Natasha (56 page)

When she returned to Raleigh, Fletcher noticed, Natalie had a difficult time without a support system around her, separated from her daughters. “She was always talking about her kids. Missing them, what they were like. She mentioned them all the time, and called them, having conversations at night.” Creatively, Fletcher thought Natalie “was having a very good time. When we worked together in scenes, she was in a very good mood and very, very funny. She would be talking under her breath, trying to make me laugh—and she succeeded.”

The production itself seemed doomed. The word filtering back to Stitzel in Los Angeles was that “it was chaotic because of Trumbull’s complete lack of control over what was going on, and Walken was pretty much directing his own scenes and doing his own thing.” Fletcher says diplomatically, “The producers and the director didn’t have a creative meeting of the minds.”

By the middle of October,
Brainstorm
was so far behind schedule that executive producer Jack Grossberg “cleaned out the entire production department” and made an emergency call to a first assistant director named David McGiffert. “He said, ‘You owe me a favor,’ and he was kind of laughing. He said, ‘They’ve got a problem on
Brainstorm
, this movie being shot by Doug Trumbull. We’ve got to take over this show. They’re in North Carolina, and we’ve gotta go in and get it right.’”

McGiffert’s perception, when he arrived on location, was similar to Stitzel’s during rehearsal. “It seemed as though a lot of the production was in chaos… for some reason, it was difficult for Doug [Trumbull] to impart his brilliance, to communicate it to actors.” Stitzel heard from his contacts on location that Natalie “really fell under Walken’s spell and followed his direction more than Trumbull’s.”

Louise Fletcher, who was there and had numerous scenes with Walken, observes, “Chris is just too
crazy
to take over. Natalie, believe me, was grounded in her craft, and I don’t believe that Chris was going to take her over in any way. He may have given her suggestions or an extra glass of wine, I don’t know. He’s a marvelous actor. He made me laugh a lot… right before the scene would start, he would do something completely different just to get the energy going, like he’d drop his pants or something. He’s not over in his own space. He’s kind of intrusive, but everybody’s got their own way of working.”

Walken’s off-the-wall style and Method approach were similar to the way Natalie’s movie-god Jimmy Dean behaved with her during
Rebel
, striking an emotional chord in her. “She would look at Chris and he’d do some funny thing that nobody would see on the set, and she’d just fall over laughing,” observed McGiffert. “Chris was trying to get her to loosen up in her role, because I think Natalie really wanted to do well, and that actually impaired her relaxing to do the part. Chris gets with his parts, and he lives in that guy, and he wanted Natalie to sense this woman.”

Walken, according to McGiffert, who was responsible for keeping track of the cast, assuaged Natalie’s “huge” insecurities about her age and weight—the pressure to be “Natalie Wood”—that Stitzel noticed prior to filming. She was especially insecure about a wedding flashback scene depicting her and Walken in their early twenties.

“She was really, really afraid of how she was going to look,” states the A.D. “Lots of time in makeup.” The morning of the scene, “Natalie
didn’t want to do it. You could tell she was stressed, and Chris had this goofy little kind of thing he did… to get her on the point where she needed to be, without upsetting her emotionally.”

Natalie’s concern that she needed to look like “Natalie Wood” was touching to McGiffert. When the scene was over, he went up to her and said sympathetically, “Look, you look good. And you can’t go back. You know, you can’t be that girl again.”

Natalie spent most of her down time in Raleigh on the telephone with her daughters, or in the trailer with Walken, who occasionally went to dinner with her. With Walken, she violated her longstanding rule to drink no more than one glass of wine during filming. “Wardrobe was going crazy because she was putting on weight from all the wine,” recalls Faye Nuell, who was then a production executive at MGM. “Suddenly she had these matronly arms and they were having to let out the clothes.”

By the time McGiffert joined the
Brainstorm
team a few weeks into October, the gossip was that Natalie and the married Walken, whose wife flew back and forth from New York, were having an affair.

“I know that’s what everyone thought,” submits Fletcher. “I think that she was in over her head, that’s what I think, in every which way. If Natalie had
one
glass of wine, she could be—she just couldn’t handle any kind of alcohol, and I think unfortunately a couple of times she had more than one glass. And I’m not saying she was alcoholic or anything like that. It’s just that I think she was kind of in
limbo
out there in North Carolina and didn’t really feel that she had her community right here, and I think that a couple of times it may have looked like she and Chris were drunk.”

In the awful aftermath of her drowning, a month or so later, Walken would acknowledge that Natalie “wasn’t much of a drinker.”

The perception that Natalie and Walken were romantically involved was so pervasive that when R.J. flew to Raleigh to visit Natalie once, “there was a little bit of consternation,” recalls McGiffert. “I remember someone in Natalie’s hair and makeup group darkly saying, ‘R.J. is coming this weekend.’ And then another time, Chris’s wife showed up with very little forewarning, and I think there was a lot of kind of dodging and weaving that was going on.” McGiffert believed that R.J. was not suspicious of Natalie and Walken while he was in Raleigh. “I don’t think he got that there was anything going on between them.”

R.J. would later tell a family employee he was irritated about Natalie’s location shooting in North Carolina because he had to film an episode of
Hart to Hart
in Hawaii that October while she was in Raleigh, leaving Natasha and Courtney without one parent at home for a few days, a violation of the Wagners’ marital understanding. R.J. felt Natalie was the one who should be home with the girls, not him.

McGiffert, who interacted with Natalie and Walken many times a day on and off the set, liked them both and had a “light relationship” with them, felt “there’s no question” the two were intimate. “It didn’t really take a hell of a lot to notice what was going on… you could see it. It wasn’t like you had to be stupid and be told this. And it wasn’t like they were lovey-dovey on the set or anything like that, but they just had a current about them, and an electricity.” McGiffert construed Natalie’s occasional wine consumption with Walken as a way for her to relax. “They weren’t drunk, but they were buzzed. Not to the point where it was impairing their work, but they were a little giddier than usual… she just looked to me like a woman who was opening up a little more.”

People who knew Natalie well, such as her hairdresser and friend of eighteen years, Sugar Bates, or her sister Lana, find it unimaginable that Natalie could have been having an affair with Walken. “I think she was probably having a flirtation, which is different than having an affair,” contends Lana. “I really don’t think that she would do that. There may have been those kind of boy-girl little attention games going on. A genuine affair, I don’t believe it for an instant. I would just never believe it of her. I really don’t believe she would do that. Ever, ever, ever, ever. She would not have risked her marriage.”

If she had, it would have been Natalie’s first known extramarital affair, something she did not condone, as she made clear by initiating a divorce from Richard Gregson and excommunicating him within hours of discovering his liaison with her secretary.

What Natalie unmistakably experienced was an emotional connection with Walken that filled a void in her life, stimulating her in a way that was powerfully evocative of Jimmy Dean’s effect on her during
Rebel Without a Cause
. McGiffert, who was around them throughout filming, sensed that Natalie was “transformed” by the relationship with Walken. “It was a dramatic, uplifting thing for her, you could tell that she was fulfilled, that she was refocused. And it was nice to see… I
think she was blown away. This weird guy from New York, he said these goofy things, and put her in these goofy positions, and he’d show her up and play jokes on her.”

Natalie was in conflict in
herself
that fall, or selves. The serious actress part of her that was drawn to Kazan and Dean was excited by Walken and the chance to express herself artistically, while the star-driven “Natalie Wood” side of her was comfortable in the celebrity world she and R.J. symbolized. “They were the king and queen of the Hollywood parade,” as Fletcher observed, “and when you spend that much time in Hollywood—and I’m using that word ‘Hollywood’ on purpose—if you start out that young, you kind of
believe
what you read in the paper, that you
are
royal in some way: you know, ‘Hollywood royalty.’ And she
was
. She was a member of that old school… she and R.J. kind of are the way they were. Together they felt
special
.”

The true Natalie, Natalie the mother, was isolated and lost without Natasha and Courtney. “She called all the time,” recalls Peggy Griffin. “I’d go over there and have a bite to eat with R.J. and she was always on the phone. Constantly. With the kids.”

McGiffert, their on-set liaison during those charged last weeks on
Brainstorm
, had fond feelings for Natalie, and liked Walken. “She was the kind of person I would like to have for a friend. She had long periods of being lonely and had spent a lot of time figuring out what was important to her. And the things that were important to her were unexpected from someone of her magnitude: simple truths, affection and honesty. And she was in a business where all three of those things are in short supply.”

Screenwriter Stitzel, whose
Brainstorm
script had been brutalized by the chaotic production, considered Walken “the downfall” of the film, “just the spirit that he brought into it, it wasn’t an uplifting spirit. It was almost evil. Not that he was abrasive, he just seemed very aloof and indifferent.” Stitzel was especially offended by the last scene in the script, which he claims Walken instigated Natalie to perform while they were intoxicated. “When you have to get drunk to have to do a scene, something is really wrong. I don’t even know if Trumbull was there or not. It’s just pathetic as to where that film was originally going to go.”

Fletcher, who was not on set during that scene, heard the same thing as Stitzel. “I know they had a tough time that night… in
her
case, it would probably have been like two glasses of wine. She was so little, and she couldn’t handle it.”

By the first week in November, the star-crossed
Brainstorm
company returned to L.A. to finish the last month of shooting on the sound-stage at MGM.

Walken checked into a hotel and Natalie reunited with her family in the house on Canon, showing up at MGM as needed for her scenes, carrying out the mundane errands of motherhood she found so fulfilling, taking lessons to strengthen her voice for
Anastasia
, which would start rehearsals after Thanksgiving and open at the Ahmanson Theater in February. “To be live on stage absolutely terrified her,” recalls Stitzel, one of the many to whom Natalie mentioned her fear.

“We were all talking about what we might do to help her,” actor David Dukes, who was cast as Rasputin, would recall. “We felt we’d probably go with body mikes because she certainly wouldn’t have the voice for a theater like that.”

Her conversations with Lana then, and an interview she gave when she got back from North Carolina, suggest that Natalie was disenchanted with
Brainstorm
. She told Lana it was a “so-so” movie, and said to a reporter, “Today’s films are so technological that an actor becomes starved for roles that deal with human relationships. My friends seem more excited about my doing
Anastasia
than about
Brainstorm…
and to tell you the truth, I feel the same way.”

Child actress Tonya Crowe, who played Natalie’s daughter both in
Cracker Factory
and
Eva Ryker
, stopped to see her mid-November on the
Brainstorm
set. Crowe remembers Natalie as bubbling over about
Anastasia
, autographing, with typical warmth, what would be her last “Natalie Wood” glamour shot, “to my favorite screen daughter.” To Crowe, Natalie was not only the epitome of a star, she was the epitome of a mother. “All I know is that she took me under her wing in such a motherly way. I worked with Donna Mills as my mother on
Knots Landing
and Donna Mills loved having a child on the set, but it wasn’t anything like Natalie. Natalie adored being a mother. She had total respect for children—not just love, but respect.”

She posed for a portrait that month as the mystery woman claiming to be Anastasia, used in advertisements announcing the forthcoming play, a haunting preview of what might have been. It was a stunning photograph of Natalie as the putative Romanov duchess, in a plunging
gown, wearing an ornate jeweled necklace, her hair upswept and her dark Russian eyes smoldering; the closest she would get to fulfilling her fantasy to honor Mud and Fahd’s reverence for the Russian royal family and her own buried identity as Natasha Gurdin.