Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Natalie’s movie star entourage, as it would be viewed, was really an emotional support system; a family, of sorts, to keep her from being alone. She admitted, in a televised documentary, that she would “panic” without them on set. Tony Curtis, her three-time costar, noticed, “Natalie always needed somebody. Always needed somebody running her life. She always had two or three guys, or somebody.”

  She bought an extra ticket every time she had to fly, making sure someone from her trusted circle was beside her on the plane. “She didn’t like to fly, but to fly alone, it was hell for her,” states Jiras. Once in 1964, when Jiras missed a flight, Natalie refused to speak to him for days, even though her business secretary, Mona Clark, was on the plane next to her. “I was alone,” she later told Jiras.

  The two invisible members of Natalie’s entourage were her psychoanalyst, Dr. John Lindon; and Maria. She phoned them both, every day, in ritualistic fashion: her mother in the morning, and Dr. Lindon at noon.

  Maria continued to live as the shadow “Natalie Wood,” signing autographs as Natalie, lurking on the set, attending Natalie’s premieres, managing her career moves, using the phone as an umbilical cord when Natalie was not with her. Her frequent companion was Shirley Moore, a neighbor who adored “Marie.” “She just was the most fun person to be around. She would tell you story after story after story. I remember once a neighbor came over to her house and said, ‘Oh, Marie! Look at the ring on your little finger. I just love your little finger ring.’ She took it off and gave it to her.”

  Moore saw Natalie and Maria together often, describing them as “very close,” characterizing Natalie as “a wonderful daughter.” Every Christmas Eve, “Natalie would put a $5000 check under her mother’s plate—and then we’d go car-hunting!” Moore witnessed the unusual relationship between Maria and Nick, whom she found to be a “sweetheart,” even though his vodka rages had become so frequent, and so violent, Moore provided Maria with a key to her house so she could spend the night on the occasions Nick chased after her with a gun.

  Mud retreated into further fantasy, still spinning dreams about marrying her Russian captain, with whom she kept in touch. “She did nothing but talk about him,” remembers Mann, who felt, nonetheless, “Marie loved Nick, he was such a handsome man.”

  Nick was a heartbreaking character to Robert Hyatt, who used to see him at the bus stop “after he had too many drunk drivings and smashed into the back of some parked car, so they took away his license.” Hyatt would pick up Fahd and drive him to his carpentry job at the studio, taking him home at night. “We would always go to this little bar and he would blast down the vodka, then go next door to the liquor store, buy a pint of vodka, stick it in his tool box, go home, go in his room, read his newspaper and drink the vodka until he passed out. He’d just given up.” Natalie was disgusted by his drinking, but anguished over her beloved Fahd, worried the next phone call would be from a hospital, to inform her he was dead.

  Natalie pretended she was in love with Loew, flashing a fourteen-karat diamond engagement ring to Mud and her friend Shirley Mann on the set of Sex and the Single Girl, refusing to take it off before her scenes, “so they turned the ring around and put tape on it, because they didn’t want the ring showing in the movie.”

  Loew was an also-ran to Natalie’s real passion, stardom. By the end of filming, she was named “Star of the Year” by the United Theater Owners, and had been nominated for her third Oscar. David Wolper produced a documentary about Natalie that winter called Hollywood’s Child, Warner Brothers prepared a Natalie Wood movie trailer, “Born in a Trunk,” and Life published a lengthy profile, “Born to Be a Star,” in December 1963, featuring a famous picture of Natalie at the head of a long conference table in a chic black suit and hat, holding court over her retinue of attorneys, agents, publicists, and business manager. Wolper filmed her for the documentary sitting up in bed, dressed in a peignoir, taking occasional puffs on a long cigarette holder, purring instructions to her agent over the phone as a maid walked in, carrying a tray with juice and coffee.

  Her costar, Tony Curtis, perceived Natalie in desperate pursuit of “the sweet smell of success. She was ready to sacrifice anything and everything for it.” Curtis, who had known Natalie since her late teens, attributed it to Maria. “Natalie was brought up in that profession and she wasn’t going to let anything stand in her way. She was searching for that ultimate hit. I personally don’t feel anything was as important to her.”

  Sex and the Single Girl, despite its confused and eccentric history, was a hilarious romp of confused identities and a slapstick chase scene, “mirth that was mine,” Heller would say. Natalie had a natural flair for comedy, something she dismissed, recalls her teen friend Jackie, “because she wanted to be a dramatic actress.” Jiras felt that Natalie possessed Carole Lombard’s combination of beauty and screwball comedy. “She adored the original, outrageous things Mel Brooks did with Carl Reiner, so that ought to give you a clue how funny she was. She used to quote his things.”

  Later in life, Tony Curtis would say he had better chemistry with Natalie than any other costar, citing his psychotherapy scenes with her in Sex as “about the funniest things I’ve ever seen. It was a wonderful dance. You can’t get it better. We never stepped on each other. She always gave me my moments and vice-versa.” He reveals, “Natalie and I had to be careful, because we found each other quite attractive, but I just didn’t want to degenerate the relationship and neither did she.” At the same time, Curtis “never felt aroused,” admitting, “Natalie’s boom-booms weren’t big enough. To each his own.”

  Curtis was aware, from his years around Natalie, that “Natalie Wood,” the movie star, was an invented personality. “Natalie never allowed herself the privilege to be who she wanted to be. Everything about her was very organized: the way she presented herself, the way she worked, her social life. I never felt much of a spontaneity, I always felt that it was somewhat under control.” Curtis also knew that her mother was the one who had created, and enforced, the star persona. “And Natalie didn’t want that, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She knew that if she blew the whistle on her mother, a lot of people in town would take that as a bad gesture, and since she was so professionally oriented, she didn’t want anything to interfere with her career, so therefore she put up with her mother’s machinations.”

  The tragedy for Natalie, in Curtis’ opinion, was that “her sense of who she was, her needs, were completely different from what she got from her profession. She would have been much happier as a nun or a hooker.” He noticed, when he was with her, “she had these depressions. I could see a cloud—some shadow in her sweet face, and I knew that she was suffering.”

  Curtis also witnessed Natalie’s water phobia, in a scene where her character jumps off a Malibu pier to “rescue” Curtis’ character. A stunt double made the jump, but Natalie was needed for close-ups in the sea-water, as she struggles to save Curtis’ character from drowning. Richard Quine, the director, shot the close-ups using a huge tank on the Warners lot. By what has become an unsettling coincidence, David Wolper shot footage of Natalie in the water scene for his documentary, Hollywood’s Child, providing a haunting record of Natalie, gingerly stepping down a ladder into the dark water, clinging to trained divers. Wolper’s documentary footage shows her once the scene is completed, standing in the water tank with a cigarette holder, glamorous and seemingly amused. What Wolper did not include was Natalie, at the end of the scene, with her head submerged in the dark tank. As she popped out of the water, “she flipped out,” recalls the on-set photographer, Bill Claxton.

  After finishing Sex and the Single Girl, Natalie faced a painful disappointment, failing to win an Academy Award for Love with the Proper Stranger, her third Oscar loss and her last nomination. The evening was doubly poignant, for one of her competitors that night was French actress Leslie Caron, on Warren Beatty’s arm.

  Natalie broke off her ambiguous engagement to Arthur Loew, Jr.
, a week later, returning to their former status as friends, leaving her alone, except for her paid companions.

  Five days after the papers announced she had dissolved her wedding plans, Natalie spent a quiet evening with Lana at the booth she and R.J. used to share at La Scala, a celebrity haunt in Beverly Hills. By a cruel coincidence, R.J. happened to walk in that night, rushing to announce to friends that he was the father of a baby girl named Katharine. R.J. darted from booth to booth passing out cigars, while Natalie summoned all of her gifts as an actress to congratulate him. She broke down in the car, with Lana, weeping inconsolably “for myself and what might have been.”

  R.J.’s news punctuated Natalie’s loneliness, and resurrected her loss over the dream life she thought she would have with R.J. When he married the older, mature Marion Marshall, Natalie had not been as traumatized, since the perception in Hollywood, according to columnist Rona Barrett, was that the marriage was an arrangement and payback for Marshall’s loyalty to Wagner during his period of adjustment in Europe, “and by marrying him she was able to circumvent the English custody laws and bring her children home to Hollywood.” Even their daughter, Katie Wagner, as an adult, would admit, “They’re really friends.”

  R.J. becoming a father was a different emotional anguish for Natalie, who had longed for a baby when they were married, blocked by her fear of childbirth and R.J.’s resistance, “and now, here he was, telling me about the birth of his daughter by another woman.” After seeing him at La Scala, passing out cigars, Natalie plunged into a dark abyss, muttering to Lana, “I’ve got to have a baby, I’ve got to have a baby.”

  “She wanted desperately to have a child,” states Lana. “She used to say that if she couldn’t find anybody to marry, and father this child that she so desperately wanted, she really wanted Gregory Peck to father the child!” That month, Natalie was a guest at then-producer Dominick Dunne and his wife, Lenny’s, tenth anniversary Black and White anniversary party, attended by the gods and goddesses of the cinema. In later years, writing about the party, Dunne would pronounce Natalie Wood the most beautiful of them all, a strange irony for a woman unable to find someone to love her.

  The Great Race, Natalie’s next picture, came at the worst possible time emotionally. Warners had forced her into it by promising to cast her in Inside Daisy Clover, an Alan Pakula/Robert Mulligan project Natalie found out about while she was making Sex and the Single Girl, pursuing Mulligan “relentlessly” to play Daisy, a teenage star created and then nearly destroyed by the studio system.

  Tony Curtis, who went from Sex and the Single Girl into The Great Race with Natalie, knew “she wasn’t happy with the way her career was going,” and that she believed Daisy Clover was the role that would bring her recognition. “She never felt that she achieved the height of what she wanted, and she wanted that so bad she could taste it. I know that for a fact. So she put up with an awful lot of movies and relationships in order to try to achieve that. The only way she could make herself available for Clover was to do The Great Race, because Jack Warner wanted it that way. And she wasn’t really interested.”

  Natalie and Curtis became estranged between the end of Sex and the Single Girl and the start of The Great Race, according to Curtis’ first wife, Janet Leigh, and by the observations of Martin Jurow, who produced The Great Race, and Jurow’s wife, Erin. Erin Jurow recalls, “We knew about the angst… because Tony was very vocal about it. He just didn’t really want to work with her.” Curtis refers, now, to a conversation he had with Jack Warner before shooting. “He asked me if I would give her some of my percentage so that she would do the movie.” Curtis balked. “I couldn’t give her anything to make her want to do the movie.”

  The Great Race, which began filming June 15, 1964, was a big-budget farce about a turn-of-the-century car race in which Natalie played a fiery suffragette in fabulous Edith Head costumes, “torn between two macho men, an evil one and a noble one,” played by Jack Lemmon and Curtis, as “Professor Fate” and “The Great Leslie.” Director Blake Edwards, a comic genius who “worshipped that kind of slapstick comedy where the girl got the pie in the face,” created what Natalie called a “party atmosphere” that she disliked. “I prefer a closed set, with no visitors… The Great Race went on forever, and then came the day when we had about five hundred extras, and the director turned loose a man dressed as a gorilla. Just for a joke, you understand.”

  Edwards ignored Natalie, assigning her to his producing partner, Martin Jurow, so he could concentrate on Curtis, Lemmon, and actor Peter Falk, who played Lemmon’s moronic sidekick. “Blake was more interested in the humor that he was getting out of Jack and Peter,” Jurow recalls, “and he was a person who didn’t worry too much about rehearsing. Natalie was not as important [to him].”

  According to Jurow, Curtis “bothered” Natalie throughout filming, “like little boys in the playground pick on certain little girls, very juvenile,” as Jurow’s wife describes. He set up a “lunch club” with himself as maitre d’, excluding Natalie. At one point, they stopped speaking to each other. “She established, very early, an equality with Jack and Tony, and she wasn’t going to be put down on a lower level, and Tony was trying to do that,” relates Jurow. “She went to Blake, and she fought for her position. We loved her for it.”

  The elaborate production, which required location shooting in Salzburg, Vienna, Paris and throughout California, was “not a thrill” for Natalie, concurs Lana, who was on set quite a bit. Curtis acknowledges, “She wanted [to play] that part a certain way, and she wasn’t getting it. She worked at it very hard, because she wasn’t allowed or given any indication in the playing of the scenes… and I think that was probably the dilemma, and her difficulty, I believe. She needed help on the set, like we all do.”

  When Natalie celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday on location in July, the Jurows were concerned about her, noticing that “her eyes were glazed, and she was not herself,” Erin Jurow recalls. “I think she was abusing herself with pills, and alcohol. Definitely alcohol, because she was drinking too much at the table. And she was miserable.” Later in life, Natalie provided a hint of what she was feeling: “At my birthday parties, the guests were always my lawyer, my agent, my publicist, my accountant, and my mother.” Curtis also attributed Natalie’s emotional state to her unhappiness with the film. “Tony told me, ‘She’s under pressure, she’s had it now,’ ” Erin Jurow remembers.

  The Great Race was still in production four months later, requiring a shaky Natalie to get on airplanes repeatedly, including crossings to and from Europe. “She wanted to get out from it,” recalls Curtis, “but the problem was, she didn’t realize how long it would take. She thought she could do it and get out, but it went on and on and on. They went so far over budget that everybody gave up on it.”

  Few, including her stand-in, saw Natalie’s torment, under the Natalie Wood mask. The assistant directors on The Great Race remember her as “a lot of laughs, a lot of fun,” a consummate professional. At twenty-six, she was still the little girl programmed to please. As Curtis observed, “I know that on the set she wanted no static from anybody, that she just wanted to be well-liked, and she was always well-prepared.”

  Natalie’s unhappiness was nowhere visible as the spunky, glamorous suffragette Maggie DuBois, the prettiest Natalie ever looked, in Lana’s opinion, though Lana was aware, by the end of the shoot, “it was physically taxing” for Natalie. “And she wasn’t overly fond of the antics… the practical jokes were troublesome to her. It just wasn’t the way she was accustomed to working, so it was kind of tough on her.”

  On a Friday at the end of filming, November 27, Natalie spent the day at Warner Brothers, dubbing her lines from The Great Race. She left the studio and drove home to the “bachelorette” French Tudor mansion she recently had purchased in Brentwood, an indication she had resigned herself to being single.

  She had plans to spend the weekend in Las Vegas with English actor Tom Courtenay, whom she met at a party
the week before, following a location romance with Hope Lange’s brother David, an assistant on The Great Race, one of Natalie’s “interim men,” Jiras would say. She had also been on a few dates with an agent named Sandy Whitelaw, and reconnected with Frank Sinatra, her recurring fascination, cochairing an October benefit for My Fair Lady with him, sharing intimate dinners in show biz restaurants. Earlier in the week, Hedda Hopper had written a cautionary column mentioning that she “wished Natalie could find stability in her personal life,” observing it was the first time in years Natalie was not married, engaged, or dating someone steadily.

  Sometime that Friday night, like her haunting vision of Marilyn Monroe, Natalie swallowed a bottle of prescription pills, saying later she didn’t want to live. She groggily telephoned Mart Crowley immediately afterward, suggesting it was really a cry for help. “All I can say about it is it was very serious, she almost did die,” he said later. Crowley crawled through a doggy door, remembers Olga, rushing Natalie to Cedars of Lebanon, where she admitted herself, ironically, as Natasha Gurdin, her lost self.

  Mike Connolly, a veteran journalist who knew Natalie well, published a cryptic item in his column in The Hollywood Reporter on November 30, mentioning that Natalie had been hospitalized at Cedars over the weekend for “mal-de-motorcycle,” his code phrase for an overdose. Several movie magazines would speculate Natalie was upset about losing the lead in Hawaii, which Walter Mirisch had just offered to Julie Andrews. Mirisch would have no such recollection.