In a sagebrush comedy that reversed the situation of The Bride Wore Boots, a city sophisticate tries to adjust to life in Wyoming with her rancher husband. Screen-mothered by Irene Dunne (after Myrna Loy turned the part down) and screen-fathered once again by Fred MacMurray, Natalie had two key scenes with her screen sister, eight-year-old Gigi Perreau. Offscreen, as Perreau remembered, they had a few more during their obligatory hours at the studio schoolhouse: “I liked Natalie very much, but was very perplexed by the notes she kept slipping me in class. I don’t recall the exact words, only the meaning, which was the same every time—‘I’m going to be a star, but you’re not.’ Then my first encounter with Natalie’s incredibly pushy mother, who was furious that the studio had decided to bill my name above Natalie’s, made me realize that some of her ambition had rubbed off on her daughter.” It was “a whole new concept” for Perreau, whose parents were not ambitious for her, and who had never experienced “this kind of relentless drive before. In those days we worked for the fun of it, and the recognition. Prestige was as important as money, unlike today, when it’s all a question of how much you can earn how quickly.” But Maria (incorrectly) believed that Perreau planned to upstage her daughter, and as Natalie had never before been jealous of other child actors, there’s no doubt who originated the idea of those notes. All the same, Natalie’s role of accomplice suggests that her mother’s ambition had begun to rub off, and Little Star had begun to believe that she was somehow special. As if to confirm it, the Children’s Day Council voted her Child Star of the Year at the end of 1950.
Not coincidentally, the adult Natalie Wood took stardom very seriously, but also made fun of herself for being so serious about it.
DURING THE FILMING of Never a Dull Moment, another episode occurred that underscores the appalling emotional divide between Natalie’s own family and the families she belonged to in movies. When a piece of furniture on the set needed repairing one day, a studio carpenter was summoned to fix it. Minutes later, Nick Gurdin appeared. “Hi, Dad!” his excited daughter called out, and a pall of silence descended over the entire stage. Director and cast stared from child star to carpenter and back again, and Natalie would have run to greet her father if Maria hadn’t held her back.
Later, her mother told Natalie that she’d seriously embarrassed her co-workers. A carpenter, like a grip or an electrician, was a social inferior who never fraternized with directors or actors, least of all with a star or, of course, a star’s mother. And Maria warned Natalie never to acknowledge her father if she encountered him at the studio again.
SOME TIME AFTER Never a Dull Moment completed production, Maria drove Natalie to visit Olga and her husband at their vacation cottage in Camp Rose, north of San Francisco. (Miraculously, Maria negotiated the round trip on Pacific Coast Highway, and others she made later, without incident or accident.) A few miles before Camp Rose, she parked the car outside a beauty shop in Healdsburg, only a few blocks from the scene of Natalie’s movie debut in Happy Land. The shop was run by Maria’s old friend Nina Kiyaschenko, who had divorced George Zepaloff after a marriage that lasted less than six years.
Natalie as a bridesmaid at Olga Viripaeff’s wedding (illustration credit 2.9)
In 1946 the Captain had told Nina, “I’m going away again, and this time I’m not coming back.” A year later Nina heard that her husband had returned to San Francisco, and managed to track him down: “I told him he should at least meet our daughter, who hardly remembered him because he’d hardly ever spent any time with her. He agreed to meet us at a hotel bar, then disappeared and left me with practically no money. When I divorced him, Zepaloff made a scene in court because the judge ordered him to pay $150 a month in alimony and $150 child support for Natasha. He made only one payment, then got himself transferred to a Matson cruise ship on the East Coast.”
As Nina couldn’t afford to take him to court, she supported herself and daughter Natasha by running a beauty shop in Healdsburg. Maria knew about this because she’d kept in touch with the Captain after he moved east. And the fact that she left Nick and Lana behind on this trip makes it clear that her plans included a visit to one of her favorite places, the edge.
In the beauty shop, Maria introduced Natalie to Nina, who introduced them both to young Natasha, then remarked (in complete innocence at the time) how alike their two girls looked.
THE RELEASE of Never a Dull Moment was delayed until November 1950, after new scenes had been added and the editing tightened, in a vain attempt to make the film live up to its title. Consequently, four Natalie Wood movies reached theaters that year; in the first, she’s on the cusp of the awkward age, and by the last she’s halfway through it.
The first began as Beloved Over All, became With All My Love during production, and was released in February 1950 as Our Very Own. In Natalie’s most upscale movie since Tomorrow Is Forever, an American family that prides itself on being “as normal as blueberry pie” lives in a suburban Shangri-la: picket fences as impeccably white as everyone’s teeth, mirrors as immaculate as the faces they reflect, every room in the house a designer’s calling card. Samuel Goldwyn’s production, shot at the Goldwyn Studios, was his answer to the suburban Shangri-la of David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away of 1944. The same masterly cinematographer, Lee Garmes, created its high visual gloss, and the screenplay (by F. Hugh Herbert, author of the Broadway hit Kiss and Tell) made the same equation of family values and patriotism.
At the center of Our Very Own is the eldest daughter (Ann Blyth). On the eve of her graduation from high school, she learns that she’s adopted and goes into an emotional tailspin. But after hysterically rejecting her adoptive parents, she discovers where she came from and realizes that her true family is the one that cared for her. “Next to the privilege of being an American,” she announces in her graduation speech on the Privileges of Citizenship, “is belonging to a family.” It brings down the house.
She’s arrived at the moment of truth after deciding to visit the mother who put her out for adoption and finding herself on the wrong side of the tracks. No sunlight on picket fences here, but a shabby frame house in the gray dusk, children playing in the street outside, the whistle of a train from the nearby railroad. Through the living-room window she glimpses a group of men playing poker and a tired, heavily made-up woman bringing them beer. It’s too much for this material girl. She knows instantly where she belongs, and heads for home in her gleaming convertible.
Only one scene, expertly acted, makes contact with a recognizable form of contemporary life. Adoptive mother meets actual mother, and Jane Wyatt’s steely graciousness confronts Ann Dvorak’s sad vulgarity. But as the stereotypically smartass youngest daughter, Natalie was praised (once again) for her “natural” performance in a role that should have been unbearably irritating. Although charm and humor (once again) saw her through, she had the advantage of playing her age, unlike the actresses cast as teenagers soon to graduate from high school: Ann Blyth (twenty-two), middle sister Joan Evans (twenty-six), and best friend Phyllis Kirk (twenty-six).
Like so many emotional dramas of the 1940s and 1950s, Our Very Own has the fascination of a grotesquely dated artifact. Although directed by David Miller, its style is communal, with the same almost hypnotic confidence of other experts in the same genre—Curtis Bernhardt (Possessed), Irving Rapper (Deception), Edmund Goulding (The Great Lie). “The problems are so darling and sweet,” as George Cukor remarked after seeing the Bette Davis version of A Stolen Life (Bernhardt) on TV. “Nothing to do with anything that’s happening now. But where people make a mistake,” he added, “is to think of all this as just absurd. One has to take into account what was really going on, for better or for worse.”
When Natalie took this into account a few years later, she found it was on the whole for worse. Meanwhile, in May 1950, she started work at Columbia on another movie equally trapped in its period. No Sad Songs for Me, Margaret Sullavan’s last film, cast her as a mother dying of cancer, ten years before
her actual death from an overdose of sleeping pills. During her relentlessly heroic last months, she prepares husband (Wendell Corey) and daughter (Natalie) for life after her death, and even chooses her husband’s second wife (Viveca Lindfors), knowing she’s secretly in love with him and will make a good stepmother.
Still an off-limits word in the 1950s, cancer is never named in the movie, and Sullavan’s appearance betrays no sign of any disease: another convention of the period, especially in star vehicles, and No Sad Songs was emphatically a star vehicle. Natalie, like Lindfors and Corey, has little to do except look lovingly sympathetic and grief-stricken. But Rudolph Maté, who recently had begun directing movies after twenty years as an imaginative lighting cameraman, not only made sure that the star was lit as glowingly as he’d once lit Dietrich, Rita Hayworth and Carole Lombard; he also proved skillful in monitoring tears, and Sullavan—whose voice Louise Brooks compared to “a voice singing in the snow”—hit the self-sacrificial notes without holding them too long.
Ideal screen family in Our Very Own. Left to right: father (Donald Cook), middle daughter (Joan Evans), youngest daughter (Natalie), mother (Jane Wyatt), boyfriend (Farley Granger) of eldest daughter (Ann Blyth) (illustration credit 2.10)
Natalie remembered Sullavan as “very kind” and “maternal” but was mystified when she became edgy and impatient with other actors for no apparent reason. In fact, the deafness that would eventually end her career was already in its early stages. When Lindfors or Corey lowered their voices during an intimate scene, Sullavan accused them of not “giving” enough, because she was determined to conceal the fact that she couldn’t hear what they said.
Ideal screen father: with Fred MacMurray in Father Was a Fullback (illustration credit 2.11)
OUT OF PIGTAILS but into the awkward age, Natalie ended 1950 with yet another negligible family comedy at Fox. The Jackpot was released in November, two months after No Sad Songs, and starred James Stewart as an “average” American father, euphoric when he wins first prize in a radio quiz show, desolate when he learns he’ll have almost nothing left after paying taxes. As his daughter, Natalie again has little to do, and the part marks a kind of turning point in her career. Beanpole thin, she’s clearly under strain, directed to act and react as a pigtailed eight-year-old when she’s really twelve. And she’s not quite plain but not quite pretty, with nothing in her appearance to suggest she’ll ever become a great beauty.
Ideal screen mother: with Bette Davis in The Star (illustration credit 2.12)
Not surprisingly, she’ll be less in demand for the next few years: something that had already happened to Peggy Ann Garner (so memorable in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and was happening at the same time to Margaret O’Brien (so fiendishly talented in Meet Me in St. Louis). For them, it’s a dying fall; but although Natalie will never join the ranks of child stars for whom the bell tolled, she will spend more time at Van Nuys High, in a world far distant from a movie set and with a family distinctly less normal than blueberry pie, where her mother consulted the tarot for a sign that a change of fortune was on the way and Nick Gurdin still raised Cain four or five times a year—sometimes so violently that Maria drove Natalie and Lana to a nearby motel for the night.
Of the three movies that Natalie made over the next two years, with three new star mothers, the first was an RKO weeper, The Blue Veil. Directed by the eternally self-assured Curtis Bernhardt, and adapted by Norman Corwin from a 1942 French film, it centers on a former governess who recalls her life over the past thirty years in a series of flashbacks. The producer, Jerry Wald, had tried unsuccessfully to interest both Garbo and Ingrid Bergman in the role before casting Jane Wyman. Thirty-six at the time, she spent the framing episodes graciously aged in latex, and the earlier ones adroitly key-lit, as a penniless young widow who becomes a governess after her husband dies in France in World War I.
Natalie appears in a flashback as one of her charges, the neglected daughter of a New York musical comedy star (Joan Blondell, splendidly costumed in a Cossack-style ermine hat, ermine wrap slung across a black tunic and diamond-studded black stockings). In the movie’s weepiest scene, the governess persuades Blondell to give up her fading career for her child. Tearfully overcome with joy at finding her real mother again, Natalie is equally tearful at losing her substitute one, while Wyman bravely and tearfully prepares for another sacrificial goodbye. But the scene is far less embarrassing than it sounds, thanks to Joan Blondell’s tact and skill as she reveals the simple heart beneath her tarnished brassiness, and to Natalie once again getting under the skin of a lonely child.
On September 5, 1951, The Blue Veil had a gala premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater. It was promoted as a family picture, and Wyman made the event a family affair by bringing Maureen, her daughter by her former husband Ronald Reagan. But she was upstaged by Joan Crawford, who brought her two adopted children, Christina and Christopher. Freighted with jewelry, the glaze of a loving maternal smile on her face, she took over (until the movie began) as the star attraction.
Thirty years of lonely courage in the leading role gained Wyman an Academy Award nomination, but most of the reviewers praised Blondell and Natalie above the rest of the cast (which included Charles Laughton and Agnes Moorehead). The period detail in The Blue Veil is vague, but Natalie’s episode is presumably set in the early 1930s, as at one point Blondell sings “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” Natalie plays her only sustained scene in a frilly white confirmation dress, and at this stage in her life it makes the awkward age look less awkward.
She’s also starting to look prettier, and although her next movie allowed her to play her age and seem relaxed in contemporary jeans and sweater, it did nothing else for her. With a script by Robert Carson, coauthor of the 1937 A Star Is Born, and an uncredited “polish” to the New York theater scenes by playwright John Van Druten, Just for You was in production at Paramount from mid-October to mid-December 1951. The director was Elliott Nugent, who had collaborated with James Thurber on his only work for the stage, The Male Animal, and later directed the film version. The songs were by Harry Warren (42nd Street) and Leo Robin (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and the cast included Bing Crosby as a producer of Broadway musicals, Jane Wyman as the star of his latest hit, Ethel Barrymore as the principal of a snobbish girl’s school and Natalie as Crosby’s neglected daughter. But after noting “the talent line-up” when Just for You was released in May 1952, the reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter found nothing to praise except Wyman’s legs (“whistle bait”) in her “Zing a Little Zong” number with Crosby. In spite of the bait, the movie failed to lure an audience.
Meanwhile, Natalie had been shipped back to Monogram Studios for the tackiest B picture she ever made, and the last and most tiresome of her brattish-kid-sister roles. In The Rose Bowl Story Vera Miles played her older sister, a Rose Princess at the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena, and Marshall Thompson a quarterback who falls in love with her while training for the Rose Bowl football game. Quickly shot during the last twenty days of May, it was quickly released and instantly forgotten in September—the same month that Natalie reported for work on another movie with a schedule only four days longer.
By this time she had celebrated her fourteenth birthday (on July 20) and also had her first period. But as Maria had never explained the facts of menstruation, the flow of bloody fluid terrified her.
Natasha Gregson Wagner: My mother was convinced she was dying and screamed for help. She never forgot that moment, as she told me thirty years later. When I was eleven, she made a point of talking to me about sex and periods.
A few weeks after her first period, Natalie experienced another trauma. The Star, in which she played Bette Davis’s daughter, was shot entirely on actual locations, one of them a sailboat belonging to Sterling Hayden, who played Davis’s lover. The director, Stuart Heisler, evidently decided to add a moment when Natalie dives into the Pacific and swims toward a nearby raft. It doesn’t occur in the script, and when Heisler proposed it
, Natalie assumed he would use a double. But Heisler wanted a close shot and refused to listen when she explained her fear of the ocean. When he insisted, Natalie began to scream hysterically, and the sound brought Davis out from her dressing-room cabin. At a 1977 American Film Institute tribute to the star, Natalie recalled Davis’s threat to leave the picture unless Heisler employed a double. “This was the only time I saw the famous Bette Davis temperament surface,” she said, then smiled at her as she added: “And it was not in her own behalf.”
Later, Maria claimed that she was also on board the sailboat and threatened to halt production unless Heisler used a double. If nobody bothered to call her bluff, it was surely because, in the release print of The Star, nobody dives off the sailboat, and there was no double on call, as the scene wasn’t in the script. Like a few others, the sailboat scene looks hastily shot; and the number of abrupt dissolves throughout the movie suggests that a tight budget dictated a number of cuts during production. As well as saving money on the sailboat loaned by Hayden, producer Bert Friedlob economized by using his own home for the Beverly Hills mansion once owned by the fallen star.
The script of The Star was the work of two magazine writers, Dale Eunson and his wife, Katherine Albert; and they based the character of Margaret Elliot, who can only relate to life as portrayed in her movies and believes she’s still young and attractive enough to play romantic leads, on Joan Crawford. (Albert had worked for a contentious time as her publicist at MGM.) One scene even makes an unmistakable physical reference to Crawford in her current Harriet Craig/This Woman Is Dangerous mode. Convinced that she’s tested successfully for a role that will launch her comeback, Elliot adopts a stern upswept hairstyle, enlarged eyebrows and mouth. Davis herself was obviously in on the joke.
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