Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Within three weeks of finding a pearl-and-diamond ring in the bottom of her champagne glass, Natalie was on a train to Arizona with Robert Wagner to get married—on such short notice, even her sister Olga was unable to attend. Olga believed that Natalie married so young “to get away, maybe… although I think she was in love with R.J. They were fun to watch together. I remember they came to San Francisco and we went out to dinner. And they always would make a production—if she was going to the bathroom, they’d have all these farewells! They had this little act together.”

  Her mother, remembers Olga, was “not always” happy about Natalie’s decision to marry Wagner, partly because, “for Mother, it was a big blow when Natalie decided to be on her own, and Mother wasn’t to interfere. That was a blow.”

  Jeanne Hyatt was a witness to her close friend Maria’s devastation at losing her star-child, the outcome that Mud had schemed to prevent since Natalie was a little girl, frightening her with grotesque lies about sex and pregnancy. Maria’s motivation to keep Natalie at home was to some degree financial, as “a lot of her meal ticket would go away when Natalie married somebody.” But the more primal reason for Mud’s hysteria over losing her daughter was survival, for as Maria’s friend Jeanne points out, “She lived and breathed through Natalie.”

  Maria had a foreboding about Natalie marrying Robert Wagner, afraid that her earlier suspicions about him were correct. She told Natalie, “No good will come of this.”

  Though her older sister had insufficient notice to attend Natalie’s wedding to Wagner, a fan magazine reporter and photographer were present every second, even on the train to Scottsdale, where R.J.’s parents had a home. Barbara Gould was Natalie’s maid of honor, just as she would have been if Natalie had married Scott Marlowe the year before. The only other guests at the Wood-Wagner wedding were Mary Anita Loos and Richard Sale (whom Natalie had met on Driftwood), Nick Adams, Faye Nuell, the Gurdins, the Wagners, and a few other family or friends.

  But the photographs, and all the details, were available to anyone who bought the March 1958 issues of Photoplay, Modern Screen, or Motion Picture.

  IRONICALLY, BOATS—AND BOAT MISHAPS—would be a recurring theme in the joined lives of Natalie and Robert Wagner.

  Their first honeymoon began with a misadventure at sea. Because Natalie was afraid to fly, the Wagners and their sixteen pieces of luggage took the Silver Streak to Miami, where they had booked passage on a chartered boat for a month-long cruise, an opportunity for Natalie to relax—with no telephones—after the grueling schedule of filming Marjorie Morningstar and Kings Go Forth almost back-to-back.

  “So what happens?” Wagner queried Louella Parsons after the honeymoon. “The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! They called it a storm—ha! It was really a typhoon.” Natalie and R.J.’s honeymoon cruise became a nightmare, as their boat lurched its way back to port. “It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing… all the furniture that wasn’t nailed down was sliding from wall to wall. It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her.”

  The newlyweds shifted their honeymoon to New York, where they checked into the Waldorf Towers, accompanied, rather bizarrely, by Nick Adams, Natalie’s perpetual sidekick. (Actor Robert Conrad, Adams’ best friend then, did not consider the arrangement strange. “Nick was a very entertaining guy, and they were pals. He was with them all the time, always hanging out. He was referred to by his friends as ‘Emperor Adams’—he was charming, he was funny, he was outrageous, and you had a sense that he really cared about you.”)

  The next few weeks were a public spectacle, with photographers chronicling the Wagners’ comings and goings to Manhattan restaurants and Broadway plays, including West Side Story, Natalie’s eventual film classic. They left New York mid-January, buying a new Corvette to drive home, another way for Natalie to avoid airplanes. Natalie and R.J.’s motor trip back to California was a surreal exercise in movie star fame: each time they drove to a different city, a local radio station announced their arrival and fans would mob the car.

  When they returned to Hollywood from their honeymoon, the Wagners had barely spent a waking hour alone. They holed up aboard My Other Lady, moored off Catalina Island, the glamorous little hideaway two hours by sea from the port south of Los Angeles. “The best part was the last week,” Natalie would say a year later, of her honeymoon. “We spent it on R.J.’s boat, off the coast of Catalina, in a dense fog for four days.” The experience would forever hold a glow for both Natalie and R.J., who romanticized Catalina, and their boat, as the perfect expression of their love.

  Natalie spent her first days as Mrs. Robert Wagner writing one thousand personal thank-you letters on pastel blue note cards monogrammed “NWW,” acknowledging wedding gifts she and R.J. had received, with thoughtful greetings to every person she addressed. It was typically Natalie, her sister Lana would observe. “The same as she took acting very seriously, she took being a wife very seriously. And gave it her all… she did everything meticulously, and very thoroughly and completely.”

  Outwardly, the newly wed Wagners appeared to have achieved romantic nirvana; however, the movie star façade that was “Natalie Wood” concealed the person inside, gasping for breath. “It was a mystery to me. I loved my husband, we were healthy, we were desirable according to the press, but all I felt was torment. I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life, and now I was expected to function as an adult woman.”

  After nineteen years of possessing a human shadow, Natalie was experiencing the same separation anxiety from her mother as Maria—her alter ego—was from her. She included Mud in all her movie contracts for the rest of her life, paid by the studio to autograph fan photos, with Maria signing as “Natalie Wood,” their shared identity.

  Natalie and R.J. kept up the illusion of movie magazine bliss, with Natalie ensconcing herself in her husband’s cozy bachelor quarters, a two-bedroom duplex apartment on Durant, in Beverly Hills, with barely enough space for their star wardrobes.

  Mud’s protective antennae went up the first time she visited Wagner’s tiny apartment, when the door was opened by a much older, “swishy” man with an English accent, identifying himself as R.J.’s butler. Mud made it her mission to rid Wagner of his live-in houseman before he married Natalie. “Her mother thought it was suspicious,” relates Maria’s friend Jeanne Hyatt, “and being that type of a person, she didn’t want Natalie to have anything to do with Wagner.”

  According to Bobby Hyatt, Natalie was also “questioning why Wagner had that guy. She was trying to get him to get rid of him. And the joke became that after they got married, not only did R.J. not get rid of the guy, but moved the guy into their apartment.” A fan magazine even reported on the oddity after the Wagners divorced:

  Natalie and her former husband, Robert John Wagner, were living then in this nice but very dinky garden apartment duplex in Beverly Hills. There wasn’t room to swing a cat by the tail, in case that was your idea of fun, but there was a butler. He was a bona fide butler all right, with all sorts of movie star credentials and references. But in that apartment it was like keeping a polar bear in a broom closet… Natalie and R.J. would weave in and out around the butler…

  Jeanne Hyatt recalls, “I used to go over there with Marie Gurdin and the butler would answer the door and one time she said to me, ‘He is the faggot!’ ” From then on, Maria complained to Jeanne Hyatt incessantly. “She mainly said, ‘I don’t know why Natalie would marry R.J. in the first place. I told her that’s a faggot around him all the time.’ And she just went on and on about that ‘faggot’: ‘Now that faggot’s gonna open the door for us.’ And she’d say it right in front of Natalie—she said she didn’t care whether he heard her or not. She was very outspoken, Marie was. Not to hurt you, but that was just the way she was.”

  Natalie wanted desperately to live the fairy t
ale she imagined for herself as a child, with the handsome prince she fantasized about at eleven. When her costar of so many movies, Ann Doran, ran into her in the Fox commissary, she was “ecstatic over her new husband. This was ‘it!’”

  Natalie made a romantic pact with R.J. never to be separated, and they vowed not to exploit their relationship by appearing in a film together. As a symbol of her love, Natalie balked at making a six-city tour to promote Marjorie Morningstar, since R.J. would be filming a movie called The Hunters and they would be apart.

  When the studio prevailed, bowing to her preference to travel by train, Natalie got a viral infection at the station before she even left Los Angeles, and was sick throughout the tour. Her insistence that her husband be with her at all times was probably as much a symptom of her emotional dependency and fear of solitude as a romantic gesture.

  Natalie was in a tug-of-war with Warner Brothers from the time she returned from her honeymoon in January through summer, refusing to accept the pictures they were offering —The Miracle and A Summer Place—as a bargaining tool to renegotiate her contract. Natalie had no idea what to do with herself, or her time, away from a movie set, admitting sadly she was “more at home on a soundstage than in my own home.” She joined R.J. on his set, appearing so often she was given a canvas chair with the title “Associate Producer” while he filmed In Love and War that June. Natalie followed the cast to the Monterey Peninsula, near the Stanford campus, where yet another movie magazine, Screen Album, took pictures of her and R.J., posing like lovebirds in the picturesque setting.

  By July, studio executives were losing patience with Natalie. The star whom the Los Angeles Examiner described as the “queen of the Warner Brothers lot” hadn’t worked for six months. That summer, she was offered a huge salary as the female lead in a prestige film. Natalie turned it down, saying she couldn’t be separated from R.J., resulting in publicity that made her appear either capricious or unreasonably demanding. The underlying reason, which Natalie did not disclose, was that one of the figures associated with the project was the famous, powerful actor she said had raped her.

  The tension with Warner Brothers reached a climax on July 14, when Natalie failed to show up for a meeting to discuss The Philadelphian, a courtroom drama costarring Paul Newman (later changed to The Young Philadelphians). She made the cover of Variety the next day for the wrong reasons: to report that Warner Brothers had placed Natalie Wood on unpaid suspension for refusing to appear in The Philadelphian.

  Natalie offered several principled explanations for her suspension in later years: that she refused to do “silly press,” she wanted the right to make pictures for other studios, and she wanted a voice in the roles offered to her by Warner Brothers. She was also unhappy with her salary, which was less than she was making as a child, at Fox.

  Natalie turned twenty a few days after she was suspended, celebrating her birthday by picking up the $27,050 in bonds that had accrued in her name since she became a child actress, money the Wagners needed without her salary. That same month, Natalie’s parents moved into a new house in Van Nuys, a few blocks from the Hyatts, offering the Laurel Canyon home to R.J. and Natalie.

  She spent the rest of the year out of work, a circumstance utterly alien to Natalie, who had acted for so much of her childhood she “didn’t know how to play.” She idled away some of her restlessness on the boat, with R.J. Occasionally they would sail to Catalina with their business manager, Andrew Maree III, and his wife, Prudence, who were in their wedding party. Prudence Maree recalls she and Natalie “kind of learned to like it, because the boat was a great love of R.J.’s.” Natalie also considered it “a place to get away from everything—ringing phones and fans and all the rest of it.” According to both the Marees, they would moor at Catalina and stay on the boat all weekend, playing cards and cooking on a hibachi. “Natalie was an excellent gin player,” recalls Andrew Maree. Neither wife set foot in the water.

  Natalie and R.J. discussed their boat with columnist Hedda Hopper then, in what would become an eerie interview in light of Natalie’s eventual drowning from their last boat, the Splendour. Wagner told Hopper, “I had my first boat before we were married, and Nat didn’t know anything about it. So she started reading books to learn how to run it, so if I fell overboard, she could come back and pick me up.” Natalie confessed to Hopper, in the same interview, that she would never set foot in the ocean. “It looks so dark down there, and I’m scared of fish. I sort of thought when the boat went along, the fish would swim away from it.”

  Faye Nuell, still a close friend, always found it odd that Natalie and R.J. had a boat, since Natalie was so terrified of dark seawater. Natalie addressed that question in a joint interview with R.J. for a magazine, after he teased her that he felt ignored when she took naps on the boat. Her comments are haunting, in view of how she died: “Don’t you realize that here I am, out in the middle of the ocean?” she asked him. “The boat could sink, a storm could come up, anything might happen. But am I afraid? No. So I lie in the sun and fall asleep—a little. Why? Because with you I feel safe, secure, but most of all happy. That’s a compliment.”

  R.J. taught Natalie to play gin rummy and poker, a game she enjoyed with wicked delight, beating her husband, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin on regular poker nights. The Wagners became fringe members of Sinatra’s “Clan,” taking the train to Vegas to play blackjack with Dino, Frank, or Peter Lawford, and to catch a show by Eddie Fisher.

  Steffi (Skolsky) Sidney, Natalie’s Rebel costar, was writing for a fan magazine called Datebook that November, and interviewed Natalie and R.J. for an “at home” profile on America’s sweethearts. While Sidney sat in their living room, R.J. rehearsed a dance number for his next movie, Say One for Me, as Natalie appeared, wearing a leopard-skin robe and slippers, accompanied by her poodles, Chi Chi and Chou Chou. She sat on the sofa beside Sidney, surrounded by her stuffed tigers, talking about how stars are different, how she wanted to bring glamour into peoples’ lives.

  Sidney found them both charming and adorable, but she left the Wagners’ home with a disturbing feeling that the marriage was doomed. She thought Natalie was too young, “and there was something about it that wasn’t real.” When Sidney tried to include her opinions in the article, the Wagners’ publicist struck her lines.

  By the end of the year, around the time of her first wedding anniversary, Natalie’s problems with the studio began to lift, triggered by Jack Warner’s return to work after a serious car accident, and Natalie’s discovery of Splendor in the Grass, which Elia Kazan, her movie god, had begun to develop at Warner Brothers.

  Both Kazan and Warners had Natalie in mind for the picture in its earliest stages. Her name appears in Kazan’s first handwritten casting notes (along with Jane Fonda and a crossed-out Lee Remick), and in his original letter of intent to Warner Brothers in January 1959 (with no other actress mentioned). He told his friend Richard Sylbert, and the Saturday Evening Post, that when he saw Natalie in Rebel, she stayed in his head.

  Warner Brothers was already intimating they would cast Natalie in Splendor while she was on suspension: the December 12, 1958, Hollywood Reporter reported that the studio had just “bought Inge’s Splendor for Natalie Wood.”

  As further confirmation, Natalie herself said later that Warner Brothers had promised her the lead in Splendor in the Grass if she would come back to the studio and first appear in Cash McCall, which is how it happened. She agreed to a new contract on February 24, 1959, after a seven-month suspension. By her new terms, she was permitted to make one non-Warner Brothers picture a year, and her salary increased to $1000 a week. In early April, she was gritting her teeth through Cash McCall, a vehicle to exploit James Garner’s television popularity as Maverick.

  The Wagners burst into the second year of their marriage spending money with reckless abandon. They bought each other matching Jaguars, and purchased a snow white showcase house at 714 North Beverly in the heart of Beverly Hills, announcing they wanted to �
��live like stars.” They hired the art director from Cash McCall and a decorator named Dewey Spriegel to turn their mansion into a Greek Revival masterpiece with white marble floors, gold rococo in the master bedroom, a saltwater pool, sunken tub, lanai, “His” and “Hers” Greek statuary, and a sixteen-foot wardrobe for Natalie’s clothes. R.J.’s butler followed him to the house on Beverly, where the surroundings were more suited to a manservant.

  “It was the very end of glamour with a capital ‘G,’ movie star with a capital ‘MS,’ ” Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith remembers.

  The mistress of the mansion wandered the halls like a stranger. “I had never thought about furniture or things like that,” Natalie later told the author of a book on child stars. “All I’d thought about is acting, and whether I got the part or not. When the decorator said, ‘What about the coffee table?’ I realized I’d never even noticed what goes on a coffee table. I’d never looked. I didn’t have any opinion about the kind of furniture I wanted. I’d always been so worried about being shy, or what people were going to think of me, or what I was going to say, that I’d never notice anything when I entered a room.”