Natasha (51 page)

Natalie’s sole concern about
Peeper
was a shot in silhouette, when her character steps from the shadows in a transparent peignoir to meet Michael Caine. “She was nervous,” remembers Rath. “It was a morality thing. She didn’t want to be seen in the nude, so I lit her from the back so you couldn’t see her and we used a body suit. It just silhouetted her so you see the beautiful legs as she opened up her robe with a flourish to tease Michael Caine. It was a pretty interesting shot—beautiful.”

Reviewers admired Natalie’s beauty and spunk, but little else, with one observing that her legendary vulnerability worked against her, writing, “She’s like an appealing waif who smears her face with mascara and rouge, climbs into mama’s slinky dress and says: ‘Aren’t I naughty?’ ” Natalie was stung by the negative reviews for
Peeper
, saying publicly that she and Caine “gave it their all.” Privately, she admitted, “It just didn’t work.”

However, by the time the picture came out at the end of 1975, sixteen months after she finished it, Natalie had retreated into motherhood and domesticity again. She was inspired into “semi-retirement” by Natasha’s enrollment in nursery school, and by the family’s move into singer Patti Page’s former house in Beverly Hills: a cozy Colonial on Canon Drive that seemed to coax out every one of Natalie’s nesting instincts.

Faye Nuell described the house on Canon as a less showy version of Natalie and R.J.’s dream house from their first marriage, potent symbolism for Natalie, whose nature was to “make things right in the end.” She created a happy haven for Natasha and Courtney, making needlepoint pillows, taping up their crayon drawings, cluttering the yard with cats, dogs, chickens, rabbits, trees to climb, even a white picket fence.

She made up for her sad, lonely birthdays as a child by making her daughters’ holidays magical, to be sure they experienced what she
missed: a normal family life. “She just loved,
loved
Christmas!” recalls Peggy Griffin. “I always used to say to her, ‘You turn into Currier and Ives.’ She just couldn’t do enough, with the decorations, and having Santa Claus there, planning children’s parties—with a gift for every child at the party, and knowing their names and seeing these little kids’ faces just light up.”

Natasha said later, “I think Mommy had a real zest for life. Everything mattered to her, you know? The holidays mattered to her. Birthdays mattered. We were
it
for her, I think. I really think that.”

“I am personally enjoying their childhood more than I did mine,” Natalie admitted once to
L’Officiel
. “Whereas, as a child, I always had the feeling of my nose pressed against the window looking in, my daughters have none of that. They are growing up more traditionally. I love being involved in their schools, their friends, their lives.”

Natalie made it clear to Lana and to Faye Nuell that “she wanted to be the mom
she
didn’t have,” indulging her daughters to the point that Natasha would admit later she was “spoiled rotten.” Natalie even sought guidance from a female analyst to make sure she did not inflict on Natasha or Courtney any of the phobias Mud instilled in her, especially about childbirth and sex. She told Natasha the facts of life at four, as she would Courtney. Natasha would remember, “We talked about sex and it was never a dirty thing. It was always a beautiful, empowering thing.” Natalie’s comment was: “I wouldn’t want them to be especially proper, I would like them to be unafraid… and feel free enough to express themselves.” Peggy Griffin recalls Natalie aggressively shielding Courtney and Natasha from Mud’s superstitions.

She was adamant that
her
daughters
not
become child actors, Natalie’s most eloquent expression of the pain she experienced as a child of Hollywood. “It was absolutely not an option to even consider acting,” Natasha would recall. “My mom never had a childhood, and it was one of her great sadnesses. One of her most important wishes was that my sister and I have a normal childhood.”

New Yorker Rex Reed would remember going with Natalie to every Christmas tree lot in Beverly Hills one December, sniffing the branches to find the perfect tree “because she wanted her house to smell like Christmas.” She and R.J. invited celebrity friends and civilians like Peggy Griffin or realtor Delphine Mann, Natalie’s other close chum, to
an open house each December 25, serving eggnog, turkey and ham in shifts from eleven in the morning until midnight, with generous supplies of wine and other alcohol, an essential part of their style of entertaining. Natalie was still on her guard about liquor, though she drank her favorite wine, Pouilly Fuissé, and alcohol was part of R.J.’s lifestyle, from highballs to fine wines.

They regularly opened their guest cottage to David Niven, Fred Astaire, Elia Kazan, Laurence Olivier—with Natalie hand-painting personalized signs above the door, such as “Gadge’s Gulch,” to make each of them feel welcome. “Natalie just had her house filled with friends at all times,” observed Peggy Griffin. “She really just crammed so much living into every given day.”

By the third year of their remarriage, the entertainment industry had embraced Natalie and R.J. as its romantic icons, beloved ambassadors of the celebrity community, a mantle that Natalie, the child of Hollywood, taught to worship stardom, and R.J., its biggest booster, felt comfortable assuming. The mayor chose R.J. and Natalie, accompanied by their daughters, to lead the televised Santa Claus Lane Parade along Hollywood Boulevard the following Thanksgiving. Whereas Richard Gregson had little tolerance for the pomp and circumstance of stardom, “Natalie and Robert Wagner made a wonderful Hollywood couple,” Karl Malden observes, “and they performed properly for the profession, at all sorts of affairs.”

One of R.J.’s most thoughtful traits as a husband was what seemed to be his egoless deference to Natalie’s status as a movie star of legendary proportions, his attentiveness to her, graciously putting Natalie on center stage when they were in public, or interviewed together, providing her with the adulation that “Natalie Wood,” her star persona, both needed and desired, particularly as her career was waning.

By 1975, R.J. resolved his dispute with Universal and was cast in the CBS series
Switch
, providing structure to his and Natalie’s idyllic family life. While R.J. was at Universal filming the series, Natalie drove Natasha to nursery school, read aloud to Courtney from her long-ago favorite book,
The Little Prince
, helped friends decorate their houses, attended PTA meetings—observing, “Normal things have a mystique for me because I’ve never had them.” Courtney, their “love child,” was a tow-headed toddler with the pastel beauty of her father and the wistfulness of Natalie. When R.J.’s pretty blond daughter Katie came to
spend weekends, Natalie had three daughters, just like Mud; Natasha, ironically, was the middle of three sisters, just like her mother.

Natalie invited her former stepchildren for summers in the guest cottage, healing her wounds from Richard Gregson, who disappeared to a farm in the U.K. and remarried after his ignominious eviction by Natalie. “His life changed so dramatically,” recalls Bricusse. “He suddenly went to live in Wales and write.” Though Natasha saw her real father from time to time, she called R.J. “Daddy.”

In the fall, R.J. came upon
“the”
boat he had been searching for since remarrying Natalie, a white sixty-foot powerboat with an outer deck and spacious cabin with room to sleep eight, a shower, a galley, and handsome dark wood trim with polished brass fittings. He showed it off to a reporter like a proud father, saying, “We looked in the South of France and England. Finally we found her… I know every boatman thinks his is
the
boat, but come on down and take a look…”

Natalie and R.J. sentimentally named their boat
Splendour
, after
Splendor in the Grass
, the movie that had such deep significance to Natalie; as a wink, they called the small, attached dinghy
Valiant
, after R.J.’s spectacular disaster,
Prince Valiant
. Natalie helped paint the engine and decorated the cabin herself, choosing Early American furniture, hand-crocheting pillows, knitting blankets, hanging family photographs, creating a homey ambience without a trace of movie star glamour.

Though Maria would later tearfully lament,
“Oh, why did they buy their boat?”
the
Splendour
brought R.J., and Natalie, interludes of great joy. Mart Crowley would later call to mind a memory of Natalie at the end of 1975, sitting on the deck with Courtney in her arms, “And she saw me staring at her. And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘There’s no movie in the world that’s worth
this
little thing!’”

The Wagners leased a mooring from Doug Bombard at Emerald Bay, off Catalina Island, where they spent most weekends when they were aboard the
Splendour
, often inviting friends. Bombard remembers the girls, and R.J., as “waterdogs,” while Natalie “liked the social part of it, but she used to kind of sun on the bow cap of the
Splendour
, sitting there reading, with a big floppy hat. I would never see her in a wet suit, or swimming.” She was famous among friends for her Spanish eggs on Sunday mornings, cooking in the little galley on the
Splendour
, the only time Natalie went near a stove. She lavished love on every room
inside the Canon house with Martha Stewart detail, but “the kitchen was not her place,” chuckled her pal Griffin.

That year, when Natalie was thirty-seven and R.J. forty-five, they achieved the happiness in their married life that fans fantasized existed the first time, when their movie star faces graced the covers of every magazine in tender poses suggesting eternal bliss. Except for an “occasional fix-up,” Natalie quit therapy after nineteen years, ten of them in analysis every day. “I’m fixed!” she laughed to Peggy Griffin.

With her newfound contentment, Natalie became more understanding of Mud, reaching a point where she was grateful for the
positive
things her child stardom brought her, since it led her to this happy stage. The fact that she would never have become a movie star without Mud, or that her mother had made it all happen “wasn’t lost on Natalie,” observes Griffin, “because Natalie loved her life, and she knew she couldn’t have it both ways.” Although she loved her mother, a part of Natalie still resented Mud for her lost childhood, the identity she forsook to create “Natalie Wood.” “We’re all human,” as Griffin points out, “and sometimes we’re contradictions within ourselves.”

Friends who had known her in her fragile twenties marveled at Natalie’s transformation. Leslie Bricusse thought of her as an iron butterfly. “She had tremendous courage, and you could tell that she wasn’t as strong as she sometimes appeared to be.” Yet Natalie was stronger than her vulnerability would suggest. That was the paradox.

She described
herself
, with pride, as “a survivor.” It was Natasha, Natalie admitted, who brought her back from the dark side. “She said to me, ‘A lot changed when I had Natasha,’ ” remembers her friend Griffin. “She suddenly realized she had to provide for her child and she had to account for herself.”

The practical change was in Natalie’s finances, which she placed in the management of a shrewd lawyer named Paul Ziffren during the great purge of 1966. More miraculous was the emotional strength she summoned once she became a mother. When Natasha would later watch
Rebel Without a Cause
, she hardly recognized the “hysterical and volatile and electric” actress she saw on the screen. “That’s not how I remember her at all. I remember Mommy as this solid, grounded, direct, funny woman. Obviously there were times when she wasn’t like that, but by the time she chose to have children she was very clear,
strong and protective. She wasn’t like the characters she played, these fragile girls. I felt safe around her.”

The place inside Natalie where her monsters still resided troubled her, even at the height of her fulfillment. “Don’t make it sound too terrific!” she superstitiously warned her writer friend Thomas Thompson that summer, as he prepared a magazine profile about her life with R.J. “Because, God knows, I don’t have all the answers… I’m so happy now it’s scary. I’m afraid to even talk about it for fear it will crumble or something.”

MOTHERHOOD HELPED NATALIE REDISCOVER
her lost self, but it was still hard for her to be seen in public without The Badge, The Image, The Face, or any of the other names she devised for “Natalie Wood,” the star personality she and Maria had created.

She made fun of being “a star” when she was with close friends like Peggy Griffin, as she had with Redford, yet Griffin noticed Natalie could never go out without her bracelet and “it was important to her to always look great, not just because she was a star… she spent a lot of time ‘doing’ herself.” Griffin traced this insecurity to Mud, “who raised Natalie to never walk out of the house without the war paint glamour going, because you never know what producer’s going to see you.”

“She got herself done up
every single day
,” stresses Lana, who had watched her sister since childhood in front of a makeup mirror, transforming herself into “Natalie Wood.” Once, around 1976, when Lana picked up Natalie to take her to a dermatologist’s office so they could both have face peels, “she had on full makeup.” Lana was startled. “I said, ‘What are you doing? They’re gonna make you take it all off!’ ” “Well what if somebody sees me?” Natalie responded uncertainly.

She envied Lana for her ability to relax and be herself. “Natalie told me that when she would go on talk shows, she would pretend to be me. Because she was accustomed to having things scripted, and she was so afraid that she wouldn’t be able to think of something to say, or that she would say something that wasn’t quite right.”

Natalie still possessed a compulsion to please, to entertain, to be perfect, even with a close chum like Peggy Griffin, who observed, “Natalie was always so happy. There was nothing sad about Natalie.
She was happy and giggly and funny and just full of the devil. She wasn’t sad at all.” Other longer-term friends, such as Leslie Bricusse, who had witnessed her panic attack in the Mediterranean, believed that Natalie’s vibrancy concealed a still fragile soul. “She was a very emotional girl, and I think instability was never far away, if she didn’t have a support system around her.”

Natalie’s complex, at times conflicting, needs included expressing herself as an actress, even though motherhood fulfilled her.

She had not buried her dream to play Blanche DuBois, reacting with excitement to an unexpected offer the end of 1975 from Sir Laurence Olivier asking her to play the sensual Maggie the Cat to his Big Daddy, with R.J. as the alcoholic, homosexual Brick, in a televised production of Tennessee Williams’
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.

The invitation was “like a gift that fell out of the sky,” Natalie said, giving her an opportunity to act with Olivier, the idol of
her
idol, Vivien Leigh, in a play by the creator of Blanche DuBois. As an added attraction, Olivier arranged to film the production in Manchester, England, set up like a play, with five weeks of rehearsal, shot in sequence.

Natalie spent two hours with Tennessee Williams in Cannes beforehand to make notes about her characterization of Maggie, and listened to friends from Mississippi to create an accent, turning hoarse from the screaming required to play the feisty Maggie, whom she would name with Alva, her other Tennessee Williams character, as the most challenging roles of her career. She compared acting with Olivier to starring with James Dean, describing them both as “fluid.”

Olivier was “insane about Natalie,” according to their costar Maureen Stapleton. Olivier, ironically, was in awe of Natalie’s beauty, the very thing Vivien Leigh, her idol and his ex-wife, worried overshadowed
her
reputation as a serious actress. It was Natalie’s insecurity about her movie star persona—The Badge—that encouraged Olivier to focus on her looks; in particular, a habit she had, at dinner, of checking her face in the blade of a knife. “She would just hold the knife horizontally across the front of her eyes,” Bricusse recalls, “and move her face up and down so she could see everything on the blade. I thought that was rather cute.” Olivier teased Natalie about it, Stapleton recalls. “He would hand her a knife and she would look in, like it was a mirror… and she was teasing
herself
.”

That October, before NBC aired
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, the San Francisco Film Festival chose to honor Natalie for her contribution to films. The other honoree was actor Jack Nicholson, who had won the Oscar that year for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

The public was invited to attend the afternoon event, which was to begin with a tribute to Nicholson, followed by an intermission. Afterward, the organizers of the festival planned to show film clips from Natalie’s movies and then bring her onstage for a question-and-answer session. For Natalie, the tribute was especially poignant, since she was born in San Francisco, and it was the thirtieth anniversary of her 1946 film debut as “Natalie Wood” in
Tomorrow Is Forever
.

Mud, naturally, planned to attend, for it was
her
creation—actress “Natalie Wood”—that was being celebrated. The surprise was the reticent Fahd, who never went to any of Natalie’s premieres and shyly avoided the limelight. For moral support, Natalie asked Peggy Griffin, Mart Crowley, and Howard Jeffrey to accompany her and R.J.

“She was very nervous at the last minute,” recalls Griffin, who had coffee with Natalie in her hotel room the morning of the tribute. Griffin finally asked Natalie what was wrong. “And she hemmed and hawed, and she finally said, ‘I just hope I’m not embarrassed out there. I’m gonna follow Jack Nicholson. Who comes to these things? All young kids. They hardly remember who I am. I’m going to walk out there after the montage of my films that they probably haven’t even seen. What if nobody has a single question?’ ” Natalie was nervous, she told Griffin, “because she’d been out of the public eye for a long time, she’d been doing the ‘mom thing.’”

When Natalie’s part of the program finally came, Griffin recalls, “They showed this endless montage of her work—such a brilliant body of work—and all of us, even those of us who knew her, were just sitting there saying, ‘Oh my God, she really did all this!’ After it was over, the applause was deafening.”

Natalie stood onstage beaming, clasping her hands together and holding them to her chest, touched that people remembered her. She told the audience it was odd to view her entire life on a movie screen, to see herself again as Margaret, the Austrian waif in
Tomorrow Is Forever
. “I was such a tiny little thing,” she remarked wistfully, telling
the audience that Natasha, her six-year-old daughter, looked exactly like
she
did in
Tomorrow Is Forever
.

“And when they started the Q&A,” Griffin recalls, “it had to be almost an hour and a half later, when only forty-five minutes was allotted-that the moderator just said, ‘I really have to limit this, folks.’ They couldn’t stop. They just went mad for her.”

Maureen Stapleton, who had just appeared with Natalie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, later offered what may be the best description of Natalie’s enduring appeal: “She had a quality that made you want things to turn out well for her in the end.”

Natalie’s most memorable moment occurred after she left the stage. As Griffin remembers, “She and I were standing there talking, and her dad, Nick, came up to her at the end, which wasn’t like him. I remember he had tears in his eyes, and he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. He had this sweet little Russian accent, and he said, ‘Natasha, I just realized how much work you’ve done.’ She was on a high for the rest of the night.”

The next spring, Natalie was nominated for an Emmy for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, though she did not win. Worse, the production received wildly mixed reviews when it aired on NBC December 6, 1976, the twentieth anniversary of the date celebrated by Natalie and R.J. as their first night together.
TV Guide
had praised Natalie’s Maggie as glowing with passion, “the performance of her career,” while the
New York Times
reviewer excoriated her as “offering a campy imitation of Bette Davis,” wearing “an inordinate amount of makeup for the sweltering Deep South,” savaging R.J. for a performance “so low keyed that it is an effort to remember he is there at all.”

Natalie’s glamorous, sexy Maggie suffered by association with weaknesses in the production, as had her Alva in
This Property Is Condemned. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had
been a rewarding experience creatively and personally for the Wagners, but it was not the triumph Natalie envisioned.

Though she doted on her daughters, by 1977 she was losing interest in decorating other people’s houses, which had become a boutique business for Natalie, who half-jested that she and R.J. had become “middle-aged squares.” They entertained their wide circle of adoring friends, many of them Hollywood royalty like Natalie, as she channeled her creativity into parties, hiring magicians and pianists to perform
at the house, even hosting a Russian-themed dinner written about in
Bon Appetit
, with recipes courtesy of Mud.

Most of Natalie’s interviews centered on her family life, with frequent references to time spent on the
Splendour
, which she had reproduced in miniature as a fifth anniversary gift for R.J. Natalie spoke of how she liked to be “on the water, and near the water, but not
in
the water.” Peggy Griffin, who went out on the boat with the Wagners on occasional weekends, stayed on the deck with Natalie, sunbathing, while everyone else Jet-Skied or swam. “Our idea of athletics was putting suntan lotion on.”

In early fall 1977, a few months after her thirty-ninth birthday, Natalie accepted a part in the big-budget special effects film
Meteor
, out of restlessness or boredom. There was only one thing about
Meteor
that interested Natalie, both she and director Ronald Neame would later confess: the opportunity to play a Russian. Leslie Bricusse had recommended her to Neame for the role of a Russian translator assisting Sean Connery, whose character was trying to avert a meteor from colliding with Earth.

Natalie approached the part of the translator with the meticulous preparation she had Maggie, or Alva, listening to tapes of Mud speaking Russian to study the inflections. Griffin recalls, “She went to Berlitz and learned Russian, which she really didn’t know. People don’t give her enough credit for that. They thought she knew it; she understood words here and there, but her parents never taught her Russian. She crash-coursed it, which is very hard to do, with a different alphabet.”

Natalie fine-tuned her Russian dialect to perfection to lose her parents’ Ukrainian accent, hoping to create a “characterization,” Kazan style, out of a stock character in a disaster movie, a frustrating experience for her. She was also approaching forty. “Aging in general was really tough for her,” recalls Lana. “It’s tough for any woman who is making her living by her appearance. Your face is six feet large on a gigantic screen, with people going, ‘Wow, do you believe what she looks like now?’ And Natalie was always worried that the film she was working on would be her last.”

“One of the things that intrigued me to work with Natalie was her age,” reveals Neame. “I was curious to see if she could make the transition from leading lady to character actress. Some women make that change perfectly—Kate Hepburn is one, Bette Davis. There are others
that can’t.” Unfortunately for Neame, and for Natalie, her part was too one-dimensional for him to make the appraisal.

Natalie’s hairdresser, Sugar Bates, recalls Neame as piqued with Natalie for wearing too much makeup to portray a translator from Russia, a habit that was ingrained in Natalie by Mud, part of Mud’s concept of “Natalie Wood,” the movie star. At thirty-nine, Natalie was more insecure about upholding that image. “The makeup man always tried to discourage her from wearing that heavy eye makeup, but she didn’t care what period it was or anything, that was
her
.”

To add to her distress on
Meteor
, Natalie knew she was being lit unflatteringly. Neame admits, “The cameraman was more concerned with the overall special effects in the film than making people look good.” When Natalie viewed the rushes, “she didn’t like what she saw… she looked a little hard,” recalls an assistant director. “It really depicted what the film was, as opposed to her looking soft and gorgeous.” Natalie asked Bates to bring her a mirror before every scene, “so she could look at herself and see how she was lit. She was smart.” For the rest of the film, there was a struggle between Natalie and the cameraman, with Neame in the middle. “Natalie liked to look good,” Neame discloses, “and I don’t blame her.” Neame’s assistant, Ginger Mason, recalls, “It was not a great, happy, fun set.”