After years pining over what might have been, Natalie put her marriage to R.J. ahead of the complex and burdensome ties to her parents and younger sister, directing her perfectionism into being a wife. “She was very, very nice to R.J., she went out of her way to be nice to him,” observed Sugar Bates. “She would make life as good as possible for him—she sort of ran the house, but also she was the wifey kind of person, too.”
The vibrancy Natalie displayed as a teenager bubbled back after she remarried R.J. “She was always up to something,” recalls girlfriend Peggy Griffin, who palled with Natalie when R.J. was working. “She was a total ‘girl’ girl, always shopping and talking clothes and makeup and gossip and diets. She was such fun.”
R.J.’s influence on Natalie’s career was evident their first spring together. She retreated from an opportunity to be considered to play Daisy in The Great Gatsby, instead embracing a television movie-of-the-week produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, costar-ring R.J., called Love Song, the first time since becoming a movie star that Natalie had considered television. There was a soupçon of reluctance in an interview Natalie gave early that summer, when she admitted that TV had less “prestige,” suggesting gamely that if George C. Scott could do it, so could she.
Two things attracted Natalie to the role, according to Gilbert Cates, the director she and R.J. requested: she would be playing a woman crippled by polio, “which would have been unique for her,” and the character, a lonely songwriter, had a scene in which she performs a song. “R.J. loved the idea, obviously, of the two of them doing the movie together.” There was a curious scene—either a strange coincidence or an intended parallel to their real lives—where Natalie’s character crushes a glass in her hands when R.J.’s character breaks her heart.
That June, Natalie wrote a letter to her friend, actress Ruth Gordon, Natasha’s godmother, expressing her new domestic bliss, including hers and R.J.’s plans for a third honeymoon in Mart Crowley’s guest house, followed by a few weeks by the beach, or house sitting for the vacationing Gregory and Veronique Peck. She was excited about the Love Song script, but even more thrilled by the short shooting schedule for television movies. Natalie seemed unenthused about returning to London for R.J. to film Colditz (“Jan.—Feb.—cold—ugh!!”), prattling to Gordon about remodeling R.J.’s house in Palm Springs. “We’re wildly happy,” she wrote Gordon, teasing that three-year-old Natasha was “running the whole house—I’m now not sure whether she’s going to be an actress or a director.” She signed it “xxxooo Natalie.”
Natalie cut off her long, sixties straight hair before starting Love Song (later called The Affair) that summer. “I remember when it came to learning how to walk like her character did, she wanted it to be authentic,” states Cates. “She had great respect not only for authenticity, but for other people’s feelings, two qualities that were not associated with conventional stars during that period. And I remember we got a nurse, and we brought someone in with the disease, and she watched how the person walked, and it was quite impressive.” Ironically, Natalie again faced opposition to using her singing voice. Cates recalls, “She and I absolutely wanted it to be her voice; Aaron Spelling wasn’t quite so sure.” Natalie prevailed. “She had a very sweet voice, and she had great commitment… 90% of it’s commitment,” assesses Cates.
A few weeks before shooting began in Santa Barbara, Natalie found out she was pregnant, placing the TV movie in jeopardy. Cates had three concerns. “Firstly, healthwise for her, whether she could do the rigors of the movie. Secondly, whether we could do it in time before she’d show. Thirdly, she had horseback riding scenes.” Cates hired a double for the riding scenes, and Natalie and R.J. ensconced themselves in a glass house by the sea in Malibu to shoot The Affair, choosing the name Courtney, the character Natalie was playing, for their unborn child.
Natalie spent her thirty-fifth birthday, July 20, 1973, pregnant with R.J.’s child, shooting their second film together as husband and wife. The years of holding back tears through birthdays spent with business managers, and Mud, were in the past. That autumn, Natalie happily knitted a baby blanket, cheerfully disregarding the extra weight she was gaining, decorating a nursery in Palm Springs for what she was calling “the most wanted baby in the world.”
After years hidden behind The Badge, Natalie was rediscovering who she was. “She just was meant to be a mother,” her friend Griffin observed. “She just loved it. She read all the books about child rearing, and if she’d meet anybody with children, the topic would immediately go there. And it wasn’t just her kids, she just really liked kids.” Natalie became intrigued with the idea of doing a picture about what would have happened to her if her parents had stayed in Russia, part of her inner journey to understand “Natasha Gurdin.”
The only cloud over Natalie’s seemingly charmed life that fall was the cancer death of her nurturing friend Norma Crane, at forty-two. Natalie paid for all her medical bills and arranged Crane’s burial at Westwood Cemetery, near the remains of Marilyn Monroe. She ran into her old love, Scott Marlowe, at the funeral. “She started to cry when she saw me. R.J. grabbed my hand, and just was very warm. Natalie was devastated. She gave the closing speech. She handled the first part of it okay, then she totally folded. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. She was down on her knees, by the open grave.” Eight years later, at forty-three, Natalie would be buried beside Crane, in the shadow of Marilyn Monroe.
All of Maria’s dark, disturbing warnings to Natalie that she was too small to have a baby came back to haunt her on March 9, when she was admitted to the emergency room at Cedars to give birth to her daughter with R.J. “I was in labor but the baby wasn’t falling. I was so scared. And physically, I was a wreck… I didn’t really know just what was going on. I thought something was wrong with the baby and they weren’t telling me.” Natalie started “fantasizing about terrible things,” she said later. After nine “hellish hours,” she delivered by emergency caesarean, a result of the umbilical cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck. It was a “disaster,” Natalie told writer Rex Reed.
Courtney Brook Wagner would be Natalie’s last child, though she often spoke of wanting more, especially a little boy.
While Natalie was nursing Courtney, she was offered a quarter of a million dollars to play what became the Faye Dunaway role in The Towering Inferno, a picture R.J. would be making at Fox that spring. She turned it down as “boring, insipid and worthless,” though she was restless after two years of quiet bliss in Palm Springs. “Palm Springs was wonderful,” Natalie said later. “But it got to be a bit much, you know? House guests every weekend. And then, during the week, nobody.” Her friend Tommy Thompson compared her to Napoleon in exile.
Natalie felt disconnected from “Natalie Wood,” from Hollywood, the only world she had known from the age of six. She convinced R.J. to look for a house in Los Angeles, and accepted a role that intrigued her as an erotically glamorous heiress in a Raymond Chandler-style caper ultimately called Peeper, costarring her brief flame Michael Caine. Natalie later told Tom Snyder she grew up believing it wasn’t possible to be a mother and an actress at the same time—Mud’s way of keeping her focus on work. Natalie decided to exorcise that demon.
She chose Peeper in part because it was filmed at Fox, where R.J. was working on The Towering Inferno, and where she could bring Natasha and Courtney to the set. Since Natalie was dabbling in movies again, she and R.J. made an agreement that one or the other of them would be with the girls at all times, a pact both took seriously.
Natalie went on a rigid 800-calorie diet to lose the fifty pounds she gained with Courtney. By June, when she started filming Peeper, she had a twenty-two inch waist and looked ravishing, according to the director of photography, Earl Rath, Jr. “She was getting a little older then, so I used a little softer lens, just to enhance the quality of her face. Every shot, I’d glamorize. I’d make her look beautiful, which was not hard to do.”
Natalie was excited to be w
orking again. She gave a party for the cast and crew the first day, and seemed “very up” throughout the highly technical production, which included night shooting and complicated interior shots on the Queen Mary. “She was right on top of it, knew her lines, and got it done,” recalls Rath, who found Natalie to be a “very nice, happy, bouncy kind of woman. She’d come in with a limo in the evening, we’d work all night long, and R.J. would drive down and pick her up.”
Natalie’s sole concern about Peeper was a shot in silhouette, when her character steps from the shadows in a transparent peignoir to meet Michael Caine. “She was nervous,” remembers Rath. “It was a morality thing. She didn’t want to be seen in the nude, so I lit her from the back so you couldn’t see her and we used a body suit. It just silhouetted her so you see the beautiful legs as she opened up her robe with a flourish to tease Michael Caine. It was a pretty interesting shot—beautiful.”
Reviewers admired Natalie’s beauty and spunk, but little else, with one observing that her legendary vulnerability worked against her, writing, “She’s like an appealing waif who smears her face with mascara and rouge, climbs into mama’s slinky dress and says: ‘Aren’t I naughty?’ ” Natalie was stung by the negative reviews for Peeper, saying publicly that she and Caine “gave it their all.” Privately, she admitted, “It just didn’t work.”
However, by the time the picture came out at the end of 1975, sixteen months after she finished it, Natalie had retreated into motherhood and domesticity again. She was inspired into “semi-retirement” by Natasha’s enrollment in nursery school, and by the family’s move into singer Patti Page’s former house in Beverly Hills: a cozy Colonial on Canon Drive that seemed to coax out every one of Natalie’s nesting instincts.
Faye Nuell described the house on Canon as a less showy version of Natalie and R.J.’s dream house from their first marriage, potent symbolism for Natalie, whose nature was to “make things right in the end.” She created a happy haven for Natasha and Courtney, making needlepoint pillows, taping up their crayon drawings, cluttering the yard with cats, dogs, chickens, rabbits, trees to climb, even a white picket fence.
She made up for her sad, lonely birthdays as a child by making her daughters’ holidays magical, to be sure they experienced what she missed: a normal family life. “She just loved, loved Christmas!” recalls Peggy Griffin. “I always used to say to her, ‘You turn into Currier and Ives.’ She just couldn’t do enough, with the decorations, and having Santa Claus there, planning children’s parties—with a gift for every child at the party, and knowing their names and seeing these little kids’ faces just light up.”
Natasha said later, “I think Mommy had a real zest for life. Everything mattered to her, you know? The holidays mattered to her. Birthdays mattered. We were it for her, I think. I really think that.”
“I am personally enjoying their childhood more than I did mine,” Natalie admitted once to L’Officiel. “Whereas, as a child, I always had the feeling of my nose pressed against the window looking in, my daughters have none of that. They are growing up more traditionally. I love being involved in their schools, their friends, their lives.”
Natalie made it clear to Lana and to Faye Nuell that “she wanted to be the mom she didn’t have,” indulging her daughters to the point that Natasha would admit later she was “spoiled rotten.” Natalie even sought guidance from a female analyst to make sure she did not inflict on Natasha or Courtney any of the phobias Mud instilled in her, especially about childbirth and sex. She told Natasha the facts of life at four, as she would Courtney. Natasha would remember, “We talked about sex and it was never a dirty thing. It was always a beautiful, empowering thing.” Natalie’s comment was: “I wouldn’t want them to be especially proper, I would like them to be unafraid… and feel free enough to express themselves.” Peggy Griffin recalls Natalie aggressively shielding Courtney and Natasha from Mud’s superstitions.
She was adamant that her daughters not become child actors, Natalie’s most eloquent expression of the pain she experienced as a child of Hollywood. “It was absolutely not an option to even consider acting,” Natasha would recall. “My mom never had a childhood, and it was one of her great sadnesses. One of her most important wishes was that my sister and I have a normal childhood.”
New Yorker Rex Reed would remember going with Natalie to every Christmas tree lot in Beverly Hills one December, sniffing the branches to find the perfect tree “because she wanted her house to smell like Christmas.” She and R.J. invited celebrity friends and civilians like Peggy Griffin or realtor Delphine Mann, Natalie’s other close chum, to an open house each December 25, serving eggnog, turkey and ham in shifts from eleven in the morning until midnight, with generous supplies of wine and other alcohol, an essential part of their style of entertaining. Natalie was still on her guard about liquor, though she drank her favorite wine, Pouilly Fuissé, and alcohol was part of R.J.’s lifestyle, from highballs to fine wines.
They regularly opened their guest cottage to David Niven, Fred Astaire, Elia Kazan, Laurence Olivier—with Natalie hand-painting personalized signs above the door, such as “Gadge’s Gulch,” to make each of them feel welcome. “Natalie just had her house filled with friends at all times,” observed Peggy Griffin. “She really just crammed so much living into every given day.”
By the third year of their remarriage, the entertainment industry had embraced Natalie and R.J. as its romantic icons, beloved ambassadors of the celebrity community, a mantle that Natalie, the child of Hollywood, taught to worship stardom, and R.J., its biggest booster, felt comfortable assuming. The mayor chose R.J. and Natalie, accompanied by their daughters, to lead the televised Santa Claus Lane Parade along Hollywood Boulevard the following Thanksgiving. Whereas Richard Gregson had little tolerance for the pomp and circumstance of stardom, “Natalie and Robert Wagner made a wonderful Hollywood couple,” Karl Malden observes, “and they performed properly for the profession, at all sorts of affairs.”
One of R.J.’s most thoughtful traits as a husband was what seemed to be his egoless deference to Natalie’s status as a movie star of legendary proportions, his attentiveness to her, graciously putting Natalie on center stage when they were in public, or interviewed together, providing her with the adulation that “Natalie Wood,” her star persona, both needed and desired, particularly as her career was waning.
By 1975, R.J. resolved his dispute with Universal and was cast in the CBS series Switch, providing structure to his and Natalie’s idyllic family life. While R.J. was at Universal filming the series, Natalie drove Natasha to nursery school, read aloud to Courtney from her long-ago favorite book, The Little Prince, helped friends decorate their houses, attended PTA meetings—observing, “Normal things have a mystique for me because I’ve never had them.” Courtney, their “love child,” was a tow-headed toddler with the pastel beauty of her father and the wistfulness of Natalie. When R.J.’s pretty blond daughter Katie came to spend weekends, Natalie had three daughters, just like Mud; Natasha, ironically, was the middle of three sisters, just like her mother.
Natalie invited her former stepchildren for summers in the guest cottage, healing her wounds from Richard Gregson, who disappeared to a farm in the U.K. and remarried after his ignominious eviction by Natalie. “His life changed so dramatically,” recalls Bricusse. “He suddenly went to live in Wales and write.” Though Natasha saw her real father from time to time, she called R.J. “Daddy.”
In the fall, R.J. came upon “the” boat he had been searching for since remarrying Natalie, a white sixty-foot powerboat with an outer deck and spacious cabin with room to sleep eight, a shower, a galley, and handsome dark wood trim with polished brass fittings. He showed it off to a reporter like a proud father, saying, “We looked in the South of France and England. Finally we found her… I know every boatman thinks his is the boat, but come on down and take a look…”
Natalie and R.J. sentimentally named their boat Splendour, after Splendor in the Grass, the movie that
had such deep significance to Natalie; as a wink, they called the small, attached dinghy Valiant, after R.J.’s spectacular disaster, Prince Valiant. Natalie helped paint the engine and decorated the cabin herself, choosing Early American furniture, hand-crocheting pillows, knitting blankets, hanging family photographs, creating a homey ambience without a trace of movie star glamour.
Though Maria would later tearfully lament, “Oh, why did they buy their boat?” the Splendour brought R.J., and Natalie, interludes of great joy. Mart Crowley would later call to mind a memory of Natalie at the end of 1975, sitting on the deck with Courtney in her arms, “And she saw me staring at her. And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘There’s no movie in the world that’s worth this little thing!’”
The Wagners leased a mooring from Doug Bombard at Emerald Bay, off Catalina Island, where they spent most weekends when they were aboard the Splendour, often inviting friends. Bombard remembers the girls, and R.J., as “waterdogs,” while Natalie “liked the social part of it, but she used to kind of sun on the bow cap of the Splendour, sitting there reading, with a big floppy hat. I would never see her in a wet suit, or swimming.” She was famous among friends for her Spanish eggs on Sunday mornings, cooking in the little galley on the Splendour, the only time Natalie went near a stove. She lavished love on every room inside the Canon house with Martha Stewart detail, but “the kitchen was not her place,” chuckled her pal Griffin.
That year, when Natalie was thirty-seven and R.J. forty-five, they achieved the happiness in their married life that fans fantasized existed the first time, when their movie star faces graced the covers of every magazine in tender poses suggesting eternal bliss. Except for an “occasional fix-up,” Natalie quit therapy after nineteen years, ten of them in analysis every day. “I’m fixed!” she laughed to Peggy Griffin.
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