Bricusse, Gregson’s great friend, was in total shock. “It just happened suddenly and explosively… knowing Richard, I was absolutely amazed. But of course one didn’t know how the marriage was going. The visible marriage was just fine.”
Natalie’s sisters, even Mud, who were fond of Gregson, hoped she could get past his indiscretion, but for Natalie it was a painful reminder of the unexpected, shattering way she had been betrayed by R.J. She took extreme measures, demanding that Gregson leave the house immediately. Natalie gathered all his clothes, wrapped them in a sheet, and threw them on the driveway, calling her attorney that night to instruct him to file for divorce. She refused to take Gregson’s calls and got a restraining order to keep him away from her and Natasha. “Natalie was really angry,” remembers Lana. “She had people posted outside the house. Seriously, he could not drive onto the driveway.” As Jiras observed, “He blew a lot.”
Gregson was beside himself. “He called me to see if I could help patch them up,” recalls Olga. “And I can’t change Natalie’s mind when she decides that she’s not gonna go back to him. And he never spoke to me after that! It was like pffft!”
NATALIE’S SUDDEN DIVORCE WAS THE TALK of Hollywood. Rumors of Gregson’s affair with her secretary whispered across town the first week in August, even showing up in gossip columns, where Natalie tersely responded, “No comment,” saying that her divorce action “speaks for itself.”
She isolated herself in the house on Bentley, bereft over the failure of her marriage and the fact that Natasha would grow up as a child of divorce. Natalie took tranquilizers to calm her nerves, unable to eat, humiliated and angry and miserable, questioning whether she ever wanted to be married again. She decided to disappear from Hollywood for a while, asking Olga to go with her on a cruise around Sardinia, accompanied by Natasha and by Mart Crowley, her buffer from being alone.
While Natalie was at this low point, she received an unexpected call from R.J., who was living in London for the summer to film an ABC movie called Madame Sin, costarring Bette Davis. By a turn of fate, his marriage had ended since his emotional encounter with Natalie the summer before, and he was now engaged to Frank Sinatra’s twenty-three-year-old actress daughter, Tina, who reportedly had a crush on R.J. as a child.
R.J. had flown into L.A. for a few days early in August for a deposition in a thorny lawsuit with Universal over residuals and his right to star in outside projects, when he happened to read about Natalie’s divorce.
“He called and said he was sorry and that he understood what an unhappy time it was for me,” she later recounted. “He asked if there was anything he could do.” Wagner said later, “I just called to see if she needed anything or if I could be of help.” He left a few days later to return to London. “R.J. never knew how touched I was by that telephone call,” Natalie would remember. “I was actually crying when we talked that day, but he never knew it.”
Natalie departed for her sad cruise around Sardinia in September, with Olga to hold her hand, and help her with Natasha, who was only a year old. Olga recalls, “It was important to me, because Natalie had never asked me to do anything for her before… so I told my boss I needed to take a month or so off to go with my sister.”
Olga was heartbroken when she saw Natalie. “She was very depressed. She had lost so much weight, she looked like Audrey Hepburn—anorexic. Her bones stuck out. She had been in the business for God knows how long, since four years old. She had really decided to get married, to have children, and she was a good mother. She really wanted Natasha, and she nursed her, she took care of her, she worried about her. She was ready to have a life. It was a real letdown for her.”
Natalie spent the cruise fantasizing about a reunion with R.J., hoping to make things in her life right again. “She was thinking about R.J., even in Sardinia,” recalls Olga. During the holiday, Natalie kept analyzing whether his call to her was consoling, or something more. As she said later, “He’s very thoughtful and it was the kind of thing he would do, without romantic motives.” Olga recalls her sister as worried about R.J.’s engagement to Tina Sinatra, which he implied was “cooling.” Natalie mused whether it could ever work out for her and R.J. a second time. “She was asking me, ‘How can I… ?’ or ‘What do you think?’ She was sort of thinking about it.”
Natalie went through a period of “desperate” unhappiness after she and Natasha came home from Sardinia in early October, when R.J.’s divorce came through and Hank Grant of the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “The question is not when he’ll marry Tina Sinatra, but where.” R.J. and Tina Sinatra were in the south of France, staying with her father, Frank, at David Niven’s villa, where Natalie holidayed with Gregson in summers before.
Actor Steve McQueen, who was recently separated from his wife, Neile Adams, invited Natalie to dinner the middle of October, giving the former costars an opportunity to act on their attraction from Love with the Proper Stranger. Natalie “thought the world of Steve,” calling him “one of the smartest cookies you’ll ever come up against.” They went to a few high-profile restaurants together and bought $800 solid-gold sunglasses, but “it was not a serious thing,” observed Adams, who was still friendly with her estranged husband. “I think they went together for about ten days, something like that. It was no big deal. Natalie was a child of Hollywood, and she really represented everything that Steve didn’t even like about Hollywood. When he first began, everything was new—the premieres, the parties and all that—but by the time he and I divorced, that was old. But Natalie still loved doing that. She always loved doing that.”
In November, Natalie had a few highly publicized dates with California governor Jerry Brown, but she was not a content woman. “I’d been thinking of R.J. almost constantly since my divorce,” she said later. When he returned from Europe, R.J. began calling Natalie, but he was still seeing Tina Sinatra.
When she met Richard Smedley, Lana’s third husband, over Thanksgiving, Smedley noticed that Natalie was under a strain. Even Natasha, who was less than two, sensed her mother was vulnerable, saying later, “Subconsciously I have a lot of memories of sort of being with her all the time and wanting to sort of protect her, take care of her and stuff.” Natalie considered Natasha her “perfect love.” She was at her happiest singing nursery rhymes with her, tape-recording their songs as forget-me-nots.
She did a favor for an old friend in December, during the depths of her depression, flying to Oakland to appear in a cameo as herself in Redford’s second foray as a producer, The Candidate. According to Redford, Natalie accepted “without a thought, without a question… she just came and did it. There was no calling the agent, no deals. She said, ‘I’m just gonna do it.’ That kind of stuff I’m a pretty old-fashioned guy about, that kind of loyalty and commitment. That meant a lot. And we had great fun, doing it.”
Natalie arrived on set in jeans and a mink coat, a perfect metaphor for the dichotomy between Natalie the person and The Badge, charming the crew with reminiscences about Splendor in the Grass, making the poignant remark that she had been playing the last scene too often in her real life. She would not see Redford again, though he would consider Natalie a fond friend evermore.
Actress Edie Adams, who had a large circle of friends, remembers a plaintive call she got from Natalie in this period. “It was very late at night, and she sounded like she was crying and very sad, and she said, ‘Edie, I’m so out of things, are you giving any parties, what’s happening?’ She just sounded awful, and so sad. And I tried to include her in things, or say, ‘Why don’t you go ask Natalie out?’”
Natalie spent a forlorn Christmas at a party at the house of Dean Martin’s ex-wife Jeanne, while R.J. announced plans to take Tina Sinatra to producer Irwin Allen’s house for New Year’s Eve. Somewhere in between, he stopped by Natalie’s house with Christmas gifts for her and Natasha, “And when he left,” Natalie recalled, “there was kind of a feeling we would see more of one another.”
A few weeks later, on January
19, 1972, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Natalie and R.J. were “dating again,” ending his engagement to Tina Sinatra. (“They were going separate directions,” observed his assistant.)
R.J. would later say that he was feeling sentimental that Christmas, and took out a box with some old newspaper and magazine clippings. “I was suddenly overwhelmed by the number of stories about Nat and me that had been published over the years,” he said, inspiring him to telephone her for a date. The fact that Natalie looked upon R.J. as the symbol of a dream she hoped to recapture was obvious by her reaction to his call. “I thought my heart would stop… it was like I was eleven years old again.” The same age she was when she first saw Robert Wagner on the Fox lot.
R.J. invited Natalie to his home in Palm Springs the weekend of January 26, a date they would celebrate in the coming years with the same nostalgia as December 6, their first time together on R.J.’s original boat, My Lady, in 1956. As soon as Natalie got off the plane, R.J. said then, “It was instant reaction.” From that point on, he and Natalie had an understanding they would remarry. “We started going out again… mostly out in Palm Springs, before anybody knew it. We fell in love all over again.”
This time, there was a better balance in Natalie and R.J.’s professional lives. During their first marriage, he accepted self-effacingly the role of “Mr. Wood,” the handsome face married to a full-blown movie star. Since then, R.J. had capitalized on his enormous personal charm, and the style he copied from Cary Grant, to transform himself into a popular television idol by playing a character—Alexander Mundy in It Takes a Thief—patterned after Grant in To Catch a Thief.
Natalie was still a “movie star” with all the prestige that connoted when she and R.J. remet in early 1972, but she had acted in only one picture, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, in six years, and her three previous films (Inside Daisy Clover, This Property Is Condemned, and Penelope) were disappointments. Financially, she had amassed a fortune, which she shared with the cash-poor R.J. “Frankly, she bailed me out. I was a financial disaster at the time, what with the divorce and back taxes and committing money to an unproduced movie. But off we started again. It was the most highly emotional and most marvelous time of my life.”
Lana, who knew how devastated Natalie was when she told Mud she found R.J. with another man the night she left him in 1961, had concerns that winter when they arrived at a dinner party at Natalie’s house, and she surprised them with R.J., implying they would remarry.
Natalie later told Lana, “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.” Lana explains, “Here was a person whose problems she knew, and could cope with, rather than having to deal with the unknown… she knew there were problems with R.J., but she’d say, ‘These things will not hurt me; I can deal with these.’ She was very good at preserving an image, at holding things in, at living up to the public perception of her.” According to Hyatt, Natalie believed R.J. would be different because he had been through analysis in Europe.
Natalie entered her new relationship with R.J. with eyes wide open, desperately in need of what he offered her: adoration, stability, and the illusion, at least, of the fairy tale she sought. “I think she got precisely what she wanted,” declared Lana. “She told me she never stopped loving R.J., that she would always love him.” While she was adrift in her single years, Natalie often mused to Sugar Bates, “R.J. was so nice, if I couldn’t get along with him, who could I get along with?”
Mud was still opposed to Natalie’s involvement with R.J., grumbling about it to the Hyatts, but at nearly thirty-three, with a lonely life as her possible alternative, Natalie chose to ignore her dominating mother, placing Maria further on the sidelines, although the Gurdins moved into a townhouse in Palm Springs within footsteps of Natalie, who happily left her Bentley house when R.J. swept back into her life.
As Natasha, who was a toddler then, would touchingly say of R.J., “He was like this Romeo that came and just saved us, and took us away, and was so fabulous.”
To Natalie and to Natasha, he was Prince Valiant.
On April 10, Natalie and R.J. were invited to be joint presenters at the Academy Awards, as they had been fourteen years earlier, in March of 1958, shortly after their honeymoon off Catalina. The Oscar ceremony in 1972 was R.J. and Natalie’s first public event together since reuniting, and they arrived on the red carpet radiating an old-fashioned glamour that was electric, looking as movie star gorgeous at forty-two and thirty-three as they had at twenty-eight and nineteen. The public was so captivated by their storybook renewed romance, they needed bodyguards to walk through the crowd. A friend of the Wagners used the word “Zeitensprung,” a German musical term for an intermission between dances, to describe Natalie and R.J.’s interrupted romance, a poetic concept they, and the public, romantically embraced.
The Hollywood-worshipping qualities in R.J. that had given Natalie pause on their arranged first date in 1956 united them in 1972, when Natalie had accepted the dominance of the star-driven, Maria side of the “Natalie Wood” persona. By choosing to remarry R.J., Natalie was choosing Old Hollywood, sublimating the part of her that was drawn to the “golden world” of Ray and Kazan.
After the Oscars, Natalie and R.J. set sail on a luxury crossing aboard the Queen Mary II, bound for London, to publicize Madame Sin and to enjoy a “pre-honeymoon.” Oddly, R.J. had seldom been on the water between his two marriages to Natalie. “When we got back together,” he said later, “we wanted to get back to sea.” In the freak manner of their original honeymoon cruise out of Florida, they encountered what R.J. described as “one of the worst storms at sea recorded in more than 100 years,” making headlines in newspapers and putting them in England two days late.
In their gilded tradition as a celebrity couple, they invited photographer Michael Childers on their pre-honeymoon. “We went off to Venice together, the three of us, it was great fun,” recalled Childers, who described Natalie as “the most glamorous star of that era. When she walked into a room, the room lit up! First of all, it smelled like Jungle Gardenia, a thousand gardenias. You never forgot an entrance. She was like the old school of actors: they knew that the camera was what brought them alive. They made love to the camera.”
Natalie and R.J. chose July 16, 1972, four days before her thirty-fourth birthday, as a wedding day, guided by astrologer Carroll Righter. Neither was conventionally religious, and both had an interest in New Age spirituality. Natalie still resisted Maria’s occult ways, but she “was fascinated by universal New Age teachings,” according to her friend Faye Nuell. “She read a lot about it, she was always seeking.”
In a sentimental nod to their romantic few days off Catalina at the end of their first honeymoon, R.J. and Natalie decided to have their ceremony on a boat, at sunset, borrowing a friend’s yacht, called The Ramblin’ Rose, moored at Malibu in Paradise Cove. The only guests were family and a few friends, with Natalie and Natasha wearing matching gingham dresses, with a picnic for a reception. “It was marvelous in spite of the sea,” was Maria’s ironic comment to a magazine a few years later:
We all thought it would be grand; however, in reality it was not such a good idea. I remember everyone kept asking when the boat was going to stop. Some of the guests were seasick before we were halfway there, and the others were well on the way to being sick… it was all everyone could do to stand for the ceremony.
There was a boat of photographers that followed us, and they kept circling the boat and causing it to rock, which only added to everyone’s misery. I think I was crying and gagging at the same time.
When they came back from their honeymoon cruise, R.J. and Natalie began “hunting all over the world for our boat,” as R.J. later put it, a quest that would take several years and lead to The Splendour, where Natalie would spend her last tragic night.
The Wagners spent the honeymoon months of their second marriage as gypsies, traveling back and forth from Palm Springs to Bentley to Natalie’s place in Tahoe to a townhouse
in the Mayfair district of London, where R.J. was filming a BBC miniseries called Colditz to circumvent a restriction that blocked him from appearing on TV in the U.S., part of his legal dispute with Universal.
Maria sometimes went along as a nanny for Natasha, under Natalie’s close scrutiny. R.J.’s assistant, Peggy Griffin, who became close to Natalie early in the second marriage to R.J., remembers her relationship with her mother as “on and off” then. “Natalie had ‘issues,’ ” as Griffin describes it, “but she was also very family-oriented.”
Natalie’s purest relationship in her family was with Olga, whom she respected, admired, and had come to realize, with irony, was the happiest one in their Russian-Chekhov family of three sisters—the one who chose a simple life, leaving Hollywood, and their star-crazed mother, behind. “She thought the world of Olga. She always wished that they had lived in proximity to each other.”
Lana, like Natalie, was struggling to overcome a childhood warped by their mother’s mad genius. The effect on Lana of having felt invisible, worshipping and envying her famous sister, created complex issues between them, erupting when Lana’s husband sold pictures of Natalie and R.J.’s second wedding. R.J. bore a grudge. Natalie eventually forgave Lana, but their relationship was strained. As Lana perceives:
It was tough for Natalie, because she was constantly trying to bridge the gap between who I was to her: was I her baby sister, was I her friend? She was constantly walking that tightrope, so there were a lot of things that she chose not to tell me… we were moving closer to being friends, but it was really tough for her to know how open she could be with me. She was protective of me. It was a lot easier for me, which I didn’t realize at the time. I could go and say ‘I need you,’ and she would help me, and everything would be fine. But for Natalie, it was really strange, because she didn’t know how to be with me at all times. I was a burden.
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