Natasha (27 page)

Nick Ray had concerns, after seeing Natalie’s filmed test, extending beyond her makeup. The director thought she appeared too thin on screen, and her voice was childishly high-pitched. Although Natalie took an attitude from the beginning, especially with Mary Ann, that “she knew she was going to get the part
period
,” privately she was insecure, with good reason. Jackie, who was at Natalie’s side throughout, points out, “Nick was trying to bring the best out of her, but he was real critical, like ‘I don’t like the way you walk.’ She didn’t swing her hips enough, or she just wasn’t sexy enough… he wasn’t sure in his own mind whether she could handle it or not.” In memos to Warner Brothers in January, Ray was leaning to actress Carroll Baker to play Judy, after rejecting Lee Remick, an earlier choice, as lacking the “right quality” for the part.

Natalie was confronting complex realities concerning Nick Ray. Throughout their clandestine involvement, Ray was simultaneously dating actress Shelley Winters. According to Natalie’s eventual stand-in, and to composer Leonard Rosenman, the director was also seeing Jayne Mansfield, another candidate for the part of Judy. Ray would claim later that Mansfield was “an hallucination” of the casting department, and that he “didn’t even put any film in the camera for her
screen test,” an assertion Rosenman, working on the score with Ray, disputes. “He tested her. I think that Jack Warner just said no.” Hopper, who read with Mansfield, considered it a “serious test.”

However serious Ray was about Mansfield, personally or professionally, the emotional and career stakes were staggeringly high for a sixteen-year-old. Even though Mary Ann thought Natalie could handle it, she conceded that her friend was starry-eyed teenaged “in love” with Ray, whose feelings for Natalie were those of a “loving” sexually sophisticated forty-three-year-old man. As she distinguishes, “‘Loving’ someone and being ‘in love’ are two different things.”

Natalie had agonizing doubts whether she would get
Rebel
. She told Hedda Hopper a few months later, “I wanted this picture more than anything. I was in Nick Ray’s office daily for a month waiting to see what would happen after my screen test. Practically everyone had tested for the role—Debbie Reynolds, Pat Crowley, Lori Nelson, and Jayne Mansfield.”

In this vulnerable period, Natalie suffered one of the great traumas of her life at the hands of one of her childhood idols, a powerful, married movie star more than twenty years older than she. She went to Jackie the morning after it happened, in hysterics; that afternoon, she showed up, berserk, at Dennis Hopper’s apartment. The following year, Natalie would confide the secret to actor Scott Marlowe, her then-boyfriend. At least several other people knew about it from Natalie, including Mary Ann, and Faye Nuell, a friend from
Rebel
. She revealed the star’s identity to each of them.

Natalie’s account to Jackie, the morning after, was that the famous actor- producer asked her to his hotel suite to read for a part. When she arrived at the suite, “he offered her a drink, they started to talk, and she asked about the part. He told her, ‘I’ve always wanted to fuck you.’ The script was just a ruse. He said he liked young girls, and he said he always wanted to fuck a teenager. She probably wasn’t the only one. It was really nasty and verbally abusive.”

Natalie told Jackie she reached for her purse and started to leave, but the star dragged her across the room and threw her on the bed. “She begged him to stop. She tried to fight him, but he told her if she fought, it would be painful. She didn’t have a chance. He just
absolutely tore her clothes off.” According to Jackie, Natalie said the star was so violent that she bled. “He knew he’d raped her. Natalie started to cover herself with her coat, and he said, ‘If you tell anyone, it’ll be the last thing you do.’”

Jackie heard this account around eight in the morning, when Natalie located her at a girlfriend’s house. “She tracked me down and came to pick me up, and she was hysterical. She looked like hell—her eyes were swollen and red. She had no makeup on. She was shaking. She fumbled for her sunglasses and told me, ‘I was raped last night.’ ” They drove to a restaurant, then to Natalie’s house. “She was afraid to tell her mother. She threw herself on her bed and sobbed, ‘It was awful. I was so scared.’ ” Natalie was terrified she might be pregnant, thinking she would die. She cleaned herself up compulsively, saying, “What am I going to do?”

Hopper recalls Natalie appearing at his door, raving, the afternoon after she was raped. “I remember I was painting. She came in, rushed into the apartment, grabbed my bullwhip and said, ‘Lay down, let me whip you’… and she was really angry. I’d never seen her so angry. She told me what had happened.” Hopper recollects Natalie telling him the rape occurred in a car. “She told me that she had woke up from being unconscious—she thought he’d given her a pill or something—and that she was laying half-in and half-out of the car. And her clothes had been taken off—at least the bottom parts were off, and he was whipping her, very hard, on her thigh. And she woke up screaming, and then he raped her. She didn’t say anything about why she was with him or any of that. I never knew.” Natalie told Hopper the star “had hurt her really bad.”

Natalie’s account to Scott Marlowe the next year was similar to what she told Jackie. She explained to Marlowe that the movie star had lured her to a hotel room (Marlowe thought it was on a Warners’ tour), “made up some elaborate little scheme, and then raped her, according to Natalie… he just threw her in his room and
fucked
her. I mean she’d been around, but she hadn’t seen anything like
that
. That kind of
rage
.” Natalie told Marlowe she eventually had to confide in her mother because she needed to treat the pain at a hospital and stop the bleeding.

Mud offered no maternal tenderness or emotional support to Natalie. According to Mary Ann, Maria “thought it was great” that
Natalie spent an evening with “Mr. Show Biz,” Mary Ann’s sarcastic description of the famous actor. Jackie and Hopper, who each suggested that Natalie call the police, both remember she was worried that if she reported that the popular, powerful movie star had raped her it would ruin her career. (“It would have,” asserts Hopper. “At that time, the studio system controlled us, really.”) Lana, who was never told, is certain her mother would have hushed the star’s assault on Natalie because of his status in Hollywood. “That would be my mom’s concern, it really would.”

Though her five close friends’ memories of some details or timing differ after forty-five years, the essence of what each recalls Natalie confiding to them is the same: that the same married film star lured or tricked Natalie, raped her so brutally she was physically injured, and she was too frightened or intimidated to report it to the police.

Natalie “hated” her former screen idol afterward, “shuddering” if she heard his name. She would keep the horrible secret, and behave as if nothing happened whenever their paths intersected, too schooled by Mud in the politics of Hollywood to cross a powerful movie star.

Mary Ann, who never feared confrontation, found it heartbreaking. “If you knew Natalie, you know what a dear soul she was, and so when things like that would happen, it’d just kill you because she wouldn’t fight back and she wouldn’t say a word because of that stupid mother of hers.” Jackie wonders still “how this man can live with himself. Today that would have been front-page news and the bastard would have gone to jail for rape and sexual harassment.”

Though Natalie “snapped back,” the brutality of the star’s sexual assault on her had an effect on her relationships with men. Mud used it to validate her perverse propaganda that it was dangerous for Natalie to have sex with well-endowed males, intensifying Natalie’s sexual phobias and fears of pregnancy. “Her mother told Natalie she mustn’t go to bed with anybody. She said, ‘Some men are too big, and you shouldn’t do that with
big guys.’
She put all that stuff in her mind.” Faye Nuell, who would become Natalie’s stand-in on
Rebel Without a Cause
, noticed that after Natalie told her that she had been raped, Natalie was “vulnerable” to men who would be “loving.” Natalie also became more reckless in her behavior. “It’s no wonder that I broke out in a big way,” she would say in future years.

Natalie was a bundle of nerves by mid-February. Ray was preparing to start
Rebel
in March, and the role of Judy was not cast. Although part of Natalie was convinced “she
was
it,” her insecure side—or, in this case, realistic—worried. “Nick really left her out to dry as to whether she had the part or she didn’t have the part.”

Hopper, whose role was set, suggested that Natalie and Jackie meet him at Googie’s for lunch during this interlude. Natalie was uncharacteristically quiet, distressed that she hadn’t heard from Ray. As they were leaving Googie’s, she proposed they go to the Villa Capri for a glass of wine to calm her nerves, and then continued to order wine until the restaurant served dinner. The three teenagers left in Hopper’s car and drank from midafternoon until the Villa Capri closed at eleven, as Natalie obsessed over Ray and the movie. According to Jackie, “No one ever questioned whether we drank,” the dubious privilege of a juvenile celebrity.

The trio, heavily intoxicated, stumbled into Hopper’s car before midnight. Natalie was upset, recalls Jackie, “because Nick was supposed to call her.” Hopper stopped to buy a bottle of whiskey at a liquor store and they drove up twisting Laurel Canyon Boulevard into the hills. As a classmate of Natalie’s from Van Nuys High recalls, “Laurel Canyon was the big deal then—it was a big deal, if you could drive it.”

Hopper parked on Mulholland, a scenic drive off Laurel Canyon with spectacular views, and they sat drunkenly “looking at the stars.” Jackie, who was in the back seat, remembers observing Hopper drink half the bottle of whiskey before she fell asleep from too much wine. She woke up to see Natalie outside the car, vomiting, with Hopper nervously muttering, “It’s all my fault, I shouldn’t have bought that bottle.” When it began to rain, they decided to drive back to Googie’s to get Natalie’s car.

Hopper, who was deeply drunk, started down the slippery, snakelike turns of Laurel Canyon, driving “almost too slow,” he recalls, because of the rain. As he was coming out of a curve, “a guy came way across the line, didn’t know where he was going and we had a head-on.”

Hopper’s car flipped, remembers Jackie: “Natalie was thrown into the middle of the street, and I was thrown on top of her, and she was
knocked cold. I thought she was dead.” Hopper, who landed atop Jackie, was miraculously unhurt. “I don’t even remember having cuts. But I gotta tell ya, I was so concerned about Natalie that I could have had my
head
in my hands and not known it.”

Jackie, who also escaped injury, screamed, “
Wake up
!” over Natalie’s lifeless body, as Hopper got up and frantically paced, repeating, “Oh man, this is all my fault,” like a mantra of guilt. Natalie drifted in and out of consciousness, wondering why her face was wet and complaining that her head hurt, as neighbors appeared with blankets, an ambulance pulled up with its siren blaring, and Jackie pitched into the brush Hopper’s open whiskey bottle, tangible evidence of their criminal activities.

When they got to the emergency room, doctors examined Natalie while Hopper and Jackie, scared sober, conferred over whom they should notify. “We needed a spokesperson, because we obviously had been drinking and it didn’t look good.” Jackie told Hopper to call Nick Ray, “because he communicated on our level.”

Natalie had the same thought, for different reasons. “I was sort of semiconscious,” she said in a later documentary about Ray. “And the police were called and they were asking me my parents’ phone number, and I kept saying, ‘Nick Ray. Call Nick Ray. And the number is so forth and so forth. I’m at the Chateau Marmont.’ And I just kept repeating that.”

Ray called his physician to meet him at the hospital, then he phoned Natalie’s parents. When the director arrived at the E.R. shortly after the Gurdins, he stormed over to Hopper, “grabs me and throws me against a wall. I was trying to explain to him, and I guess he was a little hysterical, and he slapped me very, very hard, pushed me against the wall, and said, ‘Shut up, and straighten up.’”

Once the doctors reported that Natalie had a concussion but would be all right, “she didn’t want to see her parents first,” Ray would recall, “she wanted to see me.” When the director approached her bed, Natalie pulled him next to her face and whispered, “Nick! They called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent!
Now
do I get the part?”

Jackie and Hopper, who were skulking nearby, remember hearing Ray say to the doctor, as he left Natalie’s room, “Take good care of this young lady, she’s the star of my next movie.”

NATALIE
“
LUCKED OUT
”
TO GET THE PART
in
Rebel Without a Cause
, in the opinion of her next beau, Scott Marlowe, whom she talked to about how Ray had “dangled” her until the strangely fortuitous car accident.

Whether anyone called Natalie a juvenile delinquent that night, or if she was being theatrical to manipulate Ray—in the tradition of Maria—is her secret, for no one else heard the comment, and Natalie would later ascribe it to different people. “Why would they have called her a juvenile delinquent when she was fucking unconscious?” queries Hopper. “She may have
said
that. Because I’m sure that the reason—I thought so at the time and still do—the reason she kept ‘wanting to see Nick Ray, see Nick Ray, call Nick, call Nick,’ is because she hadn’t gotten the part in the fucking movie! And she wanted him to see her—not like a Hollywood type, but really in trouble.”

One adult who came close to calling one of the teenagers a delinquent was Mud, who glared in the E.R. at Jackie, Natalie’s companion in crime, as if she was hell’s angel, smelling her breath and demanding to know if she had been drinking. Jackie lied to cover for Natalie, whose vices were an open secret with the morally flexible Mud.

On February 23,
Variety
ran a blind item about the teenagers’ drunken escapade, calling them “overenthusiastic wannabe juvenile delinquents” who “got overenthusiastic for director Ray, and lotsa nicked noses resulted.” The accident made Natalie more fearful of fast cars. “She told me they actually almost went over the edge of Laurel Canyon,” relates a classmate. “It was very, very, very frightening to her.” According to Marlowe, Natalie was “terrified” of Laurel Canyon afterward.

Almost perversely, she still had not clinched the role. Her forty-three-year-old lover, Nick Ray, was committed to Natalie, while ironically, the studio perceived her as a child, because she was playing twelve in
One Desire
. Warner Brothers also wanted a major star for the part of Judy, pushing Ray to cast Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds, who was at MGM, had no idea Warners was promoting her, and “wasn’t interested” in
Rebel
. “I was in musical comedy, and I at the time didn’t really want to do drama… I just wanted to be lighthearted and do light-hearted roles.” For Natalie, the stakes were “live or die.”

To appease the studio, Ray tested an army of actresses the last week of February. One of the eventual gang members, actress Beverly Long, remembers standing in the hall outside Ray’s office with Natalie during the tests. “She was very, very into it. She was not a star or anything then, I mean she was just a person. She was so nervous.” “I think there were fifty of us to begin with,” Natalie later recalled, “and it sort of narrowed down, and the second day it was down to ten, and the third day I think it was down to five or six. But the big problem was that I’d really up to that point only played children… and so I was finding it difficult to convince—and Nick was also finding it difficult to convince—the studio that I was out of pigtails.”

On March 1, Ray sent a memo to Warners taking an aggressive stance. “We’ve just spent three days testing thirty-two kids,” he wrote. “There is only one girl that has shown the capacity to play Judy and that is Natalie Wood. Although there has been talk of Debbie Reynolds, I think the studio might develop a star of its own with Natalie Wood. I’d be happy to close with her.” He acknowledged Natalie’s shortcomings, adding, “I could start work on [her] voice, wardrobe and hair.”

Long, who weighed a mere 107 pounds and was exactly Natalie’s height—five foot one and a half—“felt like a big moose around her. She was about ninety to ninety-five pounds and much thinner-boned than I, very fragile. She had no butt, no hips, no breasts. She looked like a twelve-year-old boy when she was naked.” Natalie said later she “had to make a lot of screen tests” to convince the producers she was the right age.

Nick Ray finally prevailed over Warner Brothers the middle of March. When Henry Willson pressured the studio for a “big price” to sign Natalie, “I spoiled it all by blurting out to Jack Warner, ‘Are you kidding? I’d do this part for nothing.’ ” Natalie told her friend Nuell “she would’ve sat on Jack Warner’s lap.” She behaved in what would become the contractual equivalent, agreeing to a seven-year option contract with Warner Brothers beginning at $400 a week. “Well, I would have signed almost anything to play that part, so I signed.”

For Natalie, winning the part in
Rebel
set up a complex of emotions, some of which were destructive. It led her to believe she could get anything she wanted, and it sent the message that Mud had been right to push her onto Pichel’s lap. Robert Blake, her occasional confidant, recognized how vulnerable Natalie was underneath the mink
and the makeup. Blake believed that being cast in
Rebel
gave Natalie “the only confidence and security that she ever had—knowing that as a young, frightened teenager, she went in and she got it.” The fact that she successfully used her “aura of sexuality” to achieve it at the tender age of sixteen was a commentary on the legacy her mother began for her at four.

Once Natalie got the part, her insecurities came out like evils from Pandora’s mythic box. “She was scared to death, because she felt that James Dean could act circles around her, and this was either make it or break it from being a kid actress to an ingénue.” The fact that Natalie had to grow up too fast was obvious by the disguises Ray and the wardrobe department devised to make her appear more sexually mature: cushioning to create the illusion of hips, a “butt pad,” and a special bra to enhance her childlike bust, which still caused Natalie great anxiety. “That was the era of Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. If you didn’t have big boobs, you were nothing.”

Nick Ray masterminded every detail. “He was always looking for ways to make Natalie more seductive, kind of the Pygmalion thing.” Ray told Natalie he had created his ex-wife Gloria Grahame’s sexy onscreen pout by stuffing cotton under her top lip. He hired a voice coach to work with Natalie to lower her girlish timbre, and found someone to teach her to walk more provocatively. At the same time, he toned down her makeup, and darkened her hair, advising her to cut it below her ears in soft waves.

Natalie’s makeover was essentially complete by the time Ray gathered the cast in his bungalow the last week of February to begin night rehearsals. He spent his days polishing the script and looking for an actor to play Plato, the troubled boy who shares Judy’s idolatry of Dean’s character. Ray would later assert that he spotted swarthy, sensual Sal Mineo in a lineup of actors trying out for the gang. Jackie, Natalie’s school friend, recounts that it was she who suggested Mineo to Ray, after noticing the teen actor in
Six Bridges to Cross
that month with her parents. According to Jackie, Ray was so grateful, he took her to lunch at Romanoff’s with Natalie, “and he put two hundred dollars down on the table and he said, ‘I want you to buy yourself something.’”

The nighttime rehearsals at Nick Ray’s bungalow had a loose, “family atmosphere,” with Ray a sort of bohemian patriarch to his largely
youthful cast, including Jimmy Dean, who had arrived from New York. “Jimmy trusted Nick a great deal,” Natalie observed, “and I think Nick was very fatherly towards Jimmy. I mean he was to Sal and to myself as well.” For Natalie, who had been rigidly disciplined from age five to memorize everyone’s parts, show up on time, and hit her marks, rehearsing with Ray—who encouraged actors to improvise—was a journey to an alternate creative universe.

“No director that I’d ever worked with had ever improvised. And Nick’s bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where he lived—the set was built
from
that, so that when we rehearsed, we really rehearsed as though in a set. And we improvised most of the scenes.” Natalie wanted desperately to be brilliant, to earn the respect of Ray and Dean, but she felt naked without a script. “Natalie liked
structure
,” according to Lana. Ray, recalls actor Corey Allen (who played Buzz), “just said, ‘Read, and see what you want to do.’ He didn’t lay anything special on us. He just said, ‘Take it easy and explore.’”

When they were working together, Natalie and Ray were “all business,” thought bubbly ingénue Mitzi McCall, who was cast as a carhop in a scene that was cut before filming, knew during rehearsals that the director and his teen star were romantically involved, as did composer Leonard Rosenman. McCall, who was in the midst of a brief romance with James Dean, considered the much-older Ray “sexy.” Rosenman, who was a more mature thirty, took a dim view of Ray’s conduct. “He was having several affairs, with different people… I liked Nick, but I
didn’t
like him, too. He was a weird guy.”

A few years earlier, Ray had been part of a love triangle that scandalized Hollywood. He told Natalie he found out that actress Gloria Grahame, his second wife, was having a secret affair with his teenaged son Tony, her stepson (whom Grahame would marry in 1961). “It was a strange situation, because Tony was
around
us at the Chateau… it was bizarre.”

Mary Ann felt that Natalie could cope with the complexities of her involvement with Ray, and that he would not hurt her. “It’s part of the business, and you go with it or you get out. And if you’re going to roll with it, you’ve got to be grown-up.”

Natalie left the first rehearsal in the thrall of Jimmy Dean, her actor-god. She revered the way he worked as a new thespian gospel, saying
later, “He was serious about his acting. He felt a deep responsibility about his role in
Rebel
.” When Dean told her they had to
“live
their roles,” Natalie found his words to be an aphrodisiac.

The next day, she and Jackie went to see Dean in
East of Eden
, which had opened at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. “She walked out and said, ‘I’m gonna marry him.’ ” Natalie later admitted she had “a big crush” on Dean. “I remember going with my school girlfriends to see
East of Eden
like fifteen times, sitting there sobbing when he tried to give the money to his father. We knew every scene by heart.”

Natalie was infatuated with what Dean
represented
—a higher form of cinematic art, the same attraction Nicholas Ray held for her. She was also confusing her own identity with Judy, her character, who falls in love with Dean’s character, Jim Stark. “I didn’t have a strong sense of my own self,” she later analyzed, recognizing that she often took on the emotional characteristics of her characters. The parallels between herself and Judy further blurred the line between fantasy and reality for Natalie, powerfully so in what Dean embodied. Not only did he play her character’s boyfriend Jim, Jimmy Dean was an icon for Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s own rebel love.

A few nights before filming began, Ray called the entire cast to his bungalow to do a read-through, an event memorialized in photographs. The actors can be seen sitting on folding chairs in a circle around Ray, looking down at their scripts in fierce concentration. Natalie is a tiny figure in a too-sexy dress, her face rapt in thought. The feeling from the photograph is one of collective intensity; it was a “weird night,” describes one participant. Marsha Hunt, a veteran stage actress cast as Dean’s mother, found the reading fascinating. “The cast sat around and mumbled. Nobody was audible but me!”

Natalie entered what she later would call the “golden world” of Nick Ray on March 30, 1955, the first day of shooting. She developed a ritual: at 5:30
A.M
., she would pick up Jackie and they would go to breakfast, where Natalie ordered egg yolks; then she drove to Warner Brothers, going straight to the makeup department. Her ritualistic breakfasts at 5:30 “were the only time Natalie was ever without makeup.”

On set, she gave the appearance of being self-assured, but the actors playing gang members, who were older, could tell that Natalie was
nervous about working in Ray’s loose style, in her first mature part. “It was palpable, and it came out in the role,” Corey Allen, who played her boyfriend in the early scenes of the film, recalls. “She didn’t seem to me to be familiar, or particularly comfortable, with exploring the things which are awkward for any adolescent… and not only sexually.” Natalie, in Allen’s opinion, had a hard time exposing herself emotionally. “Nick had a wonderfully nurturing effect on Natalie, which enabled her to go much deeper than she otherwise would have gone. I don’t mean that she didn’t
have
it. I mean that she hadn’t attained it yet.” Natalie seemed hungry for Ray’s input, “[like] a novice, who was really willing to work, and who was responsive to Nick’s direction.”

Ray’s influence can be seen to startling effect by comparing Natalie’s textured, emotional performance as Judy to her more facile portrayal of a teenager in
The Wild Bunch
a month earlier. His Pygmalion-like suggestions to darken and cut her hair brought out Natalie’s sensitive brown eyes, and the more subdued makeup revealed her natural beauty. “The camera loved her,” observed Debbie Reynolds, the studio’s choice for the role. “She had features for the camera like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. They were so beautiful, and the camera loved their faces! It was a love affair with the camera, and Natalie had that, with those big brown eyes, little nose, little mouth.”