Richard Beymer: I think there was a residue of animosity toward Natalie because of that test for Rebel, and it contributed to our situation. But a few years later we caught sight of each other at a nightclub on Sunset Strip. Natalie waved, came over to my table, and we talked for a few moments. She was incredibly sweet, left me thinking what a lovely person she was, and I felt genuinely attracted to her.
By the time Natalie and Beymer began work on West Side Story, it was almost three weeks behind schedule, mainly due to Robbins, who often made twenty takes of the same shot. “Although he devised some incredible shots,” according to associate producer Saul Chaplin, not all of them proved usable, and “the pace of shooting was incredibly slow.”
From the first, Robbins had little rapport with Wise, and totally ignored him while directing the dance numbers. “So Wise just sat there as Robbins got further behind schedule,” according to Mart Crowley, “and waited for Mirisch to do something about it.” When the unit moved to Goldwyn, Mirisch sent Robbins a memo congratulating him on the New York material, “even though it went over budget,” but cautioning: “Now you’re back in the safety of the studio, you must pick up the pace of shooting.”
Robbins never acknowledged it, and never replied to another memo a week later, when the movie had gone two more days over schedule: “Do keep strongly in mind the necessity of holding the picture within a budget we can manage.” And Crowley recalled that when he rehearsed and choreographed Natalie’s rooftop dance, and her number in the bridal shop, he continued to ignore Wise.
The rooftop dance, when Maria anticipates meeting Tony later in the evening, was not in the Broadway production. Robbins created it for Natalie. “She was musical, she’d had some training as a dancer,” he said, and his understanding of her limits resulted in a charming but incongruous solo, much closer in style to a pas seul by Balanchine for the New York City Ballet than to a dance on a Puerto Rican family’s rooftop.
Natalie’s pale blue dress for the rooftop dance was the occasion of a sharp disagreement with Irene Sharaff, who had also designed the costumes for the Broadway production. Natalie repeatedly claimed that Sharaff’s fondness for puffed sleeves was unflattering to her tiny figure, and although Sharaff modified them this time, she usually held her ground. But their frequent clashes, according to Donfeld, added to the professional tensions on the set. “Sharaff tried vainly to convince Natalie that no girl in a Puerto Rican ghetto would even faintly resemble a young Hollywood star, but the more she pushed, the more obstinate Natalie became. Finally, her personal dresser helped Natalie sneak some of Sharaff’s most integral work off the lot to the dressmaking shop of Howard Shoup, who’d designed costumes for several of her movies at Warners. When Natalie arrived on the set for the dance at the gymnasium, where Maria first meets Tony, her dress was so poorly altered that Sharaff and her two key assistants walked off the set.”
By the time Robbins started to rehearse the dance at the gym, he’d completed all the other numbers. But the movie was more than four weeks behind schedule, and on October 21 Mirisch fired him. When Natalie heard the news, “she marched right in and told Walter Mirisch what she thought,” Robbins later recalled. “Typical of her. When there were difficulties, she was right there with you.”
As telling Mirisch “what she thought” included a threat to leave the picture unless Robbins was reinstated, he called in Abe Lastfogel at William Morris to mediate the situation. Lastfogel warned Natalie against making a disastrous career move, and after Robbins gave her the same advice, she reluctantly backed down.
The problem for Mirisch, and for Robbins himself, was that in the man who “conceived, directed, and choreographed” the Broadway production of West Side Story, talent, charm, homosexual guilt and a compensating arrogance were evenly matched. From the start, he had antagonized both Mirisch and Wise, and Robert Banas (who danced one of the Jets) remembers that when Robbins came on the gymnasium set after being fired, he even slighted the dancers he’d worked to the verge of collapse. “I’m indispensable, but you’re not!” he shouted at them, then walked out again.
Howard Jeffrey, his personal assistant, left with Robbins, and Natalie lost (but only temporarily) another new friend. A former dancer who had assisted Robbins on the stage production, Jeffrey supervised the first cut of all the movie sequences that Robbins directed, and coached Natalie in the more complex steps. At Robbins’s suggestion, she turned for help to Tony Mordente, another of his assistants and one of the Jets dancers. As Robbins had only worked out the choreography for the male dancers in the gym scene, Mordente created the steps for the girls as well as rehearsing Natalie on weekends. According to Crowley, he was also very helpful when Robert Wise took over: “It seemed to me that Wise had no idea how to shoot a dance number, where to put the camera. His only instruction to Rita Moreno and the girls was, ‘Okay, girls—hot peppers!’ ”
Fortunately, Robbins retained some creative control over the editing, including the right to make suggestions after he viewed the semifinal cut. The notes he made focus mainly on the dance at the gym, which he described in a memo to Wise as “looking like general dance confusion.” The idea of “the rival gangs competing to take over the dance floor had been lost,” he pointed out, and “Tony and Maria must meet at the fiercest moment of the gangs’ crescendoing competitive dancing. This is terribly important to remedy.”
He also criticized the way Wise had re-edited “Maria,” making the dialogue on the balcony “so short and brief that when Tony and Maria begin to sing you’re back in an old MGM musical and you have Jane Powell and Howard Keel singing at each other rather than having the great emotional surge of a longer scene.” According to Natalie: “When [Robbins] was taken off the picture and later brought back for advice, he didn’t give technical advice. He would say, ‘Cut to the emotion, cut to the people, cut to the movement.’ I also found he was a fantastic actors’ director, [and] was so clever about film that he’d sometimes say to the cutter, ‘It’s ten frames off’ or something, and [the cutter] would say, ‘It’s impossible to know that,’ and he would say, ‘I’d like you to check it,’ and it would be ten frames off. And the way he moved the camera with the dancers was truly innovative.”
Although Wise took Robbins’s advice, “Maria” remains the most conventional number in the movie. Its romantic scenes, in fact, have not worn well. When Robbins cast Natalie, he realized he was taking a chance, because “you didn’t think of her as this naïve young Hispanic girl,” and at times her performance suggests that Natalie found it difficult to think of herself this way. But the role itself is blandly written until the final scene, when Maria denounces the rival gangs over Tony’s dead body—and Natalie brings a strong emotional charge to a love affair that neither she nor Beymer could bring to it while Tony was alive.
As Natalie still hoped to perform her own songs, she took singing lessons when she wasn’t on call, but an outtake of her recording “Tonight” to a playback is excruciatingly shrill and frequently off-pitch. (Maria Gurdin, as Olga Viripaeff remembered, also “couldn’t carry a tune.”) According to Rita Stone, a nightclub singer and Saul Chaplin’s lover, “Natalie’s insistence on recording all her numbers was the only thing about her that drove Saul crazy. But Rita Moreno really drove Saul crazy. It took a lot of pressure to stop her putting on weight, because Rita was convinced that a fuller figure and especially a bigger butt would make her more sexy.”
This obsession was most likely a by-product of Moreno’s more serious cause for alarm about her appearance. A thyroid malfunction sometimes caused her eyes to bulge slightly, as well as creating dark shadows under them. At the time there was no effective medication for the problem, and although the makeup man was able to conceal the shadows, it seems probable that anxiety was partly responsible for the “friction” (Banas’s word) that Moreno generated with Natalie. Several members of the original Broadway cast felt that Hollywood stardom was Natalie’s only qualification for the role of Maria, and Moreno emphatic
ally agreed; but as an actress eager for stardom, she also seemed jealous of an actress who’d achieved it, was seven years younger than herself and seductively slim.
When Chaplin and Wise heard Natalie’s test recordings, they pretended to approve them rather than disillusion her with the truth. Then, after the movie completed production, they brought in Marni Nixon to dub her singing, and Natalie had no recourse except to make clear, once again, what she thought. Unfortunately, Nixon’s semioperatic style, well suited to Deborah Kerr’s governess in The King and I, seemed no more Hispanic than the rooftop dance.
But as a whole the Robbins dances remain among the most imaginative sequences in any film musical; and when West Side Story opened at the Rivoli Theater in New York on October 18, 1961, the greater part of its success was due to him and his collaborators, dancers George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn and Rita Moreno, and to Leonard Bernstein for his score. (Although Robbins directed all but one of the dance sequences, Wise objected to his credit of “musical numbers staged by,” and it was changed to “choreography by.”) In the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight thought the movie’s only failure was “when it attempts high tragedy,” and several other reviewers found the Shakespearean parallel of Tony/Romeo and Maria/Juliet unconvincing. It seems more artificial on the screen, in fact, than in the theater, because West Side Story is the only important movie musical whose stars are not professional singers or dancers.
Although the Morris triumvirate was right to advise Natalie not to walk off the movie after Mirisch fired Robbins, they were less shrewd in negotiating her contract. As Wagner recalled, United Artists had offered Natalie $200,000 plus a choice between an extra $50,000 or 5 percent of the profits. “I advised her to take the percentage, but Abe Lastfogel convinced her that musicals never made much money, and the $50,000 was a much safer bet. She took it, and of course regretted it bitterly after the movie proved an enormous commercial hit.”
West Side Story. Final scene: Maria (Natalie, in her last ethnic role) after Tony (Richard Beymer) has been killed (illustration credit 4.12)
WHEN SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS opened in New York a few days before West Side Story, it received three important negative reviews. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, John McCarten in The New Yorker and Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic unanimously dismissed the story as “incredible” and objected to its “hysterical” tone. None of them, of course, had grown up in Kansas in the 1920s, or had any experience of the sexual problems of teenagers in the heartland. But it seems they were equally unfamiliar with Winesburg, Ohio, and failed to detect Inge’s nod to Sherwood Anderson, whose characters talk of passion “with a strained, eager quality,” whose George Willard is left, like Bud at the end of Splendor, “hearing voices outside himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life,” and whose Alice Hindman fears she “will do something dreadful” after her lover leaves town, but finally accepts “the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”
For the leading players the reviews were more generous, and Natalie’s performance would earn her a second Academy Award nomination. Like Rebel Without a Cause, this powerful and touching movie by Kazan and Inge found a strong response among youthful audiences, and a lesser but still considerable one among parents curious to know what their teenage sons and daughters were responding to.
MEANWHILE, in February 1961, Mart Crowley had moved into the garage apartment of the Wagners’ house; and day by day “their marriage seemed to be hanging by a thread.” A month later, both Natalie and RJ were relieved when he was offered a starring role in Sail a Crooked Ship at Columbia. Although RJ found the script of this crime-caper movie only moderately promising, he was encouraged by the offer of an option for two more pictures; but when Natalie visited the set, she was privately discouraged by its B-movie atmosphere. After completing two major movies herself, she saw RJ having to take what he could get, and a visit designed to boost her husband’s morale ended by lowering her own.
Producer’s idea for Natalie’s next major picture was Lovers Must Learn (later retitled Rome Adventure), with Troy Donahue as her leading man. “I’m sure it’s terrible,” she told Crowley when the script arrived, and asked him to read it for her. In a recycling of David Lean’s Summertime, Natalie would have played a younger Katharine Hepburn, on vacation in Rome instead of Venice, where two potential lovers instead of one awaited her. (Rossano Brazzi, repeating his role from Summertime, was cast as the other.) When Mart confirmed that the script was terrible, Natalie found a way to reject it without going on suspension again. “Now is the time for that tonsillectomy,” she said. During the last week of filming West Side Story she’d developed a mild sore throat, and although her doctor had warned that surgery would be necessary after she finished the picture, she hadn’t yet consulted him again: “So now she asked her doctor to write a letter advising her that postponement had made surgery essential, and she’d need several weeks to recover. Then she went to see Jack Warner, played a very effective scene pretending to feel devastated at losing the chance of a great role in a great picture, and showed him the letter.”
It worked, and Suzanne Pleshette took over the great role. But the surgery caused unexpectedly heavy bleeding, and Natalie remained at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica from April 6 to 15, and the unresolved crisis in her marriage, combined with two long, arduous, back-to-back shoots followed by a hemorrhage, lowered her morale even further. When she returned to North Beverly, she usually needed a sleeping pill at night and a tranquilizer to calm daytime attacks of panic.
On May 22 Natalie was due to report for The Inspector (later retitled Lisa), the first of two pictures for Fox that Warner had assigned her to make on a loan-out deal. It was yet another foreign-accent role, a Dutch-Jewish girl on the run from ex-Nazis at the end of World War II, and this time she got out of it by telling the truth. On May 20 she asked Abe Lastfogel to inform Warner that she was in no condition to work.
For once Producer was sympathetic, no doubt partly because the favorable advance buzz on Splendor and West Side Story had made his contract star a valuable property. He instructed the studio lawyers to send Lastfogel an official letter granting Natalie indefinite leave of absence without pay “for personal reasons,” and as discretion was in his own interest, he managed to cancel the deal with Fox on a technicality. Dolores Hart replaced Natalie for the first picture, and Joanne Woodward for the second, Jerry Wald’s production of The Stripper, adapted from Inge’s A Loss of Roses.
To keep the press off the scent, Warner gave Louella Parsons a scoop that the Wagners were about to vacation in Italy. She duly printed the imaginary news in her June 9 column, shortly before Natalie told RJ that she’d reached breaking point, and if he wanted to save their marriage, he must agree to let her consult a psychoanalyst.
By now RJ suspected that Sail a Crooked Ship was no more likely to advance his career than his last three movies at Fox, and it made him as insecure as Natalie. If he’d felt able to allow someone else to help her, it might have changed both their lives. But desperation left Natalie with nothing to fall back on except a wish for professional help, and RJ had only his pride. On both sides it was too late for a breakthrough, and the day after what RJ described in retrospect as “our final and most explosive fight,” he moved out of the house.
LIVING BY HERSELF in a showplace with half its rooms unfurnished and unfinished made Natalie even more depressed, and she asked Mart Crowley to find her a house for rent. Until she moved out, she frequently asked Asa Maynor if “it would be all right with Edd if I spent the night at her house. She hated the idea of waking up alone, so I slept on one side of her king-size bed.”
In the second week of June Natalie made her first appointment with a psychoanalyst, Dr. Stephen Hacker, and asked another member of her support group to drive her to his office. Guy McElwaine, like Mart Crowley, was a friend of RJ’s as well as Natalie’s. When the Wagners made All the Fine Young Cannibals, he was a publicist at MGM, and sho
rtly afterward he went to work for Rogers and Cowan, Hollywood’s leading public relations specialists; then, at Natalie’s suggestion, he formed his own public relations company, with the Wagners as his first clients.
Guy McElwaine: Before that first session, Natalie was determined but terrified, like someone about to go in for major surgery. When we got to the office, she asked me to have a preliminary talk with the analyst, and although I was reluctant, she was so insistent that I agreed. “Tell that son of a bitch not to fuck with my talent,” she said. So I did, more or less, and incidentally did not have a favorable impression of the man.
“Devastated” was the word that several of RJ’s friends used to describe his condition after the breakup. Mart Crowley: “He was so devastated, he’d come knocking at my door at night, then collapse in tears on the couch.” McElwaine: “He was so devastated that he sometimes slept on the couch in my office.” Asa Maynor: “Every time I saw RJ after the breakup, he was devastated. The first thing he asked was, ‘Have you seen Natalie? How is she? What’s she doing?’ ” Linda Foreman, the actress wife of talent agent John Foreman, who later became a producer: “He used to sit in a chair in our living room, not talking, almost catatonic. I’d seen husbands or wives suffer after a breakup, but never anyone as devastated as that.”
RJ in 1962, after the breakup (illustration credit 4.13)
On June 21, the Wagners announced their separation. They had “no immediate plans for divorce,” according to the official statement. “Both are hopeful the problems that exist between them can be worked out satisfactorily.” Two months later, they signed a community-property settlement (a fifty-fifty division of the spoils, including half of each other’s salaries, and the eventual sale price of the house and its contents), and repeated that they still had no plans for divorce. When Natalie eventually filed suit and went to Los Angeles Superior Court on April 16, 1962, she charged “mental cruelty,” and Maria insisted on taking the witness stand to testify (against her daughter’s wishes) that “Mr. Wagner was even rude to me.”
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