Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  The sight of her half-brother hanging from a tree had produced Maria’s first convulsion. It soon led to others, when something frightened her or when she didn’t get her own way. As a result she was considered delicate, pampered and spoiled by her parents and nanny. As a further result, Maria learned that she could get her own way by throwing a fit. She grew cunning, but at the same time incurably superstitious, and most of her superstitions were based on fear. At first they were the conventional ones: the bad luck caused by breaking a mirror, leaving a hat on your bed, or touching a peacock feather. But they grew quite bizarre with time, like her more extreme fantasies. Years later, in California, she told her daughters that she was a foundling, born into a Gypsy family that taught her fortune-telling, explained the dangers lurking in everyday signs, and later abandoned her on a Siberian steppe.

  AMONG THE MULTITUDE of poor Russians, peasants and laborers, some had never heard the word “revolution” before, and thought it meant a woman chosen to replace the tsar. The poor, in fact, simply fled the chaos of civil war: famine, butchery, looting, skyrocketing inflation. In Vladivostok, a subzero city on a bleak peninsula in Far Eastern Siberia, almost half the population had been reduced to near-starvation, and some died of cold on the wooden sidewalks rotting under heavy snow.

  Hundreds more died in the street fighting that broke out in November 1918 between Red and White Russian soldiers. Among the dead was Stepan Zacharenko, who worked in a chocolate factory and joined the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces who fought side by side with the Whites. His widow escaped by train to Shanghai with her three young sons, and wrote to ask for help from her brother, who had emigrated to Canada. With the money he sent, she bought steerage tickets on a boat that left Shanghai for Vancouver, but it’s unclear whether she traveled with her sons or remained behind.

  In August 2000, the youngest Zacharenko son, Dmitri, was living in Palm Springs. At first he insisted that his mother remarried in Shanghai, and her new husband, a Russian engineer, brought her to Canada, where the family was reunited. But at eighty-five Dmitri’s memory was erratic, and he later contradicted himself by insisting that he and his brothers were sent to live with their uncle and aunt in Montreal.

  Although Dmitri wasn’t always sure what he remembered, it’s certain that he and his brothers, Nikolai and Vladimir, attended school in Montreal, learned to speak serviceable English, and soon heard the call to go west. As a young boy, Nikolai had acquired a passion for reading and learned to play the balalaika. As a young man, he became a migrant worker, took any job that would bring him nearer California, and developed into an expert carpenter along the way. But in San Francisco he had to take the only job on offer at first, as a janitor at the Standard Oil Building.

  Vladimir, the oldest brother, played violin; Dmitri played mandolin; and when the three Zacharenkos met up in San Francisco, they formed a trio with Nikolai on balalaika to earn extra money at local dance halls. Although Vladimir eventually became a nuclear engineer, and Dmitri worked as chief accountant to an automobile tire company after joining the U.S. Army and being awarded a Purple Heart in World War II, Nikolai appeared to place his future on indefinite hold. In 1934, the year he met Maria, he was working at the docks, loading and unloading the sugarcane boats that plied the coastal ports between San Francisco and San Diego.

  A PHOTOGRAPH of Maria in Harbin with her mother, sister, two half-sisters and German nanny shows a dark-haired girl with strikingly intense eyes. She faces the camera confidently, directly, as if daring it not to find her more attractive than her siblings. She looks around sixteen, so the photograph was probably taken in 1928, the year she met and fell in love with a Russian-Armenian regimental officer from one of the military units stationed in Harbin.

  “When I was young,” Maria said many years later in California, “I was ruled by my heart, not my head.” So was her own mother, she added, who was forced to break off her affair with an impoverished aristocrat to marry Zudilov, a merger arranged by the heads of their respective families. And Maria claimed to have married Captain Alexei Tatulov in secret, because she feared her father would consider him “unsuitable.”

  For “heart that ruled the head,” read “sexual drive.” Maria probably inherited it from her mother, and there’s no doubt the same gene recurred even more strongly in her famous daughter.

  IN MARIA’S sometimes conflicting accounts of her early life, she never discussed her parents’ reaction to her secret marriage to Tatulov. But in 1929, after the birth of their daughter, Olga, it was clearly no longer a secret. At Tatulov’s insistence, Olga was baptized in the Armenian Orthodox Church; and when Zudilov learned that he had a granddaughter, he accepted the situation on condition that a Russian Orthodox priest rebaptize her.

  Maria also claimed that her father started to run short of funds soon after Olga was born, and as he could no longer afford to make her an allowance, she earned money by joining a ballet company. But her daughter Olga Viripaeff, who lives today in the Richmond district of San Francisco, where so many early Russian immigrants settled, says she never heard that the Zudilovs had financial problems, and in any case Maria never had enough training to be accepted by a ballet company. Olga knew for certain, however, that one of her father’s Russian friends emigrated to San Francisco, found employment there with an upholstery company and encouraged Tatulov to follow his example.

  Harbin, 1927. Left to right: seated, Maria and her mother; standing, Zoya, Lilia, German nanny, Kalia (illustration credit 1.1)

  Toward the end of 1929, Tatulov left by boat to San Francisco, promising to arrange for wife and daughter to join him soon as he found a job. For an immigrant seeking his fortune in the United States, the timing was bad. The stock market had crashed a few weeks earlier, and the Great Depression soon followed. Although Tatulov managed to find work in the shipyards, he also found true love; and as he wrote Maria in the summer of 1930, he was living with another woman but wanted to bring his wife and daughter to safety in the U.S.A.

  In November 1930 the American consul in Harbin granted Maria a visa. Many years later, in the course of an interview as a “Star Mother,” she claimed that her voyage to California with eighteen-month-old Olga began as a long overland trip to Pusan in Korea, continued by ferry to the Japanese mainland, then by another train to Yokohama, where they boarded a Japanese ship. Bound for San Francisco by way of Hawaii, it arrived there the first week of January 1931.

  The Japanese ship is the only reality here. But they boarded it from Shanghai, reached far more easily and quickly by direct train from Harbin. Maria, whose flair for dramatic fabrication coexisted with a very practical talent for camouflage, no doubt invented the more arduous route partly to underscore her disillusion at journey’s end and partly to cover her tracks. In the same interview, Maria never mentioned that she met another exiled Russian on board the Tatuta Maru. Nicholas Lepko had been working for an American newsreel company based in Shanghai, where the pay (known locally as “rice money”) was very low; and he accepted at once when a former colleague, who had emigrated to Los Angeles, offered to arrange an apprentice job with a film company there. Lepko’s wife, Tamara, was a dancer who had studied with Olga Preobrajenskaya, a prima ballerina at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Like so many Russian dancers, they went into exile after the revolution, Preobrajenskaya to Paris and Tamara to Shanghai, where she proved extraordinarily resourceful. From chorus girl in elaborate floor shows at the city’s nightclubs, she graduated to choreographing routines; and as she earned better money than her husband, she decided to remain in Shanghai until his future in California appeared settled.

  Maria and Lepko: a shipboard romance or just good friends? In view of Maria’s later history, romance is a possibility; but she certainly became more than good friends with Lepko fourteen years later in California.

  Also in the same interview, Maria created a more dramatic version of her arrival in San Francisco and the reunion with her husband, who now spelled his name Tatuloff,
following the example of most Russian immigrants with a last name ending in -ov. She claimed that he’d never written to tell her about the woman he was living with, but broke the news on the quayside. (“We Armenians,” he explained, “are very passionate, we can’t stay a whole year without.…”) Then he insisted that he still loved Maria as well as his other love (“He was very nice man”) and proposed a ménage à trois. Although she refused, Maria, Olga, Tatuloff and his other love lived together for a while in one room at a wretched boardinghouse. And although Tatuloff was very passionate, “I wouldn’t let him touch me.”

  After the trauma of escaping from Russia, Maria also said, she at least had the consolation of loving parents and a comfortable home in Harbin; but her second exile began in near-poverty, she had lost her husband to another woman, she spoke and understood hardly any English—and furthermore she hated Coca-Cola.

  Harbin, 1928. Just married: Maria and Alexei Tatuloff (illustration credit 1.2)

  Maria undoubtedly fell on material and emotional hard times for a while, but Olga’s account of their first months in San Francisco differs in a few significant details and is generally more credible. She agreed that her father was waiting on the quayside, but as he’d already written the “Dear Maria” letter, he simply took them both to the rooming house where he and several other immigrant shipyard workers lived. To Maria, the place seemed horribly unrefined, and she demanded that Tatuloff find an apartment for the three of them. Over the next few months, Olga recalled, they kept moving from one small apartment to another, and as Maria’s addiction to American movies soon became as intense as her dislike of Coca-Cola, she embarked on the impossible search for an affordable home with a touch of Hollywood class.

  Olga also remembered that while Tatuloff spent most evenings with his other love, Maria began to lead a fairly active and romantic social life. In fact, after the shock of a second displacement, from husband as well as family, she was obliged to fall back almost entirely on herself. And if the Maria of the 1930s is remembered as witty, charming, generous and pleasure-loving, strikingly at variance with the later, demonic Maria, it’s because her demons were still (sometimes uneasily) asleep.

  BY ONE of the many recurring coincidences in Maria’s life, Alexei Tatuloff had become friends with a fellow worker at the docks whose real name was Nikolai Zacharenko but now called himself Nicholas Gurdin (easier to pronounce and spell, he thought, especially for prospective employers; more American, yet not totally un-Russian). And after changing Maria’s life by bringing her to California, Tatuloff did the same for Nick Gurdin by introducing him to his future wife.

  Nick’s handsome, sensitive face, with its small, dark, narrow eyes, seemed at odds with his stocky build and powerful hands, but it was only after they married that Maria discovered a man at odds with himself. When they first met, she was charmed by the way he played and sang ineffably sad Russian folksongs on his balalaika; and their mutual love of music and dancing, as well as nostalgia for tsarist Russia, brought the couple together. In April 1936 Maria left Tatuloff and moved into Nick’s one-room apartment with Olga. A year later she secured her divorce, and in October 1937 Nick asked her to marry him. Did he wait until he’d earned enough to support a wife and stepdaughter, was it simply another example of his habit of postponing the future or had he noticed signs of the temperamental differences that would erupt later?

  All of the above, most likely. Nick had certainly fallen in love with Maria, and Maria certainly found him very attractive. But when she hesitated before agreeing to become Nick’s wife, she had two very urgent reasons that he knew nothing about.

  OF THE SEVERAL Russian immigrants who took the China route to California, hoped to create new lives for themselves, and in the process became major prenatal influences on the life of an unborn star, Tatuloff was the first. Maria followed, then Nick Gurdin; and last but far from least came the remarkable George Zepaloff, the “great romantic love” of Maria’s life and the main cause of her hesitation over Nick’s proposal.

  Zepaloff’s father had worked for the Trans-Siberian Railway and was transferred to Harbin around 1920. George never met Maria or any of the Zudilovs there, and when his parents separated, he and his sister went to live with their mother, who found work in Shanghai as governess in a Chinese family. Until 1929 or 1930, when he emigrated to California, there’s a gap in Zepaloff’s life, and although he talked very little about his past, including his life in Shanghai, growing up in that city at that time surely helped him acquire a taste for the fancy-free existence he managed to lead later as a sailor.

  Shanghai was Harbin on a larger, wealthier and more sophisticated scale. Once again Western and Japanese corporations dominated shipping, manufacturing and transportation; and the Chinese quarter, where the poor lived, formed less than a tenth of the area occupied by the International Settlement and the French Concession. When Zepaloff lived there, Shanghai was a city of rival opium gangs and raffish dockside cafes, where sailors from all over the world picked up White Russian prostitutes, and of more upscale dance palaces with Chinese taxi dancers and White Russian “hostesses.” The Hungarian wife of an English broker was another kind of hostess. Bernardine Fritz (later a colorful resident of Hollywood in the 1960s) gave lavish parties for the international set, mixing European diplomats and bankers with Chinese opera singers and an elegant madam from San Francisco, who ran the most expensive whorehouse in town, stocked exclusively with American girls.

  Wallis Warfield Simpson, waiting out her divorce from a wealthy husband, divided her time between Bernardine’s soirées and the garden courtyard of the Majestic Hotel, where moonlight, jasmine and a Filipino orchestra playing “Tea for Two” made her feel that Shanghai was “very good, almost too good for a woman.” In 1927, in that same courtyard, the same orchestra played “Here Comes the Bride” at the wedding of Chiang Kai-shek and Mei-ling Soong. Their marriage sealed an alliance between the commander-in-chief of the Nationalist Army and the wealthiest family in China, most of whom believed that Chiang was the only man capable of uniting the country against the warlords and an emergent Communist Party. A year later, when Chiang became head of the Nationalist government as well as its army, it was a sign that the old days would soon be over in Shanghai as well.

  For George Zepaloff (who at first spelled his last name with the Russian -ov), the new days began when he joined the Mercury Athletic Club in San Francisco. He played for its soccer team and quickly developed into a versatile gymnast and athlete. In 1932 he competed in the Los Angeles Summer Olympics and was awarded a gold cup inscribed “All Around Gymnastic Trophy, First Place Won by George Zepalov.”

  Back in San Francisco he became George Zepaloff, studied navigation, then got a job as second mate on a Matson Line cruise ship that made the San Francisco–Los Angeles–Honolulu round trip. And by the time he met Maria, she was a popular figure at dances and charity balls.

  THERE WERE TWO social clubs for Russian exiles in San Francisco, the Russian Center and Kolobok. Both held regular dances, staged occasional plays and ballets. Like many Russians, Maria was captivated by the glamour of ballet, and although she had never seen Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, she had heard about their great success in Europe; and at the Russian Center she met another ballerina from the Maryinsky. Nadjeda Ermolova, now a ballet teacher, had seen Nijinsky and Karsavina perform. Several times a year she presented excerpts from Les Sylphides and Swan Lake danced by her students, and Maria quickly became part of her circle.

  At the Center Maria also met Nina Kiyaschenko, whose father had been a well-known tsarist general. Nina was only a year old when she escaped with her parents in the winter of 1918–19 and, like Maria, made the Trans-Siberian journey to Harbin. After moving on to Shanghai, the Kiyaschenkos eventually emigrated to San Francisco; and when Nina’s father appeared at the Center, he always wore a two-headed eagle pin in his lapel and, from shoulders to hip, a tsarist ribbon in white, blue and red.

  But nostalgia for the old days wa
sn’t confined to the older generation. When they fled Russia, the parents of Maria and Nina, the Lepkos, Ermolova and many others were convinced the revolution would fail and they’d be able to return. They passed on this belief to their children and the children of their friends; and like Kiyaschenko with his tsarist ribbon and pin, Maria persisted in the fantasy of her mother’s connection to the Romanovs, lowering her voice to a reverent hush when she mentioned their name. But after Stalin became the absolute ruler of Soviet Russia, parents and children alike had to face the reality of permanent exile.

  For Maria, the Center’s two most important charity balls, held once a year in aid of the White Russian Veterans and the Russian Invalids, were invitations to nostalgia. Whoever collected the most money for these causes became Queen of the Ball; and Maria worked her way up from one of four Princesses in 1935 to Queen of the Invalids in 1936, then Queen of the Veterans in 1937. Photographs of her royal triumphs show her posed in a Romanov dream, wearing a ballgown and a pasteboard crown studded with costume jewelry.

  At Kolobok, according to Nina Kiyaschenko, the atmosphere was “more bohemian.” Although Saturday nights were reserved for “old-timers who wore evening clothes and danced the waltz,” on other nights the young fox-trotted to an American-style dance band, played pool, appeared in plays or performed solos. Olga recalled that her mother liked to sing, “and although she couldn’t carry a tune, she’d get up on the Kolobok stage and interpret the words of Russian folksongs so vividly that she always got a round of applause.” Maria also entertained by consulting tarot cards to tell fortunes, and took small parts in a few plays.

  But the star performer at Kolobok was the dance band’s young man with a trumpet, George Zepaloff. “He charmed all the girls,” Nina remembered. “He would open and close his trumpet stops and make naughty, suggestive noises. Everyone laughed and asked for more.” Although not strikingly handsome, and of medium height, Zepaloff had “a very good physique, perfectly proportioned body, slim waist, fine muscles.” Initially attracted to Maria, he later married Nina for a while, and he became “the great romantic love” of both their lives. And the affair with Maria, which began before she met Nick Gurdin and was still living together with but apart from Alexei Tatuloff, would last on and off for more than thirty years.