying.’”
Natalie felt she couldn’t do it. When Long left the bathroom, she was alone with her secret. “She had a little ring made, with a cup on it, and she put Vicks in there. And when she had to do a crying scene, she’d rub the Vicks into her eye. That’s how she cried in the scene in Rebel.”
Doran noticed Natalie was fixated on Dean, who could be “rude, nasty.” (Doran once slapped him for taking her on a wild motorcycle ride.) “If he would have said, ‘Get down and crawl over there,’ she would have gotten right down and crawled.”
Natalie’s friend Jackie, who cut class to be on set, believed Natalie was serious about wanting to marry Dean, whom Jackie felt was contemptuous of Natalie for being too “Hollywood”—the Maria component of the “Natalie Wood” composite personality. “Jimmy liked the innocence of Pier. He had this image of Natalie that she wanted to be with him just because of his fame, which was not true.” According to Jackie, Natalie tried to hide her affair with Ray so Dean wouldn’t think less of her.
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