Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  ALTHOUGH SHE NO LONGER HAD COSTAR approval as she had in her glory days at Warners, Natalie had input in the casting of her scientist husband in Brainstorm, the film’s central character. Foreman’s choice was the edgy thirty-eight-year-old Christopher Walken, who had received the Academy Award a few years earlier for his mesmerizing performance as a psychotic Vietnam veteran in The Deer Hunter.

  Screenwriter Bob Stitzel, who was revising his Brainstorm script to enhance Natalie’s fairly minor part, was with her when she attended a private screening of The Dogs of War, Walken’s most recent film, to assess whether she was amenable to Walken as her leading man. “The only thing I remember her saying is that she liked his physical look. And she also felt that he was a very good actor—but I think she was mostly reacting to Deer Hunter.”

  According to Stitzel, MGM had high expectations for Brainstorm that summer as a breakthrough special effects film, because of Trumbull’s technical genius, Walken’s combustible talent, and Natalie’s name. Natalie, he observed, seemed “very much into this movie.” Actress Louise Fletcher, who was playing Walken’s research partner, knew from her conversations with Natalie that she considered the film important to her career. “I think it was sort of like—God, I don’t want to say making a comeback, ’cause it wasn’t that—but it was the first picture she’d made in a while, and I think it meant a lot to her to look good, to be good.”

  Natalie told Stitzel she was worried about the love scenes between her and Walken because he was thirty-eight and she was turning forty-three. “You know, ‘Would that work?’ Would people laugh at her?” He also found her “extremely sensitive” about her weight, “It was written on her face, written in how she behaved. She was looking a little rounded.”

  During their script discussions that summer, Stitzel was privy to the division between Natalie and her other self, “Natalie Wood,” or The Badge. On the one hand, “she never went anywhere, believe me, without the clothes, the jewelry, the makeup—’I’m Natalie Wood, I look great’—period.” But Stitzel saw that was not Natalie. “She seemed like a real homebody, the kind that would be baking cookies for the grandchildren… she seemed very much a mother type. She would talk a lot about family things, and what they were doing as a family.”

  Natalie’s insecurities about her career, and the way she looked, came from her efforts to perpetuate the movie star alter ego Mud had created for them both. “She was carrying a heavy burden around of being ‘Natalie Wood,’ ” Stitzel observed. “There was a concern like, What’s ‘Natalie Wood’ going to be when she’s fifty? What’s ‘Natalie Wood’ going to be when she’s forty-five? What’s ‘Natalie Wood’ going to be now?”

  The month of July was trying for Natalie. She started on a rigid diet to lose weight before Brainstorm, exercising on a Pilates machine, eating so little that Louise Fletcher’s sister worried. She and R.J. celebrated their ninth wedding anniversary that month, and Natalie turned forty-three the day after it was announced Meryl Streep was cast in Sophie’s Choice. Peggy Griffin, Natalie’s good friend, recalls, “I never saw her so wishful about getting a part that somebody else got.”

  Lana had a discomfiting feeling about her sister. “She was going through a bad time, she was just going through something in her own head. In terms of herself, where she was going, what she was going to be doing.”

  One day, when Lana was at the house watching Natalie put on her makeup, the way Lana had when she was seven and Natalie was fifteen, Natalie turned to her, suddenly pensive, and said, “Do you know what I want? I want yesterday.”

  Before her birthday, Natalie telephoned her older sister, Olga, in San Francisco for a long chat. “She asked me, ‘What do you miss most about my being a movie star?’ I say, ‘Well, what I miss most is we don’t see enough of each other as a family.’”

  Natalie called her sister back a while later to say that she and R.J. and the girls were coming to San Francisco and Santa Rosa—where Natalie spent what little childhood she had—in a thirty-five-foot R.V. “So they piled into this—just before she died—they piled into this thing. And R.J. was driving, because his driver was on strike, so he had to get used to driving this van, because it’s so long. And they came with Courtney and with Natasha, who came with a little girlfriend, and R.J. parked the van right in front of my house. And the neighbors all around came and were asking for autographs.”

  Photographs from the Wagners’ summer vacation in northern California with Olga and her family show Natalie as the “real person” she always longed to be: standing with her daughters on a street in Chinatown, smiling while her husband snapped their picture; enjoying lunch at the touristy Spinnaker Restaurant overlooking the Bay, with both sisters’ families sprawled at one long table and Natasha in Natalie’s lap, playing with Natalie’s necklace.

  At the same time, Olga noticed, something seemed to be bothering Natalie, for she stayed in the R.V. by herself on occasion, seemingly withdrawn.

  When the Wagners returned from their holiday, director Doug Trumbull made arrangements for Natalie, John Foreman, screenwriter Bob Stitzel, Louise Fletcher, actor Cliff Robertson (who had been cast in Brainstorm) and himself to spend a few days under the supervision of Dr. Stanislav Grof at the experimental Esalen Institute near Big Sur. Trumbull’s esoteric idea was to research the life-after-death concept in Brainstorm by having everyone take a hallucinogenic drug that simulated death. “The only person that didn’t come up was Walken, who was doing something else,” recalls Stitzel. Once they arrived, “it turned out there was a little legal problem with this drug.”

  In its place, the Esalen Institute included Trumbull’s Brainstorm group in a rebirthing seminar, with everyone lying on the floor listening to a tape, using slow, rhythmic deep breathing until their muscles contracted and they went through emotional states from hysterical laughter to sobbing, simulating life after death. “The only person that didn’t do it was Natalie,” recalls Stitzel. “Because stars don’t lie down on floors and weep and pound. She might look vulnerable. She stayed in her room, mostly, the whole time.”

  Fletcher considered the exercise “insane. I couldn’t wait to get out of it. We had one guy stand up and rip his clothes off and he was being reborn and he was a warrior. Doug [Trumbull] was into it, because he had some idea about death. I mean, please. I’m too pragmatic and I just went along with it because I had to.”

  Natalie took her costume designer, Donfeld, with her to Esalen, taking walks, calling her daughters, and appointing Donfeld her “diet watchdog.” “The rest of us were getting into nude hot tubbing,” states Stitzel. “Natalie wouldn’t get naked,” laughs Fletcher. “She was smart. I was forced into it, or felt forced into it, but Natalie said, ‘I’m going to take a nap.’ She just wasn’t about to do that.” Stitzel found Natalie “very proper and very prim, almost prudish.”

  Natalie had struggled with her inhibitions while she was making Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass, part of her perfectionism, her obsession with presenting herself as “Natalie Wood,” the glamorous alter ego her mother invented—The Badge—symbolized by the bracelet she always wore in public to cover her flawed wrist. “She couldn’t let her hair down,” reveals Stitzel. “She had to look real together all the time. She was a movie child, raised on sets. That was her life: looking good. Doing her very best acting bit playing the role of a star.” Dennis Hopper had noticed the same thing, twenty-five years earlier, commenting that Natalie’s best performance was as “Natalie Wood.”

  Early in September, Trumbull initiated another bold idea by conventional Hollywood standards, gathering Stitzel and the Brainstorm cast—Natalie, Walken, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson—at a table on a soundstage at MGM to go through the script together, a process that lasted almost two weeks. In Stitzel’s view, it turned into “utter chaos,” with the intense, Actors Studio-trained Walken making changes in the scenes and rewriting dialogue, eventually “wrestling power” from the cerebral Trumbull.

  For
Natalie, the script sessions were a flashback to the emotionally charged script readings for Rebel Without a Cause led by the intellectual Nick Ray at the Chateau Marmont, the “golden world” she had romanticized in her mind, with the New York-based, avant-garde Walken assuming the role Jimmy Dean had when she was sixteen.

  At one point in the Brainstorm script read-through, Walken pulled Natalie aside and said, “Let’s put the script away, Natalie, and let’s improvise,” just as Dean had done with her in 1955. Natalie’s initial reaction to Walken was similar to her original, intimidated response to Dean. “You could look at the terror in her face,” recalls Stitzel. “She was like, ‘Okay,’ with her earrings all dangling. And she was trying to improvise with him.” Walken, per Stitzel, “had that East Coast, ‘I’m an actor’ kind of thing: ‘I’m an artist, what am I doing in this stupid special effects movie?’ ” The neophyte Trumbull, Stitzel observed, was “way, way over his head, particularly with this cast. They had him by the end of the rehearsal that day.”

  Natalie’s relationship with Walken was “cordial” during the fortnight of rehearsals in L.A. that early September, but it was clear she had been stimulated creatively. Walken sparked the same excitement in Natalie that Dean, Kazan, Ray, and Scott Marlowe had, bringing out the artist side of Natalie’s actress personality that had been suppressed since her movie star-style second marriage to R.J., at a time when Natalie was hungering to do serious work, to recapture “yesterday.”

  Lana recalls, “She was enjoying working with Walken. She had a great deal of respect for him. She felt that he was another one of those really serious New York actors, which meant a lot to her. She was very respectful of that whole acting process, that she did feel was very different than it is out here in Hollywood.”

  Natalie’s career spirits lifted as she prepared to go on location for six weeks in Raleigh, North Carolina, to begin filming Brainstorm, energized at the thought of working with Walken, anxious to be in a big-budget feature film again. She finalized her option for the film rights to Zelda, and made plans to portray the suicidal poet Anne Sexton, another of the dark, complex, fragile women who drew her. The jewel in her crown was Anastasia, her homage to Fahd, to Mud, to Natasha Gurdin.

  “She was getting rejuvenated about her career,” relates Peggy Griffin, then Natalie’s closest friend. “The kids were getting older, Natasha was eleven. Natalie had a sense that—you know how eleven-year-old girls are—they want to be with their friends, they don’t want to be with Mommy. Courtney was heading in that direction, and Natalie had a sense of ‘This is something I might want to do again.’ ” Since R.J. was filming Hart to Hart at the studio, there would be a parent at home with Natasha and Courtney while Natalie was making Brainstorm, part of the Wagners’ marital pact.

  When the time came for Natalie to leave for Raleigh in late September, it was wrenching. Natasha had a morbid fixation that her mother was going to die, because a playmate’s stepfather had recently had a sudden heart attack. “Tasha developed this little kind of drama that every time Natalie went out the door, Natasha started this, ‘I don’t want you to go, Mommy. What if you die? What if you die in the car?’ ” recalls Griffin. “She was developing this out of control fear of death, and Natalie didn’t want her to have a fear.” Griffin suggested Natalie just tell Natasha that Mommy wasn’t going to die. Natalie’s response was eerily prescient. “She said, ‘How could I say that? What if something ever really happened to me? Who would she ever trust to believe again?’”

  Courtney was so distraught that her mother would be away for six weeks that Natalie took a later flight from the rest of the cast so she could drive both her daughters to school, arranging for costumer Donfeld to fly to Raleigh in the seat beside her. “Natalie was terrified of plane travel,” he said later. “At the start of our trip that day, I pointed out some of the things about her past and personality that might be responsible for her fear. She hung on every word, and I thought I helped her.”

  Natalie checked into the Pinehurst Hotel in North Carolina to start Brainstorm, ridden with guilt, desperately missing her little girls. “I remember her telling me that this was the first thing she’d worked on in a long time away from her family and she was feeling a bit weird about it,” relates costar Louise Fletcher, who was at the hotel in Pinehurst when Natalie arrived. “But she was excited about doing this movie, and it was sort of striking out on her own in a way.”

  Natalie made herculean efforts to be the perfect mother while still fulfilling her creative needs. Within a few days of arriving in North Carolina, she flew back across the country for Natasha’s September 29 birthday party, despite her fear of airplanes. “I got there for dinner,” recalls Griffin, “and there was like a mob of people, kids and all that stuff. Natalie was on a flight out almost at dawn because she had to be back in North Carolina. It was a hard trip for her because it was a turnaround. We hugged and she said, ‘I’ll see you at Thanksgiving.’”

  When she returned to Raleigh, Fletcher noticed, Natalie had a difficult time without a support system around her, separated from her daughters. “She was always talking about her kids. Missing them, what they were like. She mentioned them all the time, and called them, having conversations at night.” Creatively, Fletcher thought Natalie “was having a very good time. When we worked together in scenes, she was in a very good mood and very, very funny. She would be talking under her breath, trying to make me laugh—and she succeeded.”

  The production itself seemed doomed. The word filtering back to Stitzel in Los Angeles was that “it was chaotic because of Trumbull’s complete lack of control over what was going on, and Walken was pretty much directing his own scenes and doing his own thing.” Fletcher says diplomatically, “The producers and the director didn’t have a creative meeting of the minds.”

  By the middle of October, Brainstorm was so far behind schedule that executive producer Jack Grossberg “cleaned out the entire production department” and made an emergency call to a first assistant director named David McGiffert. “He said, ‘You owe me a favor,’ and he was kind of laughing. He said, ‘They’ve got a problem on Brainstorm, this movie being shot by Doug Trumbull. We’ve got to take over this show. They’re in North Carolina, and we’ve gotta go in and get it right.’”

  McGiffert’s perception, when he arrived on location, was similar to Stitzel’s during rehearsal. “It seemed as though a lot of the production was in chaos… for some reason, it was difficult for Doug [Trumbull] to impart his brilliance, to communicate it to actors.” Stitzel heard from his contacts on location that Natalie “really fell under Walken’s spell and followed his direction more than Trumbull’s.”

  Louise Fletcher, who was there and had numerous scenes with Walken, observes, “Chris is just too crazy to take over. Natalie, believe me, was grounded in her craft, and I don’t believe that Chris was going to take her over in any way. He may have given her suggestions or an extra glass of wine, I don’t know. He’s a marvelous actor. He made me laugh a lot… right before the scene would start, he would do something completely different just to get the energy going, like he’d drop his pants or something. He’s not over in his own space. He’s kind of intrusive, but everybody’s got their own way of working.”

  Walken’s off-the-wall style and Method approach were similar to the way Natalie’s movie-god Jimmy Dean behaved with her during Rebel, striking an emotional chord in her. “She would look at Chris and he’d do some funny thing that nobody would see on the set, and she’d just fall over laughing,” observed McGiffert. “Chris was trying to get her to loosen up in her role, because I think Natalie really wanted to do well, and that actually impaired her relaxing to do the part. Chris gets with his parts, and he lives in that guy, and he wanted Natalie to sense this woman.”

  Walken, according to McGiffert, who was responsible for keeping track of the cast, assuaged Natalie’s “huge” insecurities about her age and weight—the pressure to be “Natalie Wood”—that Stitzel noticed prior t
o filming. She was especially insecure about a wedding flashback scene depicting her and Walken in their early twenties.

  “She was really, really afraid of how she was going to look,” states the A.D. “Lots of time in makeup.” The morning of the scene, “Natalie didn’t want to do it. You could tell she was stressed, and Chris had this goofy little kind of thing he did… to get her on the point where she needed to be, without upsetting her emotionally.”

  Natalie’s concern that she needed to look like “Natalie Wood” was touching to McGiffert. When the scene was over, he went up to her and said sympathetically, “Look, you look good. And you can’t go back. You know, you can’t be that girl again.”

  Natalie spent most of her down time in Raleigh on the telephone with her daughters, or in the trailer with Walken, who occasionally went to dinner with her. With Walken, she violated her longstanding rule to drink no more than one glass of wine during filming. “Wardrobe was going crazy because she was putting on weight from all the wine,” recalls Faye Nuell, who was then a production executive at MGM. “Suddenly she had these matronly arms and they were having to let out the clothes.”

  By the time McGiffert joined the Brainstorm team a few weeks into October, the gossip was that Natalie and the married Walken, whose wife flew back and forth from New York, were having an affair.

  “I know that’s what everyone thought,” submits Fletcher. “I think that she was in over her head, that’s what I think, in every which way. If Natalie had one glass of wine, she could be—she just couldn’t handle any kind of alcohol, and I think unfortunately a couple of times she had more than one glass. And I’m not saying she was alcoholic or anything like that. It’s just that I think she was kind of in limbo out there in North Carolina and didn’t really feel that she had her community right here, and I think that a couple of times it may have looked like she and Chris were drunk.”