Years later, Maria claimed that she became pregnant in the mid-1930s by a man she refused to name, hemorrhaged in childbirth, was pronounced dead at the hospital, then woke up in the embalming room and screamed for help. It sounds like a fantasy, but Olga said it actually happened. No doubt Zepaloff was the father, as Tatuloff discovered Maria in bed with him soon after their affair began. Not that he minded. By then he’d left the other love for another love, and after hearing that Maria’s life was in danger, he brought a priest to the hospital, then accompanied her supposedly dead body to the embalming room.
Nina (Kiyaschenko) Jaure: I think some of those young lives were wilder then than the lives of the young today. But they had so little money, their future was so uncertain, they needed adventure and were often reckless in searching for it.
San Francisco, 1935. Maria, a “Princess” at the White Russian Veterans Ball (illustration credit 1.3)
Five feet tall, with a sharp chin and eyes that Olga described as “changeable gray-blue” and others recalled as “almost black” and “ice-blue,” Maria never struck anyone as a great beauty, just as Zepaloff (who Maria later said looked like George Murphy, the actor-dancer she’d admired in Broadway Melody of 1938) was not conventionally handsome. But they both had vitality, charm and (at least in the early days) an alluring erotic energy.
There was also a temperamental affinity. Zepaloff “lived two lives, one out at sea, and one in port,” according to Richard Benson, the companion of his daughter by Nina. “He often talked about ‘life in different ports of call,’ where he spent much more time than at home. And he was charismatic. He drew you in.” And Maria, as she began to live two lives like Zepaloff, could draw people into her fantasies as persuasively as she drew them into the truth when she decided to tell it.
Zepaloff, who was presumably at sea when Maria almost died, graduated to first mate in January 1937 and shortly afterward proposed marriage. Maria said she needed time to think it over, and this time her head overruled her heart. The marriage would never work, she decided, because her lover spent weeks and sometimes months at sea, they met only when his ship put in at San Francisco, and during a long separation Maria grew afraid that the Captain (as she always referred to him after his promotion some years later) would fall in love with someone else.
Did Maria have the example of Tatuloff in mind, even though she herself had taken Nick Gurdin as a lover during one of those long separations from her Captain? In any case, contradictions never seemed to bother her. When Nick proposed in October that year, she’d been living with him for eighteen months while remaining secretly “faithful” to the Captain each time he returned to port.
But Maria’s fear of a precarious life as Mrs. Zepaloff was not her only reason for becoming Mrs. Gurdin. She was pregnant; and having juggled assignations with two lovers all the while, she remembered her last loving farewell to the Captain before he went to sea again and concluded (a belief she held for the rest of her life) that he was the father. She also probably knew that Zepaloff was not interested in fatherhood, something he later made very clear to Nina and their daughter.
Although marriage to Nicholas Gurdin didn’t make Maria a faithful wife, and the Captain’s marriage to Nina Kiyaschenko didn’t make him a faithful husband, the shared excitement of secrecy, deceit, mischief and a life on the edge kept the lovers faithful to each other. Because it was a Russian custom for the second given name of a child to acknowledge his or her father’s first name, Stepan Zudilov’s daughter had been baptized Maria Stepanovna. Was Maria sending a secret, mischievous signal (she later sent many others) when the birth certificate dated July 20, 1938, recorded the name of Maria and Nicholas Gurdin’s daughter as, simply, Natalie Zacharenko?
San Francisco, 1941. Just married: Nina Kiyaschenko and “the Captain,” George Zepaloff (illustration credit 1.4)
WHEN I FIRST spoke with Nina Kiyaschenko Jaure, the Captain (whom she’d married in 1941 and divorced six years later) was in an advanced state of senile dementia at a sanitarium in northern California. “My daughter and I never talked of this before,” she said, “because we didn’t think it right. For someone as famous as Natalie Wood, it could have been very harmful.” Nina continued to keep silent after Natalie died, she explained, because she read “the cheap, horrible book that Lana Wood wrote about her sister, and didn’t wish to be known as that kind of person.” Then, “George and I named our daughter Natalie, but we always called her Natasha, just as Natalie Wood’s parents always called her Natasha. A coincidence, of course. The two Natashas met as children, and people commented how much they looked alike. But you must ask my daughter to tell you the rest of the story.”
About Zepaloff as a husband, Nina said that “his looks were wonderful but his disposition wasn’t so good. He was very secretive, and never said a word about Natalie Wood. He could also be mean and nasty, and at times I was frightened of him.” After the divorce, Nina married “a man who worshiped me, was wonderful to me until the day he died. I was in love with George Zepaloff, but I really loved my late husband, George Jaure.”
LIKE HER MOTHER, Natasha Zepaloff also kept silent, although after a few meetings with Natalie Wood “I felt a strong connection, but was too young to understand why.” Later, both Maria and the Captain began dropping hints, respectively teasing and cryptic; but even when Maria unburdened herself after Natalie died, Natasha remained silent. “I never wanted people to think I was after money, and would make a claim on her estate,” she said. “You read so many stories like that.”
THERE WERE TWO REASONS why Nick never suspected that he might not be Natasha Gurdin’s father: he didn’t yet know his wife well enough, and Tatuloff had never told him about the Captain. When Maria gave birth to Natasha in Franklin Hospital, the Gurdins were renting the upper floor of a house in the Panhandle, on the edge of the Richmond district.
Page was not then a fashionable street, although the house at 1690 was (and still is) a modest example of classic late-nineteenth-century San Francisco domestic architecture, with a gabled roof and attic window. The other houses on Page are considerably larger and more ornate, and like 1690 they have been discreetly gentrified with coats of fresh paint. One block away is the Panhandle end of Golden Gate Park, drab and neglected-looking today, where Maria used to wheel Natasha for an airing in her baby carriage.
By then Maria had learned to find her way around material hard times. In Harbin, when Olga was born, Tatuloff could afford to employ a nanny. But when Olga became sick on board the Tatuta Maru, Maria passed her first test. With no nanny and no medical knowledge, she used her charm to get permission to carry her sick child up to the first-class deck, where she persuaded the ship’s doctor to examine Olga and prescribe medication for free. In San Francisco, her sharp eye soon discovered a brand of soda that often contained a nickel under the bottle cap; and when she found work in a factory after Natasha was born, she used her charm again to persuade the supervisor of the children’s playground in Golden Gate Park to look after her baby during the day—for free, of course.
San Francisco, 1941. Natalie Gurdin, age 3 (illustration credit 1.5)
In the fall of 1938, Maria’s half-sister Kalia, her husband, Sergei Liuzunie, and their young son, Constantin, arrived by boat from Shanghai. Maria had helped them obtain visas through a connection at the Russian Center and invited them to stay at 1690 Page until they found work. The families slept respectively four and three to a room, and although the Liuzunies knew no English, “they learned fairly quickly,” according to Constantin. Within a few weeks, Kalia got a job as a waitress, Sergei as a furniture refinisher, and the last of Maria’s family to leave China moved to a place of their own.
After the Liuzunies departed, the Gurdins didn’t stay long at 1690 Page. During the early years of their marriage, as Olga recalled, they were nomadic. They moved “all over San Francisco” and rented a series of small houses or apartments, some cramped and mediocre, all cold and damp in winter, warmed only by a single
kerosene heater. On weekends the couple often left Olga to baby-sit Natasha while they went out to one of the dance halls where Nick and his brothers used to earn extra money as a musical trio. In 1941 the family settled (again not for long) in their first house with two bedrooms, part of a low-income housing project called Sunnyvale.
Why did they move so often? Partly because Nick took work where and when he could find it, and partly because Maria was dissatisfied and restless. Shopping for a new place to live had boosted her spirits during those first anxious years in San Francisco, and after only a few months as Mrs. Gurdin she needed the same fix. By the time they moved to Sunnyvale, where Nick found work in the naval shipyard, the couple had lived up to Abraham Lincoln’s definition of marriage: not heaven or hell, but purgatory.
As Maria’s complaints about her husband’s lack of ambition grew more insistent, Nick began to drink heavily. Instead of taking his wife to a dance hall, he left the house at night to tour the bars with Tatuloff, who once saved his life by taking Nick to hospital after he’d been badly beaten up in a street fight and left for dead. “Very nice when sober,” as Olga remembered, her stepfather managed to save enough money to send her to ballet school and take piano lessons (Maria’s wish). Under the influence, though, he became “abusive and violent.” When Olga was in the room during a row with Maria, his rage exploded at the two of them; and when he picked up whatever object came to hand, they ran for cover just in time for the chair or lamp to miss its target and hit the wall.
Meanwhile, for a while, Natasha slept through the turbulence, at first in her crib, then in the bedroom she shared with Olga after they moved to Sunnyvale.
IT WAS NOT ONLY Maria’s accusations of failure that drove Nick to alcohol and violence. The morning after the street fighting in Vladivostok, according to William Gerhardie, who witnessed it, “revealed a frozen landscape of massacred bodies. The square, the streets, the yards, the rails, and sundry ditches betrayed them lying in horrid postures, dead or dying.” Did ten-year-old Nikolai Zacharenko see his father’s body among them—or among the dying whom the Bolsheviks finished off with bayonets and “unspeakable” battle cries? Although he never spoke of the civil war in detail, he often referred to it as a time of horror that “destroyed” his family; and for the rest of his life, outbursts of fanatical hatred for Soviet Russia alternated with passionate admiration for Tsar Nicholas II, whose portrait he packed in his suitcase when the Zacharenkos fled to Shanghai, and later hung in the bedroom he shared with Maria.
The other side of Nick Gurdin emerged during the evenings he sat alone in a chair, quietly singing a folksong and accompanying himself on the balalaika, or rereading the novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev, in private remembrance of a past that the revolution had shattered forever. But Maria, who had endured her own baptism of horror, reacted by searching for compensation in the present. Like many Russian exiles, she needed to make up for everything she’d lost—country, family, security and the sense of “being someone”—by becoming “someone” again.
A fatal difference in temperament disrupted the Gurdins’ marriage; and Maria’s decision to regain her sense of self through her daughter disrupted Natalie Wood’s life.
ONE RESTLESS DAY in the late summer of 1942, a Sunnyvale neighbor took Maria and her daughters for a drive to Santa Rosa, a small inland town forty miles north of San Francisco. Always shopping for a new place to live, Maria saw a small house under repair at 2168 Humboldt Street. She went inside, found a contractor at work and learned that the owner was desperate to sell because his wife had just left him. “Among other things,” according to Olga, “my mother was a very good con artist.” By the end of the day Maria had contacted the owner and persuaded him to accept a down payment of $100 on the $5,400 asking price, most of the furniture included.
The price was way beyond Nick Gurdin’s means, of course, and Olga had no idea exactly how her mother managed to raise money for a loan, “but she conned somebody into that as well.” Less surprisingly, she persuaded Nick to accept the situation, even though he’d have to commute forty miles to work in the shipyard or find a new job. Although it was only a whim that caused Maria to uproot the family to Santa Rosa, it became another of those coincidences that played a major part in her life and that she always seemed to take for granted.
EARLIER THAT SUMMER, Alfred Hitchcock had shot the location scenes for Shadow of a Doubt in Santa Rosa. Less than a year later, Irving Pichel remembered their classic small-town look when he needed a similar location not too far from Los Angeles for Happy Land. Originally a stage actor, Pichel moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, played a few character roles (the prosecutor in Sternberg’s version of An American Tragedy, Fagin in a cut-rate production of Oliver Twist), and directed a few routine B movies. In 1940, a contract with 20th Century–Fox promoted him to A movies, and he became the house specialist in anti-Nazi and/or homefront World War II stories. After The Pied Piper and The Moon Is Down, the next in line was Happy Land, from the best-seller by MacKinlay Kantor (The Best Years of Our Lives). A “typical” American father, devastated when his son is killed in the Pacific, receives an unexpected visitor from the “Happy Land.” It’s Gramp, his own grandfather, a Civil War veteran, who persuades him to rise above grief and take pride in the boy who sacrificed himself so nobly for his country.
Olga, a student at Santa Rosa High in 1943, came out of school one day, saw the Happy Land company (Don Ameche, Frances Dee, Ann Rutherford) at work a few blocks down the street. When she got home, she told Maria about it. But her mother gave no sign that she found the news exciting, or even particularly interesting. A few days later, Olga and a school friend were walking along the main street of nearby Healdsburg. Further ahead, they saw trailers and trucks, a camera crew, a crowd of extras. Irving Pichel was rehearsing a Fourth of July parade scene for Happy Land, and when he called for more extras, Olga was among the passersby rounded up. She found herself sharing a trailer with Ann Rutherford, then shown her place in a crowd shot. A few takes later, while the camera crew prepared the next setup, Pichel waited in his director’s chair.
As if on cue, Maria appeared with five-year-old Natasha in tow. Without telling Olga or Nick, she had made inquiries, learned that Pichel would be shooting the parade scene that day, and planned for her daughter to be “discovered,” like her favorite actress, Lana Turner, whom a talent scout had supposedly swept to stardom from the counter of Schwab’s drugstore. When she saw that Pichel was alone, Maria whispered something to her daughter and thrust her into the startled director’s lap. Years later, Natalie Wood told me that her mother had said, “Make Mr. Pichel love you,” or something very like it. Then she stuck her finger in her mouth and made a gagging sound. She also recalled “talking to him,” although not what she said, and “singing a little song.”
It could, of course, have been repellent—the precocious, innocently corrupted moppet coached by a stage mother to be adorable. Hollywood history is full of them, too many with nothing to fall back on as adults except a manufactured childhood. But as her movies make clear, there was nothing manufactured or corrupted about Natalie Wood the child actress. And like the child in the movies, the child of the movies was no different offscreen. Against heavy odds, she managed to be almost unnaturally happy for much of the time, and especially on a movie set.
Although there was no camera to record it, Maria had pitched Natasha into her first screen test; and Pichel was so captivated that he created a brief moment for her in the parade scene. But it’s not A Star Is Born yet. She has only to drop her ice-cream cone on the sidewalk, then start to cry, and in the final version of Happy Land her reaction is cut. You glimpse Natasha for a few seconds as she drops her cone, while Olga gets more screen time in the passing parade. But something about the performance (and the performance on his lap) made a strong impression on Pichel.
Fan magazines of the 1940s and -50s contain various accounts of what happened next. Pichel immediately promised her a part in his next movi
e. He advised Maria against pursuing a movie career for her daughter, because child actors nearly always suffered the consequences of an unnatural childhood. He was so charmed by Natalie that he offered to adopt her. But like all fan-magazine “inside stories,” they can be discounted as ghosted inventions of studio publicists.
Fortunately, Natalie once told me that she remembered Pichel coming to the house on Humboldt Street to say goodbye before the Happy Land company returned to Los Angeles. Before leaving, he took Maria aside. She also remembered Maria’s account of the conversation, “which was probably true.” Natasha, he said, had talent; there might be a part for her in a film he hoped to make the following year, and he promised to get in touch when it was definitely scheduled for production.
Subsequent events confirm Maria’s account, and it’s not surprising that Pichel recognized an instinctive performer in the little girl who burst into tears for the scene that landed on the cutting-room floor. Many directors and actors who worked with Natalie Wood in her earliest movies had the same reaction. As for the scene on Pichel’s lap, others before him had found Natasha an exceptionally bright and appealing child. First photographed as a naked two-month-old baby, she laughs and points delightedly at something or someone off-camera. At two and a half, she sits on Maria’s lap, an eager smile on her round, open face. Living in a bilingual household where her parents speak English with a marked Russian accent, Natasha sounds all-American, but she also speaks basic Russian with an American accent. And by the age of four, Natasha Gurdin is creating her own imaginary world. Dancing around in a slip like a miniature Isadora Duncan, she improvises steps and hums or sings music to accompany them. When Maria takes her out for a walk, she displays the first sign of a sense of humor that will later act as a shield against the world. She mimics passing strangers—performances sometimes so wickedly accurate that they tell Maria her little girl could be another Shirley Temple.
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