Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  TOMORROW IS FOREVER completed ten weeks of shooting in June 1945, and as California law obliged child actors to go to school for three hours a day, Natalie had begun to catch up on her education at the studio schoolhouse. Two weeks after the last day of shooting, Pichel sent her one of the dresses she wore in the movie “as a memento of the nice days when you were making it”; and in January 1946 Tomorrow Is Forever had a gala opening at the Carthay Circle Theater.

  Guests at the premiere included Gary Cooper, Edward G. Robinson, Ronald Reagan and his current wife, Jane Wyman, but a “women’s picture” demanded a cluster of female stars to swell the list. Olivia de Havilland, Greer Garson, Merle Oberon, Ann Sothern, Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney were also corraled for the occasion, and they all attended the private party hosted by Colbert and Pichel afterward. And when Variety correctly prophesied “good biz in class houses,” this meant very good biz indeed, as there were hundreds more class houses then than now.

  LESS FORTUNATELY, Maria had also listened to Pichel when he offered to cast Natalie in his next picture. The Bride Wore Boots, a sagebrush comedy about a wife (Barbara Stanwyck) who loves horses and the wide-open spaces and a husband (Robert Cummings) who doesn’t, defeated even the great Stanwyck, whose daughter Natalie played. And there were fewer “nice days” on this movie for Paramount, which Pichel began shooting in mid-July, a month after he completed Tomorrow Is Forever. During the eight weeks of production, Stanwyck grew very impatient with Pichel’s insistence on retakes that she considered unnecessary, and one afternoon she threatened to walk off the picture if he demanded take 6. Pichel also directed Natalie to play standard cute; but he probably had no choice, as Paramount had remodeled her to look like Shirley Temple. Hair tightly ringleted and garnished with ribbons, she was again far from “just being herself,” but for the wrong reasons.

  The Bride Wore Boots was a critical and commercial flop when it opened in June 1946, but in Natalie’s case the success of Tomorrow Is Forever overshadowed it. Six months later she posed for photographers when she accepted an award from Parents magazine as “The Most Talented Juvenile Picture Star of 1946,” and again when she received a Blue Ribbon citation from Box Office for a notable debut in one of the box-office hits of the year.

  BY THIS TIME Maria had given birth to another daughter, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Born March 1, 1946, the baby’s given name was Svetlana, but Maria soon shortened it to Lana, in homage to her favorite movie star, and with an eye on the possibility of a second child actress in the family.

  A few weeks earlier, Olga had come home from school to find a drunken Nick pointing a knife at his pregnant wife’s belly. Her arrival defused the situation; and as she was now “suffering from bad nerves” on account of the violent scenes between her mother and stepfather, Olga reacted to this one as simply another sign that she must make up her mind to leave the Gurdin household and go to live with her father in San Francisco.

  But she didn’t know that Nick had recently learned about Maria’s continuing affair with George Zepaloff. Inevitably, he suspected that she’d always loved the Captain more than she loved him. (He was right. Stricken with Alzheimer’s disease in her last years, Maria spoke her Captain’s name more often than Nick’s.) Inevitably, too, Nick had to recognize his failure as a husband. But the humiliation also aggravated his sense of failure as a man whose lack of will sentenced him to a life of dependency.

  Natalie with Richard Long (playing Claudette Colbert’s son) on the set of Tomorrow Is Forever (illustration credit 2.2)

  Part of the bond between Maria and the Captain was the excitement of living on the edge; and the excitement of provoking her husband to violence, or the threat of it, was one reason why Maria never left Nick. “My mother knew how to taunt him,” Olga recalled, and when Nick aimed a knife at Maria’s belly that day, had she taunted him by suggesting that someone else might be the child’s father? We don’t know; but Olga remembers that Maria confided the name of her third child’s biological father a few days after Lana was born.

  Ironically, rumors about Lana’s paternity had begun to circulate while Maria was still pregnant, and several years later Natalie heard that the Captain was a prime suspect. Did she confront her mother about this? Again, we don’t know; but Olga remembers that “when Natalie was around sixteen,” Maria told her the truth, and the three of them agreed it should be kept from Lana.

  NICHOLAS LEPKO, whom Maria had first met in 1931 on board the Tatuta Maru, eventually became a technician at the laboratory owned by the Los Angeles film company that first employed him as an apprentice. Around 1936 it was sold to a Japanese company, which offered him a new and better-paid contract in Japan. Lepko decided to accept, and arranged for Tamara and their ten-year-old daughter, Irene, to join him in Kyoto.

  Meanwhile, Tamara not only had continued to dance and choreograph floor shows, but had worked as assistant to a leading producer of cabaret in Shanghai. Irene couldn’t recall his name, but most likely he was Austrian-born Joe Farren, who once managed a circus in Vienna and eventually settled in Shanghai, where he opened a casino with nightclub attached. The club was famous for its chorus line, known as the Paramount Peaches; and as Shanghai favored blondes, all the Peaches were White Russian blondes, like Tamara herself.

  Apart from missionaries, the Lepkos were the only foreigners in Kyoto in the 193os. But they soon learned serviceable Japanese, and the resourceful Tamara danced in musical shows that toured Korea and Shanghai, as well as opened a ballet studio where she taught missionary children. The Lepkos remained in Japan after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, but in December 194o, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese company abruptly terminated Lepko’s contract. The family was rescued from a precarious situation by the bishop in charge of the Episcopal Church’s missionary work in Kyoto. His children were among Tamara’s ballet students, and he offered to sponsor the Lepkos as immigrants to the United States.

  Irene (Lepko) Agnew: In the early 1940s, Maria and Nick Gurdin with their daughters Olga and Natasha first came to visit us in our small apartment in Hollywood. Since we were all Russian immigrants, and my father had met Maria on the boat from Shanghai, there was immediate camaraderie and friendship.

  The Lepkos had arrived in Los Angeles in February 1941, a few weeks before the Gurdins moved to the house in Sunnyvale. “We had no belongings except our clothes,” Irene recalled; but with the extraordinary resilience of so many Russian immigrants, Nicholas and Tamara soon found employment. Nick’s qualifications landed him a job as laboratory technician at Pathé, and later at Columbia Pictures. “That was the extent of his career,” according to Irene, and he never earned more than a modest salary.

  Tamara worked as a hospital orderly, then in a factory that bottled bath salts, until a Russian neighbor recommended her to the Geller Theater Workshop. She was engaged to teach ballet there and continued to do so until she started her own studio in 1950. Olga places that first visit to the Lepkos around December 1944, just before Irving Pichel had agreed to test Natalie for Tomorrow Is Forever, and Irene remembers that Nick Gurdin talked a great deal of the horrors of the revolution, while Maria recalled her triumphs at the Russian Center as Queen of the White Russian Veterans and Invalids. On subsequent evenings, nostalgia for the old days usually prevailed: “Nick [Gurdin] played Russian songs to my mother and they sang along together and shed a few tears for days gone by. And when Nick felt blue he would phone my mother and play Russian records, and she’d sing to them, or they’d recite poetry and tell Russian jokes.”

  To his daughter, Nicholas Lepko always seemed like “a background figure,” not only during those evenings but throughout his life; and Nick Gurdin made the same impression on everyone who met him. Lepko’s professional career was stable but undistinguished, Gurdin’s a failure, and they both married women exceptionally strong in different ways. Was this one reason for the episode between Lepko and Maria that occurred within a few months of that first visit?
Another, according to Olga, was that her mother became “very competitive” with Tamara. She sometimes cooked Russian dishes for the Lepkos, and Tamara found them so delicious that she asked for the recipes. Maria obligingly wrote them out for her, “but with one ingredient changed or missing. And when Tamara wondered why the same dishes were never as good when she made them, my mother laughed about it to me.”

  Olga also suspected that Lepko made the opening move to her mother, because “he once put his hand over mine and pressed it,” and Maria confided that her “relations” with Nick had grown “very bad” at the time: “When she told me about Lepko, she said, ‘It just happened.’ She didn’t go into details, and I had the impression it wasn’t a real affair, maybe ‘just happened’ only once, and probably after one of the parties the Lepkos used to give, where all their Russian friends got very sad and merry and excited.”

  Although Olga was almost seventeen by then, pretty but “rather prudish,” and “shocked” by Lepko appearing “to make advances to her,” she knew her mother well enough to recognize the line between the fabulist and the woman of her word. Hindsight draws the line even more clearly. The key to Maria the fabulist is her craving for self-esteem. She began by romanticizing her past in Russia (the Romanov connection, the private train to Harbin); after Tomorrow Is Forever she exaggerated her role, important though it was, in Natalie’s career as a movie star, and invented new details about her past. She also enjoyed demonstrating her own fabulist powers. One evening when they were alone together in the Harland Avenue bungalow, she convinced Olga that a burglar was trying to break in through a rear window. Then she saw the look of fear on her daughter’s face, laughed and said it wasn’t true.

  Harland Avenue, 1946 (illustration credit 2.3)

  But it would not have suited Maria’s craving for self-esteem to fantasize that she was pregnant with Zepaloff’s child when she married Nick Gurdin; and to reveal that the child in question was Natalie Wood would have seriously damaged her movie-star daughter’s career. (Today, of course, it would enhance it.) Instead, she made a point of advertising her belief in “respectability” throughout Natalie’s life—a necessary precaution for both their sakes in Maria’s view—and for once she resisted the temptation to confide in Olga, her daughter confessor.

  After Lana was born, Maria went house shopping again, and in the fall of 1946 she moved the family to Burbank, where real estate was less expensive than in West Hollywood, and she could rent a house with an extra bedroom for the same price. Nicholas Lepko occasionally dropped by for a visit, and when Olga noticed that “he would sit and just stare at baby Lana,” she felt doubly certain that her mother had spoken the truth.

  In the eyes of the world, if not in his own, Nick Gurdin accepted Lana as his daughter. Without adding to his humiliation, what else could he do?

  NATALIE, OF COURSE, knew nothing of this when she began work on her third and fourth movies in November 1946. Each proved a more agreeable experience and a more successful movie than The Bride Wore Boots, although her role in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a compound of period romance and the supernatural, was scarcely more rewarding. In early 1900s England, a young widow (Gene Tierney) buys a house by the sea that turns out to be haunted by the ghost of a sea captain (Rex Harrison). The English setting was also a compound, of studio interiors on the 20th Century–Fox lot, exterior scenes shot near Palos Verdes down the coast, and a house near Big Sur up the coast, used for back-projection plates for the house by the sea. The story takes place over thirty years, and while Tierney ages discreetly in a series of elegant grayish, pearl-gray, and silver-gray wigs, Natalie as her daughter soon grows up into Vanessa Brown.

  The picture was one of several that Joseph L. Mankiewicz made early in his career as a contract director at Fox, to prove himself commercially and be allowed to write and direct his own material for the studio. Famous Artists had sent Natalie on an interview for the role, and Mankiewicz (like Pichel) was immediately charmed. He was also impressed by her reaction when he asked if she’d read “the whole script or just your part.” She looked very surprised, then told him: “The whole script.”

  Maria, of course, was on the set every day that Natalie worked, and beginning to assert herself. One day, when shooting ran slightly behind schedule, she asked Mankiewicz how much longer her daughter would be kept waiting. Years later, Mankiewicz related the sequel to his screenwriter son, Tom:

  Disguising his irritation with a joke, my father told Maria he’d be ready for Natalie in the morning if she could spell his name correctly. Next morning, when put to the test, Natalie seemed uncharacteristically nervous, and my father feared that Maria had been tutoring her half the night. She spelt his name correctly until she faltered at the last letter, which became T instead of Z. My father thought Maria was going to hit her. But shortly afterward Natalie came up to him with a charming smile and spelt it right.

  In the early 1960s, Mankiewicz told his son, the sequel had a sequel. As he walked down a corridor at Cedars-Sinai Hospital on his way to visit his agent, who was recovering from surgery, Mankiewicz heard a crisp, amused voice behind him call out his name, letter by letter: “M-A-N-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z!” He turned around and saw Natalie Wood, near the peak of her stardom, with the same charming smile.

  A WEEK AFTER she reported for work on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Natalie was interviewed by George Seaton, another writer-director under contract to Fox. Like Mankiewicz, he was charmed, and cast her in one of the key roles of her screen childhood: the girl in Miracle on 34th Street who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. Although the movie was set in New York, its stars performed against back-projection plates for most of the exteriors, but Natalie was flown to the city during the week before Christmas for interior scenes in Macy’s.

  Back in California, she was shuttled for a few days between two sound stages, sometimes playing Tierney’s daughter in the morning, breaking for lunch and three hours of school, then playing Maureen O’Hara’s daughter for the rest of the afternoon. Changing from period to contemporary costume, like changing characters and screen mothers, also became part of “the normal thing” for an eight-year-old child to do. And like her schedule, the title of Seaton’s movie was constantly switching, from My Heart Tells Me to The Big Heart, then to It’s Only Human, and finally to Miracle on 34th Street. More important, the movie gave Natalie her first chance to display a talent for comedy.

  Although not an orphan, Susan’s the child of divorced parents who lives with her mother (Maureen O’Hara); and from the vantage point of this movie, an overview reveals how Tomorrow Is Forever set the pattern of Natalie’s early career. Aside from minor roles in a handful of domestic comedies and dramas where she comes from a relatively “normal” background, she plays an emotionally displaced child whose problems are resolved by understanding adults (thanks, of course, to the understanding filmmakers who contrive a happy ending). In Driftwood and One Desire, she’s an orphan again; in The Star, another child of divorced parents; in The Blue Veil and Just for You, a neglected daughter. In The Green Promise she rebels against her father, and in No Sad Songs for Me her mother dies of cancer.

  Not all these movies are weepers, although they all share an underlying sentimentality, and reflect the formulaic unreal world that Natalie was schooled to believe in from the age of seven. The benign old gentleman (Edmund Gwenn) hired to play Santa Claus for Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and Christmas shopping season in Miracle on 34th Street—is he the genuine article or just pretending? Susan, whose mother has brought her up to distrust make-believe, accuses him of being a fraud and gives him a look of wonderfully comic disbelief when he insists that he’s as real as his beard. But the movie knows better than to commit itself. Instead, it hinges on Susan’s “conversion,” when her heart tells her that the old gentleman is “so kind and nice and jolly, he must be Santa Claus.”

  It’s the signal, of course, that a kind and nice and jolly ending for everyone will follow. An unhappy marriage has caused Susan’s mothe
r, Doris, to reject a number of illusions, including love; but now she’s enabled to see Fred (John Payne), her devoted neighbor, as a man to trust. And by accepting his love, she cues the audience to accept the human need for belief.

  In a memo to Seaton about the movie’s first-draft script, the vice-president in charge of production at Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, complained that Doris was too “cold” and “heartless.” But in their anxiety to make the movie’s heart as big as possible, and remove anything that might disturb, Seaton and his writing partner, Valentine Davies, did more than trim a few of Doris’s “cold” (read “realistic”) lines. By eliminating the character of her alcoholic ex-husband, who’s only referred to in the final version, they made her insistence on “life’s harsh realities” less understandable.

  Early in the movie, Fred tells Doris that “faith is believing in something when common sense tells you not to.” She doesn’t buy it and retorts, “You don’t get ahead that way.” But by the end she understands Fred’s answer: “It all depends what you mean by getting ahead.” This is not the only hollow echo of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Like the guardian angel in that picture, Macy’s Kris Kringle performs a “miracle” by guiding Doris, Fred and Susan herself to the suburban house of their dreams. Loss of belief in Santa Claus, in fact, is equated with loss of belief, period; and when the consequences of no more Santa are pointed out, material interests and spiritual values hold hands at the thought of toy business and Christmas business in general falling off, and workers being laid off.