Although Natalie had heard at least some of the stories about Hilton, she was not deterred; and Maria, eyes and ears on constant alert, certainly heard some of them as well. But when the affair began in December 1956, she made no attempt to discourage it. Like movie stardom, wealth was sacrosanct.
IN JANUARY 1957, fifteen-year old Natasha Zepaloff and her grandmother (the tsarist general’s widow) spent a few days in Los Angeles; and one afternoon, when Natalie was at the house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Maria invited them over. By coincidence, Natasha was wearing her hair in a short cut similar to Natalie’s in The Girl He Left Behind. Natalie noted this at once and laughed, then said she had to get ready for a date with Nicky Hilton and asked Natasha to help her choose what to wear. She opened her extensive bedroom closet, and Maria watched approvingly as they agreed on a white dress, silver shoes and ermine wrap.
Later, Natasha recalled this as the first time “I felt a strong connection with Natalie without knowing why.” When she felt it again, the occasion was always stage-managed by Maria, with an imprudent relish for intrigue. Once she drew Natasha’s attention to a framed photograph of Natalie and Nick Gurdin. “There’s Natalie with her father,” she said, and accompanied the word “father” with a broad wink.
BUT WHAT SUDDENLY propelled Natalie to change lovers in midstream when she was so powerfully attracted to RJ? Several years later, after their divorce, she began the second most serious affair of her life, with Richard Gregson; and it seems more than coincidental that before she married him, Natalie came close to repeating the pattern. The episode again involved Hilton, and Gregson remembered that “she couldn’t figure it out, and was overcome with deep pain.” Even though she was in analysis by then, there were two things that Natalie apparently hadn’t yet figured out. Like her mother, she was sometimes compelled to court danger; and she wasn’t simply undeterred by Nicky Hilton’s reputation, but excited by it. Another compulsion was also a legacy from Maria, who had repeatedly warned Natalie as a child to mistrust anyone who tried to get close to her. Consequently, Natalie as an adult drew back from emotional fulfillment at the same time as she pursued it.
Robert Wagner: Natalie had moods that would sometimes drive me up the wall.
But it was only after marrying her that he began to analyze them. Earlier, in his man-about-town role, he told a reporter: “There were so many boys around Natalie that you had to beat a path to her door.” But by the time he’d beaten the path and the competition, and Hilton had decided to beat a path to Joan Collins’s door, RJ was about to leave for Japan and Stopover Tokyo.
On March 12, 1957, their last date before he left, he gave Natalie a gold charm bracelet with “Wow Charlie” engraved on one of the charms. (They’d picked up the expression from On the Waterfront, and “Charlie” had become their private nickname for each other.) The prospect of separation had evidently made RJ accept the reality of a serious affair; the fact of separation intensified it; and over the next four months he called Natalie almost every day from his Tokyo hotel.
“I think we both realized how deeply in love we were during the time RJ was in Japan,” Natalie said later. “I dated occasionally, but my heart was not in it.”
Apart from RJ, her heart was mainly occupied with her career, and she enlisted the help of the William Morris Agency in persuading Jack Warner to cast her in the title role of Marjorie Morningstar. She had read Herman Wouk’s best-selling novel soon after Warner acquired the rights and was discouraged when the agency reported that he planned to sign either Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn.
Natalie was encouraged again when Tab Hunter, who had recently enjoyed a jukebox success with a song he recorded for Dot Records, suggested that she follow his lead and take singing lessons. The idea of a new career as recording stars was a pipe dream for both of them, of course, but at the time it promised a way of escape from Warners.
Meanwhile, in the last week of March, the studio loaned Natalie out to Bob Hope Enterprises for an appearance on one of his occasional TV specials. (This time she wasn’t even promoting one of her own movies. The deal guaranteed the studio $7,500 and “a 30-second plug for The Spirit of St. Louis.”) Natalie and Hope performed a 1920s Charleston and a 1950s rock-and-roll number, and a record of the show makes it clear how much she owed to her early training as Natasha Gurdina at Ermolova’s “dancing studio” and her later classes with Michael Panaieff and Tamara Lepko. They not only developed her instinct for graceful movement, but supplied her with the basic elements of technique (as Jerome Robbins discovered when they worked together on West Side Story). While Hope clowns along, she really dances: fluid, rhythmical, with perfect coordination. Also, she’s obviously enjoying this performance far more than her recent roles at Warners.
Two weeks later, there was encouraging news from the Morningstar front: as neither Elizabeth Taylor nor Audrey Hepburn would be available for the movie, the Morris Agency had arranged for Herman Wouk to interview Natalie in New York. But discouragement followed. Wouk found her beautiful, alluring, precocious and very determined—the polar opposite of his naive, insecure Jewish girl with a hopeless dream of becoming a famous Broadway actress. The author had casting approval, and his rejection seemed final; but in late April, when the “right” actress still had not been found, the Morris Agency convinced Milton Sperling, producer of the movie (and Jack Warner’s son-in-law), to test Natalie.
The test, like the movie itself, was directed by Irving Rapper, whom Wouk had approved after turning down Michael Curtiz (who was eager to make it) as “too old-fashioned,” and preferring Daniel Mann, on the crest of the wave after the success of I’ll Cry Tomorrow, with Susan Hayward in one of her flamboyant lady-on-the-skids roles as Lillian Roth. But Mann proved unavailable, and everyone agreed on Rapper, “who used to hold the script for me,” as Bette Davis once remarked to Robert Wagner about the director of Now, Voyager.
Since the role of the young writer who falls in love with Marjorie had not yet been cast, a hopeful unknown was hired for the test; and Rapper, who seemed out of humor, made Natalie feel unnervingly tense. But in spite or perhaps because of the tension, she played a love scene with the hopeful unknown so effectively that both Sperling and Warner decided to bring Wouk out to Burbank to see the test. A typical example of Jack Warner’s thrift, it was shot in black-and-white against a couple of flats, with lighting that Wouk described as “harsh and slovenly,” and clumsy, hurried camerawork that allowed Natalie to move out of frame several times. All the same, three minutes into the scene, Wouk realized how naive he’d been to reject Natalie because he couldn’t imagine her in the role when they met for lunch in New York: “My Marjorie would have been stammering and feeble talking to a novelist 20 years older than herself. She would have spilled coffee or dropped a fork. Natalie Wood wore a seductively cut red dress [and] carried off the interview with unshaken aplomb. She took charge. But [in the test] she was absolutely electrifying! This was my Marjorie, yearning for a career she clearly would never have, irresistibly appealing in her awkward immaturity.”
No copy of the test has survived, although a couple of stills from it certainly suggest the “electrifying” Marjorie that Wouk saw. But it was not the Marjorie of the completed movie, for reasons that include a series of often contradictory revisions to Everett Freeman’s script throughout the shoot (from August 19 to November 17); the lack of connection between Natalie and Irving Rapper, by then a tired workhorse; and a drastic change, ordered by the producer, in the character of the young writer who falls in love with Marjorie. Natalie had hoped for Montgomery Clift in the role as originally conceived, but the writer mutated to an actor-dancer played by forty-six-year-old Gene Kelly.
Wouk’s novel is a long, bulky, sentimental package, which the movie packaged even more sentimentally. For Wouk to make Marjorie (née Morgenstern) Jewish seems more a gimmick than an essential part of her star-is-not-born story, and in the movie the Jewish element is so diluted that it has no effect on her WASP lover, who�
��s only momentarily restive at the Morgensterns’ Passover dinner. And when the aspiring actress changes her name to Morningstar, so she won’t be thought Jewish, it passes without comment or explanation. Worst of all, as Natalie remembered, “I was in tears during the whole movie. They couldn’t decide on a point of view. One day Marjorie was desperately serious about becoming an actress, a few days later it wasn’t important to her. So you’d play her one way for several scenes, then they’d change.”
A palpable lack of chemistry with Kelly, who knew he was miscast and felt uncomfortable in his role, was an additional problem; and it no doubt accounts for Natalie’s unexpectedly flat reaction when he says he can’t marry her. Partly because family confrontation scenes always sparked a strong personal response, her performance is at its best in the scenes with Claire Trevor, who played her mother and somehow managed to be believable even when miscast and misfitted with a dark brown wig. And in the movie Natalie even looks different than she did in the test, too groomed and styled and lipsticked—another example of Warner Bros. putting her through its glamour blender.
When Marjorie Morningstar was finally released in April 1958 (after four months in the editing room), it received cool reviews and barely escaped box-office failure. Natalie saw it as the latest and greatest in a series of career disappointments since Rebel Without a Cause. Unlike the others, it had seemed to offer serious possibilities, all dissipated in production.
“NATALIE AND I first became good friends in the late 1950s,” Donfeld recalled, “after meeting socially a few times.” In those days he was designing album covers for Capitol Records, among them Frank Sinatra’s. “I knew she had this idea of becoming a recording star, and asked Capitol’s top producer, Voyle Gilmore, to meet with her and discuss the possibility of making a test cut for the label. He was very enthusiastic about the idea, and suggested we meet her during a break in the filming of Marjorie Morningstar.
On the day that Donfeld arranged to pick Natalie up on the set and walk her over to the studio commissary, where Gilmore would join them, Rapper was rehearsing a scene between Claire Trevor and Howard Bert, who played Marjorie’s young brother, and “humiliating him cruelly for his inexperience.” An angry Claire Trevor told the director to leave him alone. “For God’s sake, he’s doing his best!” she said, and put her arms around the boy. Suddenly Natalie appeared at her side, put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and joined Trevor in fixing the director with an accusing stare. Embarrassed, Rapper turned abruptly away. “I loved Natalie for that,” Donfeld remembered; and although the two actresses didn’t become friends until several years later, Trevor recalled the scene “as the moment I knew that one day we would.”
But the test cut of “Little Girl Blue” that Natalie agreed to make for Gilmore was the end of a pipe dream. Throughout her life, whenever she wanted to succeed at something, from acting to graduating from high school to motherhood, she really worked at it. But in spite of singing lessons, vocal exercises and sheer determination, “she just didn’t have much of a singing voice,” according to Donfeld, “and the test was no good. More than a few off-pitch notes. Even though it was typical of Natalie to continue working on her voice, and improving it, she could never sing well enough to record her own songs for West Side Story or Inside Daisy Clover.”
DURING THE LONG shoot of a boring movie in Tokyo, RJ satisfied an occasional urge for release “with a couple of Japanese girls.” And soon after Natalie began work on Marjorie Morningstar, Nicky Hilton seized the chance to resume his affair with her (while his other object of affection, Joan Collins, was co-starring in Stopover Tokyo). Did Natalie and RJ feel they needed a last diversion before accepting total commitment to each other? In any case, it should be apparent by now that a sexual history of Hollywood in the 1950s would reveal patterns of behavior that looked ahead to the “liberation” of the 1960s, and were far more unorthodox than the professional gossips discovered, or reported, or were bribed not to report.
RJ returned from Japan while Marjorie Morningstar was still in production at Burbank, and Nicky Hilton, according to Olga, was hoping to marry Natalie. But when RJ and Natalie saw each other again, they knew at once that separation had only heightened their desire to commit to each other. The end of Hilton as Natalie’s lover, and potential husband, was the beginning of a dialogue between Natalie and RJ, tentative at first, on getting married. And when the Morningstar unit moved to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks for three weeks of location work, RJ joined Natalie there. Maria, who invited herself and Lana to join them, occupied one bedroom of Natalie’s suite at Schroon Manor, a luxury hotel with its own private beach, while RJ shared the other with Natalie. Their open cohabitation made Maria uneasy, but she managed to twinkle when she served the lovers breakfast in bed. In fact she had nothing to fear, and the “scandal” was never leaked to the press—a situation unimaginable today.
Two days after Morningstar finished shooting, Natalie reported to Paramount for her next assignment, which came about through Norman Brokaw. Bert Allenberg, the William Morris senior agent who handled Frank Sinatra, had told Brokaw that his client would agree to appear in Kings Go Forth only if Warners agreed to loan Natalie to Frank Ross–Eton Productions for the picture. Although Jack Warner hesitated at first, once again fearful of a contract star doing too well at a rival studio, he was finally unable to resist a tasty offer: $55,000 for Natalie’s services for a maximum of twelve weeks. As Producer would be paying his star no more than her regular weekly salary of $750, he was guaranteed a 500 percent profit on the deal.
Brokaw had assured Natalie that Kings Go Forth, in which Tony Curtis had also been cast, would mark an important step in her career. But she had two reasons to feel ambivalent about it. The first was the prospect of another “exotic” role: Monique, an American girl with a black father, who’s been brought up in France and speaks with a French accent. The second was Sinatra himself, by 1957 a powerful combination of exceptionally gifted popular singer, movie star, charismatic bad boy and liberal hero.
Until the release of FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act, Sinatra’s political record was overshadowed by the record of his connections with La Cosa Nostra and his reputation for sexual voracity. But it’s an important part of the case history of this enormously successful and troubled man, and helps to explain the fascination he held for so many people, Natalie among them. In 1945 Sinatra had produced and appeared in The House I Live In, a short film pleading the cause of racial and religious tolerance; and he also supported several other admirable causes that the FBI considered “subversive” (among them the American Crusade to End Lynching, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and the American Society for Cultural Relations with Italy). In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee decided it had enough evidence to accuse him of being a Communist, and although the charge was never proved, it earned Sinatra a pair of influential right-wing enemies in the media. Columnist Walter Winchell and radio commentator Gerald LK Smith repeatedly attacked him as a draft-dodging, fellow-traveling, overpaid crooner, and his career went into a seven-year decline.
But it rebounded swiftly after he won an Academy Award in 1954 for his performance in From Here to Eternity. Over the next two years Sinatra recorded a series of best-selling albums in collaboration with arranger Nelson Riddle, received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in The Man with the Golden Arm, bought an elaborate home in Palm Springs, acquired an interest in the Sands casino in Las Vegas in partnership with a former associate of Al Capone and became friendly with Senator John F. Kennedy.
When Lord Byron acquired the reputation of “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” it only increased the number of people, especially women, eager to know him. The same thing happened to Sinatra, and like Byron he took advantage of it. Perhaps not coincidentally, their recent biographers have concluded that both men, with their apparently uncontrollable mood swings from warmhearted to cruel, generous to vindictive, lived on the cusp of manic depression.
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As well as a private call sheet of prostitutes and Vegas showgirls, Sinatra had a list of star conquests that included Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, whom he briefly married, Lauren Bacall and Marlene Dietrich. On Kings Go Forth, it soon became clear that the forty-five-year-old bad boy expected to add Natalie to the list, as she herself had expected and feared. And if she hadn’t been in love with RJ, she might even have responded to the call of sexual adventure, or at least enjoyed a serious flirtation.
Throughout her life, Natalie was a compulsive, charming flirt, and “flirting is a quest for approval, like acting,” as one of her later friends, actor James B. Sikking, pointed out. “It fills a pocket of insecurity. The more response you get, the more you flirt, and Natalie loved to swish her tail.” But by holding out against Sinatra, she risked his anger, which she knew could be brutal. In the event, he was intrigued by a vulnerable sweetness that he perceived behind Natalie’s tail swishing. And while kindly Sinatra eased the pressure and grew genuinely fond of her, ruthless Sinatra determined to try again later. At the same time, Natalie was fascinated by a “bad boy glamour” with more substance than Nicky Hilton’s; and for a few years during the 1960s, their relationship became another case of “friends who occasionally went to bed together.”
By the time Natalie reported to Paramount, Kings Go Forth had been in production for two months. Its story took place in the south of France during the last months of World War II, when a company of American soldiers (headed by Sinatra and Curtis) was dispatched to eliminate a pocket of German resistance in the mountains above Cannes. The action sequences had to be shot there before winter set in, and with Natalie busy on Morningstar, the script was adjusted so that only her double would be needed on location—a change that no doubt partly accounts for the excessive voice-over narration (by Sinatra) in Merle Miller’s final script, and incidentally doubled Producer’s profit by reducing Natalie’s total work schedule to six weeks.
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