Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Her sister Lana never knew about this suicide attempt; nor, possibly, did Mud, whose “deep and complicated” relationship with Natalie was one of the underlying reasons for it. “I felt bitter about life and resentful of my parents,” she told a journalist years later, alluding to “inner conflicts” she needed to resolve, referring to her struggle to figure out who Natasha was, submerged so long within Natalie Wood.

  Just as compellingly, Natalie felt “alone and empty,” triggered by seeing R.J. at La Scala, so ecstatic over the birth of his baby girl. She was afraid she would never have the happy life she envisioned when she married R.J.

  Her analyst talked her into living, she told Thomas Thompson. “If it weren’t for… analysis, I’d probably be dead today,” she said in 1975. “There didn’t seem much even worth losing,” she said of her life at the end of 1964.

  Tony Curtis, who was sliding into a serious drug problem, commented later on the irony of his and Natalie’s lives: “We both looked like we had everything—we just had everything, we were the envy of so many people—when in fact, we both were just reaching out. That’s why she needed that analysis; that’s why I needed it too.”

  1965 AND 1966 WOULD PROVE TO BE THE BEST of times, and the worst of times, for Natalie.

  Inside Daisy Clover and This Property Is Condemned—two dream projects—were in place at the beginning of 1965, films she wholeheartedly believed would move her away from frothy romantic comedies back to the “golden world” of Kazan and Ray.

  She began 1965 in an emotional freefall, leaving the country within a few weeks of her suicide attempt, against her analyst’s advice, to spend New Year’s Eve in Gstaad with actor David Niven’s twenty-three-year-old son, David Jr., a Rome-based talent agent for William Morris. “She was ready to let it rip and that’s what we did.”

  Niven, Jr., and Natalie met when the Morris Agency assigned him to watch over her while she was in Europe filming The Great Race. “She and Elizabeth Taylor were the two highest-paid actresses in the world, so I was told that I had to make sure that nothing went wrong.” The charming, fun-loving young Niven had a week’s fling with Natalie in Vienna, the basis for her impulsive Swiss holiday. “Which created a big stir,” recalls Niven, “because it’s a major no-no at the William Morris Agency. You’re never supposed to fuck your clients.”

  Natalie wanted to get as far away from reality as her fears would permit after the suicide attempt. “I remember one of her remarks was, ‘Is that real snow?’ when we drove from the Geneva airport up to the house. She was just sort of wide-eyed about everything that was going on. Everything was different, everything was exciting.” Though she was “up for anything,” as Niven remembers, Natalie was “constantly” in touch with her analyst, who had misgivings about her being “so far away” after a pill overdose. “The shrink wasn’t too sure about me, anyway… it was touch and go.”

  Natalie, who was afraid to ski, spent her time party hopping with the very social Niven, who noticed she was eager for “anything that was non-Hollywood, with people who didn’t even know about it or wouldn’t talk about it.” She was in that milieu on New Year’s Eve at the ballroom of the Palace Hotel in Gstaad, where the guests, most of them rich Europeans, were invited to dress as children or infants for a “Back to Babyland” costume party.

  Natalie went as Shirley Temple, briefly meeting a “crazed Yugoslavian” from Caracas in the shoe business named Ladislao Blatnik, or “Ladi,” who was wearing a diaper. “He would come to Europe twice a year and spend, spend, spend, spend, all the money he had made. Now he did, however, have one trick, which would get anyone’s attention. Which was, if you had a glass of champagne, he had a glass of champagne. And then he would drink his champagne after the toast, and then he would eat the entire glass.” After the party, Blatnik took Niven aside, inquiring about his movie star date.

  A few weeks later, Niven and Natalie took a train to his apartment in Rome, where West Side Story was still playing and Natalie was “a mega megastar. There were paparazzi all over the place.” They enjoyed a “fairly serious, fun” romance that was “more than a fling but less than an engagement.”

  When Natalie returned to Hollywood to play Daisy Clover, Ladi Blatnik turned up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. By March, Blatnik was calling Niven in Rome to let him know he was dating Natalie, “saying, ‘Listen, I’ve got to tell you something. This is what is going on.’ So you do the gracious thing. I said, ‘Terrific, good for you, well done, keep her in the club,’ or some stupid, inane remark.”

  Niven hung up, thinking, “This is doomed, totally doomed.” He had known Blatnik since he was seventeen, and considered him “a major con artist… a total whirlpool who would just suck up everything around him.” Not long afterward, Niven got a call from Natalie, telling him it was getting serious between her and Blatnik. “I said, ‘Listen, congratulations.’ And she said, ‘Well, what do you think about it?’ I said, ‘I think congratulations will do.’ What are you going to say? It’s a no-win situation. So you say congratulations and just drop it.”

  People close to Natalie were horrified, by and large, by her romance with Ladi Blatnik, with descriptions of him ranging from “a sweet buffoon” (Lana), to “big fat slob, phony baloney” (Shirley Moore), to “he was a nightclub act” (Tom Mankiewicz). “It was totally not Natalie,” pronounces Bob Jiras.

  Ladi Blatnik provided Natalie comic relief, and a radical change from Hollywood, the two things she had sought when she went to Switzerland after her overdose. “He’d fly in mysteriously,” recalls her friend Edd Byrnes. “We would be sitting in her living room, and all of a sudden I’d see somebody run by, outside by the pool. Open the door, and it’d be Ladi, who had flown in from Caracas. He would do all these crazy things. Crunch wine glasses up in his teeth. He faked a suicide in Palm Springs. He was this kind of adventurous Robin Hood. Natalie liked him a lot.” Blatnik was a fixture on the set of Inside Daisy Clover that spring, when he and Natalie announced their engagement.

  Creatively, she was back in her element with Inside Daisy Clover, a dark fable produced by the prestigious team of Pakula/Mulligan. “I have only had this kind of a reaction on one other thing, really, and that was Rebel Without a Cause,” Natalie said at the time. “Where I instantly realized that no matter what, I have to [play this part].”

  Natalie said later, “I felt close to Daisy.” In the script, the teen character of Daisy Clover lives in poverty on the Santa Monica pier with her eccentric, superstitious mother; she becomes a musical star under the complete control of the studio, and falls in love with their most handsome leading man, who marries Daisy, concealing his homosexuality. Gavin Lambert, who wrote both the book and the screenplay, said, “She identified with the character… I never discussed the part with her. It was hardly necessary, because she seemed to understand it, know about it, and know how she was going to do it.”

  Natalie had sky-high hopes for the picture, putting her heart and soul into Daisy, a performance praised as “eloquent” and “moving,” which she hoped would redeem her career; instead, the film was intrinsically flawed, a tremendous setback for Natalie.

  What she did derive from Daisy were two important friendships, with actors whose careers she instrumentally assisted. One was Ruth Gordon, whom Natalie approved to play Daisy’s borderline-crazy mother, reinventing Gordon as a film actress. The other was Robert Redford, Natalie’s former classmate, whom she did not remember from Van Nuys High, but had admired late in 1961 when she and Beatty saw him in the play Sunday in New York, stopping backstage to meet him. “I vaguely remember her coming, and being very dressed up, like a movie star.” Redford was now starring on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park, but had inconsequential film credits. Pakula and Mulligan jump-started his movie career by offering him the role of Daisy’s secretly homosexual movie star husband, a breakthrough that Redford credits to Natalie. “I know that she played a role in my being brought in for that part… the word that filtered back was that she wanted me t
o play the part.”

  Redford accepted the role in accord with Pakula and Mulligan that he would play Wade Lewis, Daisy’s husband, not as a homosexual but as a bisexual narcissist “just completely on the take… men, women, children. That, to me, was a more interesting character to play, and also one that I thought I could play more believably… so that’s who I played. A character who was sort of just mysterious: you didn’t know where he was, and you didn’t know what he was, but he was charming and very seductive, and that mystery surrounding his character was what drove Daisy a little crazy.”

  Natalie loved how the New York-trained, maverick Redford “really created a character,” especially after her misery on The Great Race, inspiring her the way that Dean, Marlowe, McQueen, Kazan, Ray, and to some extent Beatty had. “I wouldn’t have expected a Hollywood movie person to be that dedicated to want to go for the craft, and she did,” Redford recalls. “She really worked hard, she got herself completely into the role.”

  Working with Redford, identifying with Daisy Clover, her character, brought out the intrinsic part of Natalie that wanted to do serious work, as opposed to being a movie star, the Maria-dominated side of her personality. Redford noticed it, too: “There’s always that veneer of a Hollywood ‘star’ performance, giving the audience what you’ve learned works well. But there wasn’t a whole lot of that… particularly if you could break through that sometime shield that would come over her—‘I’m giving you my Natalie Wood performance.’ When you could break through that, which we did, you got in touch with what was really the best of her, which was this totally alive quality.”

  Natalie was exhilarated, saying later, “What I really enjoy is acting itself; not the premieres, not the setting-up, but the moment you can really get down to it on a set where everyone knows his job, and gets on with it.” She had one of her most fulfilling screen partnerships with Redford, developing “a wonderful working relationship that turned into a friendship, that carried on through the years after that. I enjoyed her immensely, on that film. We had a great time. She surprised me, because there was not a stary—she made fun of that. She was very self-effacing about her ‘star’ category.”

  Redford assessed Natalie in this way: “I think that Natalie, underneath everything, was a very sweet, genuinely down-to-earth person who was slightly colored by the warped life of being a star at such an early age. But she herself, as a human being, shone through that. She was a real person. And I responded to that.”

  Natalie confided in Redford, revealing how her mother had tortured a butterfly to get her to cry on cue; how lonely she was, her longing to be married, to have a child. The happily married Redford wasn’t sure whether Natalie realized what a caricature her fiancé, Blatnik, was. “I sure did. That was depressing.” He noticed Natalie “couldn’t be alone, she couldn’t be,” finding her vulnerable. “I think that vulnerability was part of her attractiveness as a performer. She had a girl-woman quality: she was a little girl, but a woman at the same time. And the child was vulnerable, and that vulnerability came through, and was very appealing.”

  Redford became aware of Natalie’s terror of water during a scene, ironically, on a boat. By a further coincidence, in the scene, Natalie and Redford, as Daisy Clover and her screen idol husband, have escaped to his boat to get away from the pressures of Hollywood. Redford remembers:

  We were off the coast of Ventura, shooting this scene where we’re shacked up on a yacht and someone comes and tries to find us or something… we got out there, and it was rough. The boat was going back and forth. And it got detached, [like] a runaway boat.

  And I was out there alone with Natalie. And I held on to her. She hid it beautifully—she made jokes and so forth, she was great—but she was not a happy camper. But I had a hold of her—in other words, I assured her it was gonna be okay. But it got a little weird there for a while, and then they somehow got us.

  Both Natalie and Redford were disappointed by Inside Daisy Clover, which Redford felt “had a stiffness to it.” Natalie later told her friend Peggy Griffin, and guests at a film festival, that she was upset her ironic voice-over narration had been partially eliminated. “There was also a scene where they left just half a song in and I found that very painful,” she told an English reporter in 1969. Natalie was reminded of her hurtful experience being dubbed on West Side Story, saying, “I’d like to do a musical again, but I want an absolute guarantee that the songs, sung by me, stay in the picture.”

  Redford felt similarly deceived on Daisy Clover. “I had problems with it—I had a couple problems, but one was egregious at the time.” Redford found out that the film had been altered after it was completed, changing his character from a bisexual. “I was told that they previewed the film… and the filmmakers decided they needed to do something to shock the audience, to keep their attention. So they decided to turn the character back into a homosexual-by looping a line with another character who’s in a conversation with Daisy, Natalie’s character. They looped the character to say, ‘Don’t you know he prefers young boys?’ which was never in the scene. That was supposed to get a shocking reaction. I didn’t know this. They never told me. I then confronted Pakula and Mulligan… I just said, ‘Hey, it wasn’t too cool. You could have told me, and done me the courtesy, so I was at least prepared for the fact that you turned my character into something I didn’t play.’ But because I liked them, and I was pretty young, I chose not to make a big deal out of it, just went on with my life.”

  Natalie asked Redford, while they were filming Inside Daisy Clover, if he would costar with her that fall in This Property Is Condemned, a compliment to Redford, for Natalie saw her role as Alva, which originated in a one-act play by Tennessee Williams, as “probably the closest I’ll ever get to playing Blanche DuBois,” her dream part. For a time, Vivien Leigh, her idol, had even been attached to the project as Alva’s mother, and John Huston was going to direct. Prior to Natalie’s involvement, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were the leads. By the time Redford read the script, it had become “a mish-mosh,” he recalls. “It had everybody’s fingerprints on it.”

  Natalie secured Redford as her leading man and flew to Caracas that June to meet Blatnik’s parents and consider moving to Venezuela, an experience that cooled her romance with him and caused her to delay their wedding until Christmas.

  When she returned from Caracas, Natalie addressed the problem of who would direct her Tennessee Williams movie, which was scheduled to begin in October. As Redford reconstructs, “They were running down through the director’s lists and they were down to the bottom, and I started to panic. Because I wanted to do the film, and I wanted to work with her again, but it was a mess, it needed somebody to straighten it out, and the top directors were turning it down.”

  Natalie, who had contractual rights to approve her director, costars, and virtually everything else, discussed it with Redford, who suggested a “completely unknown” Sydney Pollack, an actor he had worked with in a 1962 film called War Hunt. Since they acted together, Pollack had directed a few television shows and The Slender Thread. Redford recommended Pollack to Natalie “as self-preservation, as much as anything, because I liked him. We were the same sensibility, young guys roughly the same age. I just liked his sensibility. He had been trained in New York, and I just thought we’d have a better shot with this.”

  Redford did a desperate selling job on Natalie. “She said, ‘Who is Sydney Pollack?’ I said, ‘Oh! Hey listen! This guy is so hot! If you can get this guy—if you’re lucky enough to get him—he’s the hot new guy.’ Which he wasn’t, right? He was just my friend.” A few days later, Redford heard from an astonished Sydney Pollack, “saying, ‘Bob, what are you doin’? I got a call from Natalie Wood!’ He says, ‘What am I gonna do? My palms are sweating.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t shake hands when you go in to meet her. Keep your hands in your pocket!’”

  Pollack, who had had a crush on Natalie since West Side Story, was sent to her house on Bentley, arranged by J
oe Schoenfeld, their mutual agent. “I was very nervous. I didn’t know how a director was supposed to ‘audition.’ I remember she lived in a house that was built on a slope, and you went downstairs to the living room, and it was sort of off-beige and very luxurious, and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is all very impressive, very movie-starrish.’ The lady that worked for her asked if I wanted a drink… and Natalie came down looking absolutely incredible, and she was very, very sweet. She made it easy. She was very anxious to find out what I thought about the script, how I thought it might be improved.”

  Pollack was added to the list of people who would credit Natalie for giving them their first break. He checked into a motel in San Jose with eleven versions of the screenplay, “cutting and pasting,” emerging two days later with a mock-up final script.

  The filming of This Property Is Condemned, beginning that October in the Deep South, was intense for Natalie, who had Blatnik with her in Mississippi. “We all knew it was a challenge for her creatively,” reveals Pollack. “It was a Tennessee Williams heroine, and it had a certain kind of creative level that’s required.” Redford found Natalie as committed to Alva as she had been to Daisy, doing careful work to create a Southern character and an accent with nuances. “She was gonna go for it. She allowed Sydney to really work with her… she was very willing to take chances.”

  In a difficult sequence where Alva gets drunk and seduces her mother’s boyfriend, Pollack suggested Natalie have some wine before she shot the scene. “I don’t necessarily believe in tricks like that, but in this case, I thought it worked very well. She had two glasses of wine and it just took the edge off.” Natalie later considered This Property Is Condemned some of her best work.

  Emotionally, Natalie was dancing on the edge of a cliff, trying to keep herself from falling off. She abruptly canceled her Christmas wedding to Ladislao Blatnik over Thanksgiving, when the movie company returned to Hollywood to film. Maria’s friend Shirley Moore recalls someone (probably Mud) hiring “a lot of spies to check up on him, and when they found out when or what he really was, Natalie got rid of him quick.” Edd Byrnes heard, at the time, that Blatnik was receiving money from friends in South America “to keep on romancing Natalie and play the game, sponsoring him to marry this movie star.” Marion Picciotto, who married the playboy “Ladi” in 1972, had no idea why Natalie and Blatnik, an eventual suicide, called off their wedding. “Better a long engagement than a short marriage,” Natalie gamely told columnists.