On the set of Daisy Clover I had an almost daily opportunity to watch Natalie at work. But as George Cukor once said, “Real talent is a mystery, and people who’ve got it know it. The very best actors never talk very much about acting itself—and above all they never talk about it until they’ve done it.” This was certainly true of Natalie and Robert Redford, whose rapport was obvious from the start. His cagey charm proved an ideal match for the role of Wade Lewis, and Mulligan was the kind of director, like Nick Ray and Kazan, who only talked to his actors in private. So all I saw were the actual takes, not the preparation.
Once, I remember, Natalie said that the movie “seemed to be going dangerously well.” A prophetic remark, as we discovered when a few important changes were made without consulting us. The first was during a climactic scene when the producer’s wife (Katharine Bard) drunkenly reveals Wade’s bisexuality. Anticipating censorship, Pakula-Mulligan had cut several lines, and some but not enough were restored only after I pointed out that the scene no longer made sense. The second change was equally damaging. In the script, I used Daisy’s offscreen voice, not as narrator, but to make an occasional ironic comment on her situation. Example: Impeccably groomed and gowned, transformed into a sweet little ingenue for her coming out as a star, Daisy catches sight of her reflection in a mirror and her eyes flicker with surprise. “I don’t think we’ve met,” her voice comments offscreen before she turns abruptly away.
Natalie learned about the elimination of her voice-overs, except for the opening and closing shots, when she discovered that a rough cut of the movie was being previewed in Glendale. She sneaked into the theater (back-row seat) after the lights went down, and told me afterward, but more angrily, what she told the AFI seminar: “It was like cutting out half my performance—the other side of Daisy.”
At that preview, which I didn’t see, the movie ran two hours and thirty-four minutes. Twenty-six minutes were cut, including an important scene where Wade Lewis casually warns Daisy not to fall in love with him, and the musical number Natalie and I liked best, “Back Lot Kid.” But the final version previewed well enough in Riverside for Producer to congratulate Pakula, Mulligan and myself, and for Warner executive Walter McEwen, misguidedly optimistic, to inform Abe Lastfogel that the picture would “open locally for a special engagement at Christmas in order to qualify for Academy Awards.”
WHILE INSIDE DAISY CLOVER was in production at Warners, RJ was filming Harper, adapted from Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target, on a neighboring set. One afternoon, during a long break, he walked over to Natalie’s set, accompanied by the screenwriter of Harper, William Goldman. Natalie was performing a musical number, “You’re Gonna Hear from Me” (later revoiced, like her other numbers, by Jackie Ward). As they watched, RJ climbed several steps up a nearby ladder for a better view. After Mulligan approved a final take, Natalie walked to her dressing room and passed (by accident or design? Goldman wondered) close to the ladder. Goldman wrote an account of the dialogue that followed, and RJ has confirmed its accuracy.
WAGNER [from above]: Hi.
WOOD [stopping, looking up]: Hi.
WAGNER: That looked good.
WOOD: You think?
WAGNER: I do. Yeah.
WOOD: Hope so. [Little smile, starting off] Bye.
WAGNER [watching after her]: Bye.
“Not very telling dialogue,” Goldman commented. “But the subtext sure let you know a lot.” “It sure did,” RJ said later, and described it as “the most loaded yet.”
ON A WARM summery night at the end of May, shortly after Daisy Clover finished shooting (which was also shortly after the encounter with RJ), Natalie threw an elaborate party to announce her engagement to Ladislow Blatnik: buffet in a tent erected on the lawn, long tables set up outside to accommodate around forty guests, and a task force of waiters serving food and drinks. Toasts were proposed and drunk, and while the guest of honor performed his party trick, the nucleus and I hoped that something would occur to change Natalie’s mind.
Fortunately it did. After the engagement party, Natalie and Ladi left for a two-week vacation in Caracas, where the Venezuelan minister of tourism offered to throw a wedding party for the couple, then take them on a tour of Venezuelan beauty spots. Blatnik was eager to accept, but the press reported angry protests from opposition members of the Venezuelan Parliament when they learned that the proposed celebrations would be at government expense.
When Natalie sidestepped the invitation by announcing that they hadn’t fixed a definite date for the wedding, it was the first sign of second thoughts. Asa Maynor witnessed another soon afterward. One evening at Natalie’s house, they heard the sound of a car turning into the driveway. “Oh my God, that must be Ladi!” Natalie said. “Quick, turn out all the lights so he’ll think no one’s home.”
IN JULY, The Great Race opened to mainly negative reviews. Although Bosley Crowther of the New York Times found it “roaring fun,” Newsweek summed up the majority verdict: “An incredibly overblown imitation of old-time comedy.” Meanwhile, Donfeld’s comment circulated widely in private: “About as funny as a baby’s grave.” Natalie was praised by some reviewers for her sense of comedy and damned by others for her lack of it, but all agreed that she looked exceptionally beautiful. It was a task that Natalie the professional had set herself. Playing a role she found totally unrewarding, and in a state of personal turmoil, it was the only satisfaction she could hope for. According to Donfeld, “Edith Head seldom bothered with historical accuracy when designing period films, preferring to create a ‘look’ of her own invention, for better or worse.” On The Great Race it was definitely for better. For a journalist constantly on the move, Natalie’s wardrobe was improbably high-style and varied, but a welcome distraction.
Mindful of her percentage points, Natalie agreed to make a publicity appearance with Blake Edwards at the Indianapolis 500 race, where she posed beside period automobiles from the movie. But her reward was relatively modest. The Great Race had an enormous budget for the time and exceeded its original $5,250,000 by more than $2 million, and its box-office receipts were less than spectacular.
ON OCTOBER 5, Natalie left for New Orleans to start location filming on her next movie. This Property Is Condemned was a Ray Stark production that John Huston had originally agreed to direct, with Elizabeth Taylor in the leading role. When Huston bowed out, so did Taylor. Natalie replaced her, and for Huston’s replacement, Stark eventually settled on thirty-four-year-old Sydney Pollack, whose first movie, The Slender Thread, had just had a very successful preview. But as Pollack recalled, Natalie’s contract included the right to approve her director: “I was very inexperienced in many ways then, and scared to death when I arrived at her house. I had a strong reputation in TV, but at the time few movie people paid much attention to TV, and I felt I had nothing to show. Then Natalie came into the living room, very glamorous, very movie star, and it turned out she’d seen a TV movie I made and liked it. We sat and talked for two or three hours about the script, and next day she okayed me.”
As Stark was busy with other projects, he engaged John Houseman to produce the movie after signing Natalie and Redford for the leads, James Wong Howe as cinematographer, and Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Coe and Edith Sommer to write, in succession, one or more drafts of a script. Houseman was dissatisfied with all of them and contracted James Bridges to write another; Pollack, equally dissatisfied, signed David Rayfiel to write still another. Each writer, Houseman recalled, tried to “strengthen the film’s dubious and contrived love story.” (Tennessee Williams’s fifteen-minute play serves only as prologue to the romance, ten years later during the Depression, of Alva Starr and Owen Legate.) It was finally left to Pollack “to make some sense out of more than a dozen different drafts. And as this was before the days of computers, I laid out each draft on the floor and cut out the scenes in each I thought best.”
For Houseman, whose main contribution was to cast the talented Canadian actress Kate Reid as Alva’s mothe
r, all this confirmed what he’d suspected from the start: “Certain films are made with little hope of artistic quality or of popular success merely because a studio entrepreneur, for some special reason, finds it advantageous to produce them.” But whatever Stark’s motives, both Natalie and Pollack had serious hopes of “artistic quality.”
The main problem, Pollack agreed when we discussed the movie, was that none of the writers succeeded with the character played by Redford. Owen Legate seems undefined and opaque, the love story never catches fire, and only one of Redford’s scenes with Alva (written by Rayfiel) comes to life. They meet in a disused railroad coach, and the tragedy of an incurable dreamer in love with a cool, wary nondreamer is suggested when Alva describes her life dreams, and he responds by telling her flatly, “I have no dreams.” But once sketched in, the situation fails to develop.
Another effectively faux-Williams scene, again by Rayfiel, was lost on the cutting-room floor. After Alva runs away from her mother’s boardinghouse, the scene changes to a deserted railroad station at night. Sydney Pollack:
Alva stands at the entrance. She looks seedy, wearing a straw hat that partly shadows her face, and throws patterns of fragmented light from a street lamp nearby. She’s now a prostitute, and a young traveling salesman picks her up. She talks about her life and her mother, romanticizing it, lying about it. “You’re a very beautiful young person,” he tells her. “Did you say beautiful?” she asks. He repeats it, and she smiles. “My name is Alva Starr,” she says. “Starr with two R’s.”
The scene explains why Natalie described her role as “the nearest I’ll ever get to playing Blanche DuBois.” Although it was discarded as too “downbeat,” the movie ends on an equally downbeat but much less dramatic note and leaves the audience with a sense of anticlimax. After an abrupt cut to a shot of Alva’s tombstone, her sister’s offscreen voice starts to explain how she died, and we return to the prologue. Like many decisions imposed for commercial reasons, it harmed the movie commercially.
Maybe the director’s cut will eventually appear on video, and we’ll see just how close Natalie got to playing Blanche. But even without the scene, This Property Is Condemned contains one of her finest performances. (A New York friend, actor Ralph Roberts, wrote Natalie that Zoe Caldwell and her husband, Robert Whitehead, had always admired her, and their reaction after seeing the movie was that “you are the greatest.”)
No doubt Natalie’s personal tensions contributed to her creation of Alva, restless, sexually driven, brave and fragile. Blatnik had visited her several times during the New Orleans shoot, and they were still officially engaged, but only because she’d become a little frightened of him and didn’t want to end the relationship while she was deeply involved in the movie. Instead, having developed a “fixation” on Pollack as director, she took it a stage further: “One day after shooting,” Pollack remembered, “Redford and I went to Natalie’s dressing room to discuss the next day’s scene. After a while, Redford left. I started to make a point about the scene we’d been discussing when a pillow thrown by Natalie hit me in the face. ‘I don’t want to talk about the scene,’ she said. ‘I’m hung up on you.’ ” Pollack was extremely startled, and at first uncertain what to do. “Although the attraction was mutual, on my side it was unspoken. I was married, with a young son; and when I explained this, Natalie understood, and nothing developed.”
This Property Is Condemned. The dreamer and the man who never dreams (Robert Redford) (illustration credit 5.12)
Early in November the unit moved to Paramount Studios, and shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday Natalie told Blatnik that the wedding was off. He seemed to take the news calmly, but she knew he was very angry. A few nights later, Mart Crowley came by for a visit, and they heard a sound outside her living-room window. They crouched below the window and saw the figure of a man not far away, prowling the lawn. When he came close, they recognized Blatnik and began to laugh. When he came closer, they stopped laughing: he was carrying a gun. But then he turned away and disappeared down the driveway, having presumably parked his car on the street.
Natalie was prepared for this kind of emergency. Paul and Micky Ziffren lived in Malibu, but Ziffren kept an apartment in Westwood for occasional use. He had given Natalie the keys in case of need, and later that night she fled there with Mart, and didn’t return to North Bentley until she heard that Blatnik had left the country.
IN THE FIRST week of December, while This Property was still in production, Natalie went to a dinner party given by publicist Rupert Allan, and found herself seated next to the man who had first glimpsed her looking beautiful and lonely at Ray Stark’s party. Richard Gregson was a successful British talent agent with offices in London and New York, and like RJ he was eight years older than Natalie.
“I think I was seated next to her because I was considered ‘eligible,’ ” Gregson recalled. Personally he was engaging and assured, and professionally he was fashionable. British movies were still on the crest of a New Wave with Tom Jones and Darling; and Gregson and his partner, Gareth Wigan, had a list of clients that included Joseph Mankiewicz, Alan Bates, John Schlesinger and screenwriter Frederic Raphael.
“Natalie was smoking cigarettes through a black plastic holder that evening,” Gregson also recalled, “and I told her jade would be more elegant.” Later they were among several guests who went on to the popular showbiz club and disco, the Daisy. When they danced together, he felt “strongly attracted,” and the current seemed to flow both ways. But when he phoned the next day, Natalie refused to take the call, and refused when he tried again.
Then, much to his surprise, she invited Gregson to a large party at her house on the following weekend, and “during the evening became very flirtatious.” When he phoned the next day, Natalie not only took the call, but agreed to go out to dinner with him. “We dated on and off for a couple of weeks, the first time she was very guarded, but the night before I was due to go back to London, we went to bed together.”
When Natalie met Blatnik, she was in search of an alternative life, and by this she meant not only a life “outside” Hollywood, but a commitment to marriage and having children. She was at a low point (only a few weeks after her attempted suicide) when Blatnik impressed her as a possibility. Then she began to mistrust him, and finally to see all the way through him. Gregson, whose tough-minded sense of direction was obviously a far cry from the near-burlesque version of an “international playboy-adventurer,” became a far more serious possibility. But although Natalie clearly found him attractive, she hesitated about seeing him again after they first met. Then she changed her mind and agreed to date “on and off.” On their first date, the current seemed to flow both ways again, but a part of her seemed to resist it, and she only went to bed with him on the night before she knew he was leaving town.
Why did she hold back? A likely minor reason: although Rupert Allan considered Gregson “eligible,” he was in the middle of an expensive and protracted divorce. A definite major reason: Natalie suspected she was falling in love. And after her experience of marriage to RJ, followed by her affair with Warren, she still connected falling in love with fear of betrayal.
ON DECEMBER 22, 1965, a few days before Gregson’s departure, Inside Daisy Clover opened for a week’s run at Radio City Music Hall to qualify for Academy Awards. The critical reception, led by Bosley Crowther’s dismissal of the movie as “fatuous and vulgar,” was extraordinarily harsh. Most of the other dailies and weeklies were almost as negative, with only two notable exceptions, Newsweek and, more surprisingly, the Hollywood Reporter, whose reviewer described it as “one of the best movies about Hollywood ever made.”
It was a painful jolt for all of us, and particularly for Natalie, whose exceptional performance went unrecognized. But ten years later, Ron Haver, who was in charge of the film department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, programmed a series of films “about Hollywood” and asked me to invite Natalie to the screening of Daisy Clover. “I don’t
know, what do you think?” she said. I thought we should accept, because Haver liked the movie and thought it was time for a reassessment.
So we went, and as Natalie evidently considered the Bing Theater a screening room, she didn’t ask to sit in the back row. The audience reaction was enthusiastic, she received a standing ovation, and when we talked with various people afterward, it was clear that in spite of the damaging cuts, the movie had appealed to them in the way all of us had intended, as an ironic fable. Later it reached cult status on TV and video, but too late for Natalie to know about it.
Tom Mankiewicz: Studio life from an early age had cut Natalie off from so much, and she was eager to make up for it, but I often had the impression that she never knew exactly how to live her life.
With Blatnik out of the picture, and Gregson on suspension in London, Natalie made another try at an alternative life. She had first met Henry Jaglom, a twenty-five-year-old actor from the Actors Studio, at a party in July 1965, when he came out from New York on a visit. On March 10, 1966, when he’d come back in the hope of making a career in Hollywood, they met again at the Daisy.
Warren Beatty was also at the Daisy that evening, and although he and Natalie nodded to each other, they didn’t speak. But when she asked Henry to drive her home, he saw them leave together; and a few minutes after Natalie invited Henry to come in for a drink, the phone rang. “Warren!” Natalie said immediately. She arranged for Henry to listen in, and “I heard Warren warn her against me. ‘I’m concerned for you,’ he said.”
Why? “I don’t remember exactly, but I remember a lot of people, including Frank Sinatra and Roz Russell, considered me somehow ‘dangerous.’ Russell actually warned Natalie that I was a ‘dope-smoking rebel.’ That was the kind of reputation you could get for being unemployed, politically outspoken and smoking a moderate amount of pot.” But although Henry was unemployed, he came from a well-to-do Russian-Jewish family, bankers and landowners wealthy enough not to have suffered from anti-Semitism, and well enough known for Natalie to recognize the name. “The Russian connection was important to Natalie,” he remembered, and the prelude to “a very emotional night.”
Natalie Wood Page 25