By then RJ was in Europe, and the house had been sold for $185,000, a loss of more than $50,000 after the cost of remodeling, redecorating, furnishing and installing the saltwater pool.
IN JULY 1961, Natalie moved to a secluded house on Chalon Road in Bel-Air. It belonged to British producer Jimmy Woolf, and Mart Crowley had discovered that it was available for rent. Although he took an apartment of his own, Natalie soon felt “very unhappy and scared living alone” and asked him to move in with her. Over the next few months, a basic support group of Crowley, Howard Jeffrey and Asa Maynor kept Natalie company there; and later, when Norma Crane moved to Los Angeles, Natalie named the four of them “the nucleus.”
For admission to the nucleus, there were five essential qualifications: humor, intelligence, emotional directness, independence of spirit and what Norma called “the kindness test.” (Natalie often quoted her comment on a theater director Norma admired: “He’s very talented, but he fails the kindness test.”) Troubled childhood was a bonus, and all except Asa qualified on that level as well.
Many years later, RJ described Mart Crowley and Howard Jeffrey, themselves best friends, as “just about the two best friends Natalie ever had.” Both had problems about coming to terms with their homosexuality, although Jeffrey lived for several years with Robert Lewis, who founded the Actors Studio in partnership with Cheryl Crawford and Kazan; and Crowley would use Jeffrey’s bitter, self-deprecating wit (although not his charm or basic kindness) for the character of Harold in The Boys in the Band. Jeffrey’s mother, a formidable obsessive, was determined that he should become a famous actor and/or dancer. He joined the corps de ballet of Ballet Theatre at the age of fifteen, then danced with the Roland Petit company for the movie Hans Christian Andersen, and in 1957 became Jerry Robbins’s assistant on the Broadway production of West Side Story.
Norma Crane, born Norma Anna Bella Zuckerman, was three months old when her mother died and left her with a terror of being abandoned. She never entirely got over it, and like Natalie with her nucleus, was in search of a “family.” They also shared a belief in work as an essential aid to survival, and an extremity of feeling (more volcanic in Norma’s case) that Stella Adler categorized as inherently Russian. “Affairs of the heart,” Norma used to say, giving Natalie another favorite quote, “are more mysterious than how they make movies.”
In the case of Natalie and RJ, Norma’s remark was right on target. Separation, followed by divorce, left two people respectively unstrung and devastated, each disenchanted with the other, each seeking help in psychoanalysis. But the longer they stayed apart, the more they began to suspect that each was still the only deep, complete love of the other’s life.
5
Love and Marriage (Encore)
I always envied Natalie her love of fun. She didn’t have a Puritan ethic.
—LESLIE CARON
If she’d lived, she’d have made a great Cleopatra.
—BURT BRINCKERHOFF
For a long time I didn’t see the full extent of Natalie’s darkness, her fears.
—RICHARD GREGSON
SOON AFTER NATALIE’S affair with Warren Beatty ended, he became involved with Leslie Caron; and one morning at five a.m. he woke Caron up and said: “You’re sleeping! You’re not thinking about me!”
“Flattering in a way at first, but tiring in the long run,” she said later, and her comment reveals an aspect of Beatty’s character that suggests why (in the not-so-long run) both affairs ended.
This demand for total attention, which he was not always ready to reciprocate, was a compound of egotism and insecurity. “Warren was obsessive about going after whatever—person or project—he wanted,” according to Caron. “And once he got the person or project, he was obsessive about being in complete control.” At the same time, Guy McElwaine recalled, “Warren was very irresolute, and often couldn’t make up his mind about anything, from the movie he’d just been offered to what to choose from a dinner menu.” The irresolution, he might have added, extended to whatever affair was on the menu. In Freudian terms, Warren’s libido had “a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal.” In Hollywood terms, he was always ready to cut to the chase.
Intelligent, talented and cunning as well as physically seductive, Warren seemed determined from the start to stand above the crowd and to work with the best. He followed Splendor in the Grass with The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, adapted from Tennessee Williams’s novella, starring Vivien Leigh and directed by José Quintero, and his third movie was again written by Inge, an adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s All Fall Down. A series of bold career moves established Warren Beatty the actor as a hero/antihero/outsider figure in the wake of Brando, Clift and James Dean; and at the same time he established himself as a public figure who insisted on evading public scrutiny, something that only Garbo had brought off so well in the past. Mystery soon became part of the fascination. Was irresolution the reverse side of Beatty’s deviousness, or a mask to conceal it?
FOR NATALIE, Warren’s appeal was the opposite of RJ’s. It reflected a lifelong conflict in her affairs of the heart, between a need for security and family and for adventure and danger. She met Warren for the first time since Splendor when he came to dinner at 714 North Beverly, accompanied by his fiancée, Joan Collins. This was shortly before he left (with fiancée) for Europe and Roman Spring, and Natalie was still at work on West Side Story, and (like RJ) keeping up the appearance of a happy marriage.
By the time Natalie and Warren met again in June 1961, he’d had a brief affair in Rome with Susan Strasberg while Collins was visiting her mother in a hospital in London, then returned to Los Angeles with Collins, only to break up with her a few weeks later. Natalie was living on Chalon Road, seeing very few people apart from Crowley, Howard Jeffrey, Asa Maynor, McElwaine, her analyst and Maria, who arrived for an occasional visit (during which she opened Crowley’s letters before bringing in the mail). And Natalie occasionally went out to a dinner party, once at the house of agent Minna Wallis (sister of producer Hal B.), where Garbo put in a late, charming, disappointingly brief appearance. Beatty was not present, but they met soon afterward at another party. Like so many men who had made passes at Natalie since she was fifteen, he found her extremely desirable, and after the failure of her marriage, she was once again “in search of love” or at least the illusion of it.
When their affair began, RJ had left for Europe, where he would remain for two years, making movies (one of which would help revive his career) and keeping in touch by phone with Dr. Gerald Aaronson, his Los Angeles analyst. Mart Crowley, who drove him to the airport, recalled him confiding that “he was still in love with Natalie, but we agreed it was time to get out.”
In August, Natalie invited Crowley to fly with her to Florida, where Beatty was on location for All Fall Down. Shortly after arriving, she realized that she forgot to pack her diaphragm. They stopped at a drugstore, and to avoid the risk of a leak to the tabloids if she bought a replacement herself, she put on a pair of huge movie-star dark glasses and asked Crowley to buy it for her. The situation struck both of them as wonderfully absurd, and Natalie found it hard to stop laughing while she waited in the car.
In October, Natalie and Warren made their first public appearances together in quick succession, at the New York premieres of Splendor and West Side Story. Although the Wagners had not yet divorced, it was six years since Hollywood “forgave” Ingrid Bergman for her adulterous affair with Roberto Rossellini, and movie stars had become even more glamorous as extracurricular lovers than as man and wife.
When they were photographed together with Natalie smiling a little anxiously, it was not due to any fear of a “moral” backlash in the gossip columns. But why did Beatty usually look away from her, and appear enigmatic? Was he secretly preoccupied, or bored, or distancing himself from the kind of attention that he claimed to find unwelcome?
In November a major Bel-Air fire almost reached the house on Chalon Road and scorched the surrounding
area. Natalie moved to director Peter Glenville’s house on St. Ives Drive above Sunset Strip; and Warren, who preferred living in hotels or “house guesting” to renting houses or apartments, moved in with her. (He had previously moved into Susan Strasberg’s apartment in Rome and Joan Collins’s house on Sunset Plaza Drive.) When Natalie received her second Academy Award nomination for Splendor, RJ wrote from Europe (in a note dated March 6, 1962) to congratulate her: “I hope with all my heart that when they open up the envelope, it’s you.”
But it was Sophia Loren for Two Women, as Natalie and Warren learned when they sat together at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1962. By that time Natalie had started work on another movie for Warners, based on the Broadway musical based on the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Ethel Merman, Broadway’s original Mama Rose, meets Natalie and RJ; Sinatra is on the left. (illustration credit 5.1)
PRODUCER HAD FIRST approached Delmer Daves to direct Gypsy, but he turned it down. “I simply cannot pull for the selfish mother in this story to continually exploit her two daughters,” his memo to Warner and Trilling explained. But Leonard Spigelgass, assigned to the script, believed he could solve the problem. “Keep Rose the bitch she is,” he suggested in a memo to Mervyn LeRoy, who took over as producer and director, “a funny bitch, occasionally a warm and touching bitch—but a bitch.”
After Spigelgass completed his first draft, he met with Gypsy’s sister, June Havoc, to discuss it. “Her feelings about her mother are very deep and very bitter,” he reported. “She hates the play because she says it wasn’t true.” Although Havoc wanted Spigelgass to make it clear that Gypsy’s younger sister was only thirteen when she escaped from her mother, he objected that it would make Mama Rose “appear to be a monster. ‘Why not?’ Havoc replied. ‘That’s what she was.’ ” But LeRoy and Warner agreed with Spigelgass, and Baby June becomes sixteen when she leaves the nest.
Natalie and Warren Beatty at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962 (illustration credit 5.2)
Jule Styne, who composed the songs for Gypsy, thought Natalie “too mature” to play Louise (Gypsy’s real first name) and begged Warner to substitute either Shirley MacLaine or Debbie Reynolds, because they were “singer-dancers.” In fact, Natalie was younger than both, by respectively four and six years; Louise was a stripper, not a professional singer or dancer; and the miscastings that Styne should have objected to were LeRoy as director and Rosalind Russell as Mama Rose.
A jack-of-all-trades, LeRoy began his career as a vaudeville actor, but lacked the flair that Minnelli or Cukor would have brought to the vaudeville scenes. Russell was married to Frederick Brisson, who owned the movie rights and sold them to Warners with his wife as “part of the package.”
According to Karl Malden (who played Mama Rose’s devoted suitor), “LeRoy seemed to spend more time on the phone than directing the picture. Once he said to Natalie and me, ‘All right, now give me a nice warm scene.’ By then we both had the measure of him, and after we did a run-through, I said, “Okay, Mervyn, we’re ready to give you a nice warm scene.” Natalie recalled LeRoy as an Actors Studio–phobe, who “hated any talk of the Method or anything about it … So I would quietly try to do a preparation without letting him know that I was doing it, and walk around to get in the mood. One time I was starting a scene in which I had to be emotionally upset. And just before the take started, he had already said, ‘Roll ’em,’ and the camera was rolling, and Mervyn came running over to me all of a sudden and said, ‘Cut!’ Then he asked me, ‘What’s the matter? You look so upset!’ ”
She didn’t specify the scene, but most likely it was Gypsy’s confrontation with Mama Rose near the end of the movie. “I’m getting no help at all from Mervyn,” she told Crowley on the day it was shot, and he advised her to think of her most explosive confrontation with Mud. But this had already occurred to Natalie. Her problem with LeRoy, she said, was that “he doesn’t seem to understand that I have to get into the scene gradually, then build to the climax.” Evidently LeRoy’s idea of “confrontation” was to encourage both actors to shout at each other from the start; and it resulted in an over-the-top contest between Natalie and Russell that ended in a draw—a flagrant contrast with Natalie’s subtle underplaying in the rest of the movie, which to Malden was proof that “anyone who works with Kazan advances enormously. Natalie got better and better as an actress.”
Although a more intuitive director would have held Natalie back for the confrontation scene, by this stage in Russell’s career over-the-top had become her unstoppable approach to every role. “Natalie and I discussed Roz’s performance,” Malden recalled. “I said what was missing was that she just pushed—but you never understood why. Natalie agreed.” In fact, only an actor as skillful as Malden could make it believable that he continued to love this strident virago, who incidentally never aged by a gray hair or a day, and was never the warm or touching bitch, and seldom the funny one, that Spigelgass imagined.
Russell also insisted, according to Malden, “on doing all the songs herself. They brought in an orchestra on the set. But her voice wavered a lot when she had to hold a note, so they brought in a professional singer [Lisa Kirk] to dub her.” In Natalie’s case, the original Gypsy was not a professional singer, so her voice sounds exactly right in “If Mamma Was Married,” the duet with Ann Jillian’s precocious and more accomplished Baby June, and the solo “Let Me Entertain You.” For the movements and gestures that reflect Louise’s progression from uncertain first-timer to seasoned stripper in that sequence, she did get help—from Gypsy Rose Lee herself, who demonstrated various trade secrets, among them how to peel off an elbow-length glove for maximum allure.
BY THE TIME of Gypsy, Mud had managed never to hear anything she didn’t want to hear. Like the deaf person who switches off his hearing aid, she perfected a mechanism of denial. The parallels between Mama Rose and herself, and Natalie’s awareness of them, aroused no spark of recognition, not even when she visited the set and calmly watched Mama Rose take charge of her daughter’s career. As usual, she was there to establish Mama Maria as an important presence in the movie world.
In 1918, as she often recalled, she was six-year-old Maria Stepanovna who saw her half-brother hanging from a tree; and at nineteen she was Maria Tatuloff living on the edge of penury with her estranged husband and baby daughter in a meager San Francisco apartment. But five years later, in 1936, she wore a white evening gown for her coronation as Queen of the Veterans Ball, and she still loved to display the photos of that first transforming moment. By 1962, of course, the transformation was complete. The public Maria Gurdin had achieved status and security as a Star Mother as well as the secret satisfaction of a “great romantic love.”
She was also the undisputed head of her own household. Nick had lost his license after a third drunken-driving offense, and lost his job in the studio property department because he could no longer drive to work. To get out of the house he depended on a friendly neighbor or (less frequently) the busy Keeper of the Fan Mail; and it reduced him to more of a silent “background figure” than ever, alone with his balalaika, his Russian novels, his drunken outbursts, an indelible memory of his father’s death during the revolution and an increasingly desperate belief that his life was in ruins because of the Bolsheviki.
Gypsy. Natalie as the young Louise (illustration credit 5.3)
A FEW DAYS before Gypsy began shooting, Natalie’s analyst, Dr. Hacker, suffered a fatal heart attack. For the next eight years she was a patient of Dr. John Lindon, and her daybooks record almost daily appointments or phone calls as well as long-distance consultations when she was in New York or Europe.
Natalie as Gypsy Rose Lee (illustration credit 5.4)
Although Lindon continues to maintain an ethical silence about his patients, it’s clear that he dispelled any of Natalie’s remaining doubts that analysis would “fuck with my talent.” In 1979 she told the AFI seminar, “I know a lot of actors who just prefer to remain screwed up rath
er than run the risk of any tampering with their talent. I don’t agree with that, because I feel that if you get too sick, then you can’t function.” As well as making her “think in a different way about characters, about your own work,” she added, analysis helped her to become “more aware of others instead of being self-involved.”
The sessions with Lindon began at what Guy McElwaine remembered as “a time when Natalie was very troubled by her lack of rapport with Mervyn LeRoy, and the ride with Warren had started to get bumpy.” After Peter Glenville returned to Los Angeles, she had moved to a house on Coldwater Canyon and become seriously dependent on sleeping pills. “She sometimes went to bed early, took her Dalmane, and I would sit on her bed and hold her hand until she went to sleep,” McElwaine recalled. “She looked incredibly beautiful without makeup, but when I said so, she told me she was wearing a special undetectable makeup that she’d devised for bed. I realized then that Natalie was even insecure about her beauty.”
One of the first things Lindon told her, Natalie confided to Asa Maynor, was that “she must make commitments.” He soon perceived that her habit of being late for appointments, or sometimes canceling them at the last moment or even not showing up for them, was part of a general fear of making her own decisions. And this fear, he believed, was at the heart of her instability. Ironically, when he explained this to Natalie, she was involved with someone whose habit of not making (or keeping) commitments, from relationships to dinner dates, was at the heart of his stability. For Warren, keeping his partner of the moment on edge was an effective way of keeping control, until Natalie finally rebelled against plans often changed at the last moment, and unexplained disappearances for a night or two. Then she realized, as Leslie Caron did later, that Warren’s strongest needs were for power, and for fulfilling his ambition to be taken seriously as an actor, not just a movie star.
Natalie Wood Page 20