CAUSE: He died of heart failure at home in Yucca Street, Los Angeles, while watching an American football game on television.
Natalie Wood
(NATASHA NIKOLAEVNA ZACHARENKO)
Born July 20, 1938
Died November 29, 1981
Brunette bombshell. Born in San Francisco, California, the daughter of a Russian architect who later changed his name to Gurdin and a Siberian ballet dancer, Natalie Wood was one of the few actors to be equally successful as a child star and an adult one. Her busty (36D-24–35) 5́ 2˝ younger sister, Lana (b. Santa Rosa, California, March 1, 1946) was also an actress; she appeared as Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and was married to producer Robert Evans. Natalie, two inches shorter than her sister and a more demure 32B-22-34, was a good pupil at school and excelled at maths, which made her money conscious in later life. She made her film début aged five in Happy Land (1943) and appeared in Driftwood (1947) as Jenny, during which she broke her left wrist, leaving her with a deformed hand for the rest of her life that she skilfully hid with sleeves or jewellery. It was her portrayal of Susan Walker in Miracle On 34th Street (1947) that won audiences’ hearts worldwide. Natalie Wood grew up on screen in films such as The Ghost And Mrs Muir (1947) as Anna Muir, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) as Bean McGill, Chicken Every Sunday (1948) as Ruth Hefferan, Father Was A Fullback (1949) as Ellen Cooper, Never A Dull Moment (1950) as Nan, No Sad Songs For Me (1950) as Polly Scott, Our Very Own (1950) as Penny, Dear Brat (1951) as Pauline, Just For You (1952) as Barbara Blake, The Silver Chalice (1954) as Helena and the film in which she was a graceful adult, Rebel Without A Cause (1955) as Judy for which she earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared in The Girl He Left Behind (1956) as Susan Daniels, The Searchers (1956) as Debbie Edwards, A Cry In The Night (1956) as Liz Taggart, Marjorie Morningstar (1958) as Marjorie Morgenstern, Kings Go Forth as Monique Blair, Cash McCall as Lory Austen, All The Fine Young Cannibals (1960) as Salome Davis, Splendor In The Grass (1961) as Wilma Dean Loomis, for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, West Side Story (1961) as Maria, Gypsy (1962) as Louise Hovick aka Gypsy Rose Lee, Love With The Proper Stranger (1963) as Angie Rossini, Sex And The Single Girl (1964) as Helen Gurley Brown, Inside Daisy Clover (1965) as Daisy Clover, The Great Race (1965) as Maggie DuBois, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) as Carol Sanders, Peeper (1975) as Ellen Prendergast, Meteor (1979) as Tatiana Nikolaevna Donskaya and The Last Married Couple In America (1980) as Mari Thompson. After Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice she put her career on hold to raise a family with husband Robert ‘RJ’ Wagner, whom she had remarried at sea on July 16, 1972, having divorced him on April 27, 1962. They had originally married on December 28, 1957. Between marriages to Wagner she was married (May 30, 1969–August 4, 1971) to Richard Gregson. Praised by many, in 1966 the Harvard Lampoon nevertheless awarded a Natalie Wood Award for “the worst actress of this year, next year and the following year.” Natalie turned up in person to collect the prize.
CAUSE: Despite three Oscar nominations it is because of the manner of her death that Natalie Wood is now most remembered. She was filming Brainstorm (1983) with Christopher Walken when she drowned off the coast of Catalina. She was 43. That much is certain but how she came to be in the water is still something of a mystery, since she suffered from hydrophobia. Prior to beginning Brainstorm she began a strict diet and exercise regimen. At the time Wagner had the successful television series Hart To Hart running and gossips linked him romantically to his co-star Stefanie Powers. Arriving on location in Raleigh, North Carolina, for her film, gossips then suggested that Wood had become interested in the equally married Christopher Walken. Brainstorm was supposed to be Walken’s second attempt at becoming a major star after the critical and commercial disaster that was Heaven’s Gate (1980). Walken’s wife accompanied him on the shoot and RJ flew down twice to spend the weekend with his wife and she went to California for the other two weekends so if an affair/affairs were being conducted, all parties were remarkably relaxed about the situation. The film company returned to Los Angeles and the rumour mill went into overdrive. However, no one on the set ever reported hard facts linking Wood and Walken. During filming William Holden, lover of RJ’s Hart To Hart co-star Stefanie Powers, was found dead in his home. He had died after falling over and gashing his head while drunk. On Thanksgiving (November 26) 1981 the Robert Wagners held a party. Christopher Walken was one of the guests and it is thought then that the couple invited him to spend the weekend on their boat, Splendour, in Catalina. Walken’s wife had gone to Connecticut and he accepted the offer. At 1.15am on November 29, 1981, Wagner called the coast guard to alert them to a missing person in Valiant, an 11-foot dinghy. An air-sea rescue operation began but it wasn’t until 7.44am that the ‘missing person’ was discovered near Blue Cavern Point. It was Natalie Wood and she was dead. Hollywood pathologist Thomas Noguchi explained that Natalie had fallen into the sea while trying to get into the dinghy. She was wearing a red jacket that had become waterlogged, leaving her unable to get into the craft and had tried to paddle it to shore but exhaustion and hypothermia overcame her and she drowned. But why was she trying to leave the boat? The theories are many and varied and ultimately unsatisfactory. One had it that Wagner had found his wife in a compromising situation with Walken and she had fled the yacht and fell into the sea where she drowned. Another, even more unlikely, had Wood catching Walken and Wagner together and the shock causing her to fall overboard. We are never likely to know for sure.
FURTHER READING: Natalie: A Memoir By Her Sister – Lana Wood (New York: Dell, 1984); Natalie & RJ – Warren G. Harris (London: Sphere, 1989).
Peggy Wood
Born February 9, 1892
Died March 18, 1978
Leather-lunged singer-actress. Born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a journalist, Margaret Wood studied singing under Arthur Van der Linde and later under Madame Calvé before making her stage début on November 7, 1910, at the New York Theater in Naughty Marietta. It was the start of what would be a phenomenally long career that reached its apotheosis when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance as the Mother Abbess singing ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ in The Sound Of Music (1965). A stage regular, she made few films but they included Almost A Husband (1919) as Eva McElwyn, Wonder Of Women (1929) as Brigitte, Handy Andy (1934) as Ernestine Yates, Jalna (1935) as Meg, A Star Is Born (1937) as Miss Phillips, Call It A Day (1937) as Ethel Francis, Magnificent Doll (1946) as Mrs Payne and Dream Girl (1948) as Lucy Allerton. For eight years from 1949 she played Marta Hansen in the television series Mama. Peggy Wood was married twice – to John Van Alstyn Weaver, who predeceased her, and then to Lieutenant-Colonel William Henry Walling.
CAUSE: She died aged 86 from a stroke at her home, 1022 Sunset Road, Stamford, Connecticut.
Monty Woolley
Born August 17, 1888
Died May 6, 1963
‘The Beard’. Born in Manhattan’s Bristol Hotel (which his father owned), Edgar Montillion Woolley was indulged materially as a child, riding ponies and wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. He was educated at Yale (1907–1911) and Harvard (1911–1914) and developed a cultured, refined voice that made him a natural on Broadway. However, before he moved to the Great White Way (in 1936 when he was in his late forties) he worked as a drama teacher, numbering Thornton Wilder among his students. He made his theatrical and cinematic débuts in the same year, appearing in Ladies In Love (1936). He made a name for himself playing gregarious or talkative characters. His best-known role on the stage and subsequently in film was that of acidic theatre critic Sheridan Whiteside (based on Alexander Woollcott) in The Man Who Came To Dinner (1942). However, the Academy ignored him, though he was Oscar nominated for The Pied Piper (1942) as Howard and Colonel Smollett in Since You Went Away (1944). His other films included: Live, Love And Learn (1937) as Mr Charles C. Bawltitude, Nothing Sacred (1937) (uncredited) as Dr Vunch, Three Comrades (1
938) as Dr Jaffe, Lord Jeff as a jeweller, Arsène Lupin Returns (1938) as Georges Bouchet, Everybody Sing (1938) as John Flemming, Young Dr Kildare (1938) as Dr Lane-Porteus, Artists And Models Abroad (1938) as Gantvoort, Never Say Die (1939) as Dr Schmidt, Midnight as Judge, Man About Town (1939) as Henri Dubois, Dancing Co-Ed (1939) as Professor Lange, Life Begins At Eight-Thirty (1942) as Madden Thomas, Holy Matrimony (1943) as Priam Farli, Irish Eyes Are Smiling (1944) as Edgar Brawley, Molly And Me (1945) as John Graham, the biopic of his close friend Cole Porter Night And Day (1946) in which he played himself, Miss Tatlock’s Millions (1948) as Miles Tatlock, As Young As You Feel (1951) as John Hodges and Kismet (1955) as Omar. He grew his famous beard when he was 27 after meeting his hero, the writer George Bernard Shaw. “I am always mistaken for a Grand Duke or a Supreme Court Justice. My beard gets me the best service in the world. Waiters scurry at the wag of my whiskers. I am listened to with reverence. Everywhere, people stand aside to let a Great Man pass. Best of all, I never have to shave.” He claimed to love loneliness, always living on his own and even dining alone in restaurants: “If anyone speaks to me, I bark.” An unmarried homosexual, he would often go cruising for gay pick-ups with his close friend, Cole Porter. Woolley supposedly inspired the Porter song ‘It’s De-Lovely’. Sailing into Rio de Janeiro harbour with Porter and his wife, the composer said of the sunrise, “It’s delightful.” His wife added, “It’s delicious”, causing the naturally sarcastic Woolley to chime, “It’s de-lovely.”
CAUSE: Woolley died aged 74 from kidney and heart problems in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Fay Wray
Born September 15, 1907
Died August 8, 2004
Hollywood’s first ‘Scream Queen’. Despite making more than 90 films it is a scene in which she is held in King Kong’s paw for which Fay Wray will be forever remembered. Vina Fay Wray, the fourth child in a family of six, was born on a ranch near Cardston, Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. Her mother, Vina Marguerite Jones, had married young to a man who was impotent. To escape the horror she ran away to Canada with Joseph Herbert Wray, an ingenious if feckless wanderer who had been born in Hull. Wray was full of ideas and enthusiasm but usually they failed to materialise into anything substantial. He established a sawmill that failed. The family moved back to America, first to Arizona, where a small farm was also unsuccessful, then to Salt Lake City, Utah. He invented a can-opener for condensed milk, but the factory making it went bust. Meanwhile, Fay made her first theatrical appearance as Mrs Santa Claus in the school play. Following another move, to the small Mormon town of Lark, Joseph Wray drifted off, looking for work elsewhere. The Mormon community rallied and provided for the family. Fay’s mother, having already introduced her daughter to silent films, entered her in a newspaper competition. The prize was a screen test and Fay was the winner. Tragedy was to strike the family, however. Her eldest sister died in the flu epidemic of 1918 and, because Fay’s own health was considered frail, she was somewhat recklessly sent, at the age of 14, to live in Los Angeles with a young photographer named William Mortensen, who was a friend of Willow, her second sister. At the local junior high school, and afterwards at Hollywood High, she excelled academically and performed in school productions at the Hollywood Bowl. Her mother, hearing that Mortensen had taken photographs of Fay, jumped to the wrong conclusions, travelled to Los Angeles, broke his glass negatives and whisked her daughter off to a boarding house. “My mother was ridiculously oppressive without meaning to be,” Fay recalled. “She wanted me to have a career, but she wanted me to be untouched by it in any way.” One of the film people to whom Mortensen had introduced her gave Fay the leading role in a small film. This was followed by a series of bit parts in silent films in which she was hired purely for her looks. When she left school, she applied to the Hal Roach Studio, and was given a six-month contract. She appeared in two-reel Westerns, sharing a dressing room with Janet Gaynor and she played opposite Stan Laurel, who had not yet teamed up with Oliver Hardy. In 1928 Fay Wray starred in what she always thought her best film, Erich von Stroheim’s hugely expensive and uncompleted masterpiece, The Wedding March. She resisted the director’s sexual advances without too much difficulty or subsequent ill feeling, and she learned a great deal from him. (Much later, she refused to watch Sunset Boulevard because she thought it disrespectful that he should play a butler.) In the same year she made Legion Of The Condemned, starring Gary Cooper, whom she liked but remembered as “very stiff, rather like part of the furniture”. The film which featured out-takes from the earlier Wings (1927) was a box office success and Paramount hoped that Cooper and Wray would become their equivalent of Fox’s popular team of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. Despite promoting them as the “Glorious Young Lovers” it was not to be although, with four eventual appearances opposite him, she became his leading lady almost by default. Nor did they become an item off screen. Cooper was involved with Evelyn Brent and Wray was seeing the film’s scriptwriter. John Monk Saunders (b. Hinckley, Minnesota, November 22, 1895) was a handsome, charming, former Rhodes Scholar who had been a flying instructor during the First World War and had wept when he heard of the Armistice, because he would never now see action. Captivated by Wray’s “Nefertiti eyes,” he had a failed marriage behind him and was much more disturbed than Fay realised when she embarked on the relationship with him. While she was on location in Maryland, filming The First Kiss with Gary Cooper, two incidents occurred that changed her life. In the first she was filming in Chesapeake Bay when she fell overboard and only a fully clothed Gary Cooper diving in to save her prevented tragedy. The second was tragic. She learned that her brother Vivien had died, ostensibly by accident, probably by suicide. Saunders arrived to comfort her, and, with Cooper as witness, they were married on June 15, 1928 at Calvary Methodist Church in Easton, Maryland. For the first time she felt independent of her mother. In 1929 Fay Wray made The Four Feathers; in 1930 The Texan and in 1931 Dirigible. Although late in life she was to refer to the coming of talkies as “a kind of rudeness” which led to her being “tossed on to the commercial heap,” she appeared to take the development in her stride. Wray went to New York to star in Saunders’ musical play Nikki, which flopped (opening at the Longacre Theatre on September 29, 1931, it closed on October 31 after just 39 performances) but which introduced her to an actor called Archie Leach. At the suggestion of Wray and Saunders he contemplated changing his name to Cary Lockwood, the name of his character in the play. The studio was concerned that Lockwood was too long a name to fit on a marquee and there was already a Harold Lockwood working in films. They had a list of alternatives – short, snappy names – and he picked his new surname – Grant. By this time Wray had discovered that Saunders was a compulsive womaniser and a periodic drunk. On November 10, 1931 at the Sala D’Oro at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Saunders won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for The Dawn Patrol (1930). He was in the midst of a legal battle at the time. He said, “This is indeed a crazy business where I am being sued for plagiarism on one hand and given the statuette for originality on the other.” She made 10 films in Hollywood, one of which was King Kong (1933), which had a 10-week shooting schedule spread between June 1932 and February 1933. It saved RKO from bankruptcy, although nobody then, including Fay Wray, had any idea of its potential impact. For the rest of her life, she was asked about the special effects. King Kong himself was just 18 inches high and made of rabbit fur and moulded sponge rubber on an aluminium frame. The parts of him that “interacted” with humans – a lower leg, a foot and a paw – were built on a large scale. The paw that lifted her ten feet above the studio floor was eight feet long and, when she felt that she was slipping, she was genuinely frightened. It is said that Wray had been one of a dozen actresses auditioned for the part of Ann Darrow, and that she had been selected because she produced the loudest scream. “King Kong director Merian C. Cooper called me into his office and showed me sketches of jungle scenes and told me, ‘You’re going to have t
he tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,’” she recalled. “Naturally, I thought Clark Gable. But then he showed me this sketch of a giant ape up the side of the Empire State Building. He said, ‘There’s your leading man.’” Wray originally believed that Cooper was joking. Her auburn hair was covered in a blonde wig and that image stayed with her. She remembered, “At the première I wasn’t too impressed. I thought there was too much screaming. I didn’t realise then that King Kong and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives and longer.” The film was released on March 2, 1933. The set of Skull Island was originally used in The King Of Kings (1927) and again in She (1935) before being burned as Atlanta in Gone With The Wind (1939). Throughout 1933 and 1934 she began a new film every fourth Friday, which was how Hollywood then worked. Among the best was The Bowery with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper. Reflecting on her career eight years before her death, Wray lamented what she saw as the demise of romance in cinema. Of screen kissing, she remarked, “These days, they just chew each other. Today there is no such thing as a really wonderful embrace. You never saw Ronald Colman taking a great big bite out of someone.” She herself, when kissing on screen, always kept her mouth closed. Of silent films, she said, “Every little movement by Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford was compelling and wonderful. They held us close to their hearts. Every time we saw a silent film, we were drawn by the fact that the caring was inherent.” As for modern pictures, Wray seldom watched them, “I get put off by the previews I see on television. You seem to see nothing but gasoline explosions.” Life with the volatile Saunders became desperately erratic: sometimes sweet, sometimes tormenting. In 1935 they travelled to England (“I really came to get away from horror films,” Wray said), and she appeared with Jack Hulbert and Ralph Richardson in Bulldog Jack and with Claude Rains in The Clairvoyant. Saunders showed her Oxford and took her to the Boat Race (Cambridge won). She returned to Hollywood for the birth of her daughter, Susan Cary Saunders, on September 24, 1936; but in February 1938 she and Saunders separated. They divorced in December 1939. Wray busied herself with films and also with repertory productions in New England. On one occasion while she was away, Saunders took Susan away with him. Fay traced and recovered her daughter with the assistance of Colonel William Donovan, who was to create the Office of Strategic Services, which became the CIA. Theatrical work improved her skill and introduced her to intelligent new people. Sinclair Lewis fell for her heavily, and pursued her relentlessly; Howard Hughes courted her briefly. She had a protracted affair with Clifford Odets, which ended for reasons she never quite understood. On March 11, 1940 in Fort Myers, Florida, John Monk Saunders hanged himself. Her second, and much happier, marriage (on August 23, 1942 at the St Regis Hotel in New York) was to the distinguished screenwriter Robert Riskin (b. New York, March 30, 1897). His credits included It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes To Town, Lost Horizon and You Can’t Take It With You. “Be good to her,” she overheard Cary Grant say to Riskin. “I was so in love with her.” She and Riskin had a son, Bobby (b. New York, July 23, 1943), and a daughter, Vicki (b. Los Angeles, California, 1945). During the Second World War, while Fay found new openings in radio drama, Riskin was in Europe working for the Office of War Information. The tranquil post-war years ended when Riskin suffered a debilitating stroke in 1951. Wray tended him devotedly until his death on September 20, 1955 in Beverly Hills. In 1971 she married Dr Sanford Rothenburg, whom she had met in the hospital where Riskin was being treated. Her last film was Summer Love in 1958, but in the mid-Eighties she wrote a play about her parents, which was produced in New Hampshire with her daughter Susan playing the role of Fay’s mother. Her last appearance was alongside Henry Fonda in the TV film Gideon’s Trumpet in 1980.
Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 182
