Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Natalie and R.J. decided to fly to Moscow without their daughters, accompanied by Natalie’s friend, writer Thomas Thompson. She made arrangements to telephone Natasha and Courtney twice daily, worried about the two-week separation.

  Natalie landed in Moscow wrapped in sable, her image of Russia. The Russia she encountered in person—drab, stifling, unemotional—was nothing like the magical place in her mind. “I went through so many different emotions: seeing the place where my parents were born, viewing all the things I’d read about… I found it a very moving experience, and yet, it made me feel more deeply American than ever.”

  When she and R.J. went through customs in New York, Thompson said later, Natalie burst into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  As the Wagners returned home to Beverly Hills, their faces were on the cover of Look magazine, with the headline “Hollywood’s Most Exciting Couple.”

  Inside was a stunning full-page shot of Natalie, at forty, wearing only her magic bracelet, with the caption “NATALIE WOOD: HOLLYWOOD’S NUMBER ONE SURVIVOR.” The article, written by her friend Thomas Thompson, began:

  The bottom-line fascination we hold for Hollywood is not the gold, not even the magic, but the suspense of tragedy—the waiting for those absurdly beautiful people to fall off the tightrope and wreck their lives. James Dean was handsome and strange, but he wrapped his body in a fatal gesture that was somehow appropriate. Marilyn Monroe died with the dark roots of her blonde hair showing, her toe nails in need of clipping, her stomach full of barbiturates…

  This melancholy and melodramatic throat-clearing is by way of making a few comments about a woman who refuses to fall. If winning is surviving, then Natalie Wood is the number one seed. For almost 20 years she and I have been friends, but not until the last years have I stopped holding my breath…

  Natalie, Thompson concluded, had fought her demons and won.

  AROUND THE TIME SHE RETURNED FROM Russia, Natalie began to gather her thoughts for an autobiography, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad late at night, when R.J. was frequently out for the evening and her two daughters, six cats and several dogs were asleep, leaving the house on Canon quiet and still.

  Olga remembers Natalie asking their mother to record her memories of Siberia, and of Harbin, into a tape player, so that Natalie could include in her memoir her Russian heritage, which defined Natalie to herself, even though Maria’s doubtlessly fantastical version of her childhood in Russia would be more properly written as fiction. Natalie hid her early musings, a few lines from a chapter or two, in a fur closet, possibly wrapped inside the sable coat she wore in Leningrad during her quest to unearth “Natasha.”

  She once joked to Mart Crowley that if she ever wrote the story of her life, she was going to call it I Got What I Wanted. In Natalie’s star-crossed existence, the title is an ironic reminder of the passage from a play by Oscar Wilde: “In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

  One thing Natalie did reveal about the book she intended to write was a theme that would relate to her deep fear of dark water, she told a writer for the New York Daily News in 1979. “I’ve been terrified of the water… and yet it seems I’m forced to go into it on every movie that I make.”

  She would have that experience one last time later that year, in a television movie called The Memory of Eva Ryker, which she accepted as a disappointing alternative to the part she really desired, the repressed mother in Ordinary People, the psychological drama Robert Redford had chosen as his first film to direct. At the time, neither Meteor nor The Last Married Couple in America had been released. Natalie’s only other feature in a decade was the unremarkable Peeper.

  Redford knew Natalie’s movie career was on the wane. “She started declining in her work—not that the work wasn’t good, she just did less. She had decided to try motherhood, and that took her away from the career. And you don’t come back easy.” When Redford heard that Natalie was interested in the part of the mother in Ordinary People, he felt wrenched. “She had been out of work for a while, and her name came up, and I would have loved to have made it work, but I couldn’t. I really had Mary Tyler Moore in mind, and I was convicted on that. And Natalie had requested just a conversation about it, and that was kind of painful. I would love to have done it, but I just didn’t see her for that particular role.”

  Natalie’s request would be their last contact before she drowned, to the chagrin of Redford, who not only had deep feelings for Natalie, but also felt an emotional debt to her for choosing him as her costar in Inside Daisy Clover.

  That same summer, Natalie, a prolific reader, bought William Styron’s powerful bestseller, Sophie’s Choice, about the tragic Polish émigré forced to choose which child to sacrifice to Nazis. She developed an instant passion for the book, and its central character, reacting as she had years before to Marjorie Morningstar. “We were on the boat,” recalls Peggy Griffin, “and she was telling me about this incredible character. Of course she was relating to everything—to the actress, to the mother-child story—and she was almost acting it, she got so excited. I remember she did a little scene from it, with an accent.”

  Natalie kept a close eye on the film rights, “drooling” to play Sophie, the kind of challenging role that would revitalize her feature career. When Meteor was finally released that November, the reviews were as dismal as filming it had been for Natalie, criticisms she admitted were hurtful. The Cracker Factory, the TV movie she had put her heart and soul into, was a modest success that spring, though Natalie would not be nominated for an Emmy, an oversight Joyce Burditt found “unfathomable.”

  Fahd was in declining health, suffering a series of small heart attacks that Peggy Griffin associated with his stress over Natalie’s trip to Russia. “Who knows what stirred it up? It didn’t happen right there on the spot, but it wasn’t long after.” Natalie spent increasing amounts of time at her parents’ condominium, hoping to get closer to her father. When Griffin mentioned to Natalie how she had taken her father out for his seventieth birthday, just the two of them, Natalie’s face lit up. “And a couple of days later, she called me and said, ‘I just called Fahd and asked him to have dinner with me alone.’ ” At the last minute, Fahd canceled. “Natalie said she always knew that was Mud, not wanting it to happen—finding some health reason or something.”

  In the weeks before Christmas, Natalie filmed The Memory of Eva Ryker, a movie for CBS in which she played an heiress with a repressed childhood memory of seeing her mother drown aboard the Queen Anne luxury liner in 1939. In flashback, Natalie also portrayed the heiress’s mother, submerged in water as the Queen Anne sinks into the sea. “Oh, she hated that movie,” recalls Griffin. “She just thought everything, including herself, was terrible in it.” Even the art director, Duane Alt, was surprised to work with Natalie Wood. “She was certainly, what should I say, much more talented than to really have done this little movie of the week thing, and she obviously was used to doing big number pictures… but she was 100% into this thing. There was something very, very personal that she felt about this.”

  Natalie arranged to be hypnotized for the regression scene, studying how different parts of the body physically react in the moments before death. In a macabre foreshadowing, she “practiced” drowning to prepare for the flashback scene on the boat, which was going to be shot on the Queen Mary, in Long Beach, where a luxurious dressing room had been prepared for Natalie. “At dinner at our house one night,” she told a reporter, “everyone did his version of how the death scene should be played. If anyone looked in the window that night, he would have thought we were all crazy.” Once filming began, it was like a series of Chinese water tortures for Natalie.

  According to Walter Grauman, the director, Natalie could tolerate the scene where she floated through the ship’s waterlogged cabin, “because of the controlled circumstances,” though Grauman “knew she was scared.”

  What panicked Natalie, he found out
, was a sequence in the Pacific Ocean with actor Bradford Dillman, to be filmed at Paradise Cove, where Natalie and R.J. were married on the Ramblin’ Rose. “I was explaining to her a scene where Brad chases her down the beach, on the sand, and then she plunges down into the water, and he pursues her into the water and there’s this desperate struggle between them.” Natalie responded, “Walter, I’ll do anything you ask, but there’s one thing I’m deathly afraid of, and that’s dark water—deep, dark water.” Grauman recalls, “She had had premonitions and dreams about dark water.” Natalie had similar conversations during filming with her costume designer, Grady Hunt, telling Hunt about a recurring premonition she was going to die in dark water.

  Grauman’s solution was to show Natalie running on the sand and then insert a cutaway of her in a close-up shot in a water tank, “and then I had a stunt double go in the real ocean. Natalie was panic-stricken over dark water, deep dark water.”

  She was even terrified to get into the water tank at the studio. “I remember I went in the tank,” recalls Bradford Dillman. “I was the guy to be the guinea pig to specify exactly where she could stand to show her that her head would still be above water. She was really kind of pathologically frightened… ultimately she did go in, and I remember that she was holding on to the edge rather fearfully. Eventually she had to let go of the edge and she had to tread water, or pretend to be treading water, and she did it, and we all gave her a round of applause.”

  Actor Robert Foxworth, who was also in the tank sequence with Natalie, remembers holding her in his arms, with Natalie “just shaking like a leaf.” Duane Alt, who set up the scene, comments: “I think everybody really remembers that day very specifically because she was petrified… I really was shocked how frightened she was.”

  With the exception of her demons, Natalie was in command on Eva Ryker, as she had been on The Cracker Factory. “You thought this was her film,” a crewman recalls. “It seemed that important. She was so focused, and watching the details.” Dillman, an Actors Studio graduate, found Natalie “driven to be the best she possibly could be.” He was fascinated by her technique, which he considered to be the opposite of Method acting, “in the sense that she acted from the outside in. Hers was a very different kind of a technique. It was technical, meaning knowing where her marks were, where the lights were, where the key lights were… that she would show to advantage. There are certain actresses who could care less about how they look. They’re there to be admired as actresses. That was not Natalie’s game. She wanted everything to be perfect for her.”

  Exactly the way Mud had trained her, from the age of six.

  Sugar Bates returned to do Natalie’s hair during Eva Ryker, noticing that Natalie was under a great deal of stress in her personal life, exacerbated by R.J.’s drinking, which Bates says Natalie told her had worsened since Meteor. “She just seemed really in good shape and she loved the kids, but Wagner was drinking a lot.” Bates sympathized with Natalie. “My husband was, too, so we had a lot of talks about that.” Natalie told Bates that R.J.’s drinking “had gotten out of hand.”

  Natalie had been on a health kick since the mid-sixties, and successfully quit smoking that year. Although she still took a sleeping pill every night, an occasional diet pill, and prescription mood regulators as needed, she was uncomfortable with social drugs, which were popular in Hollywood. “We had a talk about it,” states Bates. “She just wasn’t into drugs. She said, ‘I’m not going to those parties where they put out the line of cocaine and stuff.’ ” The Wagners’ older Hollywood crowd “didn’t take drugs and things,” observed Bates. “They just drank.”

  Alcohol was one of the demons in Natalie’s life, beginning when she was a little girl, cowering in a corner during Fahd’s drunken rages. She knew the dangers of drinking, part of what had drawn her to The Cracker Factory. She told Sugar Bates she had learned in analysis to be firm with alcoholics, the reason she locked the liquor cabinet if Fahd was around, and once paid for Mart Crowley to get therapy. “When Mart was drinking a lot, she finally banned him from her house. She was such a loyal friend, and she had always been so giving, but finally she learned that it wasn’t helpful. She was learning not to be an enabler.”

  Natalie’s own drinking was sporadic. After her “Volga boatman” period as a rebel teen, she scaled back to a glass or two of Pouilly Fuissé, a martini, or a drink called a Scorpion on social occasions. By the time she made Eva Ryker, she was drinking more than in previous years, partly as a result of the Wagners’ lifestyle. “Natalie may have enjoyed drinking wine, but she never got sloppy or falling down. She never pushed it,” observed Lana. “I never saw her out of control. Wine is also a very European thing—you have wine with dinner; in sophisticated circles, you drink wine with dinner.”

  Walter Grauman, Natalie’s director on Eva Ryker, went out with the Wagners one night. “All I know is that we put away a number of bottles of wine when we were out to dinner. We had a marvelous time, but I had a hangover the next morning, and I assume that they did, too.”

  Duane Alt, one of the production crew, was a drinking buddy of R.J.’s from previous TV projects. “We’d just kill the afternoon, shooting the bull in the back part of the stage and he liked to drink, I know that. He’d say, ‘Hey, why don’t we take off and go get a beer or something? Let’s go get something.’ ” Alt, a Hollywood veteran, understood that alcohol relieved the pressures of stardom. “I think that’s something the public doesn’t understand. When you live at such an intense level, and you have to be seen as the best you can be, it’s a tough, tough thing. You’ve got to find some relaxation out of it to survive.”

  That December 6, after a long day’s filming, Bates styled Natalie’s hair in her dressing room on the Queen Mary, while Natalie put on something spectacular to meet R.J. for their special anniversary. “She was really tired, but he loved to celebrate, he loved to do these lovely parties and things. But she wasn’t looking forward to it, because she knew what was going to happen.”

  Bates recalls commiserating while Natalie talked about R.J.’s drinking. “I was thinking, ‘Where will she go from here?’ Because he loved the kids, too. My gut feeling at that point was that the family was the most important, and she would have done anything she could have done to make it work. She’d gotten old enough that she knew you don’t just run off and expect to find somebody else. If you don’t solve what you’re doing, it’s not going to get any better. She had done enough work on herself that she knew that. I didn’t get the feeling that she’d walk away unless something worse happened.”

  The Wagners began the new year of 1980 in Hollywood style. Mud accompanied them to the premiere of The Last Married Couple in America early in February, enjoying what would be her last blush in the public spotlight of Natalie Wood.

  Natalie did a round of interviews to promote her film about the sanctity of marriage, saying publicly what Bates privately intuited in her dressing room. “A lot of people just walk away from a relationship rather than trying to make it work,” Natalie told an interviewer. “Really, that’s not very healthy.”

  Natalie surprised R.J. a few days later with a lavish party at a starry, stylish Beverly Hills restaurant called the Bistro, celebrating his fiftieth birthday on February 10. Natalie invited their close friends as well as the extraordinary personages of Hollywood within their magic circle—David Niven, Christopher Plummer, Gene Kelly, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum—part of the glue that held them together as a couple.

  The Wagners, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation about the very rich, were different, even among their peers. “They were stars,” Bradford Dillman muses. “R.J. was married to Hollywood and the idea of stardom. And there are people, of course, who just luxuriate in that.” Roderick Mann, a Hollywood correspondent who had known Natalie and R.J. since the 1950s, described their partnership as a kind of prestige. “To pull in people like that for a friendly party—full of directors and movie stars, everybody was there. They were just terrific, and
they were generous friends.”

  Peggy Griffin characterized them as “a team,” for they were joint partners in a Hollywood fairy tale. Sue Russell, a British journalist based in Los Angeles, observed the Wagners sitting for a magazine cover in this period. She was spellbound watching them carry on a conversation with each other at the same time as the photographer was taking their pictures—holding their smiles as they discussed their plans for the day behind clenched teeth, like ventriloquists.

  Natalie received enthusiastic reviews for her comedy turn, and her beauty, in The Last Married Couple in America, but the film was dismissed as a second-rate Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, as New York Times critic Vincent Canby suggested. During filming, Natalie bemoaned to George Segal, “It’s one typed role after another, and pretty soon you forget every-thing. You forget why you’re here, why you’re doing it.”

  She would spend the whole of 1980 away from the camera, enjoying a family holiday with R.J. and the girls in Europe during R.J.’s spring hiatus from Hart to Hart. The British Film Institute honored Natalie in April with a retrospective, and then the Wagners visited David Niven in France, a spring tradition.

  Niven, like all of Hollywood, adored Natalie. “David always said she gave off an aura of sex like musk,” relates Roderick Mann, who regularly saw the Wagners on their trips to Europe.

  Mann sensed from his encounters with Natalie that she was a lonely woman, “even when she was married to Bob. It was like two separate people in some way. Sometimes two people meld together and are really one. They were sort of separate, I always felt.” In Mann’s view, R.J.’s charm masked a serious, somewhat boring nature. He compared Natalie to a joyous child. “Very hard to resist Natalie. She was never boring.” Mann observed that Natalie was the dominant spouse, as did Lana, who felt that R.J., at times, resented being “Mr. Wood,” which came out in “little verbal barbs here and there.” Mann observed, “Natalie was her own person. Very much so, and she was stronger than Bob. Maybe that’s a Russian thing, but there was strength there, beneath that childish exterior.” Mann witnessed a few rows between R.J. and Natalie, including one “that went on a bit,” when R.J. told Mann that Natalie “took an ugly pill. And they’d be at each other for whatever the reason.”