Natasha (53 page)

Lola McNally, a sweet-natured veteran Hollywood hairdresser who was Natalie’s choice to do her hair, saw the hidden, fragile side of Natalie during six weeks filming in Cleveland in the dead of winter. McNally recalls, “She took a liking to me right away and followed me around like a little puppy. When we’d be on the set, she’d come up every time before she did a scene and give me a hug, like, ‘Let me get my breath.’”

One of the first nights the movie company was in Cleveland, McNally heard a knock on her hotel room door. When she opened it, Natalie was standing outside in her nightclothes. “She just said, ‘Do you mind if I just come in and sleep with you?’ I said, ‘Fine. I’m from a big family. It doesn’t matter to me.’ And almost every night after that she’d come and crawl in bed with me because she didn’t want to be alone. She was a little girl, even though she was grown up.”

Natalie drew close to Lola McNally as if McNally were her mother all through filming, eating dinner with her every night, sleeping in McNally’s bed with her, showing McNally the bump on her wrist, explaining how she was afraid to get it fixed. She talked about her fear of dark water and of drowning off a boat, which had happened to McNally’s husband. McNally washed Natalie’s hair for her the way Mud did when Natalie was a little girl, because she was afraid to put her head in the water: “We used to
bend
her over the bathtub and wash it.” Natalie had McNally play child’s games with her in the snow between
takes. “We had a little contest sliding our shoes on the ice—little kid’s stuff—sliding down the hallways to see who could go the fastest. She’d say that she won and I’d say, ‘No, you didn’t win,
I
won today.’ And we’d go looking around the gardens, trying to figure out what flower was coming up, because they were covered with snow and ice.”

Natalie, who had spent her childhood with Mud at her side every second of every day, even in the bathroom, felt lost without her alter ego, needing a mother figure to replace Maria, the missing half of “Natalie Wood.”

Even when R.J. came to Cleveland for an extended visit, Natalie knocked on McNally’s door, wistfully, asking to spend the night in her bed. “I think Natalie was a little girl. That’s the only way I can put it. Like there’s some little girls that are outgoing, and then there’s those who sit back and suck their thumbs.”

After Natalie’s drowning, R.J. would allude to the ghosts from Natalie’s childhood, saying, “She worked on herself for a very long time. And she wanted to be content. She wanted to be pleased about herself. Obviously, she was being pursued, inside, somehow. Some demons were in there pursuing her. Who knows?”

Natalie’s private fragility, the lost little girl she revealed to McNally, gave special pathos to her identification with the character in
The Cracker Factory
, whose essence was Natalie. As Burditt describes, “The character is very, very vulnerable, and always trying to do her best… that constant striving, and that vulnerability, and looking for reasons to go on. And then going on
without
reasons—even if you don’t have a reason you can understand, you go on anyway.”

Burditt noticed, while Natalie was playing the part, “It’s almost like different personalities would come up. When it required an intensity, you would see that in the determination, the intelligence; and then when it was appropriate for her to be vulnerable, you just wanted to take care of her. It was all in Natalie’s personality. It was very real.”

Natalie’s divided personality as a child-woman was evident in the impressions she left on Burditt, who found her “very verbal, very persuasive. She was very generous, very openhearted, an amazingly complex woman in a good way. A lot of women with her drive, and determination to be perfect, don’t have the empathy that she did. She had all of it, and she used all of it as an actress, too. I just thought the
world of her. I thought she was brave and funny and very true to herself. She was a star, in the best sense, and didn’t seem to do a lot of stuff that stars do.”

That same winter, Natalie bought a condominium on Goshen in west Los Angeles for her aging parents. Fahd was a frail sixty-six, recently in intensive care for an irregular heartbeat. Mud, at seventy, still dwelled in the fanciful world of her imagination, decorating the new condominium with Natalie Wood glamour shots and the sad-eyed Keane portrait of her daughter hanging in the living room, “living Natalie’s life,” as Sugar Bates put it. Mud spent her time in Natalie’s movie trailer, often with Natasha and Courtney. “Natalie was always doing things for her,” recalls her stand-in. “She just
did
things for people.” That summer, Lana prepared to marry for a fifth time. At forty, Natalie was still caretaker of the lost souls in her family, as she had been at six.

She accepted a part in a feature film the first few months of 1979, called
The Last Married Couple in America
, directed by her friend Gil Cates, who brought the script to Natalie. The movie was a lighthearted look at a couple with problems in their marriage who, in the end, choose the sanctity of the family—a theme that reflected Natalie’s life, and drew her to the role. “She thought it was really a good part for her, so she and I became partners in crime. We figured out, Okay, who would be the best actor for this? At that time, it was George Segal.”

The stresses in the Wagner marriage were revealed to Lola McNally, who had observed Natalie arguing in Cleveland with R.J. over the nights he spent out, drinking. “She wanted to be with him
alone
, and he wanted to be with the crew.” John Martinelli, the A.D. on
Cracker Factory
, thought Natalie and R.J. were a great couple, “all class—class, class, class,” though he noticed, as others did, “she and R.J. were checking each other out all the time, like they were making sure they weren’t running off with somebody else.”

There was also great tenderness. Joyce Burditt, who accompanied Natalie when she promoted
The Cracker Factory
that March, was backstage while Natalie did
The Merv Griffin Show
. “R.J. was watching the feed in the green room, and he was just sitting there, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s so proud of her.’ You could just see it in his face. He had been chatting, he was a very charming guy, with a wonderful sense
of humor, and the minute she started to talk, he just looked at the monitor at the feed and was really into it, and I thought, ‘How nice. How nice for her, how nice for him.’ It gave me a really good feeling.”

Burditt’s perception was that “it seemed to be a good time in Natalie’s life. R.J. was there, they were very sweet with each other, he was so supportive of her. She was a nice person who liked her life, liked her kids, liked her husband, and that showed, too.”

That spring, as she was finishing
The Last Married Couple in America
, Natalie gave a spate of interviews comparing her marriage with R.J. to the couple she and George Segal were playing in the picture, a husband and wife who go through a rocky time and come through in the end, the way Natalie liked things to turn out. The
Saturday Evening Post
profile of her and R.J. that March was even called “Happily Ever After.” Just like the fairy tale that Natalie had longed for as a child.

When she finished filming
The Last Married Couple
in April, Natalie finally fulfilled her lifelong dream to travel to Russia, part of her journey to rediscover Natasha Gurdin. The trip was to film an NBC documentary called
Treasures of the Hermitage
, an on-camera tour of the museum, hosted by Natalie and Peter Ustinov.

Natalie envisioned the trip as a romantic odyssey to her homeland, the Russia she knew from sitting on Fahd’s lap, looking at the drawings in his fairy storybooks. Or the Russia she heard about from Mud, who spoke in whispers about jeweled aristocrats in ballgowns carrying mink muffs on wintry nights. She imagined herself Anna Karenina, riding the
Trans-Siberian Express
, eating caviar by candlelight, listening to the balalaika.

Natalie had planned that she and R.J. would take Natasha and Courtney to Russia, with Mud and Fahd as guides. Fahd refused to go. “Her father still had great anger at what happened after they left Russia,” recalls Peggy Griffin. “Their family members were all killed. Actually, he got very stressful when Natalie agreed to do that show.” Maria wanted no part of Russia, still traumatized over seeing her brother hanged, paranoid that she would be killed, insistent that Natalie take a bodyguard.

Natalie and R.J. decided to fly to Moscow without their daughters, accompanied by Natalie’s friend, writer Thomas Thompson. She made
arrangements to telephone Natasha and Courtney twice daily, worried about the two-week separation.

Natalie landed in Moscow wrapped in sable, her image of Russia. The Russia she encountered in person—drab, stifling, unemotional—was nothing like the magical place in her mind. “I went through so many different emotions: seeing the place where my parents were born, viewing all the things I’d read about… I found it a very moving experience, and yet, it made me feel more deeply American than ever.”

When she and R.J. went through customs in New York, Thompson said later, Natalie burst into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

As the Wagners returned home to Beverly Hills, their faces were on the cover of
Look
magazine, with the headline “Hollywood’s Most Exciting Couple.”

Inside was a stunning full-page shot of Natalie, at forty, wearing only her magic bracelet, with the caption “
NATALIE WOOD
:
HOLLYWOOD
’
S NUMBER ONE SURVIVOR
.” The article, written by her friend Thomas Thompson, began:

Natalie, Thompson concluded, had fought her demons and won.

AROUND THE TIME SHE RETURNED FROM
Russia, Natalie began to gather her thoughts for an autobiography, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad late at night, when R.J. was frequently out for the evening and her two daughters, six cats and several dogs were asleep, leaving the house on Canon quiet and still.

Olga remembers Natalie asking their mother to record her memories of Siberia, and of Harbin, into a tape player, so that Natalie could include in her memoir her Russian heritage, which defined Natalie to herself, even though Maria’s doubtlessly fantastical version of her childhood in Russia would be more properly written as fiction. Natalie hid her early musings, a few lines from a chapter or two, in a fur closet, possibly wrapped inside the sable coat she wore in Leningrad during her quest to unearth “Natasha.”

She once joked to Mart Crowley that if she ever wrote the story of her life, she was going to call it
I Got What I Wanted
. In Natalie’s star-crossed existence, the title is an ironic reminder of the passage from a play by Oscar Wilde: “In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

One thing Natalie did reveal about the book she intended to write was a theme that would relate to her deep fear of dark water, she told a writer for the
New York Daily News
in 1979. “I’ve been terrified of the water… and yet it seems I’m forced to go into it on every movie that I make.”

She would have that experience one last time later that year, in a television movie called
The Memory of Eva Ryker
, which she accepted as a disappointing alternative to the part she really desired, the repressed mother in
Ordinary People
, the psychological drama Robert Redford had chosen as his first film to direct. At the time, neither
Meteor
nor
The Last Married Couple in America
had been
released. Natalie’s only other feature in a decade was the unremarkable
Peeper
.

Redford knew Natalie’s movie career was on the wane. “She started declining in her work—not that the work wasn’t good, she just did less. She had decided to try motherhood, and that took her away from the career. And you don’t come back easy.” When Redford heard that Natalie was interested in the part of the mother in
Ordinary People
, he felt wrenched. “She had been out of work for a while, and her name came up, and I would have loved to have made it work, but I couldn’t. I really had Mary Tyler Moore in mind, and I was convicted on that. And Natalie had requested just a conversation about it, and that was kind of painful. I would love to have done it, but I just didn’t see her for that particular role.”

Natalie’s request would be their last contact before she drowned, to the chagrin of Redford, who not only had deep feelings for Natalie, but also felt an emotional debt to her for choosing him as her costar in
Inside Daisy Clover
.

That same summer, Natalie, a prolific reader, bought William Styron’s powerful bestseller,
Sophie’s Choice
, about the tragic Polish émigré forced to choose which child to sacrifice to Nazis. She developed an instant passion for the book, and its central character, reacting as she had years before to Marjorie Morningstar. “We were on the boat,” recalls Peggy Griffin, “and she was telling me about this incredible character. Of course she was relating to everything—to the actress, to the mother-child story—and she was almost
acting
it, she got so excited. I remember she did a little scene from it, with an accent.”

Natalie kept a close eye on the film rights, “drooling” to play Sophie, the kind of challenging role that would revitalize her feature career. When
Meteor
was finally released that November, the reviews were as dismal as filming it had been for Natalie, criticisms she admitted were hurtful.
The Cracker Factory
, the TV movie she had put her heart and soul into, was a modest success that spring, though Natalie would not be nominated for an Emmy, an oversight Joyce Burditt found “unfathomable.”

Fahd was in declining health, suffering a series of small heart attacks that Peggy Griffin associated with his stress over Natalie’s trip to Russia. “Who knows what stirred it up? It didn’t happen right there on
the spot, but it wasn’t long after.” Natalie spent increasing amounts of time at her parents’ condominium, hoping to get closer to her father. When Griffin mentioned to Natalie how
she
had taken
her
father out for his seventieth birthday, just the two of them, Natalie’s face lit up. “And a couple of days later, she called me and said, ‘I just called Fahd and asked him to have dinner with me alone.’ ” At the last minute, Fahd canceled. “Natalie said she always knew that was Mud, not wanting it to happen—finding some health reason or something.”

In the weeks before Christmas, Natalie filmed
The Memory of Eva Ryker
, a movie for CBS in which she played an heiress with a repressed childhood memory of seeing her mother drown aboard the
Queen Anne
luxury liner in 1939. In flashback, Natalie also portrayed the heiress’s mother, submerged in water as the
Queen Anne
sinks into the sea. “Oh, she hated that movie,” recalls Griffin. “She just thought everything, including herself, was terrible in it.” Even the art director, Duane Alt, was surprised to work with Natalie Wood. “She was certainly, what should I say, much more talented than to really have done this little movie of the week thing, and she obviously was used to doing big number pictures… but she was 100% into this thing. There was something very, very personal that she felt about this.”

Natalie arranged to be hypnotized for the regression scene, studying how different parts of the body physically react in the moments before death. In a macabre foreshadowing, she “practiced” drowning to prepare for the flashback scene on the boat, which was going to be shot on the
Queen Mary
, in Long Beach, where a luxurious dressing room had been prepared for Natalie. “At dinner at our house one night,” she told a reporter, “everyone did his version of how the death scene should be played. If anyone looked in the window that night, he would have thought we were all crazy.” Once filming began, it was like a series of Chinese water tortures for Natalie.

According to Walter Grauman, the director, Natalie could tolerate the scene where she floated through the ship’s waterlogged cabin, “because of the controlled circumstances,” though Grauman “knew she was scared.”

What panicked Natalie, he found out, was a sequence in the Pacific Ocean with actor Bradford Dillman, to be filmed at Paradise Cove, where Natalie and R.J. were married on the
Ramblin’ Rose
. “I was explaining to her a scene where Brad chases her down the beach, on
the sand, and then she plunges down into the water, and he pursues her into the water and there’s this desperate struggle between them.” Natalie responded, “Walter, I’ll do anything you ask, but there’s one thing I’m deathly afraid of, and that’s dark water—deep, dark water.” Grauman recalls, “She had had premonitions and dreams about dark water.” Natalie had similar conversations during filming with her costume designer, Grady Hunt, telling Hunt about a recurring premonition she was going to die in dark water.

Grauman’s solution was to show Natalie running on the sand and then insert a cutaway of her in a close-up shot in a water tank, “and then I had a stunt double go in the
real
ocean. Natalie was panic-stricken over dark water, deep dark water.”

She was even terrified to get into the water tank at the studio. “I remember
I
went in the tank,” recalls Bradford Dillman. “I was the guy to be the guinea pig to specify exactly where she could stand to show her that her head would still be above water. She was really kind of pathologically frightened… ultimately she did go in, and I remember that she was holding on to the edge rather fearfully. Eventually she had to let go of the edge and she had to tread water, or pretend to be treading water, and she
did
it, and we all gave her a round of applause.”

Actor Robert Foxworth, who was also in the tank sequence with Natalie, remembers holding her in his arms, with Natalie “just shaking like a leaf.” Duane Alt, who set up the scene, comments: “I think everybody really remembers that day very specifically because she was petrified… I really was shocked how frightened she was.”

With the exception of her demons, Natalie was in command on
Eva Ryker
, as she had been on
The Cracker Factory
. “You thought this was
her
film,” a crewman recalls. “It seemed that important. She was so focused, and watching the details.” Dillman, an Actors Studio graduate, found Natalie “driven to be the best she possibly could be.” He was fascinated by her technique, which he considered to be the opposite of Method acting, “in the sense that she acted from the outside in. Hers was a very different kind of a technique. It was
technical
, meaning knowing where her marks were, where the lights were, where the key lights were… that she would show to advantage. There are certain actresses who could care less about how they look. They’re there to be admired as
actresses
. That was not Natalie’s game. She wanted everything to be perfect for her.”

Exactly the way Mud had trained her, from the age of six.

Sugar Bates returned to do Natalie’s hair during
Eva Ryker
, noticing that Natalie was under a great deal of stress in her personal life, exacerbated by R.J.’s drinking, which Bates says Natalie told her had worsened since
Meteor. “She
just seemed really in good shape and she loved the kids, but Wagner was drinking a lot.” Bates sympathized with Natalie. “My husband was, too, so we had a lot of talks about that.” Natalie told Bates that R.J.’s drinking “had gotten out of hand.”

Natalie had been on a health kick since the mid-sixties, and successfully quit smoking that year. Although she still took a sleeping pill every night, an occasional diet pill, and prescription mood regulators as needed, she was uncomfortable with social drugs, which were popular in Hollywood. “We had a talk about it,” states Bates. “She just wasn’t into drugs. She said, ‘I’m not going to those parties where they put out the line of cocaine and stuff.’ ” The Wagners’ older Hollywood crowd “didn’t take drugs and things,” observed Bates. “They just drank.”

Alcohol was one of the demons in Natalie’s life, beginning when she was a little girl, cowering in a corner during Fahd’s drunken rages. She knew the dangers of drinking, part of what had drawn her to
The Cracker Factory
. She told Sugar Bates she had learned in analysis to be firm with alcoholics, the reason she locked the liquor cabinet if Fahd was around, and once paid for Mart Crowley to get therapy. “When Mart was drinking a lot, she finally banned him from her house. She was such a loyal friend, and she had always been so giving, but finally she learned that it wasn’t helpful. She was learning not to be an enabler.”

Natalie’s own drinking was sporadic. After her “Volga boatman” period as a rebel teen, she scaled back to a glass or two of Pouilly Fuissé, a martini, or a drink called a Scorpion on social occasions. By the time she made
Eva Ryker
, she was drinking more than in previous years, partly as a result of the Wagners’ lifestyle. “Natalie may have enjoyed drinking wine, but she never got sloppy or falling down. She never pushed it,” observed Lana. “I never saw her out of control. Wine is also a very European thing—you have wine with dinner; in sophisticated circles, you drink wine with dinner.”

Walter Grauman, Natalie’s director on
Eva Ryker
, went out with the Wagners one night. “All I know is that we put away a number of bottles
of wine when we were out to dinner. We had a marvelous time, but I had a hangover the next morning, and I assume that they did, too.”

Duane Alt, one of the production crew, was a drinking buddy of R.J.’s from previous TV projects. “We’d just kill the afternoon, shooting the bull in the back part of the stage and
he
liked to drink, I know that. He’d say, ‘Hey, why don’t we take off and go get a beer or something? Let’s go get something.’ ” Alt, a Hollywood veteran, understood that alcohol relieved the pressures of stardom. “I think that’s something the public doesn’t understand. When you live at such an intense level, and you have to be seen as the best you can be, it’s a tough, tough thing. You’ve got to find some relaxation out of it to survive.”