Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  They returned from their trip abroad in May to an unspectacular reaction to The Memory of Eva Ryker on CBS. Natalie signed a contract to renew an earlier agreement with ICM as her talent agency, where Michael Black and the powerful Guy McElwaine represented her. She still longed to play Sophie in Sophie’s Choice, which her friend Alan Pakula had optioned as a feature film; looking for ways to revitalize her career.

  She spent all of the summer, and the fall, tending to motherly duties or at Fahd’s bedside, for he was weakening from a bad heart, exacerbated by years of alcohol abuse. “She was constantly at the hospital with Nick,” states Peggy Griffin. “Months and months and months. There was one point at which Nick was in the hospital in Long Beach and R.J. pulled his back out and he was in traction at Cedars, and Natalie was back and forth between the two of them, plus picking the kids up at school. And she just did it all. She wasn’t one to say, ‘Oh, why me?’ or call in an army of maids to do this and that. They needed her, not somebody she’d send.”

  In October, when Fahd had his final heart attack, Natalie kept a promise to let him die at home, arranging for a hospital bed in his den and a round-the-clock nurse. Natalie, Lana believed, had made peace with their father’s alcoholic rage. Shirley Moore, Maria’s close friend, recalls Natalie at the Gurdins’ condominium, sitting with a bowl of her mother’s Russian eggplant, next to Fahd’s frail body, staring into his still-handsome face. “She was there every day. She was holding his hand, and reading to him, and just so sweet to him. That’s where he died. It was kind of sad.”

  Natalie made arrangements for a memorial service at Westwood Chapel, though Fahd’s final resting place would be a Serbian cemetery south of San Francisco. The night before the wake, Natalie scheduled a viewing of the body, a Russian Orthodox tradition. “People got confused, and nobody, not one person, came to the viewing,” recalls Griffin. “Natalie was there alone.” She told Griffin afterward, “I had such a peaceful sense of being alone with him for the first time.”

  Fahd’s death was a powerfully emotional experience for Natalie, who was struggling, still, to vanquish the ghosts of her childhood, conflicted with feelings of love and loss and unresolved resentment. “She was just so filled with grief for her father, I can’t even describe it,” remembers Griffin. Natalie gave the eulogy at the Westwood Chapel on November 7, 1980, a tender tribute to the papa who spent all his money in 1938 to buy his Natasha the finest carriage in San Francisco, fit for Anastasia:

  I used to call him Papa. Lana called him Pop. To R.J. he was Fahd. Then, when he had his grandchildren, Natasha, Courtney, and Evie, they called him Deda. So did Katie… he was always surrounded by his family of little women…

  I am his firstborn daughter and I will always have so many memories of my Papa, my Deda, my Fahd… his wife who loved him and shared his life for over forty years, he called Musia. My mother, Musia, was so devoted to him during his long and difficult illness—she cooked his special dishes and went without sleep herself… shall no doubt miss him most of all. But it must be a comfort for her to know that she was the love of his life…

  When we used to tell Natasha and Courtney stories about the three bears—when Goldilocks breaks the littlest bear’s chair—we always added “But never mind, Deda will fix it” because he always seemed to be able to fix anything for us…

  I think many of us here have had the supreme pleasure of watching and listening to him play his balalaika… Fahd loved music, singing, dancing and he was never embarrassed to let his feelings show. He was far too much a man to ever worry about having anyone see his tears. He sometimes cried in sorrow, but often in joy…

  Aren’t we lucky to have witnessed some of his rich, wonderful Russian explosions. He was passionate and could be wild—but his underside was soft and gentle…

  My daughter, Natasha, wrote a beautiful letter to her Deda… “Deda, I didn’t believe you would die and I never will because you’re alive with me… Natasha.”

  My youngest daughter, Courtney… wrote “Dear Deda—I hope you have a nice time in heaven, Love Courtney.”

  And now I must say my farewell. I would like to say to my father a last goodnight—“Spakoynee Noch”… Spakoynee noch, Papachka.

  Six weeks after Fahd’s death, Natalie asked her friend Peggy Griffin to go with her and Natasha and Courtney to a final memorial service, a Russian tradition. Griffin would never forget Natalie’s face as she said her last farewell to her Fahd. “I think she had a lot of unfinished business, and she really loved him. She just loved him.”

  Natalie’s deep and complicated feelings for Fahd were not unlike her love for R.J. Both R.J. and Nick were tender, handsome, artistic men with a tendency to be weak, and to have a drink to escape a private anguish.

  That New Year’s Eve, Natalie and R.J. gave a glittering black-tie dinner at their house on Canon, one of the legendary soirees they would be remembered by. “To be at a party at the Wagners’ was really extraordinary,” Gil Cates would say. “I went to several New Year’s Eve parties there where everyone from David Niven to—I remember one New Year’s Eve party, about 1:30 in the morning—Cary Grant dropped by, just to say hello.” The magnet was Natalie. “Natalie attracted people in an amazing way. People loved being around her, and not because she was a star, because I know a lot of stars that people don’t love to be around. She was fun, she had this tinkly laugh, it was just so adorable—I can hear it, it was just light and merry—just this merry, merry laugh.”

  At the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1980, R.J., in his tuxedo, picked up his glass of Dom Perignon and held it up to a sparklingly glamorous Natalie, as their crush of celebrated guests fell silent. “I love you, my darling Natalie,” he said, in a toast reminiscent of the Cary Grant-romantic way he had dropped an engagement ring into her champagne glass on a December night, twenty-three years before. “In fact,” he added, “you take my breath away.”

  It would be Natalie’s last New Year’s Eve.

  NATALIE AND MARIA, THE TWO PERSONALITIES intertwined in the actress persona of “Natalie Wood,” each began 1981 in upheaval.

  For all her fantasizing about her sea captain, and the stress of living with Fahd’s brooding, brawling Russian despair, Mud was bereft without the matinee-handsome husband who gave her what she considered her greatest gift: Natasha.

  She reacted to Nick’s passing with her usual high drama, going into “the fits,” drawing Olga to Los Angeles so the three sisters could figure out what to do with Musia. Mud went back and forth from her condominium to Lana’s apartment to the place she felt she belonged, with Natalie, an arrangement that strained Natalie and R.J.’s increasingly delicate balance.

  Something was stirring in Natalie that began during Fahd’s long illness. She was going through a creative reawakening, harkening to her youthful passion for projects that stimulated the artist side of her rather than the “movie star” personality that reflected Maria and was reinforced by her Hollywood marriage to R.J.

  As Fahd lay dying, Natalie read a version of Anastasia, the play that had moved her as a teenager, serendipitously presented to her late in 1980 by her friend Robert Fryer, the artistic director at the Ahmanson Theater, who hoped to interest Natalie in playing the lead role on the stage. During this interval of heightened family drama, less than a year after her trip to Russia, the mystery story of the putative Romanov duchess sparked something in Natalie, who in the sixties had dreamt of costarring on stage with Robert Redford. “The play was even more wonderful than I remembered,” she said that year. “I had a strong emotional reaction to it and, perhaps because of my Russian heritage, I identified with the characters. All my life I have had my best experiences when I have responded to material with my heart before my mind.”

  Mud gathered together with great excitement her treasured photographs of the Romanovs, still in their frames, ecstatic at her beloved Natasha playing a member of the Russian royal family that she had always claimed as her own. Natalie immersed herself in her mother�
�s buried treasures to prepare for the role, asking Mud if she could use the family portrait of the Zudilovs taken in Siberia in 1919 as a prop when she played Anastasia. “She told me, ‘Mud, can I borrow it? I can put it on the stage.’ She said, ‘Can I have the Romanov family, too, so it will be very authentic on the stage, too?’”

  Natalie’s true inspiration for Anastasia was Fahd. She told her friend Roderick Mann how her father had slept with a picture of the Romanovs in his bedroom, where she had seen it from her crib. “To him they were saints,” she explained. “He was always talking about the tragedy of the massacre.”

  Natalie approached the February 1982 stage production with the same mingled terror and elation she had Rebel and Splendor in the Grass, part of what attracted her to it. She even quoted Kazan’s long-ago advice to her—“Don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself ”—as a catalyst.

  Lana noticed unease in Natalie that winter. “There was contentment, definitely—she had her kids and she had a lovely home and she had R.J., who she just absolutely was madly in love with—but she was concerned about her work, and she was concerned about life.”

  At forty-two, with lackluster films and television movies becoming her stock in trade, Natalie made other sweeping changes. Early in 1981, she formed a production company with Bill Storke, a television executive friend of R.J.’s, acquiring rights to a few books to adapt into films, explaining, “The business side of acting—movies anyway—is changing to the point where I don’t think it’s practical to sit around and wait for scripts to come in. I find I enjoy buying books and working with writers. And that’s an area I didn’t think I’d ever find myself in.” Her friend Griffin observes, “Natalie was so smart and realistic. She knew, at forty-two, she wasn’t going to be the leading lady anymore. And she was a survivor.”

  She clearly wanted to resurrect her gloried Kazan/Ray past, telling a writer, “I’ve always thought it was good to be ambitious in terms of growing and realizing your potential… I want to take some risks and work.” Natalie watched in despair from the sidelines as other actresses vied for Sophie’s Choice, where once she would have been the front-runner. She was “not overly thrilled” with her own recent films.

  Natalie saw an opportunity to be involved in something substantive by playing Zelda Fitzgerald, the schizophrenic flapper she had emulated at sixteen with Hopper and Adams. She made overtures to Nancy Milford, the New York-based biographer of the respected Zelda, arranging for Milford to fly to Beverly Hills to convince her that she was Zelda, as she had done with Nick Ray when she wanted to play Judy, or Kazan for the part of Deanie, or Herman Wouk, to play Marjorie Morningstar. Natalie wanted the rights to Zelda desperately, Milford could tell, “to do a serious piece of work.”

  The schism between Natalie the star, and Natalie the artist, was evident in her encounters with the New York author. Milford recalls Natalie in a “ridiculous” cowboy hat, taking her to a party at John Schlesinger’s house, introducing her to Richard Gere, trying to impress her. She noticed the Wagners had matching Mercedes “with little shag rugs inside, which had intertwined initials. Which seemed to me almost outrageous—which, of course, may be just a Hollywood gesture.”

  Milford at first questioned whether Natalie was capable of portraying the intricate Zelda. “So as I would pull back a little, she would be more aggressively, ‘Well, what kind of person do you want me to be?’ or ‘Do you want me to be crazier?’ There was this dance going on. On the one hand, she was trying to charm me or trying to sell me or trying to give me the feeling that she could be this complex woman, and on the other hand, looking right at you, smoldering dark eyes, and yet very wary.” Natalie let Milford know “she knew whereof she spoke” concerning neurotic behavior. “She was intense, and quite lovely, and sort of screwy, I thought.”

  While Milford was in town, Natalie took her to Cedars to visit R.J., who was in the hospital for a herniated disc. Mart Crowley, who was now working for R.J., went along, carrying a plastic cup appearing to be a malted milk, “and in fact it was loaded with vodka or booze of some sort.” Like naughty children, Crowley and Natalie sneaked the glass to R.J., similar to Fahd’s former habit of hiding vodka in his toolbox.

  Milford perceived, as had Lana, that Natalie “was not in great shape” emotionally. “She was at that—sort of feeling like her career was washed up. She was a woman who seemed to be profoundly unsure of herself, while behaving as if, or acting as if, everything’s fine: great marriage to a great guy, great kids, great house… ‘but I’m a complicated woman.’ ” When Milford left L.A., she verbally agreed to let Natalie option her book, “more favorably impressed by her than I thought I would be.” She caught glimpses of Natalie’s vulnerability, finding her fragile in some way. “I thought she could have been a remarkable Zelda. I know it seems unlikely, but I did.”

  Natalie spent most of that winter and early spring under the same roof with the husbandless Mud, who had swept into the Wagners’ house, where she passed her days devising elaborate ways to provoke arguments between Natalie and R.J. “She just was a busybody,” as Bates oversimplified it, “and always on Natalie’s case. The mother just drove her crazy, with her ways. Natalie would have liked to have been away from her, not worry about her—’Just let me live my life’—but her mother would always come in and cause upsets and things. And I can’t tell you exactly what it was, because I don’t know.”

  In public, Maria hero-worshipped the suave, charming R.J., reveling in the Wagners’ prestige as Hollywood’s favorite couple. Away from the spotlight, Mud muttered darkly and superstitiously about “no good coming of this,” whispering to Lana that R.J. was a “weakling,” creating further tension over his drinking. “Natalie was mad at her mother,” relates Robert Hyatt, who heard all about it from his mother, Jeanne, and from Mud. “Marie was in the guest house, taking care of the kids, like a built-in babysitter. She was next to Natalie—that was her gig. But she was constantly trying to get Natalie to leave Wagner, constantly, and I think she had crossed the line, had told some stories to the kids, I don’t know what about. Whatever it was, Natalie got pissed.”

  The straw, for Natalie, was Mud’s fixation on ten-year-old Natasha, her namesake, look-alike daughter. When Natalie saw her mother fawn over Natasha, ignoring seven-year-old Courtney, it brought back all the ghosts of Natalie’s star-child past with Lana, the invisible sister. To protect her daughters and preserve her marriage, Natalie evicted Mud. “Wagner threw Marie out,” states Hyatt. Mud sought refuge, ironically, with Lana, who was newly divorced, living with her daughter, Evan.

  The rift between Natalie and Maria did not sever their unholy bond; Natalie continued to phone her alter ego every morning, and Mud still worshipped the ground on which Natalie walked. Peggy Griffin, Natalie’s close friend, did not characterize Natalie’s feelings for Mud as “love-hate,” even at this extreme stage. “I don’t think the word ‘hate’ would ever come into it, maybe some resentment. But if there was a problem, Natalie was there. She was very family-oriented.”

  After learning that Hart to Hart had been renewed, the Wagners escaped to the south of France for their spring pilgrimage, stopping in Paris. While she and R.J. were at Maxim’s having dinner, Natalie took a call from John Foreman, the producer friend who reunited them at his “fateful” 1970 dinner party.

  Foreman tracked Natalie down in Paris to tell her about a part he was developing for her in an unusual MGM feature about an experimental machine with sensory devices allowing one person to experience the emotions of another, even during death. The screenwriter’s idea was “to take the audience through a death experience, and explore that mystery.” The script was called Brainstorm. Because the premise was science fiction, Foreman had chosen a gifted young expert in special effects named Douglas Trumbull, famous for his electronic wizardry in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as director.

  Natalie was intrigued. When she and R.J. flew back to Hollywood a few weeks later, she told Roderick Mann why. “In the film I’m
estranged from my husband… but through his being able to experience my feelings and see things through my eyes, and vice versa, we get back together again.”

  En route from Paris to Los Angeles, the Wagners stopped in New York for Natalie to pose for a Blackglama fur advertisement, part of the company’s successful “What Becomes a Legend Most?” campaign featuring icons in glamorous furs. Natalie got to keep her sumptuous black mink to add to her fur closet, near the notes she was making for her eventual memoirs.

  She and R.J. stayed at the elegant Pierre Hotel, where they invited a longtime fan of Natalie’s, Bill Goulding, up to their suite. By contrast to Richard Gregson, who would hurry Natalie along in irritation, R.J. chatted with Natalie’s fan, assuming his role as the perfect consort, posing in seeming self-effacement next to Natalie. The casual photos of the Wagners from that summer day, with R.J. dressed in designer blue jeans, their arms around each other’s waists, Natalie smiling as R.J. looks at her adoringly, reveal no evidence of stress. They both looked a few pounds heavier than their Hollywood ideal, with evidence they were fifty-one and forty-two, but they were still the golden couple.

  When they got back to L.A. in mid-June, Natalie’s new agents at William Morris, back in her good graces after the mass firings of 1966, announced her casting in Brainstorm.