Natasha (13 page)

Unsurprisingly, Natalie bonded more significantly with the adults on
Driftwood
. She began a permanent friendship with screenwriters Mary Anita Loos (the niece of Anita Loos, famous for
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
and Richard Sale, who were courting at the time. She also got reacquainted with Walter Brennan, her costar from
Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay
, who had a supporting role in
Driftwood
. Natalie’s favorite scene as Jenny took place in a bathtub filled with bubbles, where Brennan’s character, a crochety old bachelor, scrubs her ears and lectures her about women. She felt like a “glamour girl,” Natalie said later. Frank Arrigo, the art director who set up the bubble-bath scene, went home raving about what a delightful child Natalie Wood was, “so easy to manage.”

Mud was having quite a different experience with Svetlana, whom she had decided to put into movies now that she was a toddler. Maria convinced the director, Dwan, to use Svetlana in a scene—calling her “Lana,” claiming she had named her after Lana Turner. The newly rechristened “Lana” resisted her mother’s efforts to control her from the beginning, crying throughout her debut scene, which had to be cut from the film. Mud had no tolerance for Lana, whom she described in a magazine as “a nervous child,” comparing her unfavorably to Natalie. Lana would not bend to their mother’s will, as Natalie did, nor was she selfless like Olga. “Lana was always very, very jealous,” Maria told a reporter late in life. “She wants
me
there. But Olga—she was never like that. She was very nice, she was very good.” Natalie adored her little sister. She put Lana in a wheelbarrow and pulled her around the
Driftwood
set like one of her storybook dolls.

Natalie took a trip north with her family soon after
Driftwood
, her first break in eight months and four movies. They visited Olga and the Liuzunies (Maria’s half-sister Kalia’s family) in San Francisco and stayed at a resort along the Russian River near Santa Rosa. Friends and relatives observed the dangerous dynamics in the family now that Natalie was famous.
“Miracle on 34th Street
changed their life,” avers Natalie’s cousin Constantine Liuzunie. “[Aunt] Musia lived for Natalie and that was her shining star—her
only
star—and all she could do was think about her and talk about her.” Lana withdrew into shyness. Nick made a last-gasp effort to assert his manhood, suggesting to Musia they
use their “nest egg” from Natalie’s earnings and stay in northern California. “She said, ‘No way,’ ” recalls a Russian friend. “And so that was that.” His fate sealed, Fahd anesthetized himself with vodka and fantasized his escape, as Lana recalls. “His dream was that Communism would end and he would go back to Russia.”

Natalie was the only one in the family who bore her celebrity with grace. She was the same Natasha on that visit as she was at four, relates her cousin Constantine. Natalie remained unaffected by fame twenty-three years later in 1970, at the pinnacle of stardom, when she thoughtfully wrote Constantine (“Kotick,” as she addressed him in the Russian affectionate) to tell him how touched she was by a ring he made for her birthday. She recalled that long-ago trip, and him, in warm detail in her letter, saying that the ring he designed “brought back many happy memories of our childhood” and all the “clever and interesting things” he was always making. Natalie complimented her Russian cousin on the beauty of his work, but expressed it was his “thoughts and caring” that made his gift to her “truly precious.” She signed the note as “Natasha.”

Natalie played with her childhood pal Edwin at the Russian River camp that summer as if she had never left Santa Rosa or become a movie star. “It never went to her head,” he declares. Bobby Hyatt, the child actor forbidden to associate with Natalie, said that she was “a wonderful person from the time she was a little kid all the way up,” despite the way her mother aggrandized her. “Natalie became the queen, not because Natalie
wanted
to be the queen, but because Marie
made
her the queen.”

When she and Edwin played by the Russian River that summer, Natalie was still “deathly afraid” of water, even though she had learned to dog paddle slightly for
Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay
. “I can remember her and I laying on the beach and I used to get up—and I’m not a terrific swimmer—but I used to go in the river, you know, waist high, or chest high, and she wouldn’t get close.” Natalie never talked to Edwin about
why
she was frightened of the water, or the gypsy’s warning. “Never told me, never asked.”

Canevari remembers Maria keeping Natalie, who was nine, under military-like surveillance with boys. “If I had a guy, a buddy of mine, go up the river with me, she’d give me the third degree on who was this guy. She trusted me with Natalie because me and Natalie were kids
together. If I wanted to go uptown and go and have a malt or a milkshake or something with her, it was okay, but if I had somebody with me, no way.” As a child, Natalie
preferred
boys, a trait she may have picked up from Mud, who used to say that all women were catty and all women were jealous of her.

Someone took a snapshot of Natalie with Edwin that long-ago summer, standing beside an orange tree in the Canevaris’ yard. “I told her I would keep it forever. That picture is still in my wallet.”

Natalie resumed her lonely Hollywood life in the fall. She started fifth grade on the Fox lot in a studio school that had become a ghost town. “By the time I got into the schoolroom at Twentieth Century Fox,” she later mused, “most of the child stars were already past me—Linda Darnell, Peggy Ann Garner, Roddy McDowall were gone. I was the only one in the class.” Natalie advanced scholastically due to the individual attention, but she was completely isolated. Since she wasn’t making a movie, there wasn’t even a film crew around. “It was a great event if I had another student to keep me company.”

She celebrated Halloween by reading reviews of
Driftwood
. As with
Tomorrow Is Forever
, Natalie’s complex performance was lauded while the picture she was in was criticized as overly sentimentalized. A typical review had this to say about Natalie as the truth-telling orphan: “Young Miss Wood gives with everything in the book, with a skill comparable with the best in recent times.” She was billed as “the delightful new child star” because of
Miracle on 34th Street
, which was still showing in theaters four months after its release and continued to play through Christmas and beyond. Natalie rode the crest of the
Miracle on 34th Street
wave, receiving her second Box Office Blue Ribbon Award for her performance as Susan. She ended the year with a life-sized trophy from
Parents
magazine, naming her “Most Talented Juvenile Star of 1947.” A pigtailed Natalie was pictured in newspapers standing on tiptoes, peering over the trophy in amazement. Magazines began to dub her “The Pigtail Kid.”

Miracle on 34th Street
received three Academy Awards the next spring, for Best Screenplay (George Seaton), Best Original Story (Valentine Davies) and Best Supporting Actor (Edmund Gwenn). Natalie wasn’t nominated, but she was given a Critics Award in April for playing Bean, the eavesdropping tomboy in
Scudda Hoo Scudda
Hay
, which came out that month. The film was backhandedly complimented as a “fascinating discourse on mules,” and would be remembered, if at all, for introducing Marilyn Monroe. Hollywood took notice of Natalie’s instinct for comedy, however, opening up a different range of characters for her to play beyond the sensitive waifs for which she was known.

Fox put Natalie in her first picture under contract in the summer of 1948, a full year since she had completed
Driftwood
. The movie was called
Chicken Every Sunday
, another sentimental family drama taken from a popular novel. Gene Tierney was suspended for turning down the lead, which briefly passed to Jeanne Crain and succeeded to blond character actress Celeste Holm. Holm played the sensible wife of a dreamer in 1910 Tucson who keeps her husband and family afloat by turning their home into a boarding house. Musical star Dan Dailey was cast as the impractical husband, with Natalie playing their younger daughter, her hair dyed blond to match Holm’s.

Though her part was minuscule, Natalie received star treatment at Fox. The studio provided a limousine and a driver to take her to and from Carson City, Nevada, to shoot the exterior scenes. Ruth Sydes, whose seven-year-old son, Anthony, had a bit part, recalls riding home in the limo with Natalie and her mother at the end of a day’s shoot in Carson City. “Natalie gets in the car and says, ‘No, no, no, I’m hungry, I want to eat.’ I was delighted, ‘cause I was starving and so was Anthony, but Anthony was a secondary person, character, in the show and Natalie was the little princess. So we stopped immediately.” According to Sydes, “If someone of her age was neglected or put upon in a movie and Natalie felt they were not being looked after, she’d go after them and make friends with them,” including Sydes’ son Anthony. “She took care of him if anybody tried to do anything, ‘cause he was three years younger. She had a real tender spot for the underdog.”

Natalie celebrated her tenth birthday during the shoot. The studio “made a big hoop-de-la” over it, remembers Sydes. “But she wanted all the other kids on the lot to come to her little party… and so they all went over and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. She was a very sweet girl… she had a certain kindness about her that you’re born with.”

Since Maria didn’t drive, Sydes offered to carpool her to the Fox lot. “I kind of expected not to like her,” she admits. To Ruth Sydes’
surprise, Maria “adopted” her. “She would take me places and she’d always pay. And this made her feel big, made her feel important.” Mud spent the long days on set with Sydes, spewing her shrewd wisdom about the studios, spinning yarns about how she had met director Irving Pichel on the boat from China, where he “discovered” Natalie. “I used to listen every hour to her telling me this one particular story.” Maria’s grandiosity began to surface in the Twentieth Century Fox biography of Natalie distributed to publicists, which identified her father as an “architectural designer” and her mother as a French former ballerina. Movie magazines described the Gurdins as “Franco-Russian.” Maria told friends she was an actress and a dancer. “Marie—Maria—used to make up stories all the time,” relates Robert Hyatt, who was later close to Natalie and her father. “Nobody knows where she came from, nobody knows exactly what her name is.” According to Hyatt,
Nick
wasn’t even sure of his wife’s origins.

Natalie got a microscope from her parents for completing
Chicken Every Sunday
and went directly into her next picture.
The Green Promise
was a curiosity financed by a flamboyant Houston oilman named Glenn McCarthy, who wanted to make “wholesome entertainment” and formed an alliance with actor Robert Paige to produce a low-budget movie for RKO extolling heartland values and 4-H clubs. He enlisted the 4-H organization to promote the film and staged a nationwide contest for a 4-H girl to play a small part. Paige cast himself in the agricultural drama as a county agent who tries to help a mean-spirited widower manage his farm as he woos the farmer’s eldest daughter. The story centered on the youngest daughter, Susie, Natalie’s character, who desperately wants to join 4-H and raise a pair of baby lambs. It was a showy, demanding role for Natalie, who had several crying scenes and a climactic sequence where her character sneaks out of a children’s costume party alone in a thunderstorm.

Fox loaned Natalie to RKO for the picture, which teamed her for a third time with Walter Brennan, as the cruel father mismanaging his farm. McCarthy and Paige wanted Marguerite Chapman, a glamorous brunette actress known for being “difficult,” to play Paige’s love interest. “The movie seemed so depressing to me, I was mad as hell that I had to do it,” she recalled. “I was in New York, having a great time at the Waldorf-Astoria way up in the Starlight Room… Greg Bautzer
called, and he was representing Glenn McCarthy of Houston Oil. He said he’d give me a $5000 bonus if I did it, which I knew I’d never get. Bullshitter.” Two well-known juvenile actors, Ted Donaldson and Connie Marshall, both fifteen, completed the main cast as Natalie’s on-screen brother and spiteful middle sister. Paige chose a journeyman director named William Russell.

Russell started filming around Feather River near Sacramento, since most of the scenes were outdoors on a farm. “I came back from New York and the very next day I had to go to wardrobe with those godawful clothes, and here I was, one of the best-dressed women in the world,” complained Chapman. “God! I was depressed to begin with with the whole damn thing. I dragged myself out of bed every day.” Natalie’s other screen siblings and Jeanne LaDuke, an Indiana 4-H girl who won the contest for a bit part, had a ball on location, horseback riding or playing golf. Natalie socialized with them only once in three weeks, when she and Ted and Connie played a word game in Ted’s trailer “to see who could read the fastest.” Maria’s exclusionary tactics were not as obvious as with Bobby Hyatt, but Ted and Jeanne suspected she was isolating Natalie. Chapman noticed “her mother was with her constantly. There wasn’t any interaction personally, not at all. The moment she finished a scene, she was gone.” Maria kept her distance from the other mothers. The only time she and Natalie were seen off the set was in the dining room at the Feather River Inn, where everyone was staying. “They had this little pet chihuahua and it ate at the dining table, and that was a bit off-putting to some of us. They’d put it up and it would be licking stuff off the plate.”

Natalie shared a tutor with the 4-H girl, Jeanne LaDuke, who was also ten, her first company in many months. Jeanne, who came straight from her family’s farm in Indiana to be in the movie, viewed Natalie with fascination. “There was concern about what she ate, and she had dancing lessons and singing lessons… I wasn’t used to ten-year-olds who were that professional.” Jeanne thought Natalie was nice, not at all aloof. “The person who tutored us used to do cat’s cradles, taught us all kinds of wonderful string things,” their only extracurricular activity together. “I was considered a bright little kid,” relates LaDuke, who grew up to be a college math professor. “We seemed to be very much at the same level. I didn’t think of her as being a whole lot smarter than I, and I certainly didn’t think of her as being less smart than I, we were
just good intellectual companions.” Ted Donaldson, a veteran child actor at fifteen, regarded Natalie as gifted. “No question about it. She didn’t ‘act’—I mean ‘acting’ acting.” Natalie got little guidance from her directors, including William Russell. “I don’t remember him spending a lot of time with anybody,” recalls Donaldson. “There was not a lot of time
to
spend with people—we got a small budget film, we got four weeks to do it.” Ted, who observed her mother’s control, felt Natalie “freed” herself when acting.