Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Natalie ended the year 1955 as she began it, embroiled in a complicated, scandalous, futile relationship with a middle-aged man.

  IN HER NEW YEAR’S DAY COLUMN, HEDDA Hopper predicted Natalie Wood as one of her “top picks for stardom” in 1956, a harbinger of what would be the most glamorous, clamorous year of Natalie’s life.

  Warner Brothers launched a dizzying campaign to get Natalie nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause, capitalizing on her emerging popularity as a teen idol. They scheduled five separate magazine layouts in the Gurdins’ backyard at intervals, with an ecstatic-looking Natalie dressed in a variety of bikinis and bold bracelets to cover her left wrist, pretending to dive into the tiny kidney-shaped pool she avoided, in real life, like a death trap.

  “We’d all get her in the pool and she’d do a little dog paddle,” one of the Hopper clique recalls. “I’d say, ‘Come on, you gotta learn to swim, I can teach you and we’ll take it slow,’ but the water was terrifying to her. We’d make fun of her when she would paddle around like a little dog, and we’d laugh, and call her all sorts of dumb names.”

  Natalie demonstrated an obsessive dedication to Warners’ publicity department, helping to create an artificial version of her life for fan magazines to foster the studio’s image of Natalie Wood. She was still the people-pleasing Natasha she was at four—curtsying for grown-ups, singing songs with hand gestures, desperate that people like her.

  The publicity was effective; a few months into 1956, Natalie was receiving more fan mail than any other star on the Warners lot. But the line separating Natalie from “Natalie Wood” blurred with each publicity layout she did. “They were very strange,” she said later. “It was like reading about somebody else. I didn’t feel synthetic, but lots of the stories were simply made up… there was so much invention.” Years later, in 1980, she would compare her experience to Brooke Shields’ teen fame:

  The constant attention is what is so difficult. People say, “Come here, do this, do that, let me take your picture, get up early, go on this tour, go out with that person, don’t go there, do that, wear that dress.” That’s where all the confusion sets in.

  If there were no publicity and acting was your only job, I don’t think anybody would get into very much emotional trouble.

  That’s why I feel sorry for Brooke Shields… the stress of a relentless career where she’s being photographed every day, playing the sex symbol, doing commercials, posing for the cover of Vogue—being so visible, such a star! That’s difficult.

  As she posed for fan layouts, Natalie was simultaneously completing the grueling abduction scenes in A Cry in the Night, performing with such intensity she dropped to ninety-one pounds and gashed her thigh on a rusty nail, prompting the studio physician to recommend time off, a warning Natalie ignored.

  She continued her forbidden romance with Burr, which she told one close friend had become physical. Natalie was so engrossed with her career and with Burr—who sent her flowers every other day—her head was barely turned at a Thalians party at Ciro’s in January, when she chanced to encounter Robert Wagner, the Fox heartthrob she had been maneuvering to marry since she was eleven. They shared a dance and flirted enough to be mentioned in a gossip column the next day as “in a spin… and loving the spin they were in,” but nothing more came of it.

  That winter, Warner Brothers capitalized on Natalie’s popularity, putting her in the first of two low-budget movies with Tab Hunter, the blond teen idol, who was also under contract to Warners. To promote them as romantic costars, the publicity department created the impression that Natalie and Hunter were dating offscreen, sending them to glamorous events photographed as a couple, planting suggestive items in columns (“Natalie Wood was seen coming out of Noel’s candy store with a red heart, on Tab Hunter’s arm”). “They were pushing us, so they really built us up,” recalls Hunter.

  Natalie’s true personal life—puffing from dramatic cigarette holders, sipping champagne at supper clubs with her beau, thirty-eight-year-old screen heavy Ray Burr—was causing problems between her and Warner Brothers. She and Burr were pictured together at the Coconut Grove over cocktails, listening to Peggy Lee: Burr is in a tuxedo; seventeen-year-old Natalie wears an ultrasophisticated one-shouldered gown, her mink beside her to keep her heart warm, as Lee performs “When the World Was Young,” Natalie’s poignant trademark song. That month, Natalie’s Revlon-red smile radiated from the cover of People and Places, quoting her wanting to play a “femme fatale.”

  Warners waged war over Natalie’s romance with Burr, and her glamorous nightlife, forbidding both. The end of January, Hollywood writer Joan Curtis ran into her at a party for forty “up-and-coming” young actors:

  Natalie sat in a corner sulking… over the fact that the older man she was then tingling over had been declared off-limits by her studio, and as she was still under 18, she had been requested not to pose for any pictures with a drink in her hand. In fact, a studio man was present to see the edict was carried out. Her poured-on slinky black dress (which she borrowed from wardrobe) and heavy makeup seemed out of place for one so young…

  The party—at a restaurant called the Oyster House—ironically was hosted by Robert Wagner. “My husband and I wondered why Natalie and Bob hadn’t discovered each other romantically,” Curtis commented for a magazine after the party. “Bob’s blond handsomeness seemed to compliment [sic] Natalie’s dark beauty to perfection.” Natalie, according to Curtis, thought only of her taboo boyfriend, Ray Burr. “Nick Adams confided to me that he was particularly distressed over the deep depression she was in.”

  The same week, Jack Warner—the head of Warner Brothers—“chaperoned” Tab Hunter and Natalie to an industry banquet, sending an emphatic message about the image the studio wanted to promote. Hunter recalls: “Natalie and I used to kid, we used to say, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me they’re gonna try to make us into William Powell and Myrna Loy!’ Then we’d laugh like crazy about this.”

  On February 10, the new Warner Brothers duo started filming The Burning Hills, a Louis L’Amour western in which Natalie wore a cascade of black hair and deep tan makeup to play a Mexican spitfire tending to Hunter’s cowboy wounds, a picture so camp, “she used to make jokes about it… and do all those terrible Spanish lines.” (Hunter, who later became a rancher, would remark, “The best thing in it was my horse.”) After living her part in Rebel, and as Burr’s near-rape victim, Natalie’s only comment to friends about The Burning Hills was, ‘Oh, hell, I’ve got to be up at five…’ She was more worried about wardrobe—to make sure that she had a bosom lift.”

  Natalie’s pique at Warners for pressuring her to stop seeing Burr, and forcing her into a “Carmen Miranda accent” in a picture she found absurd, revealed itself when she began staging sick-outs on the set, behavior she had learned from Mud. Stuart Heisler—the same director who had forced her to dive from Sterling Hayden’s boat during The Star—telephoned a Warner Brothers executive one evening to complain, saying:

  Something happened to Natalie Wood today and I just found out about it, and the more I think about it the madder I get… she went over to the lunch wagon, ordered a huge hamburger, ate it and then ordered a ham and egg sandwich on top of that. Then when it’s time for her to work (even though she was a little late in getting fixed up) she suddenly gets sick…

  Unless Jack Warner or Steve Trilling tells me otherwise, I’m really going to let this girl have it. From what I get from the crew tonight, this seems to have been a pre-arranged sickness—and if she goes to a premiere tonight (which I have heard she may do) then I’ll really bawl the hell out of her… we will never finish the picture the way we want to and will do if this girl is going to start acting up…

  Natalie was frustrated, telling a writer her goal was to be the “greatest actress” she could be, to play “character parts with realistic emotions,” using the model of Jo Van Fleet or Vivien Leigh, hoping she would “still be creaking on the stage at eig
hty.” During the first days of shooting the embarrassing Burning Hills, she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause, an exceptional accomplishment at seventeen. Natalie got a standing ovation on the set—validating her consuming passion to play Judy.

  While she was struggling through The Burning Hills, Natalie found out that Warner Brothers had acquired the film rights to Herman Wouk’s popular novel Marjorie Morningstar, forming a similar obsession with its title character, a sheltered Jewish ingénue inspired to be a great actress, whose heart is broken by a middle-aged composer-director. “She read the book and she just threw the book down and she said, ‘This is my next movie. I’m gonna do this. I love this character—it’s just me!’ ” Variety announced in March that Warners had Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in mind, but Natalie was possessed to play Marjorie, another character with whom she identified, telling Seventeen magazine later, “Almost every girl falls in love with the wrong man, I suppose it’s part of growing up,” a reference to her affairs with Nick Ray and Raymond Burr.

  Her verboten relationship with Burr took a more serious turn in early spring. He took Natalie to the Philharmonic, continuing his real-life role as Henry Higgins to her eager Eliza Doolittle. They went out several times a week, arranging to costar as Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII in a production of Anne of 1000 Days at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Burr regularly appeared onstage. The two made plans to go to Korea on a USO tour Burr was organizing that spring.

  “He was just so good to her and for her,” thought Tab Hunter, whom the studio wanted Natalie to date. “She was like a colt, finding its legs—experimenting with things, learning about herself, trying to find herself as an actress. Raymond Burr was like a father figure, in many ways.”

  Natalie told columnist Sheilah Graham that she and Burr had “an understanding for the future,” with Graham reporting, “It’s beginning to look like a marriage for young Natalie Wood and Raymond Burr.” When Louella Parsons put an item in her March 15 column denying any romance between Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter, stating, “Her real heart is Ray Burr, who’ll escort her to the Oscars,” Warners took drastic action. Within a week, Variety reported that Hunter would be Natalie’s date to the Academy Awards on March 21, with Natalie retracting her comments about Burr to Graham, saying, “He just helps me with my acting.”

  Burr, who was cast within months as Perry Mason, said later, “I was very attracted to her and she was to me. Maybe I was too old for her, but there was so much pressure upon us from the outside and the studio, it got awkward for us to go around together.” According to Robert Benevides, Burr’s companion in the last thirty years of his life, “He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess.”

  Natalie, trained by Maria to defer her own needs to the studio’s-whether it meant being terrified by water in a scene, keeping secret a broken wrist from a faulty stunt, or in this instance, losing someone she loved—accepted Burr’s immediate exile in exchange for Warner Brothers’ star-making buildup of Natalie Wood.

  She attended the Academy Awards on the arm of Tab Hunter, chopping off her hair as her sole expression of rebellion. (Hunter had popped into her dressing room that afternoon as the studio hairdresser was styling it, and teased Natalie to “just cut it all off.” When he returned a few minutes later in his dinner jacket, Natalie said, “Surprise!” and twirled around, revealing a pixie cut she later called “plumas locas.” “She started a whole new trend that went all over—she made publicity all over the world with that.”)

  Going to her first Oscars ceremony without Burr was not the only disappointment Natalie faced that night. She failed to win an Academy Award for Rebel Without a Cause, though the consolation was that she lost to Jo Van Fleet for her performance in East of Eden, which Natalie knew by heart. As ever, Natalie had her fur to keep her heart warm: a silver stole, identified in Warners’ publicity as a gift from her parents—paid for, by Mud, with Natalie’s money.

  Within a few days, Warner Brothers announced its second picture to pair Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter, beginning in May. The Girl He Left Behind (or The Girl with the Left Behind, as Natalie later would deride it) was another “schlocky” production, so low-budget the studio would decide to shoot the picture in black and white. “Warner Brothers made me do [it],” she later conceded, a condition of the studio’s pact to make Natalie into a movie star in the old Hollywood tradition.

  She returned to her submissive, dutiful self, “dating” up a storm with Tab Hunter, photographed in movie magazines dancing with him at a UCLA fraternity party where she served as Queen of the Dublin Ball, the model of a wholesome fifties teenager. While she was at UCLA, she ran into a few of her classmates from Van Nuys High, including one of Jimmy Williams’ former teammates, who found Natalie “totally unaffected and totally sweet,” despite her burst of fame, though it was clear, to all of them, she could no longer even pretend to fit into their world. “She honored us with her presence,” as the student chairman of the Dublin Ball would put it.

  Natalie’s absorption in her career, and her mother’s drive to make her a star at all costs, affected her close camaraderie with Mary Ann, who had always been leery of Hollywood, and of Maria. “I was approached for auditions and stuff and I just backed off. It’s not my thing. I wouldn’t like that whole thing. And of course as I got older and I saw what was happening, I really backed off. Natalie kinda went one way, and I went one.” Though their paths diverged, the friendship remained sacred. A Van Nuys graduate who talked to Natalie at the UCLA ball remembers, “The first words out of her mouth were ‘Do you ever see Mary Ann?’”

  Mud was on cloud nine over Warners’ publicity campaign to launch Natalie Wood as its newest star, and by the studio’s invented romance between Natalie and Tab Hunter, whom she considered “safe.” Maria had always been impressed by “gentlemen,” and was flattered that the well-mannered, respectful Hunter unfailingly addressed her as “Mrs. Gurdin,” presenting himself as the anti-Hopper. “I think it’s all in how the parent perceives who their daughter is going out with,” suggests Hunter. “For example, if I toot the horn and expect Natalie to come running out, or I’m a real slob about the whole thing. But I would never go over there without a jacket or tie on—unless it were a casual date—and I’d take Natalie to a nice place. And Mrs. Gurdin liked that.”

  Warner Brothers promised Natalie a spring break in Hawaii between her back-to-back pictures with Hunter, purportedly as a bonus for breaking off her relationship with Burr. A few weeks before she left for her Hawaiian holiday, she spotted an actor of eighteen named Scott Marlowe, a dark, handsome, curly-haired intellectual with a Byronic intensity. Natalie was instantly captivated. “I was at the airport picking somebody up, and she just went —something,” Marlowe remembers. “She got a real vibration from me. We were very attracted to each other. And her mother was with her, and her kid sister, and maybe the father, I’m not sure—it was very early in the morning.”

  Natalie boldly approached Marlowe, as she apparently had Hopper, offering her best imitation of a fearless flapper as romanticized by Fitzgerald. “She said, ‘Oh, I’d really love to see you and meet you again.’ She was just taken with me, I could hear it.” Marlowe, who had been living in New York taking classes at the Actors Studio, was “a little cocky” about dating a seventeen-year-old product of Hollywood. “I thought, ‘Well you know, this kid…’ ” When Natalie asked for his home phone number and then called him, “I was shocked.” She invited Marlowe to a movie premiere, accompanied by Nick Adams, Natalie’s constant companion.

  Natalie was smitten with Marlowe, who represented, for her, the magic of both the Actors Studio and James Dean, once a friend of Marlowe’s, whose anti-Hollywood sentiments he shared. “She was so responsive to me. She’d see my work, or she’d come on the set to visit me, and I would tell her stuff that I had learned at the Actors Studio, at Lee Strasberg’s, all those people that I had studied with—an
d Kazan. She adored Kazan, and he discovered me in New York, and I used to tell her stories about him, and she just loved it.”

  Natalie went to see A Streetcar Named Desire over and over again, seeming to “meld together” her awe for Kazan, for the movie, for Warner Brothers, and for Vivien Leigh, who was suffering from bouts of manic-depression. “She felt a great identification with her,” Marlowe noticed. “Wanted to be like her. And the lady was so sick.”

  In Scott Marlowe, Natalie found someone to love who combined the artistic integrity she admired in Jimmy Dean with the intelligence that drew her to Raymond Burr and Nick Ray. Like Ray, Marlowe provided Natalie with books to stimulate her hungry intellect. “I was into philosophers, and I’d given her Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and a lot of kid stuff—Nietzsche and stuff like that—because I was going through a phase of learning, and wanting to know everything. I gave her a lot of plays—a book of ‘twenty best plays’—she had never read stuff like that. All she’d ever read was movie scripts, and bad movie scripts, usually.”

  Natalie talked to Marlowe about her obsession to play Herman Wouk’s character, Marjorie Morningstar. “She was desperate to get anything that would further her. She had an incredible drive… I don’t know if she picked it up from her mother or it was forced on her, but she had an incredible sense of destiny and where she should be.”

  Natalie took singing lessons that spring with a voice coach named Eddie Sammuels, who wrote a song for her called “Eilatan,” “Natalie” spelled backwards. Warner Brothers announced that Natalie would be going on a nightclub tour with a forty-minute song-and-dance routine prepared by Sammuels, plans that never materialized, though as Marlowe recalls, “She wanted to sing well, badly.”