Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Maria “tolerated” Hopper and Adams, in the Hyatts’ opinion. Hopper remembers Natalie’s mother having “talks” with him. “She never went into any details, it was just a lot of attitude. A lot of attitude. Didn’t like me, didn’t trust me. And it wasn’t dumb of her. Natalie did what she wanted to do.” Hopper, who inspired Natalie’s sexually liberated Zelda Fitzgerald personality, believed she was enjoying her sexual freedom “and didn’t have moral hang-ups in those areas,” unaware that Natalie would agonize over moral issues with her friend Mary Ann, who asserts “she wasn’t a ‘player.’”

  Ed Canevari, who stayed with the Gurdins that September to visit his childhood best friend, found her to be the “same old Natalie” she was at four, when they baked cookies in her play-oven in Santa Rosa. The only difference was the mink stole Natalie threw over her sundress as they posed for pictures with her parents and Lana.

  On September 29, Warner Brothers exercised the option on the first year of Natalie’s seven-year contract, but she was still clawing for recognition as an actress. From what she later told Scott Marlowe, she was upset at the way Warners had placed her credits at the beginning of Rebel Without a Cause, which she saw at an early screening. “Her billing was just lousy—she was just thrown in with everybody… so she went to Henry Willson and said, ‘Please, Henry, do something to change that billing, because I think this movie is going to help me a lot.’ And he was terrified of Jack Warner. So she went in on her own and begged him to change the billing.”

  Natalie felt Warners was dismissing her as “just an ex-child star, and ex-child stars never did well historically.” She had a continuing inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Actors Studio, which she tried to disguise by demeaning it in interviews, saying, “I don’t like technique in acting… I believe if you have a feeling for acting it comes to you naturally, that you don’t need any training.” In truth, Marlowe reveals, “she wanted to model herself, in a strange way, after Jimmy [Dean],” demonstrated by a “beatnik phase” Natalie went through that fall, strolling barefoot with Nick Adams, mimicking strangers.

  She was ecstatic to be cast as Clara in Heidi, a television special to be broadcast from New York starring Jo Van Fleet, Dean’s costar from East of Eden, another Kazan protégé whom Natalie regarded in “tongue-tied” awe. Warner Brothers made arrangements to send Adams and Sal Mineo to Manhattan with her to start promoting Rebel, scheduled for release in early October.

  Natalie had to reconfront her fear of airplanes, a carryover from her trip to New York at the age of six, when pregnant Mud was unable to fly with her. She came up with a bizarre ritual of carrying her stuffed tigers with her, believing they were talismans, a superstition similar to Mud’s gypsy magic. “I won’t fly without them,” she said the next year. “I also have people write notes to me when I fly—silly little notes. That, plus the tigers, constitutes my good luck charms.”

  While she was in New York, Natalie saw her first play on Broadway, “crying her eyes out” through two performances of Anastasia, a haunting mystery about the young grand duchess rumored to have survived the execution of the Romanovs, whose family portraits Natalie saw from her crib as a child. It was the role she would be preparing to play as her stage debut twenty-six years later, before she drowned.

  The night before Natalie filmed Heidi, a Friday, September thirtieth, actor Dick Davalos, who played Dean’s brother in East of Eden, invited her and Adams and Mineo, Dean’s costars in Rebel, to dinner in Chinatown. “We were all together—all Jimmy’s friends,” Natalie would recall. “We were talking about what a great future he had, and how in a few years he’d be the greatest thing that ever hit Hollywood. Then Nick said he was sure Jimmy wouldn’t live past thirty, with all his rodeo riding and his racing.” Natalie told the group, “Jimmy’s going to outlive every one of us at this table.” The next morning, “We read the terrible, unbelievable news of Jimmy’s death in an auto accident. And we realized that he had been killed almost as we were talking about him the night before.”

  Dean’s fatal accident in a speeding Porsche along Route 466 on his way to the races in Salinas, California, would have similarly eerie reverberations throughout the country, and on Rebel Without a Cause, which came out at the time of his funeral. “The way the world reacted to Jimmy’s death was what I had heard, but was not old enough to remember, about Valentino’s death,” observed one of the Rebel gang. Actor Corey Allen, whose character drives off a cliff while racing against Dean’s character (seen through much of the movie in a red jacket), remembers, after the movie opened, “young men running around in red windbreakers, and talking with their lips barely moving, and thinking that they would somehow become Jimmy.”

  Theaters showing Rebel Without a Cause offered grieving fans a temple to worship Jimmy Dean as an actor, to mourn his passing, and to wonder what might have been, turning Nick Ray’s personal statement into “an epic,” and Natalie Wood into a star. “It’s a gruesome thought that she owes her stardom to James Dean’s bad driving, but it’s certainly true that his death helped establish him as an icon and that her association with him benefited her,” film critic Stanley Kauffman observed years later. “What might have happened otherwise, who knows?”

  Natalie called it “a lucky picture” for her, “because that part had such dimension to it—more than the normal ingénue role for a fifteen-year-old girl, so I think that helped me get into more mature roles.”

  While it was a lurid coincidence that car accidents contributed to Natalie’s fame from Rebel Without a Cause in three ways—Hopper’s head-on collision on Laurel Canyon helped her get the part, a tragic crash was the climax of the “chickie run” scene, and Dean’s fatal smash-up in his Porsche ignited the movie’s cult success—her poignant performance was memorable on its own. The Hollywood Reporter called Natalie “splendid,” with Ray proclaiming her “the greatest young actress since Helen Hayes.” She had the same vulnerability on-screen as an ingénue as she had playing an Austrian waif-child at six, clinging to Orson Welles. “She had an endearing quality,” as her actor pal Ben Cooper observed, “and I don’t think people can fake that.”

  Natalie found out about Dean’s death during the taping of Heidi, reacting hysterically. She broke down in tears at the press premiere of Rebel, and kept a miniature bust of Dean as a shrine, recalls Lana. For days, reporters would call Natalie for stories about him, designating her the keeper of Dean’s flame. “I was embarrassed,” she told Hollywood correspondent Vernon Scott months later, “because it made me look as if I were capitalizing on his fame.” At the same time, she loyally defended her friend Nick Adams to Steffi Skolsky when she heard that Skolsky was “badmouthing” Adams for selling Dean trivia, a rumor Nuell and others confirm was true, though Natalie was too faithful a friend to believe it.

  Her role as James Dean’s girlfriend in Rebel Without a Cause not only established Natalie as a mature actress, she suddenly became her generation’s idealized teenage girl. Her brown eyes sparkled from the cover of every movie magazine, featuring articles with headlines such as: “Natalie Wood Speaks Out,” “Teenage Siren,” “Natalie’s Teenage World,” “Going Steady with Stardom,” “The Dance She Couldn’t Miss,” “It’s a Wonderful Whirl,” “Togs for A Teen,” “It’s a Date!”

  Natalie’s personality buried itself further as “Natalie Wood” became more famous. She felt pressure, in public, to become the air-brushed fantasy figure smiling from the pages of fan magazines, to please everyone, to be perfect, the way Mud trained her, to look beautiful at all times, to be a star. “She was very concerned about how her fans felt about her,” her sister Lana observed. “It was sometimes a burden for her, because she felt so indebted to everyone, felt that she had to appear a certain way, had to be a certain way.”

  “I have to be ‘Natalie Wood,’ ” she would tell her friend Robert Hyatt.

  Hopper recalls, “People would come to the table—we’d be sitting eating, in the commissary, or a restaurant or whatever—and Natalie w
ould turn on this smile. This smile, you know? And the second the person left, the smile would drop and she would just go right back. She’d turn it on, and turn it off—it was incredible. I used to say, ‘I don’t know how you can do that, Natalie. How do you do that?’ She said, ‘Practice.’”

  Every moment in Natalie’s day was dedicated to the pursuit of stardom. Even the court hearing for approval of her new contract at Warner Brothers—required by law because she was a minor—became a photo opportunity for Natalie Wood, her star alter ego—and her mother’s. She and Mud went to court together, with Natalie dressed to the nines, carrying her toy white poodle, Fifi. As they left the judge’s chambers, Natalie held up Fifi for UPI photographers, mugging adorably with her poodle, a picture that made newspapers across the country the next day, with captions such as “Pats of Joy,” reporting Natalie Wood’s new seven-year movie contract.

  She opened her first checking account, depositing part of her Warners salary at the discretion of Maria, who controlled the rest as family income. Natalie had no concept how to function outside the artificial world Mud had created for her. “My first official act was to overdraw $400,” she said to a Hollywood editor. “I’m not very bright about money. I’m not domestic either. If I don’t learn how to cook, maybe I won’t have to.”

  She cooperated fully with Maria’s star-driven regime, even though her own dream was to be a serious actress like Jo Van Fleet and other protégés of Kazan, creating an internal conflict that contributed to Natalie’s confusion about her identity. Her struggle to reconcile these two competing goals is evident from this interview she gave then:

  Stardom is only a by-product of acting… I don’t think being a movie star is a good enough reason for existing. I want to contribute something of myself. I feel that it’s possible to be a star, yet be a good actor—like Brando, Clift, Eva Marie Saint and people like that. On the other hand, there are certain stars who are not actors. I don’t want to be that type. I know there are certain rewards for stardom. I can’t help being touched when fans want my autograph, but I like to think it’s because they like my work, because they like what I’ve done—not because I wear long earrings or drive a Thunderbird.

  … It would be foolish of me to say I don’t want to be a star. But if I didn’t believe in what I’m doing, I’d rather go to work in a dime store.

  That fall, Natalie heard about a picture in development at Alan and Sue Ladd’s production company on the Warners lot. The script was by novelist David Dortort, an Emmy nominee for adapting The Oxbow Incident, featuring character actor Raymond Burr. Dortort recommended the dark, heavy-set Burr, then thirty-eight, as the villain in the small-budgeted noir drama he was writing for the Ladds’ company, called A Cry in the Night. Burr was playing a sexual stalker who kidnaps a beautiful girl after he spies her necking in a car with her boyfriend. The stalker knocks out the boyfriend and drags the girl to a secret lair, where he intends to rape and possibly kill her before her boyfriend and her father, a police captain, can discover where he’s taken her.

  Natalie “staged a campaign” to play the intended rape victim, which not only challenged her as an actress, but had obvious parallels to her violent encounter with the star she said held her sexual hostage. “It was so absolutely unbelievable,” recalls Dortort, who was unaware of Natalie’s experience. “She would come up, and practically break down the door, and say, ‘I want to play that girl!’… she really had some deep feelings, and an emotional response, to the character for some reason.”

  Dortort had conversations with Natalie about the character, which he had written with a plot twist. “At first she’s terrified, but… she slowly but surely begins to dominate the man that kidnaps her and was going to rape and kill her.” Dortort asked Natalie to read a few scenes. “Watching her—and watching the animated face, and the eyes, she had wonderful eyes—she convinced me that she not only could do this part, but she almost needed to do this part.” For days, Natalie lobbied the producers. “She’d meet the Ladds on one of the studio streets and implore them, beg them, ‘I can do it. I was born to do this part.’ ” As with Judy, in Rebel, Natalie related to the character, and felt a passion to become her on-screen.

  Natalie got what she wanted, again—approaching A Cry in the Night as if it were Chekhov, not a B movie, and she was Helen Hayes. “She always did the best job she could,” observed Hopper. “If she was doing something that was not important at all, she gave it the same energy as something that was going to be great. She really loved her work. That was her life.”

  Her first day of shooting, early November, Natalie invited Richard Anderson, a reserved, contemplative actor loaned by MGM to play her boyfriend, to meet in her dressing room so they could go over their scenes, a rare gesture in a low-budget contract movie. Anderson, who was a mature twenty-nine to Natalie’s seventeen, remembers her as “very watchful,” “always fighting for better stuff,” a “fully engrossed actress” who was “really there.”

  Lana, who had to be forced into doing The Searchers, was awestruck by her older sister’s absolute dedication to acting. “Every day of her life, she never thought about doing something else. She thought of what she could do to be better. She would analyze her script and write notes in the margins, and she was very, very careful, very meticulous with all of her roles. She would get an idea of who that individual was long before she would start the film.”

  Natalie merged with her victim character in A Cry in the Night, forming a bond with Raymond Burr, her movie stalker. Their costar, Richard Anderson, noticed they “caught on immediately professionally,” and “had great sympathy for one another’s work, and what they were both trying to do.” Burr, a closeted homosexual or bisexual who seemed “overwhelmingly lonely,” according to screenwriter David Dortort, brought sympathy to the sexual psychopath, playing him as a persecuted mama’s boy with a kind heart beneath his brutish exterior. Burr’s gestures during script readings with Dortort—“bringing his hands around, fluttering a little bit”—suggested the rapist was secretly homosexual, like Burr, “and I put that into the character: that he wanted someone to talk to, someone who would appreciate him for what he was, and not criticize him.”

  Natalie, whose character responds sensitively to her captor, found herself similarly drawn to the gentle giant Burr, who had infatuated her ever since she saw his deep-set bedroom eyes in A Place in the Sun with Mary Ann. Burr, a gourmand, invited her to dinner one night, ordering escargots at an elegant restaurant. Natalie had no idea they would be eating snails, setting the tone for Burr’s “Orson Welles makeover” of her that fall. “Burr was a very classy guy, and he saw her talent, and the potential in her, and he really wanted to cultivate her, the way Orson Welles did with Rita Hayworth,” suggests Mary Ann, “and it was done very lovingly.”

  Natalie went out with Burr throughout filming, and afterward. “Natalie was so crazy about Raymond Burr,” Jackie recalls. “That was when she was kind of branching out, and learning more about literature. She said that when she would go over to his house, he could recite poetry. He was a real sensitive human being, and she had a wonderful time with him—fine wines, wonderful cook, extremely intelligent—but at the end of the day, he’d kiss her on the cheek and say, ‘Goodnight, Natalie.’”

  According to Jackie, “It was the most devastating thing when she found that Raymond Burr was gay and there was no way they were going to have an affair, because she tried her darndest. She thought with her charm she could make the difference.” Burr’s preference for men stimulated Natalie’s tendency to “want what she couldn’t have.” She continued their relationship, in the hope she could “change” or seduce him, “like Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift.”

  After Natalie’s confession she had been raped sadistically by a powerful star, the males in her life were either pseudo-boyfriends—Hopper, Adams, Perry Lopez, Martin Milner—or men of sensitivity, such as Nick Ray and Jimmy Dean, who possessed her Fahd’s tender, artistic nature. Her attraction to
the gentle, homosexual or bisexual Burr followed this trend, providing Natalie with what Debbie Reynolds referred to as a “safety net.” Hopper, who performed in an ABC King’s Row Theater production of The Wedding Gift with Natalie that December, knew that she was seeing Burr and that Natalie considered it “dating,” not a friendship, speculating, “She may have gone into a period where she was interested in gay men.”

  Her next serious boyfriend, Marlowe, believed that Natalie also viewed Burr as representative of a fantasy. “He was a protector of sorts. He would tell her things, worldly things—he thought were worldly and she thought were worldly. She wanted somewhere… she wanted a world, outside the world that was created for her: the child actress, the Warner Brothers contract; that mother, the dragon. She was living a frightening fairy tale.”

  Natalie, moreover, may have found the relationship with Burr a catharsis from her confessed rape, since Burr played her attacker on screen, and her character formed a sympathetic attachment to him, managing to escape sexual assault.

  Most of Natalie’s friends assumed that Burr was using the relationship partially as a “beard” to “cover his gayness,” as Hopper put it, a common practice in the repressed fifties. Burr claimed to have been married multiple times, to wives who died or disappeared under untraceable circumstances. “In those days, they were all in the closet,” asserts Dortort, who felt sorry for Burr. “To admit it was suicide. Absolute death.” Others presumed Burr dated Natalie to get his name in the gossip columns. Burr later told Robert Benevides, his longtime male companion, he was in love with Natalie.

  Toward the end of filming, Warner Brothers got word their seventeen-year-old starlet was dating the corpulent, thirty-eight-year-old villain of their stalker movie. “Everything gets upstairs,” Anderson would say. “Whatever happens on the set—they have their watchers.” The studio pressured Natalie to stop dating Burr, considering the relationship destructive to her image and their film.