Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Natalie had another of her freakish water-related incidents while filming Meteor, when she and the rest of the cast were nearly buried in special effects water-based mud (“evil-looking stuff—thin and runny”) on the MGM lot. “I remember tremendous courage from her,” states Neame, who knew that Natalie was afraid to shoot those sequences. “I said, ‘Natalie, how can I help you?’ and she insisted on doing it.”

  Even her ultramasculine costars, Sean Connery and Karl Malden, had trepidations. Malden recalls, “Those were difficult scenes for everybody, because it was very real. It was very real. The whole set was filled with tanks which would throw the mud down. There were a couple of times when I was under—when that mud was above me—and it was heavy mud, it wasn’t just water. It was heavy, and you had a hard time raising yourself, and if you were under, you had a hard time to get up. And so you had to be careful and protect yourself as much as you could. But Natalie never said anything.” According to Neame’s on-set assistant, Connery “protected” Natalie during shooting the same way his character did, “and it wasn’t theatrics.”

  During a break in filming the mud scene, Natalie had what is now a haunting interview with a reporter, foreshadowing her death. “My major concern isn’t remembering the Russian, or getting my accent straight, it’s not drowning in the mud. It’s unpredictable. There’s no question that there’s a certain amount of pain. People can break an elbow or a leg or whatever by slipping and falling in their bathrooms or kitchens from a little water on the floor. But when you’re involved with slippery mud and you don’t know what kind of objects are in it—they can control it only to a certain point—there is always the possibility of something going awry. So everybody, including the stunt people, is a little nervous about this sequence.”

  In the same conversation, Natalie talked about her recurring near-accidents in water scenes, starting with The Green Promise. She brought up another one, from The Great Race, that the actors with her in the scene—Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk and Tony Curtis—strangely would not recall. Natalie’s account was eerily prescient of the way she would drown, off Catalina, a few years hence. “I remember there was an iceberg, and we got swept under it! I was wearing all of these furs and heavy things and because there was machinery underneath—the wave-makers that made everything move—if you got swept underneath there, I hate to think about what could have happened.”

  Meteor was not only a difficult shoot for Natalie physically and emotionally, “the special effects were so disastrous,” Neame forthrightly admits, “the picture also was a disaster.” Natalie would promote it with her usual enthusiasm when it came out late in 1979, over a year behind schedule, though for the first time since the early sixties, she requested to travel by train.

  Though she concealed it, Natalie was still a prisoner of her fears and phobias, which made her continuing confrontation of them all the more brave.

  Around the time she turned forty, July 1978, Natalie began acting more, unable to completely exorcise “Natalie Wood,” the actress personality that dominated her life from the age of six to twenty-eight. “I think that’s what I do: I’m an actress,” as she struggled to explain the next year. “That’s my work. That’s what I know how to do, and that’s what I get pleasure out of doing. That’s my expression.”

  She admitted in interviews that she needed a “balance” between family and career, something Mud had taught her to believe was impossible. Natalie’s solution was to take Natasha and Courtney, who were seven and four, to the set with her. “She loved the acting,” acknowledges Peggy Griffin. “And quite frankly, to make a good living.”

  R.J. and Natalie reconfirmed their agreement that if one of them was on location, the other would stay at home with their daughters. When Courtney was born, they had been fortunate to find a live-in cook/nanny named Willie Mae, who had become a trusted member of the family.

  Although Natalie, with Elizabeth Taylor, was considered the last of the great movie stars, she was not a box office attraction, or a leading lady, anymore. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice was her last commercial success, a sixties film that seemed frozen in another era. Natalie was clear-eyed about her declining stature, following R.J.’s lead by accepting a miniseries, where her illustrious name assured her a star role and star treatment, if not prestige. “She didn’t hesitate to do television,” Griffin recalls.

  Natalie’s choice in projects was the Deborah Kerr role in a CBS remake of From Here to Eternity, which she shot in Hawaii that summer. R.J., whose TV series had been abruptly canceled that spring, filmed the ABC miniseries Pearl in Hawaii prior to Natalie’s television movie, providing the Wagners with a tropical summer vacation with Natasha and Courtney. Natalie had fun making From Here to Eternity for CBS, receiving a Golden Globe for her work, but it was not Splendor in the Grass, nor was it Rebel Without a Cause, or Gypsy.

  R.J. was acutely aware that he was a television star, married to a legend. That June, while he was in Hawaii, director Tom Mankiewicz flew to the island to offer him what would be his next television series, the romantic comedy-drama Hart to Hart, which Mankiewicz was hoping he could convince R.J. and Natalie to star in together for ABC. Mankiewicz would later recall R.J.’s poignant response. “I sell soap,” he told Mankiewicz. “My wife sells tickets.”

  Natalie did appear in the pilot episode of Hart to Hart in a cameo that fall, dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, the Vivien Leigh role she had always longed to play, listed in the credits as “Natasha Gurdin.” Hart to Hart, which was produced by the Wagners’ company, would make them wealthier than they already were, and enshrine R.J.’s television persona as the David Nivenish sophisticate he had been mimicking since he was a teenaged caddy. It would also foster a friendship between R.J. and his costar, Stefanie Powers, including Natalie, according to her friend Faye Nuell, who described R.J. and Powers as “brother and sister.”

  By November 1978, Natalie and R.J. seemed to have regained their emotional footing since the rocky period surrounding Meteor. R.J. was content starring in Hart to Hart, a surprise hit, and Natalie was in heaven portraying a vulnerable, wisecracking wife and mother admitted to a psychiatric ward for alcoholism, a role that finally gave expression to her passion for a project about emotional illness. The story also touched on subjects Natalie knew intimately: therapy, and drinking problems. The movie for television was based on a true story based on the life of producer Joyce Burditt, from Burditt’s autobiographical book, The Cracker Factory.

  “She had read the book,” recalls Burditt, “and she loved it. She thought it was a real story about a real person, and it resonated with her. What the heroine in the book goes through requires some courage, and I think she identified with that. She loved the character, and I began to feel in the course of making this movie with her that I understood why it resonated with her: I think she was a very brave person with a good heart.”

  After the debacle of Meteor, Natalie leapt to appear in the very sort of movie that appealed to her: an intense drama with a character she related to, shot in a structured, controlled setting. “I’ve decided to go on instinct a lot,” she told reporter Brian Linehan, “in terms of how I respond to material, rather than following a lot of advice. The times that I have done something that I didn’t respond to emotionally right away, it’s generally not worked out too well.”

  When Burditt found out that Natalie Wood was interested in playing her in the TV movie, “my first reaction was, ‘My God, she’s a movie star!’ I was amazed.” Burditt worked closely with Natalie, who originally wanted to produce the movie, but ABC had already optioned the book.

  According to Burditt, Natalie took charge, quasi producing and directing the ABC movie, which was shot in Cleveland, and at the Veterans Administration Hospital in west L.A. “She had sort of an extreme focus on what she was doing, and what was going on around her in the production. She was a better producer than the producer. She was like the antithesis of the prima donna. It was not only ‘Let’s get it done,’ but ‘Let�
�s get it done right.’ She was a particular person. She was particular about the lighting, her makeup had to be right, the atmosphere on the set had to be right, it had to be totally professional. She didn’t like a lax set, which I admired. She would have just been a great producer. It was her film.”

  Natalie said later, “I was just in love with Cracker Factory. They don’t come along every minute. I think it’s very fortunate to get a project like that once in a while, that your whole heart and soul is in.”

  She was the Natalie of old during The Cracker Factory, impassioned with every aspect of the movie, impressing each person by her kindness. John Martinelli, then a young assistant director, was charmed by Natalie’s refusal to let him run any errands for her. “She did everything herself and demanded nothing from anybody. She was a delight. It was a role that called for no makeup in some scenes and she took it off and had no complaints. Just a beautiful lady.” Richard Shapiro, the writer-producer, recalls, “It was sincere, she really wanted people to love her.”

  Natalie told Shapiro there were three things that were important to her. “The first thing was family—and her house, whatever project she was working on at the house. The second thing was work, which was very important to her. And she talked about a third, friendship. The first and most important was the family, then friends. People adored Natalie.”

  The production manager, Ed Ledding, would later make the comment that it sold Natalie short to call her a consummate professional. “She was gifted, and knowledgeable. A lot of people are professional that aren’t necessarily gifted. And she was very nice. A lot of people that are professional are not particularly nice. She was very nice, she was very talented, and she was very knowledgeable.”

  Lola McNally, a sweet-natured veteran Hollywood hairdresser who was Natalie’s choice to do her hair, saw the hidden, fragile side of Natalie during six weeks filming in Cleveland in the dead of winter. McNally recalls, “She took a liking to me right away and followed me around like a little puppy. When we’d be on the set, she’d come up every time before she did a scene and give me a hug, like, ‘Let me get my breath.’”

  One of the first nights the movie company was in Cleveland, McNally heard a knock on her hotel room door. When she opened it, Natalie was standing outside in her nightclothes. “She just said, ‘Do you mind if I just come in and sleep with you?’ I said, ‘Fine. I’m from a big family. It doesn’t matter to me.’ And almost every night after that she’d come and crawl in bed with me because she didn’t want to be alone. She was a little girl, even though she was grown up.”

  Natalie drew close to Lola McNally as if McNally were her mother all through filming, eating dinner with her every night, sleeping in McNally’s bed with her, showing McNally the bump on her wrist, explaining how she was afraid to get it fixed. She talked about her fear of dark water and of drowning off a boat, which had happened to McNally’s husband. McNally washed Natalie’s hair for her the way Mud did when Natalie was a little girl, because she was afraid to put her head in the water: “We used to bend her over the bathtub and wash it.” Natalie had McNally play child’s games with her in the snow between takes. “We had a little contest sliding our shoes on the ice—little kid’s stuff—sliding down the hallways to see who could go the fastest. She’d say that she won and I’d say, ‘No, you didn’t win, I won today.’ And we’d go looking around the gardens, trying to figure out what flower was coming up, because they were covered with snow and ice.”

  Natalie, who had spent her childhood with Mud at her side every second of every day, even in the bathroom, felt lost without her alter ego, needing a mother figure to replace Maria, the missing half of “Natalie Wood.”

  Even when R.J. came to Cleveland for an extended visit, Natalie knocked on McNally’s door, wistfully, asking to spend the night in her bed. “I think Natalie was a little girl. That’s the only way I can put it. Like there’s some little girls that are outgoing, and then there’s those who sit back and suck their thumbs.”

  After Natalie’s drowning, R.J. would allude to the ghosts from Natalie’s childhood, saying, “She worked on herself for a very long time. And she wanted to be content. She wanted to be pleased about herself. Obviously, she was being pursued, inside, somehow. Some demons were in there pursuing her. Who knows?”

  Natalie’s private fragility, the lost little girl she revealed to McNally, gave special pathos to her identification with the character in The Cracker Factory, whose essence was Natalie. As Burditt describes, “The character is very, very vulnerable, and always trying to do her best… that constant striving, and that vulnerability, and looking for reasons to go on. And then going on without reasons—even if you don’t have a reason you can understand, you go on anyway.”

  Burditt noticed, while Natalie was playing the part, “It’s almost like different personalities would come up. When it required an intensity, you would see that in the determination, the intelligence; and then when it was appropriate for her to be vulnerable, you just wanted to take care of her. It was all in Natalie’s personality. It was very real.”

  Natalie’s divided personality as a child-woman was evident in the impressions she left on Burditt, who found her “very verbal, very persuasive. She was very generous, very openhearted, an amazingly complex woman in a good way. A lot of women with her drive, and determination to be perfect, don’t have the empathy that she did. She had all of it, and she used all of it as an actress, too. I just thought the world of her. I thought she was brave and funny and very true to herself. She was a star, in the best sense, and didn’t seem to do a lot of stuff that stars do.”

  That same winter, Natalie bought a condominium on Goshen in west Los Angeles for her aging parents. Fahd was a frail sixty-six, recently in intensive care for an irregular heartbeat. Mud, at seventy, still dwelled in the fanciful world of her imagination, decorating the new condominium with Natalie Wood glamour shots and the sad-eyed Keane portrait of her daughter hanging in the living room, “living Natalie’s life,” as Sugar Bates put it. Mud spent her time in Natalie’s movie trailer, often with Natasha and Courtney. “Natalie was always doing things for her,” recalls her stand-in. “She just did things for people.” That summer, Lana prepared to marry for a fifth time. At forty, Natalie was still caretaker of the lost souls in her family, as she had been at six.

  She accepted a part in a feature film the first few months of 1979, called The Last Married Couple in America, directed by her friend Gil Cates, who brought the script to Natalie. The movie was a lighthearted look at a couple with problems in their marriage who, in the end, choose the sanctity of the family—a theme that reflected Natalie’s life, and drew her to the role. “She thought it was really a good part for her, so she and I became partners in crime. We figured out, Okay, who would be the best actor for this? At that time, it was George Segal.”

  The stresses in the Wagner marriage were revealed to Lola McNally, who had observed Natalie arguing in Cleveland with R.J. over the nights he spent out, drinking. “She wanted to be with him alone, and he wanted to be with the crew.” John Martinelli, the A.D. on Cracker Factory, thought Natalie and R.J. were a great couple, “all class—class, class, class,” though he noticed, as others did, “she and R.J. were checking each other out all the time, like they were making sure they weren’t running off with somebody else.”

  There was also great tenderness. Joyce Burditt, who accompanied Natalie when she promoted The Cracker Factory that March, was backstage while Natalie did The Merv Griffin Show. “R.J. was watching the feed in the green room, and he was just sitting there, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s so proud of her.’ You could just see it in his face. He had been chatting, he was a very charming guy, with a wonderful sense of humor, and the minute she started to talk, he just looked at the monitor at the feed and was really into it, and I thought, ‘How nice. How nice for her, how nice for him.’ It gave me a really good feeling.”

  Burditt’s perception was that “it seemed to be a good time
in Natalie’s life. R.J. was there, they were very sweet with each other, he was so supportive of her. She was a nice person who liked her life, liked her kids, liked her husband, and that showed, too.”

  That spring, as she was finishing The Last Married Couple in America, Natalie gave a spate of interviews comparing her marriage with R.J. to the couple she and George Segal were playing in the picture, a husband and wife who go through a rocky time and come through in the end, the way Natalie liked things to turn out. The Saturday Evening Post profile of her and R.J. that March was even called “Happily Ever After.” Just like the fairy tale that Natalie had longed for as a child.

  When she finished filming The Last Married Couple in April, Natalie finally fulfilled her lifelong dream to travel to Russia, part of her journey to rediscover Natasha Gurdin. The trip was to film an NBC documentary called Treasures of the Hermitage, an on-camera tour of the museum, hosted by Natalie and Peter Ustinov.

  Natalie envisioned the trip as a romantic odyssey to her homeland, the Russia she knew from sitting on Fahd’s lap, looking at the drawings in his fairy storybooks. Or the Russia she heard about from Mud, who spoke in whispers about jeweled aristocrats in ballgowns carrying mink muffs on wintry nights. She imagined herself Anna Karenina, riding the Trans-Siberian Express, eating caviar by candlelight, listening to the balalaika.

  Natalie had planned that she and R.J. would take Natasha and Courtney to Russia, with Mud and Fahd as guides. Fahd refused to go. “Her father still had great anger at what happened after they left Russia,” recalls Peggy Griffin. “Their family members were all killed. Actually, he got very stressful when Natalie agreed to do that show.” Maria wanted no part of Russia, still traumatized over seeing her brother hanged, paranoid that she would be killed, insistent that Natalie take a bodyguard.