Natalie viewed her marriage to R.J. as her one-and-only, her fantasy fulfilled, and she committed herself in the only way she knew how to do things, all or nothing. “She really wanted these things to work,” observes her friend Sylbert. “Not that people don’t have affairs in Hollywood, but it’s not something, I don’t think, that she would have done—by nature. She wasn’t gonna be married and have an affair at the same time.”
Natalie’s love affair on Splendor was with Deanie, the movie, and working with Kazan, who brought her to the greatest emotional heights of her career. The experience was exhilarating but wrenching for Natalie, who faced her demons on Splendor.
She was panicky about shooting the bathtub scene, where Deanie has a volatile confrontation with her mother about sex and purity, ending by Deanie dunking her head in the bath water, then standing up, naked and hysterical, shouting, “I’m a good little girl, Mom!” Natalie dreaded the scene, confessing to Kazan (“Gadge,” as friends called him) that she had an emotional block about crying on cue. According to Lana:
Elia Kazan—Gadge—said to her, “Do you not understand the scene? Do you not understand how you’re feeling?” She said, “Yes, I do, I do. I just don’t think I can shed tears. I won’t be able to cry.”
And he said, “Aha.” And he said, “Okay,” and he asked [actress] Barbara Loden to come over, and he said, “Could you cry for Natalie?” And Barbara said, “Sure,” put her head down for a moment, lifted her head up and tears were streaming down her face. Kazan said, “Thanks.”
Barbara left, and he said to Natalie, “Well, how did that make you feel?” And Natalie said, “Well, it makes me feel terrible. I can’t do it!” And he said, “No, no, you’re missing the point. How did it make you feel? What were you feeling when you were watching her cry?” And Natalie said, “Well, I was in awe that she could do it.”
And he said, “Yes, but did you feel empathy? Were you moved?” And she said, “Well, no.” And he said, “Exactly. There’s a big difference between just being able to turn on tears and actually feeling something and have that come true in your scene, in your acting. As long as you know what it is that you are feeling, and it’s true for the character, it doesn’t matter if you shed a tear or not. It’s still going to be moving.”
And then she felt better about that.
According to Kranze, the assistant director, Kazan put off the bathtub scene for several weeks, knowing Natalie was frantic about crying, and about putting her head under water. She would also be performing wearing only pasties. As he was preparing to shoot the scene, Kazan cleverly baited Natalie by telling her he could shoot the scene without showing her face if she didn’t think she could be emotional enough.
Then he whispered into the ear of Audrey Christie, the actress who was playing Natalie’s mother, to stand offstage and taunt Natalie before the cameras started to roll. “He had Audrey say a line which he knew would set me off. It wasn’t the line in the script. But it was a line which, when I was little, used to drive me crazy. You know that mother’s tone, so sweet: ‘Darling, is there something bothering you? Is there something I can do to help?’ Audrey just said that line in that sweet tone, and I went off the way I always used to [with my mother] and they shot it and that was it.”
Kazan may also have come up with the idea to have Natalie remove her “magic” bracelet, knowing that the feeling of insecurity that caused would heighten her performance, for she is not wearing a bracelet in the bathtub scene in Splendor, one of the few times when Natalie’s misshaped left wrist was exposed to the camera.
The combination of Kazan’s wizardry, Natalie’s emotional connection to the mother/daughter conflict in the scene, the panic of dousing her head under the bath water, and the vulnerability she felt at being seen “naked”—without her bracelet—produced a hysteria in Natalie that may be her most powerful moment as an actress.
“She broke wide open that day,” recalls Kazan’s assistant director, Don Kranze. “That was her first day where she really—she hit the scene. And it was clear that she was just terrific. I know Kazan felt good that day. He felt that he had really hit something. And we all did. Anyone who really was thinking about the movie other than their paycheck, saw something pretty good happening.”
According to Kranze, “From then on, it was easy” with Natalie. “She broke open. She became a full-fledged—she was gonna hit that role out of the park after that day.” Kranze noticed that when Natalie finished the mother/daughter confrontation scene in the bathtub, “she was emotionally moved… she felt lousy afterwards.”
According to Natalie, Kazan employed other “tricks” to provoke her into an emotional state, related to her fear of heights and of water. She told the London Times that Gadge lied to her about the scene where she had to walk on a high ledge, telling her that his assistant would be holding her hand off-camera. As soon as Kazan called action, the assistant released Natalie’s hand, terrifying her—the reaction he wanted for the scene.
Kazan was more diabolical toward the end of filming, when the cast and crew traveled to a reservoir at High Falls in upstate New York to film the sequence where Deanie tries to commit suicide by jumping off a ledge into a waterfall, the scene Gadge promised Natalie he would hire a double to perform. Several versions exist as to what happened. Natalie said later:
Elia Kazan assured me a double would do the scene where I was required to swim under an eight-foot waterfall. But then it turned out the double couldn’t swim at all, and I had to do it. I told Kazan: “I’ll do it only if you take me out to the waterfall and throw me in. I know I can’t swim that far, and I’m scared besides.” And that’s what they did. They threw me in, and had to get me out fast before I drowned.
Kazan denied it, after Natalie died. “How could you use a damn double? You had to go ten miles away,” he protested, claiming that he “gentled her into it,” and used his assistant, Charlie Maguire, to stay near her under the water for reassurance, admitting she was “not entirely reassured.”
There was a double. Natalie gave an interview to the New York Mirror that June, shortly after filming the waterfall scene, complaining about her bruised legs, scraped hand and swollen right wrist, offering the same account of how Kazan had hired a double who couldn’t swim well. Less than two months later, a bit player named Martha Linda Martin threatened to sue Warner Brothers over Natalie’s comments in the press, alleging that she was Natalie’s double for the scene, and that she could swim—suggesting that Kazan had employed a double, but misled Natalie that the double couldn’t swim to deceive her into doing the scene.
Kazan’s assistant director, Don Kranze, “won’t say it’s not true, because when we talk about Kazan tricking actors into doing things, that’s Kazan. He’s a great, great director, but a more ruthless man you will not find when it comes to getting what he wants. As all directors must be. Directors must be ruthless—and psychiatrists and psychologists and liars and manipulators and actors and whatever. They play a host of parts. I can’t deny that he tricked Natalie into something because that’s Kazan’s method.” Maguire, Kazan’s assistant, recalls holding Natalie’s hand during the waterfall scene, but is vague about the rest. Her hairdresser, Willis Hanchett, remembers the double, and learning that the double couldn’t swim, “so Natalie, being the trouper that she was, said, ‘I will do it,’ and she did.”
Natalie was “tremendously proud of having done it herself, she was ecstatic—though she was also furious that she had been hoodwinked into this,” although Natalie had known, since Rebel, that Kazan was famous for manipulating his actors, something she and Dennis Hopper had talked about frequently in their “bull” sessions about acting.
According to Kranze, who helped to set up both the waterfall and the ledge scenes for Kazan, “I can tell you, when Natalie had to get into that water, in that river, she was deadly afraid of the water. I mean deadly. And where we were, she had a good reason to be, although I didn’t know it at the time. We were in a stupid place.
We were on the edge of a waterfall, a slow-moving waterfall. What I didn’t realize at the time, or what the production manager should have realized, is that we should have kept checking upstream to see if there were any dams on that river that they might let it loose. I don’t think we even thought of the possibility of a heavy rainstorm fifty miles away. And it could have been dangerous. We should have done a lot more checking before working there.”
Natalie earned the respect and affection of everyone concerned with Splendor, creating such an indelible portrait of the Kansas innocent Wilma Dean, “it was so easy for me to forget that she was Natalie, and believe that she was just this high school kid called Deanie,” praises Pat Hingle, an Actors Studio great. “In my mind right now, when I think of her, the picture comes to me is of this teenage girl in bobby socks and that sort of thing. I am from that neck of the woods, so I know well the Midwest, and I don’t think that she could possibly have had any kind of a background like that, but she was very believable as a small-town girl. And to my mind, that’s acting.”
Actor Gary Lockwood, who played the cad who tries to seduce Deanie before her suicide attempt, felt “Kazan and Natalie were a terrific marriage, because you had this beautiful girl, and you had somebody that could get things out of her.” Lockwood characterized R.J., who was often on the Splendor set to see Natalie and would later work with Lockwood’s first wife, Stefanie Powers, as a “professional” movie star. “Natalie was a bona fide movie star. I don’t give a shit that she didn’t do Broadway or whatever, but I mean, the camera looked at her, and she turned her head to the right, and she was vulnerable, and beautiful, and you can’t buy that.”
Kazan’s favorite scene in Splendor was the last one, when a worldly, mature Deanie (Natalie—looking radiant and beautiful in a white dress and a white, wide-brimmed hat) goes back to see her lost first love, Bud (Beatty—in overalls), finding he has married a simple girl and is living on a farm. “It’s terribly touching to me. I still like it when I see it.” Kazan’s bittersweet ending illustrates poignantly paths not taken, as Natalie’s voiceover, as Deanie, is heard to quote from Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” saying:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
The lines in Wordsworth’s poem, and Deanie’s emotions, had special pathos for Natalie, reminding her of herself with Jimmy, the “old wounds” she had anticipated opening when she hesitated whether to take the role. Kazan was unaware of Natalie’s heartbreaking first love, though he recognized, as he was shooting the scene, that it struck a personal chord with Natalie, saying later, “[The scene] is wonderful because of her—because of her own pain about it. Whatever that came from, I don’t know. But you didn’t have to direct that. She had it right off. She understood it.”
While she was in the middle of shooting Splendor in the Grass, Natalie got an urgent call from her agent, saying that the Mirisch Company wanted her for the part of Maria in the film version of West Side Story, which director Robert Wise was preparing to start shooting with no leading lady in sight. The way it came about was “an odd situation,” Natalie would say later.
She had been approached about West Side Story a year earlier, around her twenty-first birthday, when the Mirisch Company was developing it with its creator and choreographer Jerome Robbins, and with Wise. Wise, and Walter Mirisch, wanted to cast the original Maria on Broadway, stage actress Carol Lawrence, but decided she “was not young enough anymore to play it in the film.” At an early production meeting, someone mentioned they needed “a fawn in the forest” to play the innocent, vulnerable Puerto Rican girl Maria, prompting casting director Lynn Stalmaster to suggest Natalie Wood. The suggestion was taken seriously enough to make the trades that July, and Natalie told Hedda Hopper in the beginning of 1960 she had been offered the part.
In the six months that followed, the Mirisches and the film’s co-directors, Wise and Robbins, “wanted to find an unknown who could sing,” but who “also had the acting chops” to play Maria, resulting in what assistant director Robert Relyea called “the largest testing, searching program probably ever in Hollywood’s history.” When the quest proved futile, Wise and Robbins tested actresses Anna Maria Alberghetti, Suzanne Pleshette, Diane Baker, Pier Angeli, Angie Dickinson, Jane Fonda, Hope Lange, and Susan Kohner. By late June 1960, with only a few weeks before filming, “panic set in,” and Natalie reemerged as a top contender, even though she was not a professional singer or dancer, nor was she Puerto Rican.
According to Wise, the Mirisches decided they needed a “name” actress around the time they all saw a screen test of Warren Beatty from Splendor, whom they briefly contemplated to play Tony, Maria’s boyfriend. When Natalie appeared on camera as the innocent Deanie, “we said, ‘That’s our Maria.’ ” Jerome Robbins said later he was impressed by Natalie’s “depth.”
Natalie was not eager to play another ingénue and was unsure she was right for the part, dangling the Mirisches into July, while she was filming Splendor. She celebrated her twenty-second birthday on the twentieth with a small on-set party, surprised by a lavish birthday dinner that night at Pierre’s, arranged by R.J., who flew in Mud from California to blow out the candles on Natalie’s birthday cake. (“All was a secret,” Maria said after Natalie’s death, still thrilled at the memory. “She was shooting that day, and she came to the hotel room and R.J. had me in the closet. She didn’t know that I was there. And R.J. said, ‘Well, you’re tired, we’re not gonna have a party or anything, just you and me will go to this restaurant.’ He said, ‘Go in the closet and get something pretty and we’ll celebrate, just you and me, very romantic.’ She open the door and there I was standing there!”) Sinatra, who was rehearsing at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, sent twenty-two bouquets of flowers to the restaurant every half hour, hiring musicians to sing to Natalie “Nothing Like a Dame.”
That weekend, as Natalie and R.J. left for New Jersey to attend Sinatra’s opening night, Natalie’s agent, Leonard Hirshan, got an emergency call, as Wise and Robbins began to film the New York exterior scenes in West Side Story:
Bobby Wise finally, at the eleventh hour, made the decision that he would like to go with Natalie Wood, but he wanted to meet with her that weekend… and I said, “She’s going to Asbury Park to see Frank Sinatra, who’s performing at a club.” So I told Bobby Wise and Jerome Robbins that if they wanted to meet her this weekend, they’re going to have to go to Asbury Park, and they said, “Okay, how about 9 A.M. Sunday morning?”
Saturday night, Natalie was seeing Frank Sinatra. I flew to Philadelphia, drove down to Asbury Park and joined Natalie and R.J. seeing Frank Sinatra perform two shows, eating dinner with him in the kitchen—Natalie, R.J., and the boys—and then going back to Sinatra’s suite until about 4:00 in the morning.
At 9 A.M., we had the meeting with the two gentlemen. It was very brief, very nice, and Bobby said, “We would love to have you do the picture,” and she said, “I’d love to do it.”
Hirshan, an associate of Joe Schoenfeld, Natalie’s primary agent at William Morris, boasted, before he left for the East Coast, that he could get Natalie $250,000 for the part, an astronomical sum in 1960. After the meeting with Wise and Robbins, Harold Mirisch agreed to the figure. When Hirshan flew back to L.A., “Harold Mirisch says, ‘Look, I know I said $250,000, but would you take into consideration $200,000 plus 5% of the profits?’ ” Joe Schoenfeld demanded the straight $250,000 salary. “Some people like to get whatever you can up front. Me, I’m a believer in royalty,” asserts Hirshan. “I, in later years, found out that 5% of the profits was worth one million dollars! Therefore, by taking 250 instead of 200, that extra 50,000 caused Natalie to give up a million dollars.” Two years later, Natalie said sheepishly, “Don’t think I’m smart; I was offered a percentage on West Side Story and didn’t take it.”
Natalie
signed to play Maria during her emotionally trying last three weeks as Deanie, saying later she was “so busy concentrating,” she hardly thought of the musical aspects of the role, requiring her to perform complex dance numbers and a light operatic score. At the same time, it was the opportunity to sing that intrigued Natalie to star in West Side Story.
The agreement that was reached about the use of her singing voice is somewhat unclear. Producer Walter Mirisch recalls her agent, Schoenfeld, telling him that Natalie “thought she could do it and wanted the chance.” According to Mirisch, she accepted the part on the condition they would let her try, with only an “outside chance” they would use her singing voice. Director Robert Wise has a similar “we’ll try it and see” recollection, though Saul Chaplin, the associate producer in charge of music, claimed later he knew from the beginning they would have to dub Natalie.
Natalie’s perception, clearly, was different. She arranged for voice lessons to begin as soon as she returned to L.A., excited at working with an orchestra. Marni Nixon, who eventually dubbed her voice, felt Natalie “really did believe” her voice would be used. “Natalie wanted to sing more than she wanted to breathe,” asserts her friend Robert Blake, who would play the guitar for her while Natalie sang. “She loved being a singer.”
Natalie attended a wrap party in New York for Splendor the middle of August, bidding farewell to her incompatible costar, Beatty, whose gag gift from Kazan at the party was a hand mirror that said, “Good God, Warren.” According to Kazan’s assistant director, Kranze, the mirror was a symbol for Beatty’s vanity during filming. “I recall distinctly getting on the set early in the morning and he’s in there before his makeup call… he’s in front of a mirror, a set stage, where the mirror’s right on the stage—and he’s got a straight pin, right? He’s putting that pin into each eyelash, and separating and moving them forward. He’s separating every goddamn eyelash! He’s going one by one by one. Oh my God, this is six feet of pure ego!”
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