Natasha (16 page)

Gigi felt sorry for Natalie, despite their rivalry. “I remember feeling that I was so glad I had my mom, that my mom was normal. That I didn’t have
her
mom. I never thought her mother was mean… we just avoided her. She was just this little kind of witchlike creature.” It was clear to Gigi that Natalie was unhappy. She told Gigi she hated her braids. “She wanted to grow up, even at eleven and a half she wanted to grow up. There was no question but that she’d done enough things at that point and she was just very eager to be a teenager.” Natalie had a crush on actor Farley Granger, Ann Blyth’s movie boyfriend from
Our Very Own
, two
pictures before. Gigi “got the feeling that she was very interested in boys.” Natalie’s oddly distended left wristbone was a source of increasing self-consciousness for her. She covered it with a western-style leather bracelet or hid it inside her sleeve in her scenes in
Never a Dull Moment
, telling Gigi there was a “scar” on her wrist. She was sensitive about what really happened, though “everybody knew that she did not like water,” relates Perreau.

Gigi, who attended a Catholic school and had a conservative upbringing, sensed a longing in Natalie for a family like Gigi’s. “It would have been interesting to have been able to talk to her about it, because I’m sure she felt such warmth and love from my mother and my siblings… and then she saw the kind of strange relationship with her own mother. I’m sure there were all kinds of psychological things going on.”

The director gave Natalie and Gigi western-style suede jackets when they finished filming. Natalie asked her costars to sign hers and started collecting autographs on the jacket. She related everything to Hollywood. She was her mother’s daughter.

Natalie entered the fifties in gloomy confusion that contrasted with the sunny ambience of the new decade. She had spent the last six years as Orson Welles’ ward, June Haver’s sister, Fred MacMurray’s daughter… or simply “driftwood.” She looked her age, nearly twelve, pretended to be nine or ten onscreen, and felt thirty. “It’s not only that child actors lose their childhood, it’s that they
use up
their childhood,” explains Natalie’s movie brother from
The Green Promise
, Ted Donaldson. “You have acted out much of your childhood. You use up a lot of the stuff that children only fantasize about, or maybe act out in games… so when you hit a certain age, a lot of changes start happening—girls have it before boys—and they don’t know who the hell they are.”

Natalie’s distress at being forced to look younger, the pressure she felt to compete, and her increasing ambivalence about acting all coalesced that summer on a movie she did for Fox called
The Jackpot
. The picture was an expression of the era, a family comedy starring Jimmy Stewart as a hard-working husband who wins a radio contest of prizes that turn his household upside down. The movie, which was taken from a piece in the
New Yorker
, was surprisingly biting, with subtle,
intelligent performances, Natalie’s included, though her part was too insignificant to be noticed. The screenwriters were the witty wife-and-husband team of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who drew from an experience of their daughter Delia’s to create a scene for Stewart’s movie children, played by Natalie and child actor Tommy Rettig (who would become famous as Jeff on
Lassie)
. “My mother used to say, ‘Everything is copy,’ ” recalled the Ephrons’ oldest daughter, Nora, a screenwriter-director, “and she meant it. One day my sister Delia got her head caught in the banister rails while peeking through them and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. Nine months later… my parents wrote it into
The Jackpot
for an eight-year-old Natalie Wood.” Nora Ephron was mistaken on two counts: the head-stuck-in-the-banister scene was performed by Rettig, not Natalie; and Natalie was
twelve
by the end of filming. The age issue was one of Natalie’s tribulations about
The Jackpot
. She was
playing
eight, which meant that she had to endure another movie in pigtails and pinafores, white anklets and saddle shoes, pretending to be four years younger than she was. To add to her discomfort, the makeup department put temporary braces on her teeth to give her character an even more awkward appearance. Without the western bracelet from her last movie, Natalie’s protruding left wrist was exposed below childish puffed sleeves. She felt so homely and humiliated making
The Jackpot
, “I cried.”

One day as she and Mud walked to the set, they encountered an exceptionally handsome young man with his hair combed to the side in a wave, dressed as a Marine for a Fox war movie called
The Halls of Montezuma
. As he passed, the actor said hello and smiled—a smile so blinding Natalie stopped to stare, in one of those moments, for a child, that crystallizes into permanent memory. For Natalie, an awkward eleven dressed to appear eight, the beautiful twenty-year-old with the dazzling smile represented all that was golden and glamorous and glorious, things that seemed unattainable to her in her braces and braids and ugly saddle shoes. “When I thought it was safe, I turned around and stared,” she said later, watching as her dreamboat disappeared. She lingered on the image, sighing to Mud, “When I grow up, I wish that I could marry him.” Natalie recognized the actor as a new Fox contract player named Robert Wagner. Wagner would have no recollection of his encounter with eleven-year-old Natalie Wood, his future wife. “I was just a staring kid as far as he was concerned.” (Wagner had also just
met his
second
wife, Marion Marshall, an older blond actress playing a nurse in their scene together.) Natalie and Mud went to the Fox publicity department, asking for a head shot of the bit player from
Halls of Montezuma
. Natalie taped the picture of Robert Wagner to her bedroom wall, where she could gaze at the face of her fantasy husband, keeping her company beside forty-seven storybook dolls.

Natalie’s misery was the catalyst for the family’s move to Northridge, a less populated area of the Valley where she could keep a horse. With dance class stricken from her schedule, she lavished her free time on her trick palomino, Powder, purchased from one of the studios. She wanted to be a veterinarian, grasping for things outside show business to satisfy the longing that Gigi, Ted Donaldson, and others had apprehended in her. Natalie yearned to be
normal
, pleading with her parents to let her enroll in junior high, an early example of the survival instinct that Natalie possessed. She was still afraid to go to public school, but “I wanted so much to be like the other kids, and have friends of my own. I guess my parents saw my point because they let me have my way.”

Mud enrolled her in seventh grade at Sutter Junior High in Canoga Park, a Valley suburb, beginning September 11, 1950. Natalie spent the night before worrying that she wouldn’t fit in, that no one would like her, that she would seem “too Hollywood.” “I got the biggest shock of my life when I saw the other girls. They were dressed in pretty sweaters and straight skirts. When I looked down and saw my frilly dress and long pigtails, I felt like crying.” Her movie image, frozen at seven, made twelve-year-old Natalie appear freakishly juvenile. “I noticed how much older the other kids looked, how much more sophisticated they were. They had lipstick and tight skirts.” A few seventh-graders wearing falsies laughed at her. The humiliation went deeper than adolescent angst for Natalie. She was so driven to be perfect, to
please
, her self-esteem derived entirely from the approval of others. She went home traumatized. “It took me one day to get a costume change, but it was years before I got over having made such a fool of myself. I think I was a senior in high school before I began to realize that every other girl in the school felt as much like an orphan in the storm as I did.” Mud consented to the new clothes, but the Pigtail Kid’s braids were money in the bank.

Even in straight skirts and sweaters, Natalie still felt she was “on the outside looking in.” After a few days, the other girls seemed immature to her despite their padded bras. Natalie was accustomed to movie stars, in an adult world. “I made the earthshaking discovery that I didn’t belong.”

One weekend shortly after Natalie started seventh grade, Rosalie Infuhr and her son Teddy stopped by the Gurdins’ house in Northridge. While the movie mothers talked shop, Natalie and Teddy went outside to saddle Natalie’s palomino. Lana, who was four and a half, tagged along. “We decided to put her little sister on the horse,” recalls Infuhr. Natalie walked Powder through the neighborhood while Lana sat in the saddle, thrilled to be alone on a horse at four. As Lana was riding Powder down the street, with Natalie pulling the reins, some neighbor children tore past them on bicycles, shooting cap guns and screaming. The horse reared, throwing Lana onto the street. As she hit the pavement, a horrified Natalie watched as Powder kicked her baby sister in the head, knocking her unconscious. “Everybody was all upset,” remembers Infuhr. Lana had multiple skull fractures and fell into a coma. The superstitious Mud refused to take her to a hospital, demanding that medical equipment be sent to the house. She canceled a trip to San Francisco to see Olga, who had just had her first child, a son named Lexi. Maria lied to Olga, telling her that Lana had measles, so she wouldn’t have to implicate Natalie in the horseback riding accident. Natalie was tortured with guilt, blaming herself for Lana’s concussion, sick with grief over her sister. She sold her horse and kept a vigil at Lana’s bedside, holding her hand. When Lana regained consciousness after a week, “it was Natalie who was sitting beside me… tears streaming down her cheeks.” Lana’s concern was that she had distracted their mother from Natalie’s career for seven days.

Natalie fell into further turmoil that October when she was transferred to a newly constructed junior high called Robert Fulton, less than a month after enrolling at Sutter. Paramount immediately put her in a movie called
Dear Brat
, though the part was so small she missed less than two weeks of class.
Dear Brat
was intended to be a sequel to a pair of successful family comedies called
Dear Ruth
and
Dear Wife
, starring William Holden and Joan Caulfield. But as screenwriter Devery Freeman recalls, “Paramount said, ‘The only thing is, Dev, we can’t get Bill Holden. Oh and another thing is, we can’t get Joan
Caulfield… but we want it to
feel
like they’re still in it…’ ” (Norman Krasna, who wrote the play on which the characters were based, requested that his name be removed from the credits, even though the film made money for Paramount.) Natalie’s character, described in the script as a “charming and earnest” girl of twelve, was so incidental she wore a dress from her own closet during filming. Her salary for six full days of work was $2333.

She was hoping her minor roles in mostly B pictures in recent years would allow her to assimilate at Fulton, but “everybody went gaga when Natalie showed up,” recalls an eighth-grader from 1950–51. One of the girls in Natalie’s class admits, “All of us were sort of in awe of her.” “She was already an established star,” as classmate Rochelle Donatoni explains, “and so it wasn’t like you would approach her and say, ‘Oh hi, I’m so and so…’ ” Other girls avoided Natalie because they were jealous. “They didn’t understand that I was dying to do their things, but they never asked, presumably because they figured I would automatically turn them down.” “I look back now and I realize how much she wanted to be accepted,” remarks a classmate named Helen MacNeil, who sensed Natalie’s longing by “her
look
. The way she looked at you.” Natalie was too shy to strike up a conversation and fell out of rhythm with the class, going to and from auditions. When she was at school, another Fulton student relates, “she seemed warm and she’d always smile—but she was out a lot, so you never felt that she was quite as much a part of the school as the people that were there on a daily basis.”

Natalie experienced a breakthrough when she met eighth-grader Mary Ann Marinkovich, a big-boned, tall brunette who wore pixie pink lipstick and was fearlessly extroverted. Mary Ann’s parents were immigrants from Croatia with a chicken farm in the Valley. “That was one of the common things we had going,” she assesses. “People that don’t come from foreign-born families sometimes don’t understand a lot of the things that go on, but we both did.” Mary Ann was brazenly confident and enough of a character to be unimpressed by Natalie’s fame. “I never bugged her about things, I never asked her about things. If she was here today, good; if she wasn’t, that’s fine. There was no pressure on her, where kids at that age are very cliquish and they demand loyalty et cetera, and she
couldn’t
. They didn’t realize she went to work, she wasn’t going to just play around. I had a little older attitude.”

Mary Ann was with Natalie at times when other junior high girls whispered jealously as they passed her by. “Natalie was really a very tender soul, and when people would rebuff her—and young girls are just the worst, they’re vicious—she would take this to heart and I would say to her, ‘Honey, you just
can’t
please everyone… the hell with it. Forget about that.’ I was a little harder, and I think it helped her to get over worrying about, ‘Gee, this one didn’t even
smile
at me when I walked by.’ She didn’t have a mean bone in her body.
Believe
me. There were times I wish she
had
been a little stronger, but she just would never dream of offending anybody. And believe me, there were times when she
should
have, but it wasn’t in her.”

Mary Ann was the first girlfriend Natalie ever had, the first friend she was permitted since Edwin. “The moment I met her mother,” recalls Mary Ann, “her mother said to me, ‘Oh, I want you to be Natalie’s friend because you’re very pretty.’ ” Mrs. Gurdin continued to scrutinize her, adding, “And because you’re strong, and you’re always
thinking
.” In Mud’s Machiavellian mind, Natalie’s life was a movie and she was the director. She cast Mary Ann as Best Friend, though Mud really didn’t want Natalie socializing with
anyone
who couldn’t advance her career. If she gave a party for Natalie, Mary Ann noticed, Maria only invited girls who were blond, so they weren’t in competition with Natalie. Though Mary Ann was dark, “I was bigger, totally different looking, so in her mother’s eyes, I wasn’t a threat. That’s why her mother fostered and really harbored the friendship.” Mary Ann used to tease Natalie about her tiny, five-foot frame, saying, “You actresses all look alike. Little paper dolls. You’ve gotta get somebody that wears a size ten shoe!” Natalie was sensitive about her size, which she worried made her seem even more juvenile. “She seemed poised, which you might consider more mature,” a classmate observes, “but because of her looks I did not get the feeling she was older. She had this really cute, darling face that made her seem if anything younger than her years—almost a baby face, like a doll.”