Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  Music to Maria’s ears, but the conversation with Pichel was more than that. She translated a conditional promise into a firm guarantee that Natasha was on the brink of a great career in movies. The memory of that initial bitterness and sense of isolation as an exile would no longer haunt her; the drabness and disappointment of her life with Nick would soon be over, and Maria herself transformed from nobody to somebody, the mother of a star. “She decided to take a chance and move to Hollywood,” in Olga’s words; and after confronting Nick with a fait accompli by taking their daughter to the set of Happy Land without his knowledge, Maria confronted him with more of the same. She’d placed their house on the market, and as soon as it sold, the family was moving to Hollywood.

  If Nick had been drunk, he would certainly have retaliated with violence. Sober, he was easily reduced to submission when Maria held the winning cards. God and Irving Pichel had offered Natasha what the inadequate family breadwinner had failed to provide: a ticket to the future.

  By the end of May 1944, the house on Humboldt Street had been sold. Two weeks later Natasha said goodbye to the small-town life she’d led for less than two years. Her few memories of it soon faded: the backyard swing that Nick had made; the Protection of the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church, which she attended with her family; her kindergarten friend and neighbor Ed Canevari, whose father owned the delicatessen that Ed manages today.

  The Gurdins spent the first night of their 450-mile journey to Los Angeles in the car, parked off the highway at midpoint along the coast. Next night they arrived at 1716 North Alexandria Avenue, a house in the Hollywood foothills. It belonged to Nadjeda Ermolova, the ballet teacher Maria had met in San Francisco. Her “Dancing Studio” for children, and her own private apartment, occupied the first floor of the property that Ermolova bought when she moved to Los Angeles, and she supplemented her income by renting out the second-floor apartment. It was unoccupied when Maria contacted her, and Ermolova offered to let the Gurdins stay there temporarily; and as it remained untenanted, they stayed for the rest of the year.

  They lived very frugally, as Nick found only occasional work as a laborer, and there was just enough money for fourteen-year-old Olga to exchange Santa Rosa High for Hollywood High, where Maria enrolled her in drama class. (Maybe both her daughters would become famous actresses?) Maria tried to contact Pichel, but he was no longer working at Fox. As for Natasha, the only reliable witness is Olga, who remembers only that Maria enrolled her sister at Ermolova’s studio.

  The studio’s brochure advertised courses for children in “Ballet, Toe, Character and Step Dances.” But its photos suggest that Ermolova’s heart belonged to Diaghilev. In the cover portrait she wears an elaborate headdress studded with pearls that might have come from the last scene of The Firebird; and among the snapshots of kiddie students with mainly Russian names is one of Natasha Gurdina in ethnic costume, striking a folk-dance pose like a Polovtsian maiden from Prince Igor.

  Natasha had started kindergarten before the Gurdins left Santa Rosa, but Olga was vague about her sister’s education during the rest of 1944—and about her life beyond Ermolova’s studio. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “our mother got Natasha to try out for different parts.” This seems more than unlikely. Long gone were the days when a stage mother (especially if she spoke with a Russian accent) could occasionally sneak into a studio and persuade someone to audition the daughter she insisted was a child prodigy. With the coming of sound, a guard was posted at every studio entrance, and no one could gain admittance without a pass.

  Hollywood, 1944. “Natasha Gurdina” at Ermolova’s “Dancing Studio”​ ​(illustration credit 1.6)

  On Maria’s life, Olga was more specific. She remembered that when her mother went off for a day or two “to visit the Liuzunies,” Nick gave no sign that he suspected anything. In fact, she had kept in touch with the Captain, and whenever his ship came in, Maria went off to meet her great romantic love. On those occasions, Olga also remembered, she helped her mother choose a dress, and watched the special care she took with her appearance.

  But Maria’s secret assignations didn’t prevent her from keeping a sharp eye on the main chance. She had discovered the existence of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and in December 1944 she learned that Irving Pichel’s next movie would be Tomorrow Is Forever for International Pictures, a subsidiary of RKO, and that he planned to conduct a search for a child to play the orphaned ward of Orson Welles.

  Now that she knew how to contact Pichel, Maria called RKO. The “con artist” had no trouble getting through directly to his office, and when he agreed to test Natasha for the part, it was a turning point for both mother and daughter.

  PICHEL HAD BEEN approached to direct Tomorrow Is Forever while he was shooting Happy Land, but it took more than a year of story conferences and script revisions to adapt a preposterous novel, and meanwhile he made another movie. Claudette Colbert’s reluctance to play the mother of a draft-age son was a further reason for the delay in production of Tomorrow Is Forever, and she finally committed when Welles, “deeply ashamed but in need of money,” accepted the role of her supposedly dead husband. In fact, after being wounded and disfigured in World War I, he’s undergone plastic surgery, assumed German identity, and become a successful industrial scientist. After World War II, he gets a job with an American company and finds himself working for Colbert’s second husband. It takes a great many puzzled stares before Colbert suspects that he’s really husband number 1, but for the sake of her marriage to husband number 2, and the orphaned ward he wants her to adopt, he refuses to admit it and dies that same night.

  In current studio slang, Tomorrow Is Forever was a weeper, and Pichel told Maria that the test scene would require Natasha’s tears to flow as spontaneously as they had when she dropped her ice-cream cone in Happy Land. Maria assured him yet again that her little girl was a born actress; but the surest way to stop the born actress in her tracks was to remind her, as Maria repeatedly did, that the future depended on her ability to cry on demand.

  When the very small child entered a huge, dim, cavernous studio soundstage for the first time in February 1945, five months before her seventh birthday, she was not only still feeling the effect of sudden displacement from home and kindergarten in Santa Rosa to a ballet class in Hollywood where she posed for photographs in Polovtsian costume. She was tense on account of her mother’s tension. And when the test began, Natasha was so overwhelmed by the battery of studio lights, the camera’s eye confronting her, and Maria’s eyes fixed on her from the sidelines that the scene went dead and her own eyes remained dry.

  When Pichel called next day with the news that Natasha had failed the test, it didn’t stop Maria in her tracks. She gave Natasha a tongue-lashing, then called Pichel back, saying her little girl had burst into tears at the news and begging him to give her another chance. (It was Maria’s anger, of course, that had provoked her little girl’s tears.) The fact that Pichel agreed to another test tells as much about his intuition as about Maria’s persistence. He shot the first test because of the impression that Natasha had made on him in Santa Rosa; and the former actor had seen enough of Maria to guess what went wrong in the studio.

  Meanwhile, Olga had acquired some basic Stanislavsky in drama class, and when Natasha asked her to suggest a way of crying on demand, she advised her “to think of something very sad,” then reminded Natasha of a day not long before they left Santa Rosa, when they took her German shepherd puppy for a walk. It suddenly dashed across the street, and they saw it run over by a truck. No doubt Pichel prepared Natasha for the second test with his usual kindness and patience, and kept Maria in the background (as far as such a thing was possible); but Natasha had only to think of her dead puppy to weep copious tears. And once she started thinking about it, she couldn’t stop. As a result, she rose to a pitch of emotional intensity that astonished Pichel, producer David Lewis and the president of International Pictures, William Goetz, when they ran the test.

&nb
sp; As well as the part, Natasha acquired a new name. Lewis and Goetz decided that Natasha should revert to her baptismal Natalie (more American), and they changed her last name to Wood as a “good-luck gesture” to their mutual friend Sam Wood, director of the recent box-office hit Kings Row. And until Warner Bros. signed her to a long-term contract ten years later, Natalie Wood was effectively under contract to her mother, who personally negotiated the deal ($100 a week) with International, then went house shopping, and moved the family to a rented bungalow on Harland Avenue in West Hollywood.

  Maria also accepted an offer from Famous Artists to represent Natalie, and on her behalf signed a three-year contract, to be renewed every three years by mutual consent. But she insisted on the right to approve or veto every offer that Natalie received, and when she disagreed with the first Famous Artists agent assigned to handle Natalie, she refused to deal with him anymore and moved on to the next. Over the years, six Famous Artists heads rolled; and after a merger transformed the agency to Ashley-Famous, Maria had a new batch of surrogates to fire if anyone stepped out of line. Meanwhile, several major talent agencies balanced Maria’s reputation against her daughter’s growing desirability, and the scales didn’t tilt in Natalie’s favor until 1957.

  By then Maria had become “someone” again. In her powerful new identity as a Star Mother, she had authorized Natalie Wood to appear in twenty-one movies, twelve TV shows, one TV series that ran for a year, and one radio show, and approved her seven-year contract with Warners. Soon after Tomorrow Is Forever made Natalie famous, Maria also bought herself a car, even though she hadn’t learned to drive. She took lessons from an instructor, but failed the test no less than seven times. For her eighth test, the “con artist” arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles with a handful of signed photographs of Natalie Wood and presented them to various employees, including her examiner. “I’m her mother!” she told everyone. The examiner passed her.

  Maria remained “a fairly crazy driver,” according to Olga, who remembered that she once drove straight over a street divider when she wanted to make a left turn. As well as taking the jolt and the honk of indignant horns in her stride, Maria did no serious damage to the car. But unlike Nick, who eventually lost his license after a third drunken-driving offense, she never had a citation or an accident during all the years that she covered thousands of miles to meet her Captain and to take Natalie to studios from Burbank to Beverly Hills almost every working day.

  At the studio, Lon McCallister, who acted with Natalie in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1947), remembered, “Maria remained a watchful silent presence, always on the set.” Later she became more vocal, especially to visiting journalists; but even when silent she could make everyone aware of her.

  Natalie Wood: I went to work early in the morning so often that it seemed a normal thing for a child my age to do.

  Because the mind of a child is usually open, it’s receptive to any kind of rubbish thrown into it. Although this particular child’s mind received more than its fair share, the rubbish was disguised with a layer of enticing perfume; and it was only once in a while, after the perfume wore off, that Natalie sniffed something rotten in its place. At seven she had woken up to find herself famous, but at fifteen she woke up to compute the price of fame. Until then the Wonder Child had never found the time to look back on her life since the first day she entered a studio soundstage and to question what she had always been told to take for granted. At fifteen her feeling of confinement was acute enough, and her mind sharp enough, to make her think and feel for herself, instead of what others had always tried to make her think and feel. And after confronting things in her life that she didn’t know that she knew, or hadn’t wanted to admit, she felt the ground, along with her own identity, give way under her feet.

  2

  Lost Childhood

  I raised my daughter to be a movie star.

  —MARIA GURDIN

  Her mother was genuinely, fanatically obsessed with Natalie’s talent and possibilities. It became the focus of her life, and sometimes made her as close to certifiable as you can get.

  —ROBERT WAGNER

  LITTLE STAR BIG FUTURE” was the title of a publicity brochure that International Pictures circulated in February 1946, when Tomorrow Is Forever went into general release. It included a fanciful account (courtesy Maria Gurdin) of Natalie’s family background; quoted reviews from newspapers across the country (“A new child star emerges,” “Brilliant child discovery,” “Natalie steals the picture in every scene in which she appears”); mentioned the “honor award” from Louella Parsons in Cosmopolitan (“Natalie Wood eats your heart out”); and featured a series of carefully posed portraits by Madame Valeska, famous for her “candid camera.”

  Five years earlier, Roddy McDowall had received the same kind of publicity after his first American movie, How Green Was My Valley. By the time they became good friends, both he and Natalie had successfully negotiated the difficult passage to adult acting careers; and McDowall once commented that for children, acting in front of a camera became an expanded version of “Let’s Pretend,” the imaginative games they played at home. “We believed in our roles,” he said. “We never had to question a motivation, and ask, ‘Why do I have to do that?’ But as adults, we had to begin all over again, to ask questions before we could play a scene convincingly, and acquire the technique to make an audience believe it.”

  Among the child stars of that era, in fact, there were performing moppets as well as genuinely talented actors, and the performers usually found it impossible to begin all over again. Shirley Temple was a phenomenal little darling who sang and tap-danced and winked her way through the 1930s. But by the mid-1940s she had lost her identity as the antidepressant mascot of the Depression years, and seemed unable to find another in “grown-up” roles. Offscreen she became a tough, shrewd little adult, whose mother had taught her two important lessons: the difference between Shirley “acting” and Shirley “just being herself,” and between “fact and fantasy.” As a result, the performing moppet was able to leave fantasy behind at twenty-one and move on to marriage, motherhood and Republican politics.

  But Natalie’s mother never taught her child to separate fact from fantasy, because she often blurred the line herself. This would create pain and confusion in Natalie’s adult life, although it encouraged the child in her game of “Let’s Pretend” in front of the camera. Far from “just being herself” in her first movie role, she had to imagine and portray an Austrian World War II orphan whose parents were killed in an air raid. Haphazard schooling meant that she was barely able to read and had to memorize her lines in each scene with the aid of a dialogue coach provided by the studio. The coach also taught her, by speaking the words aloud and asking Natalie to repeat them, how to say some of her lines in German and the rest in English with a German accent.

  Hair blonded and braided in the style of an infant fräulein, she was basically as disguised as Orson Welles, with his German accent, dark wig and beard streaked with white, limp and cane. Six foot three to her three foot ten, he brought his bravura presence and theatrical skills to a role desperately in need of them. But although the novice could only follow her instincts and Pichel’s patient instructions, she managed to get under the skin of her character, stubborn yet helpless, self-contained yet lonely; she also cried without hesitation on (frequent) demand, reacted hysterically to the sound of a popgun that reminded her of World War II and listened with uncanny intentness to the other actors in her scenes. By contrast, Colbert and George Brent (as husband number 2) seemed no more than smoothly efficient; as Look magazine noted in its review of the movie, Welles’s “only acting rival is his tiny bilingual screen ward.”

  Hollywood, 1946. Natalie Wood and Orson Welles in Tomorrow Is Forever (illustration credit 2.1)

  Welles agreed, finding Natalie’s performance “almost terrifyingly professional.” But as he told his friend Henry Jaglom many years later, he also found “something very sad and lonely
about this compelling child.” One day, during a break between takes, she seemed so in need of comfort that he sat her on his knee. She was surprised at first, then pleased, and snuggled closer—until Maria suddenly appeared, snatched her daughter away, and darted a look of such ferocious anger at Welles that he “felt terrible, as if he’d done something wrong.”

  No doubt Maria also made the compelling child feel she’d done something wrong. Like her tongue-lashing of Natalie after she failed the first test, it was a sign that Maria could suddenly turn from loving mother into emotional terrorist.

  WELLES LATER described Irving Pichel as “a perfectly competent man,” a fair verdict on a style of filmmaking as deliberate and theatrically trained as Pichel’s own voice. (He had been the offscreen narrator of How Green Was My Valley.) But Pichel was more than competent in his interplay with actors, especially children. (He had previously directed Roddy McDowall and Peggy Ann Garner in The Pied Piper.) On August 10, 1979, at the American Film Institute Film and Humanities Seminar with Natalie Wood, Natalie remarked that directors who start out as actors always have an “extra understanding of an actor’s problems.” Pichel had it, she said, and was a wonderful mentor on her first movie. He also gave her mother some excellent advice. Untrained children respond more naturally to imaginary situations, he explained, and warned Maria “not to send me to any acting coaches or schools.” Fortunately, Maria listened. Just as Welles realized that Natalie needed no training, she was aware of her daughter’s intrinsically strong imagination. Did she also guess where it came from?