Natasha
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With her newfound contentment, Natalie became more understanding of Mud, reaching a point where she was grateful for the positive things her child stardom brought her, since it led her to this happy stage. The fact that she would never have become a movie star without Mud, or that her mother had made it all happen “wasn’t lost on Natalie,” observes Griffin, “because Natalie loved her life, and she knew she couldn’t have it both ways.” Although she loved her mother, a part of Natalie still resented Mud for her lost childhood, the identity she forsook to create “Natalie Wood.” “We’re all human,” as Griffin points out, “and sometimes we’re contradictions within ourselves.”
Friends who had known her in her fragile twenties marveled at Natalie’s transformation. Leslie Bricusse thought of her as an iron butterfly. “She had tremendous courage, and you could tell that she wasn’t as strong as she sometimes appeared to be.” Yet Natalie was stronger than her vulnerability would suggest. That was the paradox.
She described herself, with pride, as “a survivor.” It was Natasha, Natalie admitted, who brought her back from the dark side. “She said to me, ‘A lot changed when I had Natasha,’ ” remembers her friend Griffin. “She suddenly realized she had to provide for her child and she had to account for herself.”
The practical change was in Natalie’s finances, which she placed in the management of a shrewd lawyer named Paul Ziffren during the great purge of 1966. More miraculous was the emotional strength she summoned once she became a mother. When Natasha would later watch Rebel Without a Cause, she hardly recognized the “hysterical and volatile and electric” actress she saw on the screen. “That’s not how I remember her at all. I remember Mommy as this solid, grounded, direct, funny woman. Obviously there were times when she wasn’t like that, but by the time she chose to have children she was very clear, strong and protective. She wasn’t like the characters she played, these fragile girls. I felt safe around her.”
The place inside Natalie where her monsters still resided troubled her, even at the height of her fulfillment. “Don’t make it sound too terrific!” she superstitiously warned her writer friend Thomas Thompson that summer, as he prepared a magazine profile about her life with R.J. “Because, God knows, I don’t have all the answers… I’m so happy now it’s scary. I’m afraid to even talk about it for fear it will crumble or something.”
MOTHERHOOD HELPED NATALIE REDISCOVER her lost self, but it was still hard for her to be seen in public without The Badge, The Image, The Face, or any of the other names she devised for “Natalie Wood,” the star personality she and Maria had created.
She made fun of being “a star” when she was with close friends like Peggy Griffin, as she had with Redford, yet Griffin noticed Natalie could never go out without her bracelet and “it was important to her to always look great, not just because she was a star… she spent a lot of time ‘doing’ herself.” Griffin traced this insecurity to Mud, “who raised Natalie to never walk out of the house without the war paint glamour going, because you never know what producer’s going to see you.”
“She got herself done up every single day,” stresses Lana, who had watched her sister since childhood in front of a makeup mirror, transforming herself into “Natalie Wood.” Once, around 1976, when Lana picked up Natalie to take her to a dermatologist’s office so they could both have face peels, “she had on full makeup.” Lana was startled. “I said, ‘What are you doing? They’re gonna make you take it all off!’ ” “Well what if somebody sees me?” Natalie responded uncertainly.
She envied Lana for her ability to relax and be herself. “Natalie told me that when she would go on talk shows, she would pretend to be me. Because she was accustomed to having things scripted, and she was so afraid that she wouldn’t be able to think of something to say, or that she would say something that wasn’t quite right.”
Natalie still possessed a compulsion to please, to entertain, to be perfect, even with a close chum like Peggy Griffin, who observed, “Natalie was always so happy. There was nothing sad about Natalie. She was happy and giggly and funny and just full of the devil. She wasn’t sad at all.” Other longer-term friends, such as Leslie Bricusse, who had witnessed her panic attack in the Mediterranean, believed that Natalie’s vibrancy concealed a still fragile soul. “She was a very emotional girl, and I think instability was never far away, if she didn’t have a support system around her.”
Natalie’s complex, at times conflicting, needs included expressing herself as an actress, even though motherhood fulfilled her.
She had not buried her dream to play Blanche DuBois, reacting with excitement to an unexpected offer the end of 1975 from Sir Laurence Olivier asking her to play the sensual Maggie the Cat to his Big Daddy, with R.J. as the alcoholic, homosexual Brick, in a televised production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The invitation was “like a gift that fell out of the sky,” Natalie said, giving her an opportunity to act with Olivier, the idol of her idol, Vivien Leigh, in a play by the creator of Blanche DuBois. As an added attraction, Olivier arranged to film the production in Manchester, England, set up like a play, with five weeks of rehearsal, shot in sequence.
Natalie spent two hours with Tennessee Williams in Cannes beforehand to make notes about her characterization of Maggie, and listened to friends from Mississippi to create an accent, turning hoarse from the screaming required to play the feisty Maggie, whom she would name with Alva, her other Tennessee Williams character, as the most challenging roles of her career. She compared acting with Olivier to starring with James Dean, describing them both as “fluid.”
Olivier was “insane about Natalie,” according to their costar Maureen Stapleton. Olivier, ironically, was in awe of Natalie’s beauty, the very thing Vivien Leigh, her idol and his ex-wife, worried overshadowed her reputation as a serious actress. It was Natalie’s insecurity about her movie star persona—The Badge—that encouraged Olivier to focus on her looks; in particular, a habit she had, at dinner, of checking her face in the blade of a knife. “She would just hold the knife horizontally across the front of her eyes,” Bricusse recalls, “and move her face up and down so she could see everything on the blade. I thought that was rather cute.” Olivier teased Natalie about it, Stapleton recalls. “He would hand her a knife and she would look in, like it was a mirror… and she was teasing herself.”
That October, before NBC aired Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the San Francisco Film Festival chose to honor Natalie for her contribution to films. The other honoree was actor Jack Nicholson, who had won the Oscar that year for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The public was invited to attend the afternoon event, which was to begin with a tribute to Nicholson, followed by an intermission. Afterward, the organizers of the festival planned to show film clips from Natalie’s movies and then bring her onstage for a question-and-answer session. For Natalie, the tribute was especially poignant, since she was born in San Francisco, and it was the thirtieth anniversary of her 1946 film debut as “Natalie Wood” in Tomorrow Is Forever.
Mud, naturally, planned to attend, for it was her creation—actress “Natalie Wood”—that was being celebrated. The surprise was the reticent Fahd, who never went to any of Natalie’s premieres and shyly avoided the limelight. For moral support, Natalie asked Peggy Griffin, Mart Crowley, and Howard Jeffrey to accompany her and R.J.
“She was very nervous at the last minute,” recalls Griffin, who had coffee with Natalie in her hotel room the morning of the tribute. Griffin finally asked Natalie what was wrong. “And she hemmed and hawed, and she finally said, ‘I just hope I’m not embarrassed out there. I’m gonna follow Jack Nicholson. Who comes to these things? All young kids. They hardly remember who I am. I’m going to walk out there after the montage of my films that they probably haven’t even seen. What if nobody has a single question?’ ” Natalie was nervous, she told Griffin, “because she’d been out of the public eye for a long time, she’d been doing the ‘mom thing.’”
Natalie stood onstage beaming, clasping her hands together and holding them to her chest, touched that people remembered her. She told the audience it was odd to view her entire life on a movie screen, to see herself again as Margaret, the Austrian waif in Tomorrow Is Forever. “I was such a tiny little thing,” she remarked wistfully, telling the audience that Natasha, her six-year-old daughter, looked exactly like she did in Tomorrow Is Forever.
“And when they started the Q&A,” Griffin recalls, “it had to be almost an hour and a half later, when only forty-five minutes was allotted-that the moderator just said, ‘I really have to limit this, folks.’ They couldn’t stop. They just went mad for her.”
Maureen Stapleton, who had just appeared with Natalie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, later offered what may be the best description of Natalie’s enduring appeal: “She had a quality that made you want things to turn out well for her in the end.”
Natalie’s most memorable moment occurred after she left the stage. As Griffin remembers, “She and I were standing there talking, and her dad, Nick, came up to her at the end, which wasn’t like him. I remember he had tears in his eyes, and he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. He had this sweet little Russian accent, and he said, ‘Natasha, I just realized how much work you’ve done.’ She was on a high for the rest of the night.”
The next spring, Natalie was nominated for an Emmy for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, though she did not win. Worse, the production received wildly mixed reviews when it aired on NBC December 6, 1976, the twentieth anniversary of the date celebrated by Natalie and R.J. as their first night together. TV Guide had praised Natalie’s Maggie as glowing with passion, “the performance of her career,” while the New York Times reviewer excoriated her as “offering a campy imitation of Bette Davis,” wearing “an inordinate amount of makeup for the sweltering Deep South,” savaging R.J. for a performance “so low keyed that it is an effort to remember he is there at all.”
Natalie’s glamorous, sexy Maggie suffered by association with weaknesses in the production, as had her Alva in This Property Is Condemned. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had been a rewarding experience creatively and personally for the Wagners, but it was not the triumph Natalie envisioned.
Though she doted on her daughters, by 1977 she was losing interest in decorating other people’s houses, which had become a boutique business for Natalie, who half-jested that she and R.J. had become “middle-aged squares.” They entertained their wide circle of adoring friends, many of them Hollywood royalty like Natalie, as she channeled her creativity into parties, hiring magicians and pianists to perform at the house, even hosting a Russian-themed dinner written about in Bon Appetit, with recipes courtesy of Mud.
Most of Natalie’s interviews centered on her family life, with frequent references to time spent on the Splendour, which she had reproduced in miniature as a fifth anniversary gift for R.J. Natalie spoke of how she liked to be “on the water, and near the water, but not in the water.” Peggy Griffin, who went out on the boat with the Wagners on occasional weekends, stayed on the deck with Natalie, sunbathing, while everyone else Jet-Skied or swam. “Our idea of athletics was putting suntan lotion on.”
In early fall 1977, a few months after her thirty-ninth birthday, Natalie accepted a part in the big-budget special effects film Meteor, out of restlessness or boredom. There was only one thing about Meteor that interested Natalie, both she and director Ronald Neame would later confess: the opportunity to play a Russian. Leslie Bricusse had recommended her to Neame for the role of a Russian translator assisting Sean Connery, whose character was trying to avert a meteor from colliding with Earth.
Natalie approached the part of the translator with the meticulous preparation she had Maggie, or Alva, listening to tapes of Mud speaking Russian to study the inflections. Griffin recalls, “She went to Berlitz and learned Russian, which she really didn’t know. People don’t give her enough credit for that. They thought she knew it; she understood words here and there, but her parents never taught her Russian. She crash-coursed it, which is very hard to do, with a different alphabet.”
Natalie fine-tuned her Russian dialect to perfection to lose her parents’ Ukrainian accent, hoping to create a “characterization,” Kazan style, out of a stock character in a disaster movie, a frustrating experience for her. She was also approaching forty. “Aging in general was really tough for her,” recalls Lana. “It’s tough for any woman who is making her living by her appearance. Your face is six feet large on a gigantic screen, with people going, ‘Wow, do you believe what she looks like now?’ And Natalie was always worried that the film she was working on would be her last.”
“One of the things that intrigued me to work with Natalie was her age,” reveals Neame. “I was curious to see if she could make the transition from leading lady to character actress. Some women make that change perfectly—Kate Hepburn is one, Bette Davis. There are others that can’t.” Unfortunately for Neame, and for Natalie, her part was too one-dimensional for him to make the appraisal.
Natalie’s hairdresser, Sugar Bates, recalls Neame as piqued with Natalie for wearing too much makeup to portray a translator from Russia, a habit that was ingrained in Natalie by Mud, part of Mud’s concept of “Natalie Wood,” the movie star. At thirty-nine, Natalie was more insecure about upholding that image. “The makeup man always tried to discourage her from wearing that heavy eye makeup, but she didn’t care what period it was or anything, that was her.”
To add to her distress on Meteor, Natalie knew she was being lit unflatteringly. Neame admits, “The cameraman was more concerned with the overall special effects in the film than making people look good.” When Natalie viewed the rushes, “she didn’t like what she saw… she looked a little hard,” recalls an assistant director. “It really depicted what the film was, as opposed to her looking soft and gorgeous.” Natalie asked Bates to bring her a mirror before every scene, “so she could look at herself and see how she was lit. She was smart.” For the rest of the film, there was a struggle between Natalie and the cameraman, with Neame in the middle. “Natalie liked to look good,” Neame discloses, “and I don’t blame her.” Neame’s assistant, Ginger Mason, recalls, “It was not a great, happy, fun set.”
Mason sensed that Natalie was going through a rough patch in her life because of her age, commenting, “Natalie, at that time, didn’t seem very happy.” Mason, who was an attractive and younger thirty-six, considered Natalie to be “really rude” to her, behavior that was uncharacteristic of Natalie, “who went out of her way to be kind to people,” observed Sugar Bates, who had worked with Natalie for over fifteen years.
Natalie discussed with Bates, during filming, her concerns about how she was aging on screen, revealing that she would not have more than one glass of wine at night because it would show up the next day on camera. “She used to chew bubble gum to exercise her chin, because she was worried she had a double chin, and I said, ‘Come on! You’re so perfect!’ She would laugh about stuff like that.”
Bates ascribed Natalie’s concern to “professional vanity,” her legitimate worry that she would get fewer offers if she looked older. “Which was really smart, because she was selling herself as a product, and she wanted to look good.” Natalie toyed with the idea of plastic surgery around her eyes, but in the end her phobia of doctors prevailed. Her friend Griffin observes, “Natalie was one of those people who would only think of surgery if it was life or death.” Ironically, Mud, the source of her paranoia, had her eyes done then.
Ginger Mason noticed that when R.J. visited the set, Natalie was “insecure and possessive,” which Mason interpreted as part of Natalie’s concern about turning forty. “It was just my instinc
t… from whatever she was going through at the time, that period of life or something. He would always say hello or try to talk to me, and then he would back off. She was always very somber.”
According to Lana, Natalie had an abiding fear that she would lose R.J. because of what had happened in their first marriage, and watched him closely.
Production designer Richard Sylbert, Natalie’s friend since Splendor in the Grass, sat next to her and R.J. at a tribute to John Houseman during Meteor, accompanied by his wife, Sharmagne. Both were struck by how melancholy Natalie was, “one of those curious details” that lingered in their minds. Sharmagne Sylbert watched Natalie follow R.J. with her eyes all night, acting “horribly insecure.” Natalie became distressed by a comment that she might be too old to play the schizophrenic teenager in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the passion project she had been trying to get made for years. “She looked really depressed,” Richard Sylbert appraised that night, noticing a similar malaise in R.J. “She was not happy. I could feel it coming out of her pores. She really wanted this marriage to work.”
Natalie’s longtime friend and hairdresser, Bates, saw strains in the marriage during Meteor that were not present when she worked with Natalie on The Affair. Natalie suggested the cause was R.J.’s drinking. “That was how the industry was. After work, he’d have a few drinks, and it takes its toll.” Natalie enjoyed her Pouilly Fuissé, but she was not by nature or by choice a heavy drinker, because of what she had witnessed with Fahd. “It was a way to relax after a hard day of shooting,” as her stand-in and friend of twenty years, Roselle Gordon, describes.
No one questioned whether Natalie and R.J. were devoted to each other, or to their girls. “They just adored each other,” extols Gordon, who watched them together over many years. “It was wonderful to see. What a caring, loving relationship, both of them. Sometimes you’d ask her something and she’d say, ‘Well, let me ask R.J.,’ and she would consult him. They were just courteous and kind and gentle with each other and loved each other. And I think it was better the second time than the first time, because they were both older, and lived longer and were able to find each other again and appreciate the marriage.”