Natasha (19 page)

Natalie was thrilled to see Ann Doran again, even though they were doing a “B” picture with such a low budget the cast had to furnish its own wardrobe. Doran and character actor Jim Backus played parents of a Rose Bowl princess pursued by the star football player in a typical fifties family film, called
The Rose Bowl Story
. Natalie was their boy-crazy younger daughter, who monopolized the phone talking to her boyfriend, or flirted with the college football players. (Backus’ character finally erupts, saying, “The only way anyone could reach you in this house with that brat tying up the phone is by carrier pigeon!”) It was one of the rare occasions in her child-acting career when Natalie was part of a happy family instead of a parentless child faced with a tragedy. She showed the same panache for comedy as she had in
Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay
, playing a similarly smart-mouthed kid sister, managing to be called “the cutest cutie seen in a long time” when the picture came out in October, despite her uncharacteristic baby fat.

The star of the movie, as Natalie’s older sister, was a complete unknown named Vera Miles, a former Miss Texas “so doggone scared on her first picture, doing a big part, she was eager and willing to do anything,” remembers Doran. “Poor little Vera Miles had a scene where she had to wear a coat and she couldn’t afford to buy one. She and her husband were living on beans and rice and she was so pleased to have a job. And I loaned her my coat, since we had to furnish our own clothes, and Natalie looked at me and she said, ‘You mean you’re gonna let her wear your coat?’ And I said, ‘Of course. Because she doesn’t
have
a coat.’ Natalie understood immediately. She whispered,
‘Oh… that’s different.’”

Doran and Natalie had a “wonderful time,” despite the insipid plot and bizarre casting of the college football hero, played by an actor who looked old enough to own the team. “It was just the most fun, one of those close pictures. The most delightful time both of us had in a long time.”

Natalie finished eighth grade after filming, capturing Jimmy long enough to sign his 1952 yearbook, hinting at her interest with this poem:

That summer, she was invited to a Hollywood party by one of her agents at Famous Artists, where they had taken notice of her curves and decided to send her to events for publicity, hoping to create a more mature image. While she was at the party, Natalie met the actor who played Elizabeth Taylor’s brother in
Father of the Bride
, Tom Irish, who was represented by the same agent. Irish was smitten by Natalie and asked her out, an idea encouraged by Famous Artists, which viewed their dating as an opportunity to publicize two clients at once. Mud still opposed Natalie dating boys from junior high, but she offered no resistance to Irish, since the dates might advance Natalie’s career. Irish was twenty-one; Natalie was thirteen.

Tom Irish began calling for Natalie at the house in Northridge, picking her up for dinner dates in his car, an old hearse. Maria would greet him at the door and send her thirteen-year-old daughter off with a grown man. “She could have objected,” he points out, “but she never did.” Irish “never even laid eyes” on Natalie’s father, “or if I did he was just in one of the other rooms, passing through.” Mud’s motivation was clear: to get Natalie’s picture in the paper. “A lot of these things we did for publicity,” Irish relates. “Publicity shots, publicity dinners and stuff… and then, we did a lot of things that
weren’t
advertised, you might say. Non-publicity.” Irish considered thirteen-year-old Natalie his girlfriend. “Somehow I never thought about the age. She looked older. She acted more mature than most people… she was busy doing things, and I was trying to do my little thing.” Irish claims he never realized Natalie was in junior high, “‘cause we only saw each other on dates, and usually in the evening. We went to the Captain’s Table restaurant, and to different restaurants on La Cienega occasionally.”

Natalie was beyond her depth in the relationship, pretending to be a woman, less than a year out of pigtails. “You’re not a little girl and
you’re not mature,” as she explained to a writer four years later. “You feel so awkward. You don’t know how to act or what you’re supposed to be.” She had no idea what to even
say
on a date. “I can remember I was so desperate for conversation that I read street signs.” Natalie started reading the sports section so she had something to talk about. It was her intelligence that enabled her to straddle the age gap on her dates with Irish; inside, Natalie was still a child. She asked her parents for a canopy bed for her fourteenth birthday that July, so she could have a more “grown-up” bedroom. She was dating a twenty-one-year-old, but Natalie was still playing with her forty-seven dolls.

Fortunately, Irish in many ways was as naïve as she. He and Natalie attended their first movie premiere together that summer, arranged by Famous Artists to get publicity shots of their young star couple arriving in formal clothes under klieg lights at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Irish picked up Natalie in his 1941 black Cadillac, “which either looked like I was being kept or I worked for a funeral parlor.” He continues:

Mud reveled in this new aspect of Natalie’s career, thrilling to the artificial reality of the Hollywood publicity machine. When a movie magazine editor suggested a pictorial of Natalie hosting a sleepover, Maria staged a slumber party for the photographer, casting students from Fulton as Natalie’s girlfriends. Mary Ann telephoned them. “When the guy came to take the pictures, the girls were all sitting around in blankets and her mother was supervising the whole thing: ‘I want
you
to throw a pillow, and
you
sit on the bed…’ ” Maria, the mistress of illusion, had found her natural habitat in Hollywood. “It was almost like a feeding frenzy,” recalls Mary Ann of the household. “It was constant
energy
that this woman expended. It was amazing when you really think about it. All systems were going. She had the father running doing this, even little Lana was a little pitcher. Everything was clicking and in order. That’s a lot of organization to put together, I give her credit for that. Things were
done
—hair appointments, everything, she had the whole thing going, it was unbelievable.”

’Natalie and Tom Irish faithfully performed their parts in the sideshow, dressing up for Hollywood events, attending a party “for the young up-and-coming” at Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s mansion, Pickfair, where Natalie “wouldn’t even
go
in the pool.” When they dated without photographers present, Irish took Natalie to dinner, or roller-skating. They occasionally visited her wealthy Russian godparents, who had moved to nearby Santa Barbara, where they owned a home that was more like a palace, with “servants with the white gloves and all that. Every time you’d turn around they’d pour this vodka-it looked like it had moss or seaweed or something in it, horrible-looking
stuff—into these little glasses and they’d say something in Russian. Up and down went the vodka, and egad, you could get so sick!”

Irish found Natalie a sexual naïf, a circumstance he did not try to compromise. “Our encounters seemed to just—gosh, they went so fast. We were sitting there, mixing, at your little premiere, and you’re in and you’re out, and then you go off to some other spot and looking and talking to other people. There wasn’t too much of being all by ourselves or up on the hill or something. We just didn’t do any of that in those days.” During the months they dated, Irish and Natalie did no more than pet. “It was just plain necking, there was no tongue business. Probably bored her to tears.” It was pure luck that Irish, at twenty-one, was a gentleman, for Natalie, at thirteen, knew little about sex, and what she believed, via Mud, was dangerously misleading.

Late that summer, Natalie’s name made its way into Hedda Hopper’s column, announcing that she had been cast in Bette Davis’ new picture,
The Star
. She was absolutely
thrilled
to get the chance to work with Bette Davis, Natalie said later, proof of her new maturity about acting. The script was a tour de force for Davis, then forty-something, playing a bankrupt, once-famous star unable to accept that her movie career is over. Natalie had several emotional scenes with her, as the daughter Davis was forced to abandon who idolizes her nonetheless. Tom Irish had a small part as a party guest (cut from the film), providing Natalie with company on the set. The entire production was scheduled for twenty-four days, a breakneck pace to accommodate Davis, who had to start a musical that September, according to screenwriter Dale Eunson.

The first scene scheduled for Natalie took place on a sailboat owned by actor Sterling Hayden, who was playing Davis’ lover. In the scene, he takes the forgotten star (Davis) and her daughter (Natalie) sailing. Late in August, Mud and Natalie were driven to the harbor south of Los Angeles in San Pedro, where passengers catch the ferry to Santa Catalina Island, to shoot the sailboat scene. What happened during the filming of that scene remains a topic of controversy. According to Natalie, the director, Stuart Heisler, changed the script once she and Mud got to the harbor at San Pedro. “All of a sudden, it turned out that I had to jump
off
the boat and swim to a faraway raft. So there I was, faced with the threat of being
flung
into the ocean—or losing the part.” During a televised tribute to Bette Davis in 1977, with Davis present, Natalie offered this anecdote of what occurred after Heisler ordered her
to jump off the boat: “I went into hysterics that must have been heard all the way to Catalina. In any case, Ms. Davis certainly heard them. And she came out of her dressing room to find out what all the commotion was. This was the only time that I
ever
saw the famous Bette Davis temperament surface, and it was not on her own behalf. But she
did
tell the director that she wouldn’t stand around while he threw some terrified kid into the ocean, and that if he’d wanted a swimmer he should have gotten Johnny Weissmuller.”

There was more to the story, as Natalie revealed in an interview in 1981, shortly before she drowned, eerily, from a boat moored off Catalina Island. According to this expanded account, Natalie
was
forced to jump into the ocean from Hayden’s boat for the scene. “I was a complete wreck by the time I had to leap into the water,” she told the reporter. “I looked over the rail and saw a huge shadow swimming by. The director told me: ‘Just jump. There’ll be men in rowboats to pick you up. If you get scared, just scream.’ The second I hit the water, I panicked. The icy ocean took my breath away. I swam a bit, but was hysterical. They finally got me out, and used a double to shoot the scene again. The girl almost drowned in the kelp. And after all that, they cut the scene from the movie.” In a separate interview, she was quoted saying she’d been “thrown into the sea and nearly drowned.”

Despite the fact that Natalie, Lana and Bette Davis each at various times publicly credited Davis with coming to Natalie’s rescue, Maria insisted to her last breath it was “a big lie.” From what Maria said, Natalie was afraid of the director, a “tough German,” and was too intimidated to tell him she couldn’t jump off the boat because of her fear of the ocean and of sharks. “I’ve always feared sharks,” Natalie acknowledged in 1981, prior to her drowning, “even before
Jaws
scared everyone else about them.” In Maria’s version, which Olga believes to be true, Mud advised Natalie to tell the director, Stuart Heisler, that she was willing to do the scene but her “crazy mother” wouldn’t let her. “I went to him and I said, ‘Mr. Heisler, Natalie don’t know how to swim very good, and in dark water I won’t let her.’ ” Heisler complained about the cost to reschedule, so Maria told him he was in breach of contract for asking Natalie to do a dangerous scene. Bette Davis, according to Maria, flew into a rage. “She said, ‘Who do you think you are? You know how much money it cost to stop the movie?’ I looked straight in her eyes and I stood up to her.” Maria claimed that after the
scene was shot, the stunt double came up to her and said, “Mrs. Gurdin, you’re lucky that you wouldn’t let Natalie swim. I was scared, because something was touching my legs.”

Dale Eunson, who wrote the screenplay and was often on the set, knew nothing about the incident, though he confirms that his script did not require Natalie to jump off the boat, just as she said. Oddly, Sterling Hayden’s wife, Betty, who was
on
the Haydens’ boat during the sailing scene, never heard anything about the fracas, then or later. “I was out there while everybody else was sailing the boat—lying down with the pillow in my hand, so I wouldn’t be seen on camera.”