At a party after the Modern Screen ceremony, Natalie bumped into Robert Wagner, whom she hadn’t seen since their unexciting publicity date five months earlier. He was worried about how much weight she had lost—“neuroses” kept her thin, Natalie told a magazine—and invited her to meet him at his studio commissary for lunch the next day. Natalie’s indifference, and Wagner’s easy-going nature, are suggested by the fact that she arrived three hours late, to a patiently waiting Wagner, still in good humor.
Natalie found Wagner’s mellow manner a soothing balm for her increasingly frazzled nerves, accepting a date on his new sailboat, My Lady, moored at Newport, south of L.A. My Lady was Wagner’s first of many boats, paid for with his “movie money,” and he was intoxicated with her, and with the ocean. Natalie discovered that sailing off to sea, where she could not be reached, was a relaxing panacea from the stresses of the studio and the demands on her. “At night, when the sky is full of stars and the sea is still you get the wonderful sensation that you are floating in space,” she said. “You don’t even think words, yet you get the glorious feeling that you are tuned in on the universe.” She spent that night—December 6—aboard My Lady, which she and Wagner would celebrate in future years as their most sentimental anniversary, commemorating their first date and the first time they were intimate.
Natalie’s fear of dark water—seawater—was still with her, but she somehow separated it from being on a boat. “I don’t think it occurred to her that she would go in the water, or go off the boat,” her then close friend, Judi Meredith, noticed. “R.J. always had a boat, and it started out with a smaller one, and then it just grew. And she was going with R.J., and I don’t think it would have occurred to her to say, ‘No, this is not for me.’ ‘Cause Nat was gung-ho for life.”
Wagner said later he “fell head over heels in love” with Natalie “the way they write about in songs,” describing their relationship as “intense,” but in fact they saw each other only sporadically the next few months. Natalie was seeing several other suitors, including hotel heir Nicky Hilton, Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband, whom she met a few weeks later as part of a “star junket” to promote the opening of a new Hilton hotel in Mexico City. Natalie “liked the idea” of dating the dark and dashing Hilton, according to her friend Meredith, and was eager to emulate Elizabeth Taylor, in the opinions of Robert Blake and Marlowe. She juggled three boyfriends on her trip to Mexico City: Bob Neal, a wealthy businessman in Hollywood circles, took her to the airport, Hilton was with her in Mexico City, and Wagner picked her up by limousine when she flew home.
Respected character actor Karl Malden, who was playing Natalie’s father in a Warners potboiler they shot that winter eventually called Bombers B-52, remembers beaus “swarming” around Natalie on the set, “There must have been five or six boys around all the time—and you know, it was funny, they’d come together. Two or three of them’d come in, and hang around… She was always a serious actress, that was her profession, she really cherished it, she worked on it, so she was always conscientious there, but as a person—boy, she had a good time at eighteen.” Malden glimpsed the loneliness underneath Natalie’s surface gaiety when he discovered she had never been on a family picnic, and arranged to take her on one. She told him, afterward, that it was one of the happiest days of her life, which Malden found desperately sad.
Natalie paid for the Gurdins’ new house that December—perversely, on Laurel Canyon, the street she feared—fashioning her bedroom into a separate “wing” so that she could pretend she was in her own apartment, something she was still too terrified to do. She surrendered her schoolgirl pink canopy bed for modern bedroom furniture, all in black, and acquired a private phone line so she could “talk all night” with Nick Adams or Barbara Gould or Judi Meredith, the friends who kept her company through the long nights that frightened her, “sometimes falling asleep on the phone.”
The “ambition of her life” was to play the part intended for Elizabeth Taylor in Marjorie Morningstar, a role she was certain would catapult her to true movie stardom, which consumed her thoughts more than any of the boyfriends who phoned with “love talk” night and day, according to the neighbor who shared her party line. “For fun, I work,” Natalie told Cosmopolitan in 1957, which described her “demonic ambition.” She tested for the part of Marjorie in January with a drove of actresses amid great publicity over who would play the coveted role. Natalie anguished into spring, as the tests continued.
“Warner Brothers tortured her over Marjorie,” recalls Marlowe, who still had occasional taboo contact with Natalie by phone. Her agent at the time, Mike Zimring, was aware of what the studio was doing. “I knew Natalie was going to play the part, but I had to play this game. The studio wanted to test all these other girls for publicity—because it was a big deal, who would be Marjorie Morningstar. I always felt so damn guilty about that.” Natalie even adopted a Brooklyn accent with her friends, pretending to be Jewish, desperate to play Marjorie not only as her ticket to stardom, but a chance to prove herself again as a serious actress, disgusted by the pictures she was being forced to make for Warner Brothers.
She exhibited some of her old “rebel” behavior, engaging in swearing contests for sport with her friend Meredith and their “core monster group” of Hopper and Adams and occasionally actor Robert Conrad. “We were so full of B.S., running around and terrorizing theaters and things, putting our feet in the back of people’s seats so they’d move, and dressing in black leather. Oh God, we were like Peck’s bad boys, but it was just to make ourselves laugh. We didn’t care what anybody else thought.”
Natalie added a new swain to her assortment of men that spring, the young and wealthy Lance Reventlow, who took her to the Academy Awards. In April, she was seen with Frank Sinatra, her mentor in the ways of Hollywood at fifteen. Sinatra was courting her for his next movie, Kings Go Forth, as well as personally, according to Natalie’s chum Nuell, who recalls how Sinatra “adored” her. Natalie told a movie magazine it was not uncommon for her to have three dates on the same night—Hilton, Wagner, Reventlow, Robert Vaughn, Bob Neal, Nick Adams, Dennis Hopper, and the list went on.
By late spring, Natalie was pilloried in the press. Hedda Hopper warned her, in print, she was going to “burn out”; columnist Sheilah Graham wrote, “Tomorrow won’t come for Natalie Wood if she doesn’t slow down”; Look published a profile of Natalie, querying, “Is she riding for a fall?” Movieland criticized her for dating Sinatra, calling him “her most incongruous escort,” writing that he was “old enough to be her dad.” Even Variety took a shot, tittering, “Natalie Wood’s either got a great press agent or she’s boy crazy.”
Judi Meredith, Natalie’s close friend, considered the attacks unjustified. Meredith, who had her own apartment, acted as a “beard” for Natalie when she spent the night with Hilton, because Natalie’s father disapproved of him, an arrangement Maria—impressed by Hilton’s name—encouraged. “Her mom told her dad that she was staying overnight with me, but she wasn’t. Natalie got pretty much whatever she wanted.” Meredith largely discounted the negative gossip about Natalie’s male harem, saying they were “purely platonic” for the most part. “Nick [Adams] was just sort of the kid next door. So was Dennis [Hopper]. Dennis the Menace, for God’s sake. He was just inventive.”
Natalie’s school friend Jackie, who was still around her quite a bit, felt “Natalie couldn’t be faithful to one boy then.” Several years later, Natalie admitted that she fell in love much too easily, observing poignantly, “It’s not really love, though; I guess you call it fascination.” “She could have had anyone,” observed Jackie. “She was looking for happiness.” Natalie told a magazine she was looking for a man who was “intense about something.” With Scott Marlowe evicted from her life, she seemed to spiral downward. A female friend who remained unnamed described Natalie during this period to Coronet magazine, later, as reminding her “of an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine. She was burning herself up. I was frightened and
I waited for something to happen.”
There was evidence. Amanda Duff, who met Natalie years earlier during The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, written by Duff’s husband Philip Dunne, recalls seeing Natalie at a party, smoking heavily, noticing that “her hands were shaking.” At another party in this period, Natalie encountered actress Anna Lee, who had a small part in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir as George Sanders’ screen wife. Natalie, who was only eight when she made the movie, was curious about her screen mother, the beautiful Gene Tierney, who had suffered a nervous breakdown in the interim. “She wanted to know what my scenes with Gene Tierney were like.”
Natalie’s childhood hypochondria returned with a vengeance. She missed several days shooting Bombers B-52 because she thought she had a “nervous heart,” driven by car from the set by Hilton. “Every time she reads a book about a disease or hears a person discuss a sickness,” her friend Meredith wrote at the time, “she’s promptly convinced that she has it, too. During the past six months, she was convinced she had hardening of the arteries, TB, rheumatism, sclerosis of the liver, leukemia, and half a dozen other diseases I never even heard about… luckily, just as quickly as she identifies these ‘symptoms,’ she gets over them.”
Photoplay, then the most influential movie magazine, published a two-part cover series on Natalie, describing her as “controversial,” frighteningly ambitious, “flashy,” criticizing her for having so many boyfriends, reporting there was “talk she won’t make it in her personal life.” Movie TV, another popular magazine, wrote that Warner Brothers had been warned there would be no more fan magazine covers for Natalie if she “doesn’t slow down on men,” prompting the studio to exert pressure on Natalie to rehabilitate her image. Natalie would complain, later, that the fan magazines “tried to make me look like a femme fatale.”
She narrowed the field of suitors to Hilton and Wagner by May, just after Warners announced she would play Marjorie Morningstar, the same week Wagner left for Japan to shoot a movie with Joan Collins. Troy Donahue, who was seeing Judi Meredith and double-dated with Natalie, recalls her “trying to make up her mind—I remember—between R.J. and Nicky.” According to Olga, Hilton invited Natalie and their mother to the family mansion to meet his father, Conrad Hilton, to discuss terms for a marriage, with Conrad Hilton attempting to “bribe” Maria, who thought at the time that Natalie would choose Hilton over Wagner. “That was very serious,” recalls Lana of the Natalie-Nicky Hilton romance. “He was like part of the family or something.”
Wagner inundated Natalie with phone calls from Tokyo, sometimes every three minutes; by the time he returned to Hollywood on July 2, she was cooling the romance with the violent-tempered Hilton in favor of R.J., telling friends how gentlemanly and attentive R.J. was, traits she valued after her confessed rape. “She was crazy in love with Nicky,” recalls Troy Donahue, “but knew it wouldn’t be the best thing.” Friends noticed that Natalie was also drawn to men who were handsome, like her father. Wagner took her out on his boat for her nineteenth birthday on July 20, surprising Natalie with a Black Mist mink stole, the perfect symbol of the glamorous life they would have together.
The studio was ecstatic with Natalie’s romance with Wagner, who worshipped at the altar of Hollywood and posed endlessly with Natalie for fan magazines, flashing his dazzling movie-star smile as they quickly became the era’s favorite new celebrity couple, joining the ranks of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Natalie acquired a “personal” couturier, Howard Shoup, the costume designer from Bombers B-52, who “taught her how to dress” and created special costumes for her with “boob uplifts” to create the illusion of the larger breasts she had coveted since Pride of the Family.
Wagner’s and Warner Brothers’ joint influences on Natalie were startlingly obvious when she arrived in New York that summer to test with supporting actors for Marjorie Morningstar. Natalie was pictured in the Tribune in a glamorous off-the-shoulder white gown, quoted as criticizing the New York “method” actors she earlier had worshipped, saying, “They don’t like movies so, I say, why don’t they leave Hollywood and go back to the stage. Or better still they shouldn’t go to Hollywood in the first place. I for one am tired of hearing them complain about Hollywood. I resent kids who say movies are terrible, non-creative and all that. That’s just talk.”
The star-driven, “Maria” aspect of Natalie’s personality had assumed center stage via her budding romance with Robert Wagner, to the delight of her studio. By early August, rumors that Natalie would marry Wagner—who called her “Bug”—began to pop up in the trades. When Natalie, increasingly afraid to fly, took the train to the East Coast in mid-August to start filming Marjorie Morningstar, Wagner tagged along, staying at the same Adirondacks resort hotel on Schroon Lake as Natalie, Maria and Lana. The fan magazines, and Warner Brothers, embraced the couple, putting them on covers in dreamy, romantic poses—Wagner tenderly kissing Natalie on the forehead, or the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes—with headlines such as, “Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner: It’s the Romance of the Year!” or “Natalie’s Love Search Has Ended!” Louella Parsons bubbled that they would marry, writing that Wagner had become accustomed to being called “Mr. Wood.”
By the end of summer, Natalie’s disenchantment with Marjorie Morningstar was summed up by her private comments about the director, Irving Rapper, to a friend: “I’d rather spend my life in a crapper than do another picture with Irving Rapper!” Actress Ruta Lee, who had a small part in the film as a rival of Marjorie Morningstar’s, remembers Natalie being “not too crazy” about their “old guard, somewhat dogmatic” director, and vocalizing it.
The Lithuanian, outgoing Ruta Lee bonded with Natalie over their ethnic backgrounds and shared rituals. “She was very real, very down-to-earth… and she had a wonderful, dirty giggle. Loved a bawdy story. Was very earthy and very wonderful… and yet there was something about her that, even though I was very, very young, wanted me to reach out and kind of make a haven for her, and protect her in some sort of way.”
Wagner celebrated his and Natalie’s joint return to Hollywood in September by buying a new forty-two-foot powerboat, which he planned to name The Natalie, but changed to My Other Lady. The two spent increasing amounts of time on Wagner’s boat, out at sea, one of the few places where Natalie found it possible both to drop the “Natalie Wood” mask and to relax, something she found difficult with her driven, intense nature. She confessed to Seventeen magazine she hadn’t had a day off in two and a half years, since Rebel.
Natalie kept up the pace, beginning in November the film for which Sinatra had pursued her, Kings Go Forth. It was a war drama set in the Mediterranean, with Natalie playing a French-speaking mulatta driven to a suicide attempt by a playboy soldier (Tony Curtis), rescued by Sinatra’s character. She spent her time between scenes listening to Sinatra records (“He’s from greatsville!” she told a reporter from Bride magazine, sounding like Wagner), or knitting an afghan to use on the boat as a surprise for R.J.
On December 6, the anniversary of their first date aboard My Lady, Wagner arrived at the Gurdins’ to take Natalie to Romanoff’s, carrying a bottle of Dom Perignon and two crystal glasses. When he filled Natalie’s glass with champagne, she discovered a pearl-and-diamond ring on the bottom, engraved with the words “Marry me?” At Romanoff’s, Wagner discreetly dropped a pair of diamond earrings in Natalie’s glass, the way Cary Grant, his role model, might have done on screen.
Their first call was to Hollywood reporter Louella Parsons, who wrote breathlessly about R.J. and Natalie’s movie-scripted engagement in her column the next day. In keeping with the Hollywood theme, Natalie hired her movie costume designer, Howard Shoup, to create a wedding gown for her, with Shoup sketching a beautiful short white lace dress and romantic lace coverlet for her head.
When Wagner showed up on the set of Kings Go Forth to see Natalie, Sinatra, who had a special relationship with Natalie that Faye Nuell, Janet Leigh and others perceived as romanti
c then, pulled him aside, giving Wagner “the Hoboken guide of, ‘Don’t you do anything to hurt her,’ ” recalls Nuell, who happened to be visiting Natalie. “He said, ‘If you ever hurt her, you’ll have to answer to me.’”
That week, Natalie had lunch with her oldest and dearest friend, Mary Ann, rhapsodizing about R.J. and their engagement, telling Mary Ann how “perfect” he was, how “perfect” their marriage would be, reminding Mary Ann how she once had seen Wagner on the Fox lot and fantasized marrying him, how this was her fairy tale come true. Mary Ann had a deep concern for her friend, related to Mud’s original suspicions about Robert Wagner as one of Henry Willson’s stable of handsome young actors reputed to be homosexual or bisexual. Wagner, recalls Rad Fulton, another Willson client, was the topic of “a lot of stories” in Hollywood concerning “the same thing they were saying about Henry.”
Mary Ann broached the subject with Natalie, expressing her concern. Natalie told Mary Ann she had discussed the topic with R.J., who denied the rumors he was bisexual. “She said, ‘Oh Mary Ann, all these people are just jealous of us.’ ” Mary Ann was still uneasy. “R.J. presented such a grandiose thing. She was in love with love. And he was extremely handsome, surfacely [sic] extremely charming, and she was being pushed by all sides—studio, Mama, everybody. And it seemed almost… you know how when things seem to be too perfect? I told her, ‘Nothing’s that perfect.’”
Mary Ann’s caveat about Robert Wagner caused a rift between the two friends. “She believed everything he said. But sometimes you’ve got to listen. She was hearing what she wanted to hear. And the studios were pushing, and Mom. She was into this, both hands, both feet, everything—all systems go.”
Natalie had a similar experience with her friend Jackie. “I hadn’t seen her in a long time, because she was making all these movies. And she called me one day and she said, ‘What are you doing? I want to take you to Romanoff’s for lunch, I have something to tell you.’ ” Jackie expected to see Natalie in her T-Bird, “but she had a black Cadillac, and the whole persona of Natalie had suddenly changed to this very sophisticated—she had a black turban on, and a black jersey sheath, and a cigarette holder, and the leather gloves. So we march into Romanoff’s, and we’re talking, and she pulled off the glove, and there is the diamond on her finger. She said, ‘I’m marrying Robert Wagner.’ ” Like Mary Ann, Jackie had heard rumors about Wagner’s bisexuality and mentioned it to Natalie, who again denied it.
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