Natalie started to see a psychoanalyst, to learn how to “just be,” struggling to reclaim the identity that was lost to her at six, when she became the actress Natalie Wood. “I didn’t know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be, they being agents, producers, directors, or whoever else I was trying to please at the time.” Natalie, in her sister Lana’s later observation, needed analysis as a place where she could “be naked and real.” R.J. was against it. He was threatened by the idea of his wife in analysis, just as Mud had been when Natalie briefly went to Marlowe’s therapist, perceiving it as a reflection on him. “I was afraid of it,” Wagner said later.
Robert Hyatt came back into Natalie’s life in 1959, after a stint in the Army, and saw her fairly often, since he and his mother lived near the Gurdins. He and Natalie talked about her therapist, an elderly doctor on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Natalie told Hyatt she needed therapy because she wanted to have a baby, and she was terrified to get pregnant because of Mud’s horror stories. Scott Marlowe experienced Natalie’s pregnancy fears when they were dating. “Oh my God, she was just frightened to death. We had to be very careful. We were very, very careful. Again, it was the mother.”
When Maria tried to force thirteen-year-old “Lana Lisa” into show business—pushing her to interview for a National Velvet television series and other acting jobs—Lana called Natalie in desperation. Natalie moved her little sister into her house on Beverly temporarily, even permitting Lana to sleep in the same bed with her and R.J. “Natalie protected her like she was Lana’s mother,” recalls Natalie’s agent, Zimring. Mud harrumphed to a movie magazine that Natalie “spoiled” Lana, whom she called “lazy.” “Which is why I became so attached to Natalie,” explains Lana. “Because she grew up and away and was married and I could go and stay with her. It was like actually being with somebody who cared about you.”
Natalie’s tenderness toward Lana, shielding her sister from their mother’s ambition, spoke volumes about the way Natalie perceived her own tragic childhood. She developed a fascination, that year, with a popular San Francisco-based artist named Margaret Keane, identifying with Keane’s paintings, which usually depicted a wispy waif-child with enormous, sad eyes. “She was obsessed with them,” recalls Dennis Hopper. “She thought they looked like her.”
Natalie commissioned Keane to paint her the way she had looked as a child, and sat for a portrait of herself at nearly twenty-one. Keane would remember Natalie posing for her, hours upon hours, without complaining or moving a muscle; still the little girl who would do anything to please. Keane’s adult portrait of Natalie, childlike in a simple black dress, gazing soulfully with dark, tragic eyes, was on display wherever Natalie lived for years afterward, representing her image of herself as a fragile figure of immense sadness. It was reminiscent of the refrain of her long-ago favorite song: “Where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?”
Her glamorous life with R.J. showed signs of strain. When Hyatt visited Natalie at the house on Beverly, he noticed enormous bottles of prescription pills in the medicine cabinet, with thousands of Seconals, Dexedrines, Nembutal, and Dexatrim. “Natalie would get up in the morning and take a Dexie, then she would have a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a glass of white wine for breakfast.” Hyatt considered her anorexic, before the term came into vogue. “She was worried about her weight, because she noticed her mother had gotten fatter as she got older, and she was afraid it would happen to her.”
Lana, who stayed for several weeks with her sister and R.J. after “running away,” was aware that her sister still took sleeping pills. A publicist who played poker at the Wagners’ recalls Natalie and R.J. using their colored prescription pills as “chips” in the poker game. Natalie’s diet and sleeping pills were commonplace in their crowd, asserts Faye Nuell. “It was like something people did then. It wasn’t thought of as drugs in those days. That was the day of the Dr. Feel-Goods—there were all these drugs. I knew Cary Grant when he was doing LSD with his psychiatrist. That was all before the sixties drug culture. Nobody thought about it.”
Natalie’s rebel years of drinking ended with her teens. Once she got married, she would have an occasional glass of champagne or wine (her favorite was Pouilly Fuissé). Hyatt noticed that when he visited the Wagners’ house, R.J. often had a bourbon-and-water in his hand.
Natalie and R.J. blended his Old Guard cronies with her younger contemporaries in their social life. According to actor Robert Conrad, part of a group called “the pack” then, “R.J. and Natalie had ‘pocket friends.’ One night or two nights it would be the young, contract, we’re-all-trying-to-make-it group, and then it would be the Fred Astaire, high-powered, Abe Lastfogel, president and head of William Morris. It was like that. And they entertained every night.”
The strange fascination between Frank Sinatra and Natalie continued after her marriage to R.J. One of the few people who knew about Natalie’s teenage friendship with Sinatra, Bobby Hyatt, recalls that Sinatra was a frequent guest at the Wagners’ when he was there. Natalie would be upstairs giggling with Sinatra, while R.J. played poker downstairs in the den, the only room not under construction.
In July, Sinatra cohosted with R.J. an extravagant surprise twenty-first birthday party for Natalie at Romanoff’s, serenading her in song with Dean Martin. Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith, who met Sinatra at the party and began a months-long romance with him, observed, that night, that Natalie was “smitten” with Sinatra, who “did treat Natalie with deference.” When Meredith started to date Sinatra, “Natalie would talk about Frank a lot, about how he treated her so beautifully.” In August, Sinatra invited the Wagners to New York with him and Meredith. They traveled together by train, spending several days on the East Coast, going to nightclubs like the Blue Angel and Monsignor’s.
Sometime the next year, when they were all four at a dinner party at Romanoff’s, Meredith was startled to have “a rift” with Natalie in the powder room over Sinatra. “I’m not confrontational at all, neither was Nat, but a couple of comments were made by each of us.” Natalie made it clear, in the encounter, she had a crush on Sinatra, “and I didn’t know it… and I think my being the center of attention with him—and at one point, very serious—that threw her, she didn’t expect it.”
The jealous confrontation over Sinatra ended the friendship between Natalie and Meredith, who thought Natalie’s infatuation was “a crush on a megastar. Sinatra was a magic person, an icon I guess. I don’t know if it was like something you think about—everybody fantasizes on what would have been, what could have been, what should have been but doesn’t. There’s a huge line between fantasy and acting out. We all make reality out of dreams.”
Natalie and R.J.’s profligate spending and fast life with such as Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, began to catch up with them by the end of 1959. “It was like we were playing house with play money,” Natalie said later, “and when it ran out—that was it.” To recoup their financial losses, they agreed to break their marital agreement to not make a picture together after MGM offered Natalie $150,000 to cast her with R.J. in a Southern Gothic soap opera ultimately called All the Fine Young Cannibals.
Natalie approached it with her usual dedication, moving a dialect coach into the house to teach her and R.J. the proper Texas accents, but the picture would come to be known as the fiasco of her career. Hyatt visited her on the set, where Natalie was worried whether her husband could handle a dramatic role.
Although Natalie joined R.J. earlier that year ridiculing “nose-picking fringe Method actors” in the New York Times, she was embarrassed by the bad Hollywood films she had made since accepting her star-making Faustian pact with Warner Brothers, beginning with the Tab Hunter pictures. It rankled her to be forced into Cash McCall by the studio, which had caused her to forfeit an opportunity to costar with Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, which she wanted “desperately.”
All of her hopes and dreams for her career seemed to resid
e with Splendor in the Grass, the picture Warners had dangled to get her to return to the studio. She saw Splendor, and its director, Kazan, as her last best hope to restore her integrity as an actress. As with Rebel, A Cry in the Night, and Marjorie Morningstar, her three earlier passion projects, Natalie deeply identified with the character in Splendor because of parallels to her own life. Wilma Dean, “Deanie,” the sweet high school girl in Splendor, was almost too close to Natalie for comfort.
In the script, by William Inge, Deanie has a weak but tender father and an overbearing mother who demonizes sex and tries to keep her from the high school boy she loves, with tragic results, leading Deanie into a mental institution for psychoanalysis. Natalie recognized herself, and Jimmy Williams, in the thwarted teen lovers Deanie and Bud, though in the movie it is Deanie—not Bud—who tries to commit suicide. The role excited her because of the storyline with the controlling mother, Natalie told her friend Bobby. At the same time, “I always had a bit of inner resistance to doing that part,” she said later, “because I felt I would have to open doors and relive a lot of feelings that I had put the lid on. I had a hunch that emotionally it wasn’t going to be good for me… [that it would] open up a lot of wounds.”
The script also called for the character of Deanie to sob in several scenes, to walk on a high ledge, to submerge her head under water in a bathtub, and try to drown herself—some of Natalie’s most deep-seated fears. Natalie ultimately decided she had to play Deanie, despite the emotional risks, because of a greater fear: she told Kazan, when they met, she was afraid her career was in danger.
Natalie’s first encounter with the director she idolized since seeing A Streetcar Named Desire at thirteen was a dramatic illustration of the Natalie/Maria schism in actress “Natalie Wood.” Her by now best friend Norma Crane, a graduate of the Actors Studio, was with Natalie as she was dressing at the Waldorf in New York to see Kazan about playing Deanie. As Crane would recall, “The girl in Splendor is the purest, most virginal girl in the world, and Natalie was putting on mascara, high heels up to here, false eyelashes, bracelets, rings. I said: ‘You’re going to meet Kazan. The part!’ She said: ‘I’m Natalie Wood and that’s how I go out at 7 at night.’”
Kazan’s encounter with Natalie was illuminating for the director. Although she was his original choice to play Deanie, he said later that he had second thoughts while he was developing the project at Warner Brothers, worried about hiring a “has-been child star.” According to Leonard Hirshan, one of Natalie’s agents at Morris, Kazan also “didn’t feel that she looked as virginal as he wanted… he was looking for a quality that he didn’t see in her then.”
Upon meeting Natalie, the shrewd Kazan, who was famous for psychoanalyzing his actors, correctly perceived Natalie as half-child, half-woman, “like a doll dressed up by adults.” He saw a “desperate twinkle” underneath the makeup and recognized an “unsatisfied hunger” in Natalie to excel. He looked past her mink, and believed Natalie when she told him she was “disgusted with the image” she had acquired.
He recalled, two years later, “I put paint remover on her, took off her glamorous clothes, and put her up there, naked and gasping. She wanted a new career, and I guess I gave her a new career. She had tremendous willpower to be good. So many actors, you feel they have a private life, a husband and kids, and acting has a place. But with her, acting is her whole life.”
Natalie told Kazan she would do anything for him in the picture, with one exception: she confessed her terror of “feeling helpless in dark water,” saying that she would require a double for the scene where Deanie tries to drown herself. What else she confided only they knew.
Before Natalie arrived on the East Coast to begin Splendor, assistant director Don Kranze recalls, “I remember Kazan saying to us—because Natalie was sort of a lightweight from the Kazan standpoint, okay?—he said, ‘You’re going to see a Natalie Wood that you’ve never seen before.’ So he had something in mind.”
Natalie and R.J. left Hollywood like movie stars on April 8, 1960, for Natalie to begin Splendor in the Grass, taking the luxurious Super Chief, accompanied by Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor, who was on her way back to New York to complete Butterfield 8. The Wagners rented an apartment on Sutton Place overlooking the East River, where R.J. practiced the piano for a picture that never materialized, Solo, despondent over his career, which he said later was “going downhill.”
Natalie started Splendor with the mingled fear and pleasure she had Rebel, describing her work with Kazan as a return to the “golden world” of Nick Ray. She would recall Kazan encouraging her, “Don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself,” to be bold, be free, to “shock herself,” helping Natalie to realize that her perfectionism was inhibiting her. She was stimulated by the cramped, makeshift New York stages where they were shooting, so unlike the artificiality of Hollywood. “She worked as if her life depended upon it,” as Kazan famously would later say.
Kazan’s makeup person, Bob Jiras (“B.J.”), had been preparing for Natalie’s arrival with the same idea of transforming her. “I knew that Kazan didn’t like makeup that much, and I went to see a couple of Natalie’s films, and she was always very heavily made-up. And I knew that Kazan wouldn’t want that.” Jiras used “a very simple makeup” on Natalie in a filmed test as the sweet Deanie—less, even, than in Rebel Without a Cause—leaving it to Kazan to convince her that she would still look beautiful without her Natalie Wood mask.
Kazan watched the test with Natalie and Jiras, as Natalie gasped at her nearly naked face, “and Kazan turned to Natalie and said, ‘B.J. is really talented, don’t you think?’ And that’s how he got her. He could feel her negativism, so we had to present it as that’s the look she wanted, instead of her saying, ‘Don’t you think I need more lipstick?’ It ended right there.” Natalie was enamored of the way she looked in Splendor because Kazan was. She became instant close friends with the affable, talented Jiras and requested him on nearly every subsequent picture.
Natalie’s costar in Splendor in the Grass was Warren Beatty, a gorgeous, intense young actor making his film debut as Deanie’s teen love, Bud, on the recommendation of William Inge, who had earlier cast Beatty in an unprofitable production of his play A Loss of Roses, Beatty’s only other credit. “Warren, hell, hadn’t done anything,” as Pat Hingle, the Kazan protégé who played Beatty’s/Bud’s tyrannical father recalls. “Warren had been in a Bill Inge play that didn’t succeed… he could hardly have been more of a neophyte.”
The popular mythology in Hollywood, in future years, would be that Natalie and Beatty began a love affair while making Splendor, under the noses of Robert Wagner and Beatty’s fiancée, Joan Collins, who left for London early in the production to star in Esther and the King. The rumor about Natalie and Beatty became so pervasive by 1988, that Kazan included it as fact in his memoir published that year.
In truth, Natalie and Beatty disliked each other throughout the filming of Splendor in the Grass. Natalie talked about it in later years, in interviews with the New York Times, Interview, and Cosmopolitan, describing Beatty as “difficult to work with.” Bob Jiras, who was doing her makeup, confirms Natalie found him problematic.
“Warren was a pain in the ass,” affirms Kranze, the assistant director. “He was very young, anyway, but his emotional maturity was about thirteen… we all sort of felt about Warren that he’s an immature boy playing a man’s game.” Richard Sylbert, the Oscar-winning production designer who worked on Splendor, one of Beatty’s best friends, admits, “He was a real pain in the ass. The crew called him ‘donkey dick.’ He was the Warren Beatty he was gonna become, meaning—and I say this, this is all good—he was gonna do what he wanted to do. He didn’t care what anybody thought.”
Natalie became so annoyed with Beatty she asked Kazan’s right-hand man, Charlie Maguire, his associate producer, to keep Beatty out of her dressing room. As Kranze explains, “In New York it wasn’t so fancy shmancy. We didn’t have a separate room for her and
a separate room for him, so they shared the makeup area. Charlie said she didn’t want him in there. ‘She can’t stand him, she wants him out of there.’ That was his remark to me.” Natalie would later tell several Hollywood writers, for publication, that she and Beatty had so much friction, she worried whether they would be convincing in their love scenes.
Natalie repeated this to Robert Redford, when they became friends later. “She told me she didn’t like him. That’s not when they got together.” The production designer, Sylbert, one of Beatty’s best friends and a friend of Natalie’s, confirms, “There was nothing going on during the film. And not only that, they didn’t like each other. Nothing happened, I guarantee it. And he’s told me that, and she told me that.” Natalie’s confidant, Jiras, states flatly, “There was no love affair. There was nothing.”
Joan Collins, who flew to New York on weekends to see her fiancé, further denies there was an affair between Natalie and Beatty. “She wouldn’t let him out of her sight,” Jiras says of Collins. As filming progressed, Natalie began to respect Beatty’s talent, and found him attractive, Jiras noticed, but she still considered him a pain. Natalie gave Beatty the secret nickname “Mental Anguish.” “Here comes ‘Mental Anguish,’ ” she would whisper to Jiras. “Then it was shortened to ‘M.A.’”
During an in-depth interview between her two marriages to Wagner, Natalie addressed the rumor she had an affair with Beatty, calling it “complete, utter nonsense.”
As free-spirited as Natalie was in her rebellious teen years, when boyfriends lined around the block, once she married, she respected her marriage vows, as those close to her knew. The image of gaiety that became associated with Natalie from her zany movie magazine covers as America’s Teen was “Natalie Wood,” not Natalie. Lana comments, “Natalie was—I don’t want to say that she was more serious than she was fun, but if you had to draw lines, she was. Even her type of ‘fun’ was more serious than anyone else’s.”
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