Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  On the surface, Natalie’s life seemed like a Sandra Dee movie fantasy of a teenage star: she had breakfast in her canopy bed every morning, brought to her by her mother, served on a tray in her cotton-candy-pink bedroom filled with toy tigers—gifts from famous male admirers, who called on her constantly ringing, pink rhinestone phone.

  Warner Brothers flew her to Honolulu that April on an all-expense-paid “holiday,” with sightseeing activities scheduled by the studio, in the company of reporters and photographers from Movie Parade and Photoplay, recording her activities as a “diary” for Natalie’s fans. Maria went along, ostensibly as her chaperone, though she was really in Hawaii as the “shadow” Natalie Wood.

  Natalie spent her private time reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, books from Scott Marlowe she carted onto the plane, along with her “lucky” toy tigers to protect her; Natalie Wood, the actress, was photographed for fan magazines on a catamaran in the ocean off Waikiki, arranged by Warner Brothers. The ride on the catamaran, a combination sailboat/outrigger canoe, was Natalie’s first time on a boat. According to her Movie Parade diary, she leaned too far over the side and fell into the ocean. “We were pretty far out when it happened,” Natalie was quoted as saying. “Maybe I could have swam back—and maybe I couldn’t. Two native boys jumped in after me and helped me back in the boat. Whew! I get cold just thinking about it.”

  After two weeks, Natalie was restless to get home “and to work.” She and Mud took an ocean liner, the SS Lurline, from Hawaii to San Francisco, re-tracing the last leg of the days-long journey young Marusia made with her first daughter, baby Olga, a quarter of a century before aboard the battleship Asama Maru, when she arrived to a mistress and a home that was one room of a hovel crammed with Russian sailors. This time, when Maria disembarked at San Francisco’s Port of Angels, paparazzi swarmed the dock, snapping pictures of her and her daughter as they clamored for a shot of Natalie Wood, the movie star composite of Maria and Natasha.

  They spent a day or two with Olga, who had divorced herself from her mother’s and sisters’ Hollywood lives, living a quiet existence in San Francisco with her husband, Lexi, an insurance agent, and their two sons, five-year-old Lexi and three-year-old Dmitri. Natalie posed with her nephews for the San Francisco paper, with the headline “S.F. Actress Visits Here.” Olga, who once dreamed of a career in voice, contented herself with singing in the choir at the Russian Orthodox Church where her mother and Nick were married when she was ten.

  “Sometimes when I visit my sister and see her two children, I wonder if she missed a lot by getting married,” Natalie told a movie magazine when she got home. “But when I look at her, she seems happy, and I guess that’s the difference between her and me. Right now, nothing could be further from my mind than getting married.”

  Scott Marlowe, who picked up Natalie when she flew in from San Francisco and was with her every day in the weeks afterward, sensed deep disturbance beneath her outwardly glowing “actress” personality, which he traced directly to Maria.

  “I was onto that mother from the very first date. Very first date. She looked me over with such a jaundiced eye and thought, ‘Uh-oh, there’s a problem here, I can see it.’ I think she spotted it at the airport, the very first day.”

  Mud correctly assessed Marlowe as a threat to her possession of Natalie, in the same way Jimmy Williams was. Like Williams, Marlowe possessed a rebel strength capable of standing up to Mud. “I was a maverick,” Marlowe explains, “and Natalie liked that.” Natalie was also “madly in love with Scott,” observed her sister Lana, increasing the possibility she might leave home, abandoning Mud and the glamorous career they shared. Tab Hunter, who was filming his second movie with Natalie, recalls, “Natalie loved the fact that Scott was part of the Studio and that very kind of crazed crowd like Jimmy [Dean]… he was opposed to the ‘Hollywood’ image.”

  Marlowe felt that Natalie’s mother had prostituted her to make her a star from the age of four, when she met Pichel, revealing itself as he and Natalie became intimate. “She was very, very experienced for a very young girl. She knew too much, more than a kid that age should know. She knew about all the men’s body parts, and about what to do, how to please, or how to get herself loved. She knew all those little things, and it was very sad. I was aware of it from the beginning.”

  Natalie “had a very wistful kind of quality” that touched Marlowe, “a very sort of sad orphan’s quality. She was just incredibly appealing.”

  He recognized Natalie’s terror of being injured during intercourse or of becoming pregnant as phobias instilled by her mother to keep her at home, making movies. “Her mother knew what she was doing. Her mother knew that she was with me, and she just made her fearful. Just scared her, all the time.”

  When he found out that Natalie was afraid to be alone, a fear her mother encouraged, Marlowe refused to go out with Natalie at certain times, pushing her to spend time by herself so she could become independent.

  “There was an edition of Freud that came in six paperbacks, that went through all his phases in analysis and therapy in women,” recalls Marlowe, who loaned his set to Natalie. “She devoured them.” When Natalie expressed suicidal feelings “in a very general way, in a sort of dramatic way,” Marlowe took her to see his therapist, concluding she wasn’t “seriously” suicidal. “She just wanted away from that scene: that mother, that father.” He perceived Natalie’s occasional drinking and heavy smoking as a way “to drown out all that stuff.”

  Natalie’s “twisted and broken” wrist became a metaphor for her, the child abused at the hands of her mother and the studios. “That would have been so easy to fix,” Marlowe observed. “It was such a minor thing. But she wore it like a cross, a medal. Her mother also put it in her head that it would have laid her up too long in a cast.”

  According to Lana, Natalie was afraid to have a doctor operate on her wrist, “for the same reason that she used to talk about plastic surgery and say, ‘I’m just going to have to grow old, because I’m too terrified to have anything done.’ ” Maria had attached herself to Natalie so symbiotically, Natalie assumed her mother’s phobia of doctors, just as she had her fears of drowning and dark water. For that reason among others, Lana would one day interpret her mother’s neglect as her own saving grace. “That’s what my analyst told me. I was saying, ‘Poor me, the forgotten, horrible, nobody cared…’ and my analyst told me, ‘No, you’re very lucky. Your mother didn’t influence you.’”

  The bracelets that Natalie used to cover her left wrist in public were symbolic of the split, in her mind, between herself and “Natalie Wood”; when she put on the bracelet, she became the flawless movie star who was always glamorous and beautiful, the only standard Maria would accept.

  Marlowe’s influence in getting Natalie to start therapy made him even more of a danger to Maria. “She did not like any kind of analysis at any time,” witnessed Lana. “She would get very angry: ‘What do you talk about when you go to the doctor? You probably talk about me with that doctor…’ ” In analysis, “Natalie realized how she’d been manipulated and used,” her later confidant Mart Crowley would comment. “She felt angry about it. With good reason.” According to Lana, “She just really didn’t like our mom. She liked our dad a lot, but she didn’t like the kind of person our mom was.”

  Marlowe would recall attending an actors’ soiree at the Chateau Marmont with Natalie, where a hypnotist put her in a trance as a party trick. “He hypnotized Natalie in a room with thirty people… and just created the most nightmarish thing that came out of Natalie about the death of a dog. And she sobbed and sobbed.” Natalie was still disturbed when she came out of the trance. As they left the party, she told Marlowe how her mother had forced her to re-live her dog being crushed, to get her to cry for Pichel. “That mother was ruthless.” The incident was so unnerving to Marlowe, he avoided hypnosis afterward. “I remember taking Natalie home, at like six o’clock in the morning
, and the mother was out of her mind with worry. I had a very old junky car. But it had nothing to do with our doing anything wrong—it was just that Natalie had to go on location for The Girl He Left Behind. She never cared where she was.”

  Marlowe had deep feelings for Natalie, saying later, “She was the most meaningful woman in my life, Natalie Wood, the most wonderful woman.” According to Marlowe, she possessed the same fragile, vulnerable quality with him as she projected on camera. “That was real. That was all real.”

  Natalie’s admiration for Marlowe was apparent while she was filming her second “B” picture with Hunter, playing the girlfriend of a reluctant Army trainee. “Scott was very serious and very dramatic and so ‘Method,’ ” Hunter recalls. “I remember one time Nat and I were doing a scene and we’d had a little bit of an argument and I said to her in the scene, ‘Well, what do you want?’ And she was really mad at me when we did the take, and she said, ‘I want to see some signs of you growing up!’—and she yelled this at me, she was so involved. So when we cut, I said, ‘Thank you, Rod Steiger.’ ” (The Hollywood Reporter would notice her efforts in its review, calling Natalie “one of those rare beautiful young women who gives you the feeling there is thought going on behind her lovely brow.”)

  Through Marlowe, Natalie met an Actors Studio graduate that summer named Norma Crane, a blond actress nearly ten years older, who would become her closest friend around 1959 and until Crane’s premature death in 1973 from cancer, when Natalie quietly would pay all her medical bills and arrange for her funeral.

  About the same time as she met Crane, Natalie acquired another new girlfriend, named Barbara Gould, a Fox bit player near her age, with whom she was close for the next year or two.

  By June, Natalie was living part-time with Scott Marlowe, alarming Mud into the surveillance activities she had used on Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s first love. “Her mother would open my mail! Just dumb things, like a phone bill, anything, a personal letter.” She induced Nick Adams to follow Marlowe when he was with Natalie. “The mother had him actually spying on us and reporting back. I don’t know if he was being paid or not.” Mud did pay a struggling actor named Nicky Blair, who had a tiny role in Natalie’s new film, “and he had nothing to say, really, except that I used bad language. I had a vile, filthy mouth. I used to say ‘fuck’ a lot when I was a kid—I was just trying to be older—and he went to the mother and said that I had this filthy mouth.”

  A few weeks prior to her eighteenth birthday, after an argument with Mud, Natalie proposed to Marlowe, in a manner reminiscent of Jimmy. “We were walking on the beach. She said, ‘Let’s get married.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ and she said, “Yeah, I want to get away from her. I want to get away from orders. And I feel that you’re my harbor and my shelter.’ ”Marlowe demonstrated Jimmy’s strength of character. “ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can do that, but you certainly can get away from these people.’

  “She wanted to marry me. I didn’t particularly want to get married. But I knew that, probably, was the only way we would ever stay together, is if we got married, so I agreed. It was mostly her… she wanted to get away from that whole family and background stuff, away from that awful childhood.”

  Though Natalie told movie magazines she felt sorry for her sister Olga because Olga missed a glamorous career to start a family, Natalie, in her heart, still desired what she sought with Jimmy at fifteen. “She wanted to have a normal life, and have a husband and kids,” she revealed to Marlowe. “Kids were very, very important to her.” How much of that was fantasy, or seeking “time lost” from her own childhood, Marlowe could not be sure.

  Louella Parsons announced Natalie’s engagement to Scott Marlowe in a banner headline on July 2, quoting Natalie saying, “I’ve never loved any other man.” When Parsons suggested they might marry on Natalie’s eighteenth birthday—July 20—because she would no longer need her parents’ consent, Mud reacted like a Fury, setting out to sabotage Marlowe. “Her mother got frantic—frantic—and she gave out this story that I would never go to premieres.”

  Mud warned publicists at Warner Brothers that Marlowe could ruin Natalie’s image because he disliked publicity and drove a “junk heap.” When he took Natalie to the opening of Moby Dick in his 1940 Cadillac on a rainy night, accidentally stepping on a woman’s train, “I was just taken to task in the press, saying that I was not good for her.” Maria escalated the anti-Marlowe campaign, enlisting Nick Adams, who gave interviews to fan magazines accusing Marlowe of using Natalie to further his career.

  Warners took seriously Maria’s propaganda to break up the relationship with Marlowe, who had never played by studio rules. “When I came to this town, I was so inaccessible to those gossip people that they were out to destroy me. I’m not overreacting, either: they were out to destroy me. I was a threat to Warner Brothers and to Natalie. They just wanted to end it. And get on with her.”

  Natalie was caught in a tug-of-war between her respect for Marlowe’s disdain of cheap publicity, versus her mother’s powerful influence and her now ingrained obsession with image and the pursuit of stardom. As she admitted a decade later, “I [even] used to worry about the fan mags!”

  Mud’s scheme to discredit Marlowe extended to Warners’ publicity department, which issued “erroneous” press releases in mid-July stating that Natalie was demanding they cast Marlowe in her next picture or sign him to a contract. “It was a nightmare for me. Warner Brothers just tried to keep her away from me.”

  The day she turned eighteen, July 20, Natalie had her first date with Robert Wagner, to attend a press screening of his new Paramount picture, The Mountain, followed by a dessert party with forty-eight other film stars and the press.

  Over time, the Natalie Wood legend has been that Wagner telephoned Natalie to invite her to the premiere after photographers posed them together at an industry event, a publicity story that began to circulate after they married. Natalie and Wagner gave conflicting versions of the industry event—Wagner said it was a charity luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire, Natalie wrote that it was a nighttime “Hollywood party-fashion show.” They also offered differing accounts of when he phoned her for the date: Wagner said he was “captivated” and called right away, Natalie wrote that it was “a few weeks later.” Suspiciously, there is no record in the press of an event matching either description.

  According to Bobby Hyatt, whose mother and he were still in close contact with the Gurdins, Wagner took Natalie to the July 20 press screening of The Mountain as an arranged date to fulfill agent Henry Willson’s earlier promise to Natalie that she could go out with Wagner when she turned eighteen.

  Maria and others would also recall it as a studio “set-up” date, as would Marlowe, who was still engaged to Natalie and begged off going to the Mountain premiere, preferring to spend the evening at a friend’s place at the Chateau Marmont, where Natalie began the evening. “I remember she got dressed at the Chateau, and went on the date.”

  Natalie chose a sea-blue chiffon dress and a tiny diamond tiara for her night with her childhood Prince Charming, though it was not the romantic fantasy she had envisioned at eleven. Robert John Wagner (“R.J.” to friends), who was twenty-six to Natalie’s eighteen, worshipped the older, conservative bastions of Hollywood, copying the style and mannerisms of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, to whom he had ingratiated himself as a teenager while caddying at the Bel Air Country Club, next door to his wealthy parents’ home. His perfect manners, polished prep school charm, and penchant for fifties slang like “the gonest” and “the coolest,” were the antithesis of the intellectual-poet-rebels who fascinated Natalie.

  “She was sort of all into that whole Actors Group, and I was sort of a Happy Jack Squirrel kid, you know, with nothing on my mind, much, but my hair,” was the amusing, self-deprecating way Wagner would remember it in the late seventies, when he and Natalie were married to each other a second time. He admitted, “I really liked Natalie a lot, and I really wanted to strike up a lit
tle conversation… and she sort of resisted me a bit, actually, at the beginning, because I was so different than all the rest of them.”

  Ironically, it was Wagner, not Natalie, who was star-struck in their first extended encounter after Natalie’s schoolgirl crush on the Fox lot in braces and braids. (“She was so beautiful—those eyes!”) Wagner, a high school graduate more interested in mimicking Hollywood stars than in his studies, found Natalie “a great intellect—she read like crazy.” Wagner’s career, from Fox bit player to Prince Valiant, had primarily been as a pin-up boy for teenage girls. He was awestruck by Natalie’s “wonderful talent… that driving ambition to be somebody.” His recognition of his limitations, and Natalie’s superior gifts, was honest almost to the point of poignancy. “She was much more accomplished an actor than I will ever be,” he said in midlife.

  Their first evening together underlined the differences. Natalie would recall Wagner doing “perfect imitations of movie stars,” while he remembered, “She was so honest. She was real and very vulnerable.”

  Maria, who had been worried about Natalie’s girlish infatuation with Wagner because of his representation by the homosexual Willson, dismissed him completely that night. “He came in and I thought, ‘Well, at least the studio sent one with good manners.’ That was my first impression of R.J.”

  In her studio publicity, after she married Wagner, Natalie would help create the illusion she waited by the phone for Wagner to call from the time he brought her home from the premiere. Marlowe recalls, “She came back and we met at the Chateau later that night… and she said, ‘I had the most boring evening. He’s very sweet—and so boring. So boring. Please don’t let me do that again.’ And I said, ‘I can’t go to them. I can’t. I can’t sit through those Warner Brothers things.”