Natasha (39 page)

Kazan’s assistant director, Don Kranze, “won’t say it’s not true, because when we talk about Kazan tricking actors into doing things, that’s Kazan. He’s a great, great director, but a more ruthless man you will not find when it comes to getting what he wants. As all directors must be. Directors must be ruthless—and psychiatrists and psychologists and liars and manipulators and actors and whatever. They play a host of parts. I can’t deny that he tricked Natalie into something because that’s Kazan’s method.” Maguire, Kazan’s assistant, recalls holding Natalie’s hand during the waterfall scene, but is vague about the rest. Her hairdresser, Willis Hanchett, remembers the double, and learning that the double couldn’t swim, “so Natalie, being the trouper that she was, said, ‘I will do it,’ and she did.”

Natalie was “tremendously proud of having done it herself, she was ecstatic—though she was also furious that she had been hoodwinked into this,” although Natalie had known, since
Rebel
, that Kazan was famous for manipulating his actors, something she and Dennis Hopper had talked about frequently in their “bull” sessions about acting.

According to Kranze, who helped to set up both the waterfall and the ledge scenes for Kazan, “I can tell you, when Natalie had to get into that water, in that river, she was deadly afraid of the water. I mean deadly. And where we were, she had a good reason to be, although I didn’t know it at the time. We were in a stupid place. We were on the edge of a waterfall, a slow-moving waterfall. What I didn’t realize at the time, or what the production manager should have realized, is that we should have kept checking upstream to see if there were any dams on that river that they might let it loose. I don’t think we even thought of the possibility of a heavy rainstorm fifty miles away. And it could have been dangerous. We should have done a lot more checking before working there.”

Natalie earned the respect and affection of everyone concerned with
Splendor
, creating such an indelible portrait of the Kansas innocent Wilma Dean, “it was so easy for me to forget that she was Natalie, and believe that she was just this high school kid called Deanie,” praises Pat Hingle, an Actors Studio great. “In my mind right now, when I think of her, the picture comes to me is of this teenage girl in bobby socks and that sort of thing. I am from that neck of the woods,
so I know well the Midwest, and I don’t think that she could possibly have had any kind of a background like that, but she was very believable as a small-town girl. And to my mind, that’s acting.”

Actor Gary Lockwood, who played the cad who tries to seduce Deanie before her suicide attempt, felt “Kazan and Natalie were a terrific marriage, because you had this beautiful girl, and you had somebody that could get things out of her.” Lockwood characterized R.J., who was often on the
Splendor
set to see Natalie and would later work with Lockwood’s first wife, Stefanie Powers, as a “professional” movie star. “Natalie was a bona fide movie star. I don’t give a shit that she didn’t do Broadway or whatever, but I mean, the camera looked at her, and she turned her head to the right, and she was vulnerable, and beautiful, and you can’t buy that.”

Kazan’s favorite scene in
Splendor
was the last one, when a worldly, mature Deanie (Natalie—looking radiant and beautiful in a white dress and a white, wide-brimmed hat) goes back to see her lost first love, Bud (Beatty—in overalls), finding he has married a simple girl and is living on a farm. “It’s terribly touching to me. I still like it when I see it.” Kazan’s bittersweet ending illustrates poignantly paths not taken, as Natalie’s voiceover, as Deanie, is heard to quote from Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” saying:

The lines in Wordsworth’s poem, and Deanie’s emotions, had special pathos for Natalie, reminding her of herself with Jimmy, the “old wounds” she had anticipated opening when she hesitated whether to take the role. Kazan was unaware of Natalie’s heartbreaking first love, though he recognized, as he was shooting the scene, that it struck a personal chord with Natalie, saying later, “[The scene] is wonderful because of
her
—because of her own pain about it. Whatever that came from, I don’t know. But you didn’t have to direct that. She had it right off. She understood it.”

While she was in the middle of shooting
Splendor in the Grass
, Natalie got an urgent call from her agent, saying that the Mirisch Company
wanted her for the part of Maria in the film version of
West Side Story
, which director Robert Wise was preparing to start shooting with no leading lady in sight. The way it came about was “an odd situation,” Natalie would say later.

She had been approached about
West Side Story
a year earlier, around her twenty-first birthday, when the Mirisch Company was developing it with its creator and choreographer Jerome Robbins, and with Wise. Wise, and Walter Mirisch, wanted to cast the original Maria on Broadway, stage actress Carol Lawrence, but decided she “was not young enough anymore to play it in the film.” At an early production meeting, someone mentioned they needed “a fawn in the forest” to play the innocent, vulnerable Puerto Rican girl Maria, prompting casting director Lynn Stalmaster to suggest Natalie Wood. The suggestion was taken seriously enough to make the trades that July, and Natalie told Hedda Hopper in the beginning of 1960 she had been offered the part.

In the six months that followed, the Mirisches and the film’s co-directors, Wise and Robbins, “wanted to find an unknown who could sing,” but who “also had the acting chops” to play Maria, resulting in what assistant director Robert Relyea called “the largest testing, searching program probably ever in Hollywood’s history.” When the quest proved futile, Wise and Robbins tested actresses Anna Maria Alberghetti, Suzanne Pleshette, Diane Baker, Pier Angeli, Angie Dickinson, Jane Fonda, Hope Lange, and Susan Kohner. By late June 1960, with only a few weeks before filming, “panic set in,” and Natalie reemerged as a top contender, even though she was not a professional singer or dancer, nor was she Puerto Rican.

According to Wise, the Mirisches decided they needed a “name” actress around the time they all saw a screen test of Warren Beatty from
Splendor
, whom they briefly contemplated to play Tony, Maria’s boyfriend. When Natalie appeared on camera as the innocent Deanie, “we said, ‘That’s our Maria.’ ” Jerome Robbins said later he was impressed by Natalie’s “depth.”

Natalie was not eager to play another ingénue and was unsure she was right for the part, dangling the Mirisches into July, while she was filming
Splendor
. She celebrated her twenty-second birthday on the twentieth with a small on-set party, surprised by a lavish birthday dinner that night at Pierre’s, arranged by R.J., who flew in Mud from
California to blow out the candles on Natalie’s birthday cake. (“All was a secret,” Maria said after Natalie’s death, still thrilled at the memory. “She was shooting that day, and she came to the hotel room and R.J. had me in the closet. She didn’t know that I was there. And R.J. said, ‘Well, you’re tired, we’re not gonna have a party or anything, just you and me will go to this restaurant.’ He said, ‘Go in the closet and get something pretty and we’ll celebrate, just you and me, very romantic.’ She open the door and there I was standing there!”) Sinatra, who was rehearsing at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, sent twenty-two bouquets of flowers to the restaurant every half hour, hiring musicians to sing to Natalie “Nothing Like a Dame.”

That weekend, as Natalie and R.J. left for New Jersey to attend Sinatra’s opening night, Natalie’s agent, Leonard Hirshan, got an emergency call, as Wise and Robbins began to film the New York exterior scenes in
West Side Story:

Hirshan, an associate of Joe Schoenfeld, Natalie’s primary agent at William Morris, boasted, before he left for the East Coast, that he could get Natalie $250,000 for the part, an astronomical sum in 1960. After the meeting with Wise and Robbins, Harold Mirisch agreed to
the figure. When Hirshan flew back to L.A., “Harold Mirisch says, ‘Look, I know I said $250,000, but would you take into consideration
$200,000
plus 5% of the profits?’ ” Joe Schoenfeld demanded the straight $250,000 salary. “Some people like to get whatever you can up front. Me, I’m a believer in royalty,” asserts Hirshan. “I, in later years, found out that 5% of the profits was worth one million dollars! Therefore, by taking 250 instead of 200, that extra 50,000 caused Natalie to give up a million dollars.” Two years later, Natalie said sheepishly, “Don’t think I’m smart; I was offered a percentage on
West Side Story
and didn’t take it.”

Natalie signed to play Maria during her emotionally trying last three weeks as Deanie, saying later she was “so busy concentrating,” she hardly thought of the musical aspects of the role, requiring her to perform complex dance numbers and a light operatic score. At the same time, it was the opportunity to sing that intrigued Natalie to
star
in
West Side Story
.

The agreement that was reached about the use of her singing voice is somewhat unclear. Producer Walter Mirisch recalls her agent, Schoenfeld, telling him that Natalie “thought she could do it and wanted the chance.” According to Mirisch, she accepted the part on the condition they would let her
try
, with only an “outside chance” they would use her singing voice. Director Robert Wise has a similar “we’ll try it and see” recollection, though Saul Chaplin, the associate producer in charge of music, claimed later he knew from the beginning they would have to dub Natalie.

Natalie’s perception, clearly, was different. She arranged for voice lessons to begin as soon as she returned to L.A., excited at working with an orchestra. Marni Nixon, who eventually dubbed her voice, felt Natalie “really did believe” her voice would be used. “Natalie wanted to sing more than she wanted to breathe,” asserts her friend Robert Blake, who would play the guitar for her while Natalie sang. “She loved being a singer.”

Natalie attended a wrap party in New York for
Splendor
the middle of August, bidding farewell to her incompatible costar, Beatty, whose gag gift from Kazan at the party was a hand mirror that said, “Good God, Warren.” According to Kazan’s assistant director, Kranze, the mirror was a symbol for Beatty’s vanity during filming. “I recall distinctly getting on the set early in the morning and he’s in there before his makeup call… he’s in front of a mirror, a set stage, where the mirror’s right
on the stage—and he’s got a straight pin, right? He’s putting that pin into each eyelash, and separating and moving them forward. He’s separating every goddamn eyelash! He’s going one by one by one. Oh my God, this is six feet of pure ego!”

In later years, Natalie would describe Beatty’s behavior filming
Splendor
more charitably, saying that he was “insecure.” The impression
she
left on the cast and crew at the end of the picture was as “a very nice, professional young girl,” in Kranze’s view. “Pert, likeable, lively, with it, can take a joke, friendly, vivacious.” Kranze perceived “that was not her personality, but that’s what I saw. I guess she was darker than I’m suggesting.” Production designer Dick Sylbert knew and liked Nick Gurdin from his carpentry work at the studios. “I always called her ‘Natasha,’ ” he said of Natalie. “That was my sort of name for her. She was terrific. Natalie was not a snob. She really liked the people who make movies.”

One of them, a young “gofer” named Mart Crowley, who would eventually write the groundbreaking play
The Boys in the Band
, “fell in love with Natalie so much,” recalled Maria, “even if he is a homosexual. When she finish the movie, he start to cry and say, ‘Oh, I’m not gonna see you.’ So she said, ‘Okay, you gonna be my secretary,’ and so she took him to L.A.” Crowley became, as Mud would put it, Natalie’s “best girlfriend.” He also became her “caretaker,” Nuell said later, someone to hold Natalie’s hand during long, insomniac nights.

Beatty and his fiancée, Joan Collins, who was back from London, went their romantic way, as Natalie and R.J. departed for Hollywood by train on August 19 for Natalie to start rehearsals on
West Side Story
. They arrived to find their white Scott-and-Zelda mansion in a state of lavish disrepair, with the floor sagging under Natalie’s sunken six-foot-square tub, and the extravagant staircases wobbling. She and R.J. fired the contractor and escaped to the haven of their boat for a week so Natalie could shake off the intense emotions from
Splendor
, before the taxing
West Side Story
shoot. R.J. was having problems with his studio, Fox, over changes they made to
Solo
, and his “phone wasn’t ringing” with offers.

The Wagners’ new house on Beverly, which Natalie would later complain was unfairly maligned as “Miss Havisham’s mansion,” was beautiful, recalls Faye Nuell. Natalie and R.J. had purchased extraordinary pieces from Hearst’s castle at San Simeon, including antique
balustrades, wrought iron gates, and an ornate fifteenth-century eight-foot bed with a massive oak headboard in the upstairs master bedroom.