The Silver Chalice was originally planned as an American-Italian-British co-production, with “authentic” location work in Rome, Antioch and Jerusalem. But financial negotiations with overseas production companies broke down, and it became 100 percent Warners, shot entirely at the Burbank studio apart from one location scene near Palm Springs, a stand-in for the Syrian desert. Natalie’s hair was dyed blond to match Mayo’s, and she was fitted with blue contact lenses to match Mayo’s eyes. But two days later she began to suffer from eye inflammation and refused to wear the lenses anymore.
When the movie opened during Christmas week, none of the reviewers commented on the mysterious change in young Helena’s eyes from blue to very dark brown, then back to blue for Mayo’s first appearance. Most likely they were too bored by a relentlessly pedestrian movie to notice the discrepancy—although they should have noticed the production’s one positive feature: the sets by Rolf Gerard, a theatre designer chosen by Victor Saville, the British producer-director. Unlike the stiff, literal attempts at period reconstruction of Quo Vadis? and The Robe, Gerard’s designs created a postmodern biblical world muted in color, elegantly stylized, light and uncluttered.
Saville had been one of the very few adventurous directors of British films during the 1930s, but you’d never have guessed it from his later work in Hollywood. As for Natalie, the best thing about her role was that it took only two weeks to complete; the worst, that her blonded hair and slathered makeup were almost brutally unbecoming. The role itself was something to get through rather than act, but it gave her a prophetic moment during a scene with Peter Reynolds, the actor who grows up to become Paul Newman. Shocked by the way her master treats young Helena, he asks why she allows it. “Because,” she whispers, “I’m a slave.”
Four months after the movie opened, but for reasons totally unconnected with it, Warners signed Natalie to an exclusive long-term contract. It was dated March 30, 1955, and the terms included a weekly salary of $250 for the first year, less than she’d earned on Pride of the Family; but a regular income was the deciding factor for those who always decided on Natalie’s behalf. Warners had an option to renew the contract every year for seven more years, with a weekly salary increase of $250 each year, minus twelve weeks of annual unpaid layoff.
The contract also stipulated that Natalie must “comply promptly and faithfully with all requirements, directions or requests,” including the studio’s decision to loan her out and send her on publicity tours. Furthermore, she was required “to act, sing, speak, or otherwise perform as an actress in such roles and such photoplays and other productions or assignments as Producer may designate, [and] to perform and render such services whenever and wherever and as often as Producer may request or deem necessary.”
In other words, Producer owned her. Did Natalie know what she was getting into? Years later, she couldn’t remember if she ever read the contract (as a minor, of course, she couldn’t sign it), only that she understood it was “standard.” Anyway, she had no choice. Unless she agreed, she couldn’t play Judy in Rebel Without a Cause.
MEANTIME, after her two weeks’ work on The Silver Chalice, Natalie returned to Van Nuys High for the fall and winter semesters of 1954–55. But she interrupted her studies to appear in a couple of TV productions, the first (aired on November 14, 1954) for General Electric Theater, a CBS dramatic anthology hosted by Ronald Reagan.
I’m a Fool was adapted from Sherwood Anderson’s story by Arnold Schulman, who would later write one of Natalie’s best movies, Love with the Proper Stranger. “Put up a good front and the world is yours,” a midwestern farmer advises his young son when he leaves home to work as a racetrack groom in a neighboring town. And when the poor country boy falls in love with Lucy, a young girl visiting wealthy friends in the town, he duly reinvents himself as the heir to a family fortune.
The leading role was played by James Dean, himself a country boy from Indiana, who had filmed East of Eden on a nearby Warners soundstage while Natalie was making The Silver Chalice. Elia Kazan’s movie had not yet been released, and Natalie saw Dean for the first time when he rode up (late) on his motorbike and climbed into the rehearsal studio through an open window instead of entering by the door. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a pair of scruffy old jeans held up by a safety pin, and Natalie’s first impression was of someone “totally weird,” but after they began working on their first scene together, she found him totally fascinating.
Instead of a fixed approach to each scene, Dean liked to improvise a series of different ones, until he felt that he’d explored every possibility. This was the opposite of what Natalie had been taught all her life, by directors who expected her to do exactly as she was told and by a mother who warned her never to argue with them. But the director of I’m a Fool worried about completing the show on schedule, and what excited Natalie made Don Medford accuse Dean of lacking discipline. As a result the two young actors bonded, and in retrospect the intimacy of their final scene seems like a rehearsal for the scene in the deserted mansion in Rebel Without a Cause.
General Electric Theater was a half-hour show, and the story is inevitably fragmented as it moves between present and past, with Eddie Albert as James Dean thirty years on, recalling an episode from his earlier life. The farewell scene at the railroad station, almost entirely in close-up and close two-shot, is not only the strongest in the show, but gives Natalie her most sustained opportunity. About to return home, Lucy suddenly realizes she’s in love with this mysterious, lonely boy, and as the train pulls out, she promises to write. But he knows that he’ll never get her letters, because he’s never told his real name or address.
It’s beautifully played, Dean already the archetypal troubled outsider of his generation and a constantly inventive actor, Natalie displaying an emotional depth that so many shallow teenage roles had denied her. The ache of loss and missed connections also seems personally resonant for both of them, youthful romantics at once eager and wary, as if they suspect that the world may never be theirs.
Like all TV shows then, I’m a Fool was very briefly rehearsed before it aired, but as Natalie remembered later, she had enough contact with Dean to realize that “he was proud of being an actor.” This was something she felt personally very unsure about at the time; but although she found it a revelation to work with a twenty-three-year-old actor at once so passionate and so relaxed about his craft, she could find no cause for pride in her next assignment. The Wild Bunch was a segment of another dramatic anthology, Four Star Playhouse, and took her back to domestic sitcomland. She played one of two spoiled, vacuous sisters (Gigi Perreau was cast as the other) who at first resent their widowed mother’s second marriage and her introduction of a stepfather (Charles Boyer) into the family. Directed by William A. Seiter, one of many veteran Hollywood workhorses put out to TV pasture in the 1950s, the show was as instantly disposable as a plastic spoon. Boyer, Perreau and Natalie acted with no visible signs of involvement in heart or mind, and in Natalie’s case it was doubly understandable. By then her heart and mind were otherwise deeply engaged.
The Wild Bunch was aired on February 17, 1955, the same week that Nicholas Ray began testing several young actresses for an important role opposite James Dean in his next film for Warners, Rebel Without a Cause. Dean, of course, was one reason that Natalie wanted the part; the other was the part itself. She had obtained a copy of the script through the agent currently in Maria’s good graces, Dick Clayton of Famous Artists, and for the first time in her life announced what she wanted—an interview with Nick Ray.
The script that Natalie read (dated January 21, 1955) was only two-thirds finished, with the rest in synopsis form. To develop a screenplay from his own story outline, Nick had first engaged Irving Shulman, author of The Amboy Dukes, a novel about juvenile delinquents from apparently “normal” middle-class families. But although Nick liked some of Shulman’s ideas, director and writer disliked each other personally. For a second draft Nick turned to Stewart Stern, who had w
ritten a movie he admired (Teresa, directed by Fred Zinnemann) and was also friendly with Dean.
After their first script conference, Stern realized that “Nick had a vision of what he wanted to say” but was unable to articulate it clearly. Fortunately, Stern had his own vision after reading Shulman’s material. In the story of three young people deeply alienated from their families, he saw the possibility of “a modern version of Peter Pan,” with the trio pooling their frustrations and inventing a world of their own. This way, Stewart suggested, they could make a film about “the nature of loneliness and love.”
As well as connecting immediately with Nick, Stern’s way drew an immediate emotional response from Natalie. She identified strongly with Judy’s rebellion against her family and her discovery of something that Natalie herself had been denied: friendship with her own kind. But Jack Warner wanted a star (actual or, in his view, potential) for the role. By the time Nick agreed to interview Natalie, he’d been obliged to test Debbie Reynolds, Jayne Mansfield, Pat Crowley (1954’s “Star of Tomorrow”), Kathryn Grant (soon to marry Bing Crosby and retire from the screen) and Margaret O’Brien, who amused him by confessing that she’d never been a rebel and always respected her parents. He rejected them all, and had almost made up his mind to cast Carroll Baker, whom he’d tested in New York on the recommendation of Elia Kazan.
At sixteen, Natalie was at least six years younger than all the other candidates except O’Brien, who was seventeen; and when she arrived at Nick’s office on the Warner lot, it was not only her youth that appealed to him. How quickly did Natalie realize that he found her extremely desirable, and how soon did Nick make his move? Possibly later that day; certainly not long afterward. The interview took place in the first week of February, and by the time she made her first test ten days later, they were lovers.
Talented dreamer, obsessive gambler, with a wearily handsome face, robust physique and fractured psyche, Nick Ray had mood swings that took him to the verge of manic depression. But his sexual appetite was not yet dulled by twenty years of heavy drinking. He had married and divorced two wives, initiated and broken off affairs with many women and a couple of men. Natalie, although a virgin, had already developed highly responsive sexual antennae, and they picked up Nick’s signals. He seemed mysterious, laconic and powerful, like an aging Heathcliff, and the timing was right for an act of open rebellion. Her parents, she knew, would be horrified when they learned about it, and Maria might have a convulsion; but the Star Mother would keep quiet for the sake of her daughter’s career.
Natalie, James Dean and Marsha Hunt before the first cast reading on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. After the reading, Hunt decided she didn’t like the part and was replaced by Ann Doran. (illustration credit 3.2)
When Natalie made her first test, James Dean was in New York. Dennis Hopper, already cast in Rebel Without a Cause and signed to a Warners contract, had taken his place in previous tests and did so again with Natalie. Although it was a rainy night, Nick shot the test on the studio back lot. Warners had decided that the movie would be shot in black-and-white CinemaScope, and as Hopper recalled, Nick wanted to see how the new lens would register darkness and rain: “By the time we finished, Natalie and I both felt like wet unhappy animals. Next day she phoned and asked for a date. I was astonished. We’d never met before, I came from a very conventional middle-class family in San Diego—although not as restrictive as Natalie’s—and this was the 1950s, when girls who’d turned sixteen only a few months earlier just didn’t do things like that.”
But Natalie did a thing like that, because Nick Ray had awakened her sexual drive, and she’d also tasted the excitement of release from convention. Freedom of choice—responding to her own needs instead of deferring to the needs of others—had existed only in her imagination until now. Hopper, recently turned twenty, was on the same road to emancipation. Once over the shock, he caught Natalie’s excitement and agreed to pick her up at the Chateau Marmont the next day. She planned their assignation like an experienced conspirator, asking him to wait outside in his car at five o’clock, when she’d be leaving Nick’s bungalow. (He liked love in the afternoon.) Obviously they couldn’t go to the Gurdin house, and Dennis shared his apartment with a roommate, so as night fell they drove up to the Hollywood Hills and, on the unlighted, rustic “Lovers’ Lane” stretch of Mulholland Drive, made love for the first time.
WARNER AND HIS executive assistant Steve Trilling were moderately impressed with Natalie’s test, but not convinced that she could sustain the role of Judy. Nick was convinced that she could and insisted on making a second test, which he directed after a week’s coaching.
Shortly afterward, on an unseasonably warm evening in February, Dennis Hopper took Natalie out to dinner, with one of her classmates from Van Nuys High whose name, years later, he is no longer sure of: “Later that night I was driving both girls back to their homes in the Valley when an oncoming car collided with my open convertible on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. All three of us were thrown out of my car, and although I escaped with minor bruises, like the classmate, Natalie had a slight concussion. I got scared because she was unconscious for maybe a minute. Then she recovered consciousness, and her wits, and asked me to call Nick, not her parents.”
But the emergency room receptionist at the hospital called the police, who arrived within a few minutes. They released Hopper and Natalie’s classmate after questioning because they had no serious injuries, then insisted on calling Natalie’s parents because she appeared slightly dazed. In Myron Meisel’s 1974 documentary on Nick Ray, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Natalie claimed that she “kept saying ‘Nick Ray, Nick Ray, the number is …’ I just kept repeating the number of the Chateau Marmont, so that’s what they did call. Nick sent his doctor down to the hospital, then he came down himself, and I said: ‘Nick, they called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent, now do I get the part?’ And I got it.”
In the documentary, Nick also told the story about someone at the hospital calling Natalie a juvenile delinquent, although both he and Natalie knew it had been invented by the Warner Bros. publicity department almost twenty years earlier. Neither of them ever talked publicly about their affair, and fell back on an old story for the sake of “respectability.” And for the same reason, Nick also pretended that he called the Gurdins before driving Natalie home.
Almost two years after the event, toward the end of 1956, Nick Ray told me privately why Natalie kept insisting that the police call him from the hospital; she dreaded the scene her parents would make if they learned about the accident. Coincidentally, Nick added, when he drove Natalie home after his doctor pronounced her fully recovered, he mentioned that he’d tried to call her from the studio earlier that afternoon. Warner and Trilling, he said, had seen the second test and agreed to cast her as Judy.
The classmate from Van Nuys High was in fact Jackie Eastes, one of several who promoted themselves to “close friend” after Natalie’s death and came forward like a legion of Forrest Gumps with accounts of happening to be present at various important moments in Natalie’s life. (Eastes even claimed that she recommended Sal Mineo for Plato in Rebel Without a Cause, after seeing him play a small part in his first movie, and Nick rewarded her with $200.) But the level of credibility in the case of all these “close friends” is on a par with the “inside stories” in fan magazines.
Dennis Hopper: When I think about those early days with Natalie, the way she called me up for a date after that first test in the rain, the cool way she handled two affairs at the same time, how quickly she told me to notify Nick and not her parents after the accident, I realize Natalie was way ahead of her time. Incredibly progressive. And maybe the first passive-aggressive.
She was certainly “way ahead of her time” in responding so directly to her need for sexual adventure with Dennis, and again when she realized that the affair with Nick was also his sexual adventure, not a deep involvement. In fact, as Dennis remembered, when Nick learned about the situation, “h
e accepted the threesome.”
At least until Maria learned about it.
STEWART STERN’S SCRIPT note on the character of Judy was an uncannily predictive comment on Natalie herself. “At sixteen,” he wrote before he’d met her, or Natalie had met Nick Ray, “she is in a panic of frustration regarding her father—needing his love and suffering when it is denied. This forces her to invite the attention of other men in order to punish him.” And perhaps not coincidentally, Natalie’s first lover was a man old enough (at forty-three) to be her father, with the same first name as Nick Gurdin.
WHEN JACK WARNER approved Natalie for the role of Judy, he made two conditions: she must sign a long-term contract with the studio, and must begin lessons with a voice coach as soon as possible.
The studio head now in control of Natalie’s career for the next ten years was a shrewd administrator who liked to meddle in creative matters, even though he once remarked that he’d rather “go on a fifty-mile hike than crawl through a book.” But his jovial smile and fondness for terrible jokes concealed more than a hard bargainer. He had surprising flashes of perception about the popular appeal of scripts and actors, and he also spotted Natalie’s one drawback: a lack of vocal range. She’d never before had to sustain an emotionally complex scene with abrupt changes of mood; and one of her test scenes (at the police station) for Rebel Without a Cause was virtually a monologue veering between confusion and loneliness, defiance and appeal for help.
Natalie Wood Page 10