Natasha (33 page)

Natalie’s absorption in her career, and her mother’s drive to make her a star at all costs, affected her close camaraderie with Mary Ann, who had always been leery of Hollywood, and of Maria. “I was approached for auditions and stuff and I just backed off. It’s not my thing. I wouldn’t like that whole thing. And of course as I got older and I saw what was happening, I
really
backed off. Natalie kinda went one way, and I went one.” Though their paths diverged, the friendship remained sacred. A Van Nuys graduate who talked to Natalie at the
UCLA ball remembers, “The first words out of her mouth were ‘Do you ever see Mary Ann?’”

Mud was on cloud nine over Warners’ publicity campaign to launch Natalie Wood as its newest star, and by the studio’s invented romance between Natalie and Tab Hunter, whom she considered “safe.” Maria had always been impressed by “gentlemen,” and was flattered that the well-mannered, respectful Hunter unfailingly addressed her as “Mrs. Gurdin,” presenting himself as the anti-Hopper. “I think it’s all in how the parent perceives who their daughter is going out with,” suggests Hunter. “For example, if I toot the horn and expect Natalie to come running out, or I’m a real slob about the whole thing. But I would
never
go over there without a jacket or tie on—unless it were a casual date—and I’d take Natalie to a nice place. And Mrs. Gurdin liked that.”

Warner Brothers promised Natalie a spring break in Hawaii between her back-to-back pictures with Hunter, purportedly as a bonus for breaking off her relationship with Burr. A few weeks before she left for her Hawaiian holiday, she spotted an actor of eighteen named Scott Marlowe, a dark, handsome, curly-haired intellectual with a Byronic intensity. Natalie was instantly captivated. “I was at the airport picking somebody up, and she just went —
something
,” Marlowe remembers. “She got a real vibration from me. We were very attracted to each other. And her mother was with her, and her kid sister, and maybe the father, I’m not sure—it was very early in the morning.”

Natalie boldly approached Marlowe, as she apparently had Hopper, offering her best imitation of a fearless flapper as romanticized by Fitzgerald. “She said, ‘Oh, I’d really love to see you and meet you again.’ She was just
taken
with me, I could hear it.” Marlowe, who had been living in New York taking classes at the Actors Studio, was “a little cocky” about dating a seventeen-year-old product of Hollywood. “I thought, ‘Well you know, this kid…’ ” When Natalie asked for his home phone number and then called him, “I was shocked.” She invited Marlowe to a movie premiere, accompanied by Nick Adams, Natalie’s constant companion.

Natalie was smitten with Marlowe, who represented, for her, the magic of both the Actors Studio and James Dean, once a friend of Marlowe’s, whose anti-Hollywood sentiments he shared. “She was so responsive to me. She’d see my work, or she’d come on the set to visit
me, and I would tell her stuff that I had learned at the Actors Studio, at Lee Strasberg’s, all those people that I had studied with—and Kazan. She adored Kazan, and he discovered me in New York, and I used to tell her stories about him, and she just loved it.”

Natalie went to see
A Streetcar Named Desire
over and over again, seeming to “meld together” her awe for Kazan, for the movie, for Warner Brothers, and for Vivien Leigh, who was suffering from bouts of manic-depression. “She felt a great identification with her,” Marlowe noticed. “Wanted to
be
like her. And the lady was
so
sick.”

In Scott Marlowe, Natalie found someone to love who combined the artistic integrity she admired in Jimmy Dean with the intelligence that drew her to Raymond Burr and Nick Ray. Like Ray, Marlowe provided Natalie with books to stimulate her hungry intellect. “I was into philosophers, and I’d given her Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and a lot of kid stuff—Nietzsche and stuff like that—because I was going through a phase of learning, and wanting to know
everything
. I gave her a lot of plays—a book of ‘twenty best plays’—she had
never
read stuff like that. All she’d ever read was movie scripts, and bad movie scripts, usually.”

Natalie talked to Marlowe about her obsession to play Herman Wouk’s character, Marjorie Morningstar. “She was desperate to get anything that would further her. She had an incredible drive… I don’t know if she picked it up from her mother or it was forced on her, but she had an incredible sense of destiny and where she should be.”

Natalie took singing lessons that spring with a voice coach named Eddie Sammuels, who wrote a song for her called “Eilatan,” “Natalie” spelled backwards. Warner Brothers announced that Natalie would be going on a nightclub tour with a forty-minute song-and-dance routine prepared by Sammuels, plans that never materialized, though as Marlowe recalls, “She wanted to sing well, badly.”

On the surface, Natalie’s life seemed like a Sandra Dee movie fantasy of a teenage star: she had breakfast in her canopy bed every morning, brought to her by her mother, served on a tray in her cotton-candy-pink bedroom filled with toy tigers—gifts from famous male admirers, who called on her constantly ringing, pink rhinestone phone.

Warner Brothers flew her to Honolulu that April on an all-expense-paid “holiday,” with sightseeing activities scheduled by the studio, in the company of reporters and photographers from
Movie Parade
and
Photoplay
, recording her activities as a “diary” for Natalie’s fans. Maria
went along, ostensibly as her chaperone, though she was really in Hawaii as the “shadow” Natalie Wood.

Natalie spent her private time reading Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, and
Band of Angels
by Robert Penn Warren, books from Scott Marlowe she carted onto the plane, along with her “lucky” toy tigers to protect her;
Natalie Wood
, the actress, was photographed for fan magazines on a catamaran in the ocean off Waikiki, arranged by Warner Brothers. The ride on the catamaran, a combination sailboat/outrigger canoe, was Natalie’s first time on a boat. According to her
Movie Parade
diary, she leaned too far over the side and fell into the ocean. “We were pretty far out when it happened,” Natalie was quoted as saying. “Maybe I could have swam back—and maybe I couldn’t. Two native boys jumped in after me and helped me back in the boat. Whew! I get cold just thinking about it.”

After two weeks, Natalie was restless to get home “and to work.” She and Mud took an ocean liner, the SS
Lurline
, from Hawaii to San Francisco, re-tracing the last leg of the days-long journey young Marusia made with her first daughter, baby Olga, a quarter of a century before aboard the battleship
Asama Maru
, when she arrived to a mistress and a home that was one room of a hovel crammed with Russian sailors.
This
time, when Maria disembarked at San Francisco’s Port of Angels, paparazzi swarmed the dock, snapping pictures of her and her daughter as they clamored for a shot of Natalie Wood, the movie star composite of Maria and Natasha.

They spent a day or two with Olga, who had divorced herself from her mother’s and sisters’ Hollywood lives, living a quiet existence in San Francisco with her husband, Lexi, an insurance agent, and their two sons, five-year-old Lexi and three-year-old Dmitri. Natalie posed with her nephews for the San Francisco paper, with the headline “S.F. Actress Visits Here.” Olga, who once dreamed of a career in voice, contented herself with singing in the choir at the Russian Orthodox Church where her mother and Nick were married when she was ten.

“Sometimes when I visit my sister and see her two children, I wonder if she missed a lot by getting married,” Natalie told a movie magazine when she got home. “But when I look at her, she
seems
happy, and I guess that’s the difference between her and me. Right now, nothing could be further from my mind than getting married.”

Scott Marlowe, who picked up Natalie when she flew in from San Francisco and was with her every day in the weeks afterward, sensed deep disturbance beneath her outwardly glowing “actress” personality, which he traced directly to Maria.

“I was onto that mother from the very first date. Very first date. She looked me over with such a jaundiced eye and thought, ‘Uh-oh, there’s a problem here, I can see it.’ I think she spotted it at the airport, the very first day.”

Mud correctly assessed Marlowe as a threat to her possession of Natalie, in the same way Jimmy Williams was. Like Williams, Marlowe possessed a rebel strength capable of standing up to Mud. “I was a maverick,” Marlowe explains, “and Natalie liked that.” Natalie was also “madly in love with Scott,” observed her sister Lana, increasing the possibility she might leave home, abandoning Mud and the glamorous career they shared. Tab Hunter, who was filming his second movie with Natalie, recalls, “Natalie loved the fact that Scott was part of the Studio and that very kind of crazed crowd like Jimmy [Dean]… he was opposed to the ‘Hollywood’ image.”

Marlowe felt that Natalie’s mother had prostituted her to make her a star from the age of four, when she met Pichel, revealing itself as he and Natalie became intimate. “She was very, very experienced for a very young girl. She
knew
too much, more than a kid that age should know. She
knew
about all the men’s body parts, and about what to do, how to please, or how to get herself loved. She knew all those little things, and it was very sad. I was aware of it from the beginning.”

Natalie “had a very wistful kind of quality” that touched Marlowe, “a very sort of sad orphan’s quality. She was just incredibly appealing.”

He recognized Natalie’s terror of being injured during intercourse or of becoming pregnant as phobias instilled by her mother to keep her at home, making movies. “Her mother knew what she was doing. Her mother knew that she was with me, and she just made her fearful. Just scared her, all the time.”

When he found out that Natalie was afraid to be alone, a fear her mother encouraged, Marlowe refused to go out with Natalie at certain times, pushing her to spend time by herself so she could become independent.

“There was an edition of Freud that came in six paperbacks, that went through all his phases in analysis and therapy in women,” recalls
Marlowe, who loaned his set to Natalie. “She devoured them.” When Natalie expressed suicidal feelings “in a very general way, in a sort of dramatic way,” Marlowe took her to see his therapist, concluding she wasn’t “seriously” suicidal. “She just wanted away from that scene: that mother, that father.” He perceived Natalie’s occasional drinking and heavy smoking as a way “to drown out all that stuff.”

Natalie’s “twisted and broken” wrist became a metaphor for
her
, the child abused at the hands of her mother and the studios. “That would have been so easy to fix,” Marlowe observed. “It was such a minor thing. But she wore it like a cross, a medal. Her mother also put it in her head that it would have laid her up too long in a cast.”

According to Lana, Natalie was
afraid
to have a doctor operate on her wrist, “for the same reason that she used to talk about plastic surgery and say, ‘I’m just going to have to grow old, because I’m too terrified to have anything done.’ ” Maria had attached herself to Natalie so symbiotically, Natalie assumed her mother’s phobia of doctors, just as she had her fears of drowning and dark water. For that reason among others, Lana would one day interpret her mother’s neglect as her own saving grace. “That’s what my analyst told me. I was saying, ‘Poor me, the forgotten, horrible, nobody cared…’ and my analyst told me, ‘No, you’re very lucky. Your mother didn’t
influence
you.’”

The bracelets that Natalie used to cover her left wrist in public were symbolic of the split, in her mind, between herself and “Natalie Wood”; when she put on the bracelet, she became the flawless movie star who was always glamorous and beautiful, the only standard Maria would accept.

Marlowe’s influence in getting Natalie to start therapy made him even more of a danger to Maria. “She did not like any kind of analysis at any time,” witnessed Lana. “She would get very angry: ‘What do you talk about when you go to the doctor? You probably talk about
me
with that doctor…’ ” In analysis, “Natalie realized how she’d been manipulated and used,” her later confidant Mart Crowley would comment. “She felt angry about it. With good reason.” According to Lana, “She just really didn’t like our mom. She liked our dad a lot, but she didn’t like the kind of person our mom was.”

Marlowe would recall attending an actors’ soiree at the Chateau Marmont with Natalie, where a hypnotist put her in a trance as a party trick. “He hypnotized Natalie in a room with thirty people… and just
created the most nightmarish thing that came out of Natalie about the death of a dog. And she
sobbed
and
sobbed
.” Natalie was still disturbed when she came out of the trance. As they left the party, she told Marlowe how her mother had forced her to re-live her dog being crushed, to get her to cry for Pichel. “That mother was
ruthless
.” The incident was so unnerving to Marlowe, he avoided hypnosis afterward. “I remember taking Natalie home, at like six o’clock in the morning, and the mother was out of her mind with worry. I had a very old junky car. But it had nothing to do with our doing anything wrong—it was just that Natalie had to go on location for
The Girl He Left Behind. She
never cared where she was.”

Marlowe had deep feelings for Natalie, saying later, “She was the most meaningful woman in my life, Natalie Wood, the most wonderful woman.” According to Marlowe, she possessed the same fragile, vulnerable quality with him as she projected on camera. “That was
real
. That was
all
real.”

Natalie’s admiration for Marlowe was apparent while she was filming her second “B” picture with Hunter, playing the girlfriend of a reluctant Army trainee. “Scott was very serious and very dramatic and so ‘Method,’ ” Hunter recalls. “I remember one time Nat and I were doing a scene and we’d had a little bit of an argument and I said to her in the scene, ‘Well, what do you want?’ And she was really mad at me when we did the take, and she said, ‘I want to see some signs of you growing up!’—and she yelled this at me, she was so involved. So when we cut, I said, ‘Thank you, Rod Steiger.’ ”
(The Hollywood Reporter
would notice her efforts in its review, calling Natalie “one of those rare beautiful young women who gives you the feeling there is thought going on behind her lovely brow.”)