Natasha (8 page)

The article was pure fantasy, a brash announcement of the shameless promotion of Natasha that soon would distinguish Maria within the ranks of Hollywood stage mothers.

NATASHA’S CHILDHOOD, IF SHE HAD ONE
, ended when she left Santa Rosa in the spring of 1944. She felt an oppressive burden, at five, to be a success in Hollywood, thinking she was responsible for the family’s upheaval.

The move was wrenching for her and fifteen-year-old Olga, who would remember standing near the swing Nick built for them in the backyard, watching wistfully as their mother piled everything they owned into the car. Six-year-old Edwin walked over to say goodbye. “That killed me when they moved. I told Natasha I was going to miss her. I even gave her a hug goodbye.” Natasha’s last, flickering image of her childhood was of Edwin, her only friend, waving a forlorn farewell in front of the first house she and her sister had known. “I’m sorry we moved from Santa Rosa,” admits Olga, expressing the one regret she would convey from a childhood of injustices. “But even if we’d stayed, Natalie would have found her destiny, I guess.”

So effectively had Maria subjugated the minds of both daughters and her husband, all departed for Hollywood convinced Natasha would be in the movies. Whether her eventual stardom was fated, or manipulated by Maria, is the existential mystery. “She was
destined
for this
life
, because of that mother,” suggests a close friend. “And the father. He was as guilty, he just was silent.”

Natasha slept through her pilgrimage to the promised land, squeezed between Olga and the family belongings in the back seat of the car. Nick drove straight through the night, stopping to pick up a hitchhiker, a whimsy of Maria’s. Olga kept a picture, among her mementoes, of the hitchhiker, posed alongside Natasha and their mother.

The Gurdins pulled into Hollywood around the beginning of June, 1944. They arrived virtual peasants: Nick did not have a job, they had no money, no home, no resources. The family’s hopes were pinned entirely on Natasha.

Maria arranged for the Gurdins to stay with Olga’s former ballet teacher, Nadia Ermolova, who had a small apartment and dance studio on Fountain in the bowels of Hollywood. From there “she called Irving Pichel, and did some little sob act. That they were very poor in Santa Rosa, and Natasha
loved
him so much, and could they come see him?” Pichel was surprised, then dismayed, as he later wrote: “The family turned up in Hollywood, where, Mrs. Gurdin revealed to me, she was interested in a career for Natasha.” The director guiltily likened himself to “a modern Pied Piper who had, however unwittingly, piped the child out of her Hamelin town.” He had a long, sobering talk with Maria and Natasha about child stars, explaining how their families suffer and how child actors miss having normal childhoods. To do that to Natasha, Pichel advised Maria, would be a tragedy. “The mother, like the daughter, appeared to accept my judgment,” he wrote later. Within a week, Pichel began filming
A Medal for Benny
. Natasha Gurdin was not among the cast.

The calculated kismet upon which Maria had gambled the house, the family’s security and Natasha’s mental health did not go as she had planned, or the gypsy foretold.

Contrary to the impression she gave Pichel, Maria was neither chastened, daunted, nor persuaded by his alarm at the prospect of Natasha getting into movies. She simply determined to find another entrée. To that end, the Gurdins remained in Nadia Ermolova’s cramped apartment through the summer and into the fall. Olga wrote despairing letters from Hollywood to Lois, her childhood companion in San Francisco, who remembered it as “a hard move for my friend.” Natasha, who turned six that July, sent frequent, heartfelt scrawls to Edwin, suggestive of how lonely she was. Hollywood was not the kingdom of palaces her mother conjured. “When I first saw a studio I was five and expected red velvet and gold,” she later said.

In a letter to Edwin that September, Natasha enclosed two photographs of herself, taken the same day in the front yard. Both are of Natasha in a full-skirted Russian costume with a head kerchief. In one photo, her mouth is painted with red lipstick and she playfully strikes a Russian dancer’s stance, mugging for the camera. The other shows Natasha without makeup, holding out the sides of her Russian dress in
a stilted pose, a pained smile forced onto her desperately sad face. They illustrate the schism she was feeling about her life.

The haunted expression behind Natasha’s eyes in the second photograph provides a glimpse into the pressures she was experiencing. Maria had discovered
The Hollywood Reporter
, and foraged it daily for a part for Natasha, assimilating industry gossip like an agent on the make. “She’d read all the trade news, and keep up with what movie was shooting and who was doing it,” relates Olga, who recalls her sister “trying for different things.” Natasha was competing for roles against experienced child actors with agents and show business connections while
she
was being led around town by her Russian mother on the lure of a thirty-second cameo in
Happy Land
. “When I would go on an interview for a part and not get it—to me it was a total rejection. I thought they were turning
me
down.” Natasha was guilt-ridden, feeling responsible for the family’s move from Santa Rosa, desperate to please her overbearing mother, mesmerized into believing she must have a magical life. When she said her prayers at night, Natasha asked God to please make her a movie star.

The family made ends meet through Maria’s machinations. According to Olga, her mother got Nick a job as a carpenter at one of the studios, “maybe through Pichel or somebody, I’m not quite sure.” They scraped together enough money to move out of Nadia’s by the first of the year, relocating to a small stucco cottage at 9060 Harland, off Doheny in West Hollywood. Nick made a swing for the backyard, where Natasha could pretend, at least, that she was back in Santa Rosa.

Maria had been unsuccessfully making the rounds in Hollywood with Natasha from June of 1944 to February of 1945 when she read in the trades about a movie Irving Pichel was directing called
Tomorrow Is Forever
. It was adapted from a popular wartime novel condensed in the
Ladies Home Journal
, based on a tragic, operatic poem by Tennyson called “Enoch Arden.” Orson Welles, a Hollywood wunderkind from his masterpiece of four years before,
Citizen Kane
, was cast as an Army lieutenant so disfigured in World War I he nobly chooses to let his wife think he has died. The wife, played by Claudette Colbert, discovers she is pregnant with her husband’s child at the same time he is presumed dead; after giving birth to a son, she remarries. Pichel was looking for
a little girl to play the difficult role of an English-and-German-speaking Austrian refugee from the Second World War whom Orson Welles’ character adopts while recovering from his injuries in Vienna.

“My mother got all excited about this,” recalls Olga, who participated in Maria’s strategy to get Pichel to cast Natasha as the Austrian orphan. Maria chose not to contact the director, knowing he would discourage her. She somehow managed to get Natasha’s name onto a list of six girls auditioning for Pichel at the end of February. “When I saw it there,” Pichel said later, “I was depressed.” The pressure on Natasha was mounting. Six years of Maria’s incantations had her believing the only thing that mattered in life was to be a great actress. “Ever since I was knee high,” she would say later, “I’ve been waiting for my break.” For months she had been paraded by Mud in front of casting directors who barely looked up. This was her
friend
, Mr. Pichel. She
had
to get the part; her family was depending on her. However burdened she felt, Natasha did not confide in anyone. Her desperation was internalized, hidden beneath the façade of the good little girl. As an adult, Natalie would tell Lana that most of her anxieties were from the pressures she felt at six to succeed in Hollywood.

Prior to the casting call, Maria carefully assessed Natasha, as Olga, her forgotten daughter, would recall; plotting how she could present her so Natasha would stand out from the competition. The afternoon of the audition, five pretty, painted little girls sat in Pichel’s office wearing frilly dresses and Sunday curls. Natasha walked in with braids in her hair, dressed “the way she plays in the backyard,” giving her an air of naturalness. Maria claimed, later, Pichel had advised her to do this, but it was Mud. “She was very alert. If all the other mothers did one thing, she’d say let’s pick something that’s not gussied up.” In this case, Maria was emulating Margaret O’Brien, the gifted child star known for her dark pigtails and solemn grace—as Natalie would admit to O’Brien years later. “We kind of laughed about that,” confirms O’Brien, “pigtails and everything.” Maria was returning to her Edna May axiom: if a formula works, steal it.

The role of Margaret Ludwig, the bilingual Austrian war refugee in
Tomorrow Is Forever
, demanded a child actress with the gifts of a Margaret O’Brien. The character has been traumatized by seeing both parents killed by Nazis and anguishes over the frail health of her
guardian (Welles), who has spirited her out of Vienna to America. Little Margaret has several heartrending scenes. In one, she reacts hysterically when a toy makes a popping noise, reminding her of the gunshots that killed her mother and father. The other occurs at the end of the film, when Welles’ character succumbs to pneumonia and Margaret sobs, “Everyone who belongs to me dies.” Pichel had chosen one of these scenes for the screen test, which had to be spoken in a German accent.

According to Natalie’s eventual mythology, studio publicity, and her mother, her screen test was flawless. This was not so. “She played the scene and it was not very good,” recalled Pichel. It was frankly remarkable Natasha had not suffered a nervous breakdown, asked at six to perform an emotional scene using a German accent with no acting experience, believing her family’s welfare hinged on her performance, enchanted by Mud to expect
magic
. “I remember proudly telling my mother afterward that I hadn’t cried even though they asked me to,” Natalie said years later. “My mother got mad and said, ‘What do you mean, you didn’t cry?’”

Pichel’s reaction to Natasha’s poor audition was relief. He explained to Maria that he needed a little girl who could cry at will. “I took her mother aside and advised her not to feel too badly but, on the contrary, to be happy about it, as I was.” His parting words to Maria were, “Natasha is too nice a little girl to be anything but a normal little girl.” There was no argument.

Privately, Maria was frantic, remembers Olga, a witness to the crisis at home. After a night of “great commotion,” Mud commanded Natasha, anguished at her imperfection, to telephone Pichel and beg him for a second chance. Then Maria got on the phone. She told Pichel Natasha had been crying desperately because she lost the part, that she had been so happy to see him she could not play a sad scene, “but if you will give her another chance, she will, she knows, be good.” Pichel, moved by Natasha, agreed to another screen test.

Maria hung up the phone, possessed with getting Natasha to cry on cue. The task of preparing her for her screen test fell to Olga, a cruel irony lost on Mud. Maria’s older daughter did as she was told though “it just seemed funny to me, because I was only what, sixteen?” While coaching Natasha, Olga remembered her drama teacher in Santa Rosa instructing the class to think of something sad when they needed to cry. She told Natasha to think about the day their dog was killed in
Santa Rosa. Natasha looked stricken, reliving the nightmare of her puppy darting in front of a truck. “I got her to cry,” recalls Olga. Maria, hovering nearby, made mental notes of the technique.

Outwardly Natasha “seemed to get through the scene pretty well,” her sister thought, unaware Natasha had been emotionally scarred. “From that time on, whenever I did a movie, I always counted the crying scenes,” Natalie said later. “That was a barometer of how difficult the part was going to be for me.” The true horror of that stigma was yet to come.

Maria took Olga out of Hollywood High for Natasha’s screen test. Pichel would recall Natasha stepping aside before her scene. In those moments, Olga whispered to her to think about their little dog, coaxing Natasha into tears. Then something else occurred, Natalie would later confide to actor Robert Redford. Her mother pulled her to the side, where no one could see, “took a live butterfly out of a jar and tore the wings off it.” Tenderhearted Natasha went into hysterics as her mother called out, “She’s ready!” grabbing her by the hand and pushing her in front of the camera. Natasha cried so profoundly Pichel was moved to write about it later, describing her tears as “seeming to come from the depth of some divine despair.” Her audition broke Pichel’s heart, and with it his resolve to keep her from becoming a child actress.

Twenty years later, when Natalie told Redford the story, he wondered, “How can anyone survive this? But she did.” She survived, but Natasha was never the same, in ways that would gradually reveal themselves.

Maria’s ruthlessness with the butterfly and the dead puppy was a warning how far she would go to advance Natasha’s career to the detriment of her daughter. Though she was still only a child, Natasha was beginning to understand that her mother was living through her. The narcissism and drive that put Marusia on street corners collecting coins to become Queen of the Ball had been redirected toward her daughter, where it would be commingled for the rest of their lives. Fahd was relegated to the sidelines, too ineffectual to be her advocate.