ALSO BY GAVIN LAMBERT
The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life
Inside Daisy Clover
Norman’s Letter
A Case for the Angels
The Goodby People
On Cukor
GWTW: The Making of “Gone with the Wind”
The Dangerous Edge
In the Night All Cats Are Grey
Running Time
Norma Shearer: A Life
Nazimova
Mainly About Lindsay Anderson
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2004 by Gavin Lambert
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lambert, Gavin.
Natalie Wood : a life / Gavin Lambert — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81680-1
1. Wood, Natalie. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States— Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.W59L36 2004
791.43′028′092—dc21
[B] 2003047578
v3.1
To Leslie Caron
Everyone who has studied the matter in depth says it is not necessary to die, ever, but one by one everybody has died, including the specialists who had said that it was really not necessary, but they probably left messages saying that yes, it is not necessary, they simply decided they wanted to, and did, and thus became the same as the rest of us, the living who die, but one thing is certain and painful: it is not fun at all when somebody dies prematurely.
—William Saroyan, Obituaries
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
1. Out of Russia
2. Lost Childhood
3. Growing Pains
4. Love and Marriage
5. Love and Marriage (Encore)
6. First and Last Things
7. Something Extra
Notes on Sources
Acknowledgments
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 Maria and her mother with sisters Zoya, Lilia and Kalia, 1927 (Private collection)
1.2 Just married: Maria and Alexei Tatuloff, 1928 (Private collection)
1.3 Maria at the White Russian Veterans Ball, 1935 (Private collection)
1.4 Just married: Nina and “the Captain,” George Zepaloff, 1941 (Private collection)
1.5 Natalie Gurdin, age 3, 1941 (Private collection)
1.6 “Natasha Gurdina” at Ermolova’s “Dancing Studio,” 1944 (Private collection)
2.1 Natalie Wood and Orson Welles in Tomorrow Is Forever, 1946 (AMPAS)
2.2 Natalie with Richard Long on the set of Tomorrow Is Forever (Photofest)
2.3 Natalie in a cowgirl costume, 1946 (Private collection)
2.4 Miracle on 34th Street: Natalie, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn (AMPAS)
2.5 Editors of Box Office present Natalie with the Blue Ribbon Award. (Private collection)
2.6 As Jenny in Driftwood (Private collection)
2.7 Michael Panaieff’s ballet class (Courtesy Bob Banas)
2.8 Natalie on the set of The Green Promise (Private collection)
2.9 Natalie as a bridesmaid at Olga Viripaeff’s wedding (Private collection)
2.10 Ideal screen family in Our Very Own (AMPAS)
2.11 With Fred MacMurray in Father Was a Fullback (AMPAS)
2.12 With Bette Davis in The Star (AMPAS)
3.1 With Margaret Sullavan and Wendell Corey in No Sad Songs for Me (Photofest)
3.2 Natalie, James Dean and Marsha Hunt on the set of Rebel Without a Cause (Private collection)
3.3 Sal Mineo, James Dean and Natalie in Rebel Without a Cause (AMPAS)
3.4 Nick Ray, James Dean and Natalie on the deserted mansion set of Rebel Without a Cause (AMPAS)
3.5 Natalie and James Dean at play between setups (Photofest)
3.6 Natalie and James Dean at rest between setups (Photofest)
3.7 Dennis Hopper and Natalie at a studio screening of A Streetcar Named Desire (Private collection)
3.8 Natalie, John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers (Photofest)
3.9 As a half-Mexican spitfire, with Tab Hunter, in The Burning Hills (AMPAS)
3.10 Natalie and Tab Hunter during a break on location for The Girl He Left Behind (Private collection)
3.11 Natalie, age nineteen, with Nick Gurdin, 1957 (Private collection)
3.12 Graduation picture of Natasha Zepaloff, age seventeen (Private collection)
3.13 Natalie, age seventeen, with Nicky Hilton (Private collection)
3.14 As the mulatto girl in Kings Go Forth with Frank Sinatra (AMPAS)
4.1 Natalie and RJ, 1958 (Photofest)
4.2 Just married: Natalie and RJ with Lana Wood, Barbara Gould, Nick Gurdin and Robert Wagner Sr., 1957 (Photofest)
4.3 Natalie and RJ at Natalie’s twenty-first birthday party (Photograph by Murray Garrett/Getty Images)
4.4 Natalie lapsing into “Russian” melancholy (Photograph by Murray Garrett/Getty Images)
4.5 Natalie with her sister, Lana (Private collection)
4.6 Natalie in Splendor in the Grass (AMPAS)
4.7 Audrey Christie and Natalie in Splendor in the Grass (Photofest)
4.8 Joan Collins, Warren Beatty, Elia Kazan, Natalie and RJ during a set break (AMPAS)
4.9 Elia Kazan, Natalie and Warren Beatty at a Warner Bros. celebration (Photofest)
4.10 Kazan with Warren Beatty and Natalie on the set of Splendor in the Grass (AMPAS)
4.11 The farewell scene of Splendor in the Grass (AMPAS)
4.12 The final scene of West Side Story (AMPAS)
4.13 RJ in Europe, 1962 (Private collection)
5.1 Ethel Merman meets Natalie and RJ (Photofest)
5.2 Natalie and Warren Beatty at the Cannes Film Festival, 1962 (Photofest)
5.3 As the young Louise in Gypsy (Private collection)
5.4 As Gypsy Rose Lee (Private collection)
5.5 Natalie and Steve McQueen in Love with the Proper Stranger (Photograph by William Claxton/courtesy of Demont Photo Management)
5.6 Natalie with costume designer Edith Head (Photograph by Dominick Dunne)
5.7 At Marguerite Littman’s London party (Photograph by Mark Littman)
5.8 Natalie and Roddy McDowall (Photofest)
5.9 Wardrobe test for The Great Race (Private collection)
5.10 Blake Edwards and Natalie in The Great Race (Photofest)
5.11 Robert Mulligan and Natalie on the set of Inside Daisy Clover (Private collection)
5.12 With Robert Redford in This Property Is Condemned (AMPAS)
5.13 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (AMPAS)
5.14 Just married: Natalie and Richard Gregson, May 30, 1969 (Private collection)
6.1 Mother and child: with Natasha Gregson Wagner, age 5 months (Private collection)
6.2 At Olga Viripaeff’s house, 1972 (Private collection)
6.3 Natalie and RJ on board Ramblin’ Rose, July 16, 1972 (Private collection)
6.4 RJ with Norma Crane, Howard Jeffrey and Mart Crowley (Private collection)
6.5 Maria and Cesar Romero at a charity event (Private collection)
6.6 Natalie, c. 1970 (Photograph by Michael Ch
ilders)
6.7 With RJ as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Photograph by Michael Childers)
6.8 With Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy (Private collection)
6.9 Kate Wagner, RJ, Natasha, Natalie and Courtney in Los Angeles (Photofest)
6.10 With William Devane in From Here to Eternity (Photofest)
6.11 The Cracker Factory: RJ photographs Natalie at work. (Private collection)
6.12 Psychiatric patients in The Cracker Factory (Photofest)
6.13 With Peter Ustinov in Leningrad for Treasures of the Hermitage (Private collection)
6.14 With RJ on the swim-step of Splendour (Photograph by Malcolm Leo)
6.15 On location for Brainstorm (Private collection)
6.16 With Christopher Walken on the set of Brainstorm (Photofest)
6.17 Natalie driving the Splendour dinghy (Photograph by Malcolm Leo)
7.1 Natalie as Anastasia (Photograph by Michael Childers)
7.2 Natalie (Photofest)
1
Out of Russia
I’m very Russian, you know.
—NATALIE WOOD
Everything Russian is feeling. Everything in the Russian landscape is full of the melody of the inside. That is Russia. It is not America. We are agitated, but we are not emotionally free people. We don’t cry when the snow falls. The English are not like that either, neither are the French. There is only Russia left, with that extreme sensibility of reacting, caring, feeling.
—STELLA ADLER
SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN P.M. on November 6, 1917 (New Style calendar), the Bolsheviks seized power by storming government buildings and the Winter Palace in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). After months of violent disorders throughout Russia, the revolution was under way; and as the majority members (Bolsheviki) of the Socialist Party believed in “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants,” thousands of wealthy landowners and businessmen realized their lands and businesses would be confiscated, and fled the country with all the money and possessions they could take with them. Supporters and/or relatives of Tsar Nicholas II (government ministers, army officers, princes and grand dukes with their wives and children) also took flight, and when fighting between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces erupted across the country, thousands more fled their homes to become refugees from a savage and devastating civil war.
Among the refugees were two families, one rich, one poor, living three thousand miles apart. A daughter of the rich family and a son of the poor family eventually emigrated to California, met in San Francisco, and were married on February 8, 1938. The Russian Orthodox ceremony took place at the Russian church on Fulton Street, when the bride was almost five months pregnant, and the following July a future star was born.
IN 1917, Stepan Zudilov was forty-two years old, a portly, prosperous middle-class businessman who owned soap and candle factories in Barnaul, southern Siberia, and an estate in the outlying countryside. By then he had fathered a large family: two sons and two daughters by his first wife, who died in 1905 after giving birth to their younger daughter; and by his second wife, whom he married a year later, two more daughters followed by two more sons.
His youngest daughter, Maria Stepanovna, born in 1912, claimed years later in California that her mother came from an aristocratic family with Romanov connections, and had “married beneath her.” But this was Maria the fabulist speaking, with her dreams of nobility, and Zudilov the outspoken tsarist and land-and-factory owner had no need of Romanov connections to qualify for the Bolshevik hit list. The Zudilovs were known as “gentry,” and to the Bolsheviks all landowning gentry were suspect, like the family of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin (who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933). “Any of us who had the slightest chance to escape did so,” Bunin wrote after he fled from his estate in central Russia to France by way of Romania.
But the armies of the new government headed by Lenin were slow to gain control of an enormous country, and for almost a year the Zudilovs, like their tsarist neighbors, were in no imminent danger by remaining in Barnaul. It was not until the summer of 1918, six months after the civil war broke out, that the Bolsheviks managed to gain control of all southern and central Russia. On the night of July 16, Tsar Nicholas II, his entire family, their doctor and servants, were executed by a squad of Red Guards at Ekaterinburg, the western terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the news reached Barnaul, it sent tremors of fear throughout the neighboring gentry; and by late November, Red Guard units were only a hundred miles from the town, after executing suspected tsarists en route.
Zudilov had arranged to be warned of their approach in advance, and when the alert came, the family hurried to a prepared hiding place on the estate, stuffing as much money and jewelry as they could inside loose-fitting peasant clothes. Forgotten in the panic of the moment was eighteen-year-old Mikhail, Zudilov’s eldest son, who happened to be out of the house.
After the soldiers moved on, the family left their hiding place. Just outside the house, they were confronted by Mikhail hanging from a tree. The sight of her dead half-brother sent six-year-old Maria into convulsions.
KNOWING THE SOLDIERS were bound to return, the Zudilovs quickly made plans to leave Russia, and in the dead of winter they set out for Harbin in Manchuria, the northeastern province of China. Maria claimed later that they traveled by private train, with a retinue of servants as well as stacks of rubles and the family jewels stowed in their luggage. Although there’s no doubt they escaped with enough assets to live very comfortably in exile, the private train is almost certainly another example of Maria the fabulist.
Red Guards were still searching the area for potential enemies of the new Soviet Russia, and a private train would have aroused immediate suspicion. But as Barnaul was a stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway, only four hundred miles from the Manchurian frontier, and Harbin the last stop before Vladivostok for eastbound trains, it seems far more likely that the Zudilovs decided to keep a low profile and traveled by the regular route.
When the child from a secluded country estate looked out the train window during that journey of almost three thousand miles, she would have glimpsed the same frighteningly alien world as the Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie, who traveled by the Trans-Siberian that same year. He saw a “stricken land of misery,” with ravenous and spectral refugees huddled on the platform when the train slowed down past a wayside station; dismal tracts of frozen steppe, occasionally swept by a violent gale that caused the coaches to rattle, squeal and shudder; and near the Chinese frontier, where civil war had been especially ferocious, a wake of gutted villages and more desperate refugees, some dying or dead.
Ivan Bunin: No one who did not actually witness it can comprehend what the Russian Revolution quickly turned into. The spectacle was sheer terror for anyone who had not utterly lost sight of God.
Like thousands of other refugees, Zudilov chose Harbin because it was a Chinese city with a strong Russian presence. The Byzantine dome of the Russian cathedral dominated its skyline, and there was an extensive Russian quarter, part business, part residential, with street signs in Russian, droshkies instead of rickshaws, restaurants that served borscht and beef Stroganoff. Japan had also moved in, with trading concessions at the port on the Songhua River, investments in the city’s grain mills, and a chain of “Happiness Mansions,” brothels that featured very young boys as well as girls; and Britain, with the British Export Company, which employed ruthlessly underpaid Chinese to slaughter thousands of pigs, fowl and sheep every year, then freeze them for export to the homeland and the United States.
Business as usual, of course, meant politics as usual, colonial expansion in a country weakened by years of internal rebellions led by rival warlords. By the spring of 1918, Russian nationals formed almost a third of Harbin’s population of three hundred thousand, and the Chinese quarter was just a suburb, like a picturesque Chinatown set in a Hollywood silent movie; while the much larger central downtown area, with its handsome beaux-arts rail
road station and Hotel Moderne, looked solidly Western. Under the agreement between Russia and China, the stretch of the Trans-Siberian that crossed Manchuria was officially known as the Chinese Eastern Railway; but it was Russian-financed, maintained by Russian workers, and guarded by regiments of Russian soldiers headquartered in Harbin.
And in the wake of the revolution, the Zudilovs escaped one political upheaval only to find themselves in the middle of another. Not long before they arrived, fighting had broken out between Red and White Russian workers and guards on the railway. The Soviet government had sent in militiamen to rout the anti-Bolsheviks; and in case a full-scale civil war developed, the Japanese made ready to invade Manchuria and seize control of the Chinese Eastern. At the end of December, when the Zudilovs reached Harbin, the Chinese government intervened by sending in an army to disarm and deport the Soviet militia; and for the moment at least, the situation was defused.
A few weeks later, on February 8, 1919, the Zudilovs celebrated Maria’s seventh birthday. Although she was too young, of course, to understand the ways of the great world, the flight from Barnaul had stamped images of warning and terror on her mind. Like most Russian refugees, the Zudilovs stayed within their own community of exiles, ignoring China and the Chinese; but as she grew up, Maria couldn’t fail to notice—beyond the house in the Russian quarter where Zudilov established his family with a Chinese cook and a German nanny for the girls, and the Russian school where she occasionally took ballet lessons as well as regular classes—more warning signs that the great world was a disturbingly insecure place.
Throughout the 1920s, the city witnessed several outbreaks of fighting between Red and White Russians, parades of underpaid Chinese workers on strike against foreign companies, and street demonstrations by the growing nationalist movement. In 1920 one of these demonstrations led to violence, and smoke covered the city when the storage plant of the British Export Company was burned to the ground. Occasional Soviet threats to invade Manchuria and restore order sent shivers of alarm through the exiles; and an increasingly familiar experience for Maria was the sight of Russians who had arrived in style, like her own family, reduced to begging in the streets when their money ran out.
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