As Maria liked him (“He made her laugh,” according to Carlyle), enjoyed being invited to “go out on the town” and was naturally impressed that Lana Turner had been a Willson client, she became a willing beard. “But Natalie’s mother didn’t laugh too often,” Carlyle recalled, “and Natalie was always trying to lighten the proceedings. They both had very ‘Russian’ lapses into melancholy, but I noticed that the film of sadness that occasionally covered Natalie’s face only happened in her mother’s presence. Mrs. Gurdin, by the way, had striking looks, like a Louise Brooks gone askew, but she was the formidable controlling presence when the four of us went out to nightspots like Cyrano and the Mocambo, and always the first to announce, ‘Time to go home.’ ”
At parties without her mother, Carlyle often saw Natalie “necking on a bed with a guy—hardly ever the same one—although I’m pretty sure, in spite of what some of them claimed later, that was as far as it went.” His most lasting impression was of someone “working a room in search of love.”
It was always a different room. Unconditional love, from her family or a lover, was something Natalie believed she had never been given.
FOR HER NEXT TV show of 1955 Natalie was loaned to Studio One and flown to New York immediately after Thanksgiving. In Miracle at Potters Farm, directed by Franklin Schaffner and aired on December 19, she played the teenage daughter of a widowed farmer. His death leaves her an almost penniless orphan, with three younger brothers to care for. The farm is insolvent, the family in danger of being split up, but although a long way geographically from Thirty-fourth Street, they’re saved by the same kind of “miracle.” And the movie delivers a more homespun but similar message: “You put your faith in something, everything turns out pretty well in the end.” “Everything” in this case means everything needed to make the farm operative again: truckloads of chickens, cows, animal foodstuff, seeds for growing crops, fertilizers, power tools and a new tractor.
With a star’s mandatory eye shadow, lipstick and impeccably styled hair, Natalie seems far too groomed for an impoverished farm girl, and has little to do except act nice and normal, worried and finally joyful. No pigtails, but otherwise she’s back where she started, in never-never land. A minor point of interest (there are no major ones) is that the eldest of her brothers is played by Burt Brinckerhoff, later to direct Natalie in one of her finest performances, in The Cracker Factory.
Two days after Christmas she was on the small screen again in an episode of Kings Row, one of three TV series recently launched by the studio under the collective title of Warner Bros. Presents. Like Casablanca and Cheyenne (the only one that ran for several seasons), it was a low-budget spinoff from a big-screen hit, padded with additional characters that bore no relation to the original movie; and in “The Wedding Gift,” Natalie played Dennis Hopper’s mail-order bride.
The end of her first year under the new Warners contract, in fact, marked the beginning of a professional life that often felt like another night journey. After the revelation of her talent in Rebel (to herself as well as to audiences), the studio would exile her from substantial acting roles for five more years. Now that she’d reached her full height of five foot two, with a tiny, finely proportioned ninety-five-pound figure that emphasized her large, exotically dark eyes, Warners decided that Natalie looked “ethnic” and cast her as a half-Mexican spitfire in her first movie of 1956. The Burning Hills was a western shot from mid-February to mid-April, and her opening lines, delivered from a horse and cart to a group of cowboys who flirt with her, are a preparation for the kind of dialogue she’ll have to struggle with: “You dirty gringos! You’re no good! None of you! You make a rathole of this town!”
Her co-star was Tab Hunter, playing a man on the run from a group of cattle thieves he’s threatened to expose, and he remembered that “Natalie had a lot of trouble with her accent. It was pretty terrible, and at one time the studio thought of getting a Hispanic actress to dub her.” As a child, she’d imitated a German accent unquestioningly and successfully in Tomorrow Is Forever, but as an adult in The Burning Hills she had “to begin all over again,” and acquire the technique of appearing to believe in a role that she found absurd.
With the help of a dialect coach, Natalie’s accent improved enough to become acceptably inauthentic, but as a half-breed on the range she faced yet another reality problem: as well as the standard orange vermilion lipstick, she wore thick mascara, a heavy black wig, and Latino body makeup as deep as an Acapulco tan—accessories dictated by the studio, of course. As Connie Nichols, Natalie’s hairdresser on several of her early Warner movies, recalled: “1950s makeup was always too heavy and garish, and Natalie was far more beautiful offscreen at this time. Unbelievably beautiful, in fact.”
Although almost as obsessed as MGM with the way its stars had to look, Warners was less successful at making them look their best, or even look the part. The only “creative” suggestion on record of Richard Whorf, producer of The Burning Hills, is his memo to the hairdressing department: “Natalie’s hair should be shorter, fluffier and not so coarse, [and] Tab Hunter is to grow no whiskers.” Whorf either didn’t know or didn’t care that in the pioneer West a half-Mexican girl with short fluffy hair was as improbable as a man on the run who managed to shave every day. But Natalie knew that she had to devise one authentic detail for herself. Always determined to conceal her distended wristbone, she circled it with a rawhide band.
The Burning Hills was one of several Warners movies made by a director who gave actors no help at all. “One thing Natalie and I agreed on,” Tab Hunter recalled, “was that being under contract to Warners, you learned who’s a hack and who’s the real thing.” And they agreed that Stuart Heisler, who directed The Burning Hills, was emphatically not the real thing. Hunter found him “completely unable to communicate with actors. In a film I made later, Heisler came over to Jack Palance, who was also in it, as he was starting to prepare a scene. The only thing he said was, ‘Remember, you hate cops!’ ” And Natalie had not forgotten Heisler’s behavior on The Star. This time she disliked him and her role so much that Heisler complained to Jack Warner about the way she deliberately overate during lunch breaks so she could “suddenly get sick,” and he threatened to “really bawl the hell out of her.”
Miscast and undirected in The Burning Hills, Natalie seems distinctly amateurish. It took Warners to dent her professionalism, and the studio did nothing to repair it by continuing to assign her to mediocre pictures and directors.
ALTHOUGH NATALIE and Tab Hunter were doomed to co-star in another terrible movie a few months later, at least they liked each other and even managed to enjoy working together. “We both wanted better material,” he recalled, “and agreed to try and make the best of what we were given.” They also enjoyed each other’s company offscreen, and were happiest in their roles when the studio cast them as “dates” at movie premieres and events. “Although you could go on suspension for refusing a part,” Tab Hunter explained, “you could refuse an arranged date, and Warners didn’t insist or penalize you for it. But there was no question of that with Natalie, who was always stimulating to be with.”
Another ethnic role: as a half-Mexican spitfire (with Tab Hunter, as a man on the run) in The Burning Hills (illustration credit 3.9)
At the 1956 Academy Awards ceremony, they saw the award for Best Supporting Actress, which Natalie had hoped to win for Rebel, go to Jo Van Fleet for East of Eden; and near the end of the show, Ingrid Bergman received the Best Actress award for Anastasia, a part Natalie would choose for her theater debut only a few months before she died.
“The awards were naturally on Natalie’s mind,” Tab Hunter remembered. “But she was also worried about the way her hair looked. We were shooting [The Burning Hills] very late that day, and it left her no time for a session with the hairdresser. ‘Why don’t you just cut it short?’ I said. ‘I was recently in Europe and saw a lot of girls who looked great with short hair.’ So she did, and it worked. Typical of the wa
y Natalie picked up on things right away.”
And over the next few years, columnists will note Natalie’s frequently changing hairstyles, from European short cut to debutante, long mane to upswept; they will also comment on her series of wardrobe changes, from all-American teenager (capri pants and striped sweater) to glamour girl (low-cut black satin evening gown). Denied the challenge of variety in movie roles, the frustrated actress also develops a variety of life roles: simple teenage girl and animal lover with her dogs, birds and toy leopards; dedicated artiste who places career above romance; movie star hiding behind enormous dark glasses in her red Thunderbird; girl-about-town “romantically linked” by Hedda and Louella with almost every young actor on the Warner lot and (this is when the long cigarette holder first appears) “hoping to own a real leopard one day.”
All these life roles, of course, were only surface experiments, monitored by Maria and the publicity department at Warners, and the studio treadmill limited Natalie’s time for exploring life outside the gates of Burbank. In any case, she wasn’t ready for it. As a minor with no control over her money until her twenty-first birthday, she couldn’t leave home even if she wanted to; and with relatively little knowledge of the great world, she was still very insecure about her ability to function as an independent adult. With so many of her everyday needs taken care of by Maria or the studio, there were curious gaps in Natalie’s everyday practical knowledge. It would take her another ten years to learn what to pack when traveling alone; and another gap would become the subject of a joke: “Sure I’m domestic—I know how to order room service.”
But the strongest roadblock in Natalie’s present life was that she hadn’t yet freed herself from the childhood reflex of doing as she was told; and she now faced, in the person of Jack Warner, an authority figure even more powerful than her mother.
Shortly after The Burning Hills finished shooting, Maria took Natalie to Hawaii for a week. “She was very excited about it,” Tab Hunter remembered, “and told me it was the first real vacation she’d ever had.” But it wasn’t a vacation from authority, as the studio paid for it, and in return Natalie had to pose for publicity shots with Hugh O’Brian, the popular star of its TV series Wyatt Earp. They were photographed dancing together on the beach at Honolulu, Natalie in a swimsuit, O’Brian in swimming trunks pressed tightly against her. “He’s too fast for me,” she told Olga later, adding that she refused his invitation to a dinner date.
Back at the studio, where Jack Warner had begun to increase production of movies for TV under the Warner Bros. Presents umbrella, Natalie was immediately assigned to The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Publicized as “a modern version of Chaucer,” it aired May 22, but apparently no copies have survived. And on June 12 Natalie began her second picture with Tab Hunter, written by Marion Hargrove, who specialized in comedies of army life. The Girl He Left Behind was the last and least of them; Natalie later referred to it as “The Girl with the Left Behind.” Tab Hunter remembered that she grew increasingly impatient with the material and its workhorse director, David Butler: “She hated every moment because she wanted something better. But she was always very prepared, very professional, even for dreck. At times I thought she even worked too hard at ‘exploring a character’ when there was no character to explore.”
A few days before shooting ended, Hunter introduced Natalie to Scott Marlowe, an actor friend from New York who had studied at the Actors Studio and just completed a small role in his first film, Men in War. They “clicked,” according to Hunter, “both personally and because Scott was serious and knowledgeable about acting.” After a spy for Louella Parsons reported seeing them at several little theaters (Hollywood’s equivalent of off-Broadway), she announced that Marlowe was “the great love of Natalie’s life.” He wasn’t, but Natalie had begun a relationship as unconventional (in 1956) as her affair with Nick Ray.
Her first studio-arranged date with a gay or bisexual actor had been with Nick Adams, whom the publicity department considered a more likely “beau” than Sal Mineo for the New York premiere of Rebel. His amiable manner and eagerness to please gained her confidence for a while, and he also played up to Natalie’s girl-about-town role by blatantly seizing every photo opportunity to put his arms around her and making sure the gossip columnists took note. (Later she had reason to agree with Nick Ray’s verdict: “The most ambitious actor I’ve ever known.”) Her next arranged date, after A Cry in the Night, was with Raymond Burr, who played the sophisticated Older Man of the World and escorted her to Romanoff’s and La Rue. “We had escargots for dinner last night,” Natalie told Hedda Hopper, playing up to Burr as expertly as she would play down Adams, when he became too persistent, by describing him as “always more like a brother.”
Robert Wagner: From the first, Natalie had no problem accepting something still taboo at the time, and formed many lifelong friendships with gay men. And she was always totally loyal, never talked about their private lives.
But Scott Marlowe was Natalie’s first gay friend to become an object of attraction; and as with Dennis Hopper, her first heterosexual friend, they “occasionally went to bed together.” Career-minded to an almost obsessive degree, but an adept sexual politician, as Dick Clayton, his agent at Famous Artists recalled, Marlowe was a regular at Hollywood’s leading gay bar of the period, the Red Raven. Jack Larson (playing Jimmy Olsen in the Superman TV series with George Reeves at the time) remembers Marlowe as darkly handsome, fashionably sullen, beer bottle in hand, always dressed in black, “with something desperate in his aggressive pose as a sex object, and a glazed look in his eyes, as if he really hated being gay.”
Before James Dean definitely committed to play Jim Stark in Rebel, Marlowe had been one of several members of the Actors Studio interviewed by Nick Ray as a possible second choice. He tasted movie honey and moved to Hollywood, but adopted the defiant anti-Hollywood stance of some of his New York colleagues—not a good idea unless you’ve already proved your talent (like Dean in East of Eden), and although Marlowe impressed several directors, producers and acting teachers as talented, his behavior alienated them.
Trent Dolan, another of Dick Clayton’s clients, went to the same acting class as Marlowe, and “saw him do a scene as a fucked-up teenager. He was brilliant, but he played every part the same way, it was all he could do. When [acting teacher] Charles Conrad finally said, ‘Scott, now try and do something we haven’t seen you do,’ he got furious, walked out, and never came back.”
Marlowe created a good deal of publicity for himself as Natalie’s “great love,” but his career was virtually over five years later, after only one leading role in a superior low-budget movie, A Cold Wind in August. The remaining forty-five years of his life brought one more good role in a TV movie, No Place Like Home, a handful of routine supporting parts, and a final decade of violent mental disturbance.
“I was always telling Scott to lighten up,” Tab Hunter recalled, but Natalie responded to a fellow rebel with the allure of an Actors Studio background, and admired his open contempt for the Hollywood machine. As for his sexuality, Hunter (as discreet as Natalie herself) never talked about his own or his friends’ private lives; but whether or not Marlowe confided in Natalie, her sexual radar seldom failed to pick up signals. And Marlowe’s signals would certainly have aroused her sense of adventure and her curiosity.
Natalie and Tab Hunter as themselves during a break on location for The Girl He Left Behind (illustration credit 3.10)
By 1956 “Child Star Grows Up” and “Love Smites Natalie Wood” had headlined gossip columns often enough to alarm her mother, who viewed a romance (as she’d already proved in the case of Dennis Hopper) as even more threatening than a close friendship. Maria knew that some of Natalie’s dates were orchestrated by the studio, but she couldn’t be sure about all of them; and although no longer able to exercise total control over her daughter’s life, she found ways to monitor it. Like the timekeeper who clocked studio employees in and out of Warners, she waited for Na
talie’s return from a date, examined her daughter’s skirt for wrinkles, then inspected her underwear for possible stains.
JACK WARNER LOANED Natalie and Dennis Hopper to the Kaiser Aluminum Hour that summer for Carnival, a live TV show directed by George Roy Hill, with Natalie playing a hoochy-koochy dancer and Dennis a barker. It aired from New York on August 24, and no record of it survives, but according to Dennis the loss is not for mourning.
In mid-September Warners released The Burning Hills, to instant commercial success and a notable increase in fan-mail for its stars. The studio quickly prepared a more ambitious publicity campaign for the November release of The Girl He Left Behind, and sent Natalie and Hunter to New York for press interviews and a joint TV appearance on the October 15 Perry Como Show. The protocol for these shows was that the host promoted the movie and his guests “entertained,” and for Como’s audience Natalie and Tab ice-skated to music.
Nick Adams, who happened to be in New York that week, had recently managed to ingratiate himself with Elvis Presley. He told Natalie that the singer wanted to know if he might ask his favorite actress for a date. “Natalie was all shook up after Presley called and asked her to go out with him when she got back to Los Angeles,” Tab Hunter remembered; and the dinner date led to an invitation to visit Presley at home in Memphis.
Natalie at eighteen was no longer obliged, as she remarked later, “to have a welfare worker following me around everywhere, including the bathroom.” On November 1, wearing movie-star dark glasses, scarf around her head, sweater and jeans, she flew to Memphis under an assumed name. But she was unofficially chaperoned by Nick Adams, who had maneuvered an invitation for himself as well, and alerted the press. Hundreds of fans assembled outside Presley’s mansion for Natalie’s arrival, and when the couple went out to dinner at the Hotel Chisca, hundreds more waited outside the entrance, then screamed their names when they arrived. Next day Presley took Natalie for a ride on his new motorcycle, with Adams following on one of the singer’s older models.
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