Natasha (41 page)

On December 5, Natalie placed her handprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, as she had vowed at sixteen, when she and Jackie Eastes took Dennis Hopper to gape at the movie star signatures. She laughed gaily for the television cameras filming the ceremony, holding her hands up to show the wet cement, cocking her head to the side, flashing a Natalie Wood smile, but Natalie’s animation seemed like a wind-up doll, and her dark, dancing eyes appeared troubled.

Her career kept soaring. By Christmas,
Splendor
and
West Side
were playing across the street from each other on Hollywood Boulevard.
West Side Story
would play continuously in the same Paris cinema for seven years.

Natalie began the year 1962 with an Oscar nomination for
Splendor in the Grass
and a role she had been coveting for eighteen months, Gypsy Rose Lee. Natalie was driven by demons to play the stripper with the stage mother of all stage mothers, Mama Rose—played in the film by Rosalind Russell—viewing
Gypsy
as the catharsis for all her years as a child star under the tyranny of Mud. Lana recalls, “She used to kid that Rosalind Russell was actually portraying our mom.” Maria raved against the movie—even
The Hollywood Reporter
ran an item about it—recognizing, though she would never admit it, that
she
was Mama Rose.

Three major magazines dispatched reporters to Hollywood to interview Natalie for cover stories during the filming of
Gypsy
that winter —
Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post
, and
Show
—with all three journalists delivering unflattering profiles of her as neurotic and driven, mocking
her perfectionism with asides about “rehearsing for
Gypsy
as if it were
Otello
.” Her friend Henry Silva, a well-known screen villain, remembers Natalie as “crushed” by what was written about her in
Newsweek
. She complained, later, that the
Saturday Evening Post
writer only spent nine minutes with her.

Morgan Brittany, the then nine-year-old actress who played Dainty June, spent hours on the set observing Natalie, whom she idolized, noticing every nuance of her dress, behavior, and mien at the peak of her career. “I didn’t know charisma at the time, but when she walked in the room, everything stopped. I remember her coming in with high, high heels, like four inches, Capri pants, and an angora sweater, white, with white pearls. She always wore a bracelet—sometimes it made a lot of noise, rattling. She loved to sit and watch us rehearse… she smoked, constantly smoked. I never saw her without a cigarette, ever.” Brittany never noticed Natalie
not
look like a star. “It was the furs, the cigarette, the sunglasses, jewelry, pearls, the bracelet.”

Brittany recalls Natalie as fragile, insecure that her voice would be dubbed after what happened to her on
West Side Story
, constantly being reassured by director Mervyn LeRoy that her character “wasn’t supposed to be a good singer.” She was nervous that her breasts would not look voluptuous enough, intimidated by playing a big-boned stripper nearly six feet tall. “She had a tough time doing the numbers, worrying that she wasn’t doing a good job. I remember she had a problem with the last strip tease number; she wanted only one brief shot when she got down to next to nothing on.”

Orry-Kelly, the famous dress designer, employed the same artifices as Nick Ray had with Natalie on
Rebel
, padding her hips and the base of her brassieres to give her curves, using a French cut on the costumes to optically lengthen her legs.

Harry Stradling, a respected director of photography known for the flattering way he photographed female stars, made sure tiny, delicate Natalie was alone on stage when she did her strip tease so she would not appear dwarfed by the other statuesque dancers, and photographed her from low angles, shooting up.

Still, “there was a lot of tension,” acknowledges Brittany, who remembers everybody, including Rosalind Russell, “walking on eggshells” around Natalie. “She’d get into moods and smoke and smoke. She was Queen of the Warner Brothers lot, so she had a lot of
power then, and she’d get angry about something, and go off to a corner, stomping her feet.” When Warren Beatty came to the set, “she’d sit on his lap and she’d whisper in his ear and he would reassure her,” observed Brittany, who wondered what her idol saw in Beatty, who wore thick “Coke bottle” glasses. “She just had this
power
over him. He adored her.”

Preteen Ann Jillian, who played Baby June, had a similar experience:

Costar Karl Malden, who had worked with Natalie when she was a boy-crazy teen on
Bombers B-52
, observed, as many in the industry would, how “as Natalie grew up, she became more beautiful, and more beautiful.”

Malden knew that Natalie struggled with the musical numbers. “It was challenging for
both
of us. I’m not a singer and a dancer, she wasn’t a singer and a dancer, and we both went at it. She wanted to do it badly, and so did I. It was something we never would have gotten a test for if we hadn’t been under contract with Warners, so we said, ‘Let’s do it.’ In a crazy way, but we did it. The one place where she was really scared stiff was when she did the strip number. She was scared stiff that Gypsy Rose Lee was there and was gonna tell her things,
and
that she was having to strip. And I thought she was magnificent.” Malden recalls only one piece of advice the famed stripper offered Natalie: “Gypsy would say, ‘When you take the sleeve off, don’t do it fast, take time, take all the time in the world.’”

Child actress Ann Jillian, whose mother grew up in Russia and was Lithuanian, felt a kinship with Natalie, sensing an ineffable sadness, a “brooding,” that touched her. “Children can have a sense in that way.
On the top there was this wonderful giggle she had that was so endearing and delightful, but her eyes said something else.”

As it had been since she was a child, Natalie’s star shone in the quiet, poignant moments, such as when, as the young Louise, she tenderly sang “Little Lamb.” Jillian recalls Natalie being terribly nervous beforehand, “and Mervyn had to tell her, ‘Everything’s gonna be fine.’ He comforted her in telling her that exactly what she was feeling was exactly what was needed for that scene.”

Natalie brought all the pathos of her lost childhood to the song, touching Jillian. “Because it was such a plaintive little song. You know: ‘I wonder how old I am, do you think I’ll get my wish, little lamb, little lamb, I wonder how old I am.’ And then the little breath that she took at the end—’little lamb…’—on a sustained note, and the way her voice kind of trailed off and slightly, almost very delicately, broke off.”

Jillian could sense “there was so much more behind that. You could feel the depths from where she was bringing it. She was very childlike, and I could tell she was calling up certain things, like what comes earlier:

“I think she had to come to grips that she was a used child star who missed out on a childhood,” Lana said later of Natalie’s experience on
Gypsy
. “The resentment toward my mom for all the pushing and the long hours and the this and the that.”

Watching from the wings, as she had since Natalie was six, on
Tomorrow Is Forever
, stood Mud, fixing her compelling gaze on her star, unfazed by the tear in her daughter’s voice singing “Little Lamb,” or the anguish behind her eyes.

Jillian’s lasting image of Natalie, from
Gypsy
, “is from a series of Russian fairy tale story plates that I have, one of which is the Snow Queen. And I see these enormous, beautiful chocolate eyes, with this beautiful raven hair and vanilla white skin, dressed regally in the jewel tone colors of her region… Natalie was the Russian princess, who came here and had the American dream.”

The Academy Awards took place on April 9, at the end of
Gypsy
. The editors of
Life
magazine were so certain Natalie would win as Best
Actress for
Splendor in the Grass
, they assigned a photographer to follow her throughout the day. He sat in the row behind Natalie and Beatty in the auditorium, with Natalie under instruction to turn around so that he could photograph her reaction to winning an Academy Award. When Sophia Loren’s name was announced, Natalie not only faced the disappointment of losing, but the ignominy of watching the photographer from
Life
fold up his camera equipment and prepare to leave. She would laugh about it, fifteen years later, but in April 1962, it stung.

West Side Story
, for which she was
not
nominated, received ten Academy Awards that night, making Natalie’s loss for
Splendor
all the more bittersweet.

Later that week, she appeared in court to file for divorce from R.J., dressed in black from her turban to her silk stockings, a clue to Natalie’s emotions. She and Beatty left shortly afterward for a two-month trip to Europe, where the Wagners, ironically, had planned to go before their separation.

Natalie’s romance with the unabashedly ambitious, marriage-phobic, sexually driven Beatty was more impressive in photographs than in reality. She would describe it, later, as “changes of heart, flying jars of cold cream, protestations of renewed love, and clashing of egos.” He and Natalie had moved into a glass house at the top of San Ysidro in Benedict Canyon leased by Natalie, where they both obsessed about their careers more than each other.

“Natalie’s entire relationship with Warren was a very passionate, tumultuous one,” remembers Lana, who briefly lived with Natalie and Beatty later that year after secretly marrying at sixteen in a ceremony in Tijuana that was quickly annulled. The elopement was the first in a series of abrupt, failed marriages for Lana, who had unexpectedly developed into a buxom ingénue, half-heartedly pursuing the family business of acting, with help from Natalie, who also gave her little sister a gold Jaguar and a mink coat for her sixteenth birthday. Lana recalls the dynamics of Natalie’s love affair with Beatty as, “
‘Warren didn’t show up on time to go to the party,’ ‘Warren didn’t get home for dinner,’ ‘Where was Warren?’
Not a match made in heaven.”

The Natalie-and-Warren trip to Europe the summer of 1962 was glamorously recorded in photographs by almost as many magazines as Natalie and R.J.’s 1957 wedding.
Life
made Natalie its June 15 cover
girl when she and Beatty attended the Cannes Film Festival, and she was photographed in Paris, discovering haute couture, the beginning of a chic new image for Natalie. While at Cannes, Natalie charmed the Russian delegation by folk dancing, speaking to the Russians in their native tongue. It would later be falsely reported that she and Beatty traveled to Russia together, stimulating him to develop his future film
Reds
. Beatty may have gotten the idea from time spent with Natalie and the Russian delegates in Cannes, but Natalie would not visit her parents’ homeland for the first time until much later.

The couple did stop in Rome, so Natalie could discuss potential projects with Françoise Sagan and director Federico Fellini, and to greet Elizabeth Taylor, who was filming
Cleopatra
. By a coincidence so bizarre it would inspire a play by Mart Crowley called
Remote Asylum
, she and Beatty had drinks one night at the Hostario Del Orso, a Rome nightclub, where they ran into R.J. with former actress Marion Marshall, whom he had met when both were bit players in
Halls of Montezuma
in 1949, when Natalie spotted Wagner on the Fox lot. Marshall lived in Rome with her two young sons by ex-husband Stanley Donen, and had offered friendship and support to the emotionally destroyed Wagner since he relocated to Europe.

From what Natalie later told her friend, writer Thomas Thompson, R.J. invited her and Beatty to come to his table for a drink, “almost perversely” ordering her favorite wine, Pouilly Fuissé. She recalled the encounter as bittersweet, with R.J. sitting next to Marion and Natalie beside Beatty, while she and R.J. exchanged meaningful looks across the table. She described the feeling as a “bond of sadness.” Later that night, R.J. tried to telephone Natalie at her Rome hotel for hours, unable to get through because Beatty tied up the line with career-related calls. “I never knew he tried to call me until years later,” Natalie told Thompson. “I was in my hotel room for a week, crying my eyes out. If that call had come through, I think I would have dropped everything and gone running back to him.” R.J. later would refer to it, poignantly, as “that night in Rome.”

“Things might have been different,” he said.

Instead, Natalie fulfilled her sad destiny, returning to the house on San Ysidro to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday with Beatty, who told the
Saturday Evening Post
, that July, he was “confused” about marriage, a signal of the state of their love affair.

She and Beatty went to a party in early August, possibly at Peter Lawford’s in Malibu, attended by Marilyn Monroe, who was thirty-six. Natalie would recall Monroe mumbling to herself, all night,
“Thirty-six, thirty-six, thirty-six—it’s all over
.” The experience haunted Natalie, who said later she was thinking, “I don’t want to join that long gray line of faded movie stars who are left with yellowed scrapbooks and memories.” When Monroe was found dead from an overdose a few days later, Natalie phoned Mud in the middle of the night, desperately worried she would “end up like Marilyn,” dead and alone, taking too many pills.