Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  She flirted at the commissary with her tutor, the handsome but stalwart Hennessy, or when he took her to dinner during a night shoot. “She’d kind of play games like that, but I told her to knock it off—I didn’t want any kind of suspicion of anything like that.”

  “Natalie wanted an affair with me,” asserts Leonard Rosenman, the film’s composer. Rosenman, while flattered (“I thought to myself, ‘Oh boy, I wish I was 150 years younger!”), chose to be Natalie’s friend, and to counsel her. He was impressed by her intellect, suggesting she go to college after she finished Rebel. Natalie seemed interested, but told Rosenman it was impossible. “She said that her mother just constantly wanted her to work.” (“She could have been anything,” avers Mary Ann, “she was so smart.”) The composer urged Natalie to get therapy, concerned about her home life and the fact that, at sixteen, she was involved with a forty-three-year-old man.

  The perception among the young female cast was that Natalie was promiscuous. “I never understood it,” said Long. “Why did she need to do that? She was such a wonderful girl on her own.” Natalie’s close friend Nuell felt that Natalie was “pressing the limits” in defiance of her mother. “Somewhere, probably, she wanted someone to say, ‘Stop it. Don’t do that.’”

  Throughout filming, Natalie was obsessed with a smoky, melancholy song recorded by Peggy Lee, called “When the World Was Young,” a bittersweet lament to lost youth that she sang constantly. “The song reminded her of her,” Jackie observed:

  They call me coquette and mademoiselle,

  And I must admit, I like it quite well.

  It’s something to be the darling of all,

  La grande femme fatale, the belle of the ball.

  There’s nothing as gay as life in Paree,

  There’s no other person I’d rather be.

  I like what I do, I like what I see.

  But where is the schoolgirl that used to be me?

  You’ll see me at Cap d’Antibes or in Spain.

  I follow the sun by boat or by plane.

  It’s any old millionaire in a storm,

  For I’ve got my mink to keep my heart warm.

  And sometimes I drink too much with a crowd,

  And sometimes I laugh a little too loud.

  My head may be aching, but it’s unbowed,

  And sometimes I see it all through a cloud.

  Ah… the apple trees,

  And the hive of bees, where we once got stung.

  Summers at Bordeaux, rowing the bateau,

  Where the willow hung, just a dream ago

  When the world was young.

  “It was sad… ‘where’s the little girl that used to be me?’ ” reflects Jackie. “And I think that was the way she perceived a lot of her life, especially in those years. Because she was being kind of used, and even though she felt in love with Nick Ray, I’m sure there was a point where she’s saying, ‘Why am I sixteen, having sex with somebody that’s that old?’”

  Jackie believed that Natalie “was such a sensitive person,” she fell in love with every man with whom she was intimate. Scott Marlowe, Natalie’s subsequent boyfriend, got the impression Natalie wanted to marry Nicholas Ray, suggesting that the relationship was not casual on her part.

  Natalie and her great friend Mary Ann had soul-searching conversations about their relationships with men. Underneath her sexually rebellious behavior, Natalie was influenced by old-fashioned mores. “We got into heavy discussions about how men and women go in and out of heavy love affairs, and how men seem to function without a problem—hello/goodbye—and women are just devastated. And why? Is it the nesting syndrome?” Natalie felt incapable of fleeting sexual relationships without an emotional attachment, and was frustrated by the 1950s double standard dictating that “it ‘wasn’t nice’ ” for women to enjoy their sexuality. According to Mary Ann, in Natalie’s heart, she wanted to find one true love, marry him, and live happily ever after. “She was—quote unquote—‘seeking bliss.’”

  She was also desperate to escape Fahd’s alcoholic rages and the gypsy-mystic regime of her obsessively ambitious mother, flinging herself into relationships in the hope she would find the security and love that was missing in her life.

  Natalie said later her favorite scene from Rebel was one between herself and Dean that was cut from the film. The choice reveals much about what Natalie was feeling at the time:

  It was in the car. I was waiting for him and he comes up and we talk to each other. There was a section of the scene where I imply that I’ve sort of been around, that I’m not really pure.

  I say to him, “Do you think that’s bad?” And he says, “No, I just think it’s lonely. It’s the loneliest time.”

  I thought it was a wonderful line—right on the cutting room floor.

  Sometime during filming, Natalie’s affair with Nick Ray came to a bittersweet end. She told Mary Ann that Ray had cut it off, “but she had been in the business long enough to realize that these things happen… it was a little bumpy for her, but it was best.” Natalie offered a more poetic version to Jackie, saying she had gone to Ray’s bungalow one day when he was out, leaving behind her key, and the books he had loaned her, as a romantic gesture their affair was over.

  Jackie thought that Natalie broke off the relationship with Ray in the hope that Dean would see her in a romantic way. “She and Jimmy were having a big fight when they shot their love scene, and it was really upsetting to her. She complained because she’d come on the set and he wouldn’t speak to her.” In Jackie’s view, Dean’s disinterest intensified Natalie’s desire. “She always wanted what she couldn’t have.”

  Ann Doran would recall that Natalie finally “meshed” with Dean creatively. “Sal Mineo told me afterwards that he used to talk to her. Sal was a kind soul. He’d say, ‘Honey, it’s his way of doing things. Just get with him.’ And Natalie finally got with it.”

  By the end of filming, she and Dean became close friends, with Natalie resuming her role as “Nurse Nancy,” comforting Dean through his distress over the news that Pier Angeli—still married to Vic Damone under pressure from her mother—was pregnant. “Pier was Jimmy’s whole life, I mean eat, live, sleep, breathe—it was so sad, that whole thing,” asserts Mary Ann, who often was present when Dean “poured his heart out” to Natalie. “She felt close to him, because the same type of situation had happened to her with Jimmy [Williams]. It was a few years before, but those wounds take a long time to get over.” In Mary Ann’s view, Dean brought out Natalie’s “huge maternal instincts. She was always going to make everybody better.”

  Jackie saw Natalie’s friendship with Dean as a consolation prize after she was unable to turn the relationship into something romantic, an analog to Nick Adams’ friendship with her. “She wanted Jimmy, and she tried every way she could think of to get him to go out with her. If she couldn’t seduce him, she would take the friendship.”

  Though Natalie told reporters, later, that she briefly “dated” Dean, all her friends understood the relationship to be platonic. (Hopper believes that Dean would not have become involved with a minor at such a critical stage in his career, and that he wanted to keep his personal life separate from the work.) Lana remembers him coming to the house to see Natalie, as would Maria, who described James Dean, later, as a “very nice boy” who surprised her by singing a song, in Russian, for her.

  Lana confirms her sister was “obsessed” with Dean; Natalie’s later comments about him suggest that she idealized Dean even before his fatal car accident.

  Once, when she was at Dean’s house with Jackie, Natalie found a scrapbook he put together. She sneaked it out for a few days so she could look at it, and as Jackie recalls, “It was the most pensive, sweetest… he had pictures of babies, and he had his favorite poem, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee.’ The sensitivity of this human being! In the back of the book, there was a little thing cut out of a newspaper, and it said, ‘Ways for a Boy to Get a Dog,’ and if that didn’t tear me apart!�
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  Natalie would later compare Jimmy Dean to the Little Prince, the magical character in the allegorical fable she adored, who believed “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.” She explained the dichotomy between the tender, poetic Jimmy Dean she idolized and the intermittently provocative costar who taunted her, by saying, “It was like two separate people: there was the Jimmy I was working with, and there was this other person on the screen.”

  That June, while Rebel was in postproduction, Natalie drove onto the Warner Brothers lot with Faye Nuell, planning to have lunch at the commissary and loop some lines from the film. When she pulled onto the studio lot, the parking places were taken. As Nuell recalls, “There was a security guard standing there and he said, ‘Oh! Miss Wood!’ And he moved one of the sawhorses and made a parking place for her.

  “She looked at me, and she said, ‘You saw that?’”

  Natalie knew, in that instant, that Rebel Without a Cause had made her a star at Warner Brothers, four months before its release.

  NICK RAY GAVE NATALIE A TOY TIGER AFTER they completed Rebel, a gift suggesting her sexual paradox as a child-woman. She started to collect stuffed tigers with frenzy, acquiring so many she briefly would become known as “Tiger.”

  Natalie had not set foot in Van Nuys High for months, but she considered it an accomplishment to graduate with the class of 1955, a symbol of her striving for a real life. She was deprived of even that opportunity to be herself when photographers showed up on June sixteenth to take shots of Natalie Wood, the star, as she left her house to attend the commencement ceremony. Natalie posed for them with Mud in countless contrived scenes at the front door, smiling effervescently in her cap and gown. Once she was alone, she burst in tears at losing a moment Natalie considered hers, not Hollywood’s. She and Margaret O’Brien celebrated their joint graduations that night at Peter Potter’s Supper Club, where Natalie resumed the Natalie Wood persona, “flouncing in with her fur,” making sure she got to the stage to give a live interview.

  She spoke wistfully to a fan magazine of going to college one day to study art and literature, testing in the top ten percentile. Natalie was on a movie set within hours of graduating, canceling a vacation in Hawaii to start The Searchers, director John Ford’s now-legendary western about a loner with a deep hatred for Indians, played by John Wayne, who embarks on a five-year quest to recover his niece from Comanches, who kidnapped her in a vicious raid.

  Although Natalie, who would be playing Debbie, the niece, thought “it was a big deal to do a picture with John Wayne” and considered her small part to be pivotal, the true reason she accepted The Searchers was that John Ford had agreed to Mud’s idea to cast eight-year-old Lana as young Debbie in the scenes through the kidnapping. (Ford had only one stipulation, according to Lana. “I was brought into the office to meet John Wayne, and John Ford said, ‘Can you pick her up?’ So he lifted me off the ground, held me up, said ‘Okay,’ and that was it.”)

  Fan magazines would trill how Natalie’s little sister Svetlana Gurdin had chosen the stage name of “Lana Lisa Wood,” and that she was excitedly following in Natalie’s footsteps as a child actress, but it was all Mud’s doing. “She pushed me massively,” reveals Lana, who was filling the void in their mother’s life that Natalie’s growing independence created. Mud’s approach with “Lana Lisa” bore no resemblance to her consuming attention to Natalie, her golden girl. “She said, ‘This is what you’re doing, you’re going to work on this film. Get up, get showered, I’m taking you to a set, these are your lines, learn them.’”

  Natalie would recall the imperious Ford as “tough, but kind to me” during the shoot, which took place on a Navajo reservation in the blistering summer heat of Monument Valley, Utah. The authenticity of the setting (“just dust and heat”) led to Natalie “frying” her skin from sunbathing, and spooked Lana, “because every night you could hear the Indians chanting and singing, and then there was a dust storm and we got trapped in the commissary.” The cast semi-roughed it, staying at the Goulding Trading Post, where Ford took his evening meals, expecting John Wayne and the rest of his stars to join him, “as he sat holding court at this long table… and we were all there to do his bidding.” That was the recollection of Wayne’s handsome son Patrick, who had a small role in the picture.

  As the only teenagers on the remote location, Pat Wayne and Natalie drifted together, enjoying a mutual crush that was a sweet contrast to her adult experiences on Rebel. Patrick Wayne recalls, “We didn’t have to fake being in the frontier, we were living in it, so you were really looking anywhere for any kind of amusement. There were no movies, there was no radio, there was no television, there was nothing!” Outside the influence of her provocateurs, Hopper and Adams, Natalie turned to more innocent pleasures, playing cards or board games with Pat. “We spent a lot of time talking together on the set, and just related as two young teenagers about the same age. And I had a great deal of fondness for her, even puppy love.”

  Pat Wayne, barely sixteen, was slightly awed by Natalie’s “world of experience, and the stories that she would tell me about things that she had done.” He was shocked that someone as dazzling as Natalie could be “neurotic” about a tiny bump on her wrist, which she showed him in secrecy one day, “but I guess she just had no sense of the fact that her charisma or her presence would overcome anything.” Natalie’s ambition to be a star nearly overwhelmed the relaxed Pat. “It wasn’t unattractive, but… she seemed like a person that had figured out that she was going to do what it took to be a success.”

  She impressed Ford, who came back to the Trading Post after directing the climactic scene where John Wayne finds Natalie living among the Comanches, saying, “That girl was brilliant today.”

  “Duke Wayne was a great guy for eyes,” costar Harry Carey, Jr., said later. “And every confrontation that was very dramatic that he had with Natalie—because he really wanted to kill her [character] because she’d been living with the Comanches for so long—he said she had such great eye contact, that she gave so much… he couldn’t stand actors or actresses that didn’t really look at him when they talked to him, and this with Natalie impressed him very much.”

  John Wayne’s only personal comment about Natalie was to his son Pat. “He noticed that we were spending a lot of time together, and he said, ‘Just be careful where you’re going.’ I guess he was concerned that I was gonna become too involved with her and get upset or whatever. He was being fatherly.”

  Natalie celebrated her seventeenth birthday on location for The Searchers, coming back to L.A. a year closer to the magic age of eighteen she believed would set her free. She splurged on a new Thunderbird convertible, gambling that Warners would exercise her option and she would have the security of a salary again.

  She finished the summer in a social whirl—at a beach party in Malibu with actor Hugh O’Brian; spotted by gossip columnists having dinner with Pat Wayne; mugging with Nick Adams in a Hollywood costume shop; on the arm of Perry Lopez for the opening of the Greek Theater, then on to Ciro’s. Most of the “dates” were set up by publicists for the purpose of generating pictures for fan magazines of up-and-coming young stars at play, and Natalie threw herself into them with the élan she gave everything. In the photographs, she is always animated, makeup Max Factor perfect, a different bracelet over her left wrist at every event, her beau gazing at her magnetized.

  Natalie was like a whirligig, spinning between boyfriends and phone calls and photo shoots and parties, making sure there were no empty moments. She said tellingly, “Actors are basically lonely people,” admitting to one writer that she was frequently lonely and depressed. Her bedroom had become a zoo of toy tigers—including a stuffed tiger’s head mounted on the wall, given to her by Mud. Dennis Hopper “thought it was cute and eccentric,” recalling “stuffed animals everywhere.” Natalie’s tigers were a replacement for the collection of storybook dolls that had been her nighttime companions up to then, hinting in interviews at her
fear of being alone. “That’s why I have toy tigers around me—to keep me from getting lonely and depressed.”

  Some of the young actors from her publicity dates buzzed around Natalie on their own time—so many that Mud and Fahd called her Scarlett, a role Natalie had a “burning ambition” to play. The beaus—Hopper, Adams, Lopez, actor Martin Milner—seemed to be more friends than boyfriends. Hopper fell into this curiously ambiguous category after they completed Rebel, “when we got into a relationship where we were going out to parties together and we would score for each other. She’d say, ‘I’d really like to have a date with him,’ and I’d say, ‘I’d really like to have a date with her,’ and we had great fun procuring for each other… we weren’t blind to the fact that we could see other people, but we were having sex all through our relationship.”

  Natalie set up Hopper with Margaret O’Brien on a blind date, a mismatch that signaled the two child stars’ drifts in different directions. O’Brien recalls, “He was not my cup of tea, and I wasn’t his cup of tea… he was trying to be Jimmy Dean and I didn’t understand that scene at all, so I think he thought I was boring and I thought he was strange.”

  Maria used a portion of Natalie’s Warner Brothers earnings to construct a swimming pool in the backyard, “so she could monitor the Rebel boys—Hopper and Adams,” according to Robert Hyatt, who heard her grouse about Natalie’s boyfriends, paranoid that Natalie would get pregnant, or fall in love, and leave home. Since Natalie had stripped her of her earlier power, Mud had to resort to subterfuge to try to retain control over her alter ego. She came up with the idea of building a pool to entice Natalie’s swarm of beaus to the house, so she could keep an eye on them—a plan that was not only manipulative but oddly perverse, since she and Natalie were terrified of drowning, and there was barely space for a wading pool. Lana recalls, “Natalie would get in, get wet and get out.”