When Richard went to London to finalize the dismantling of the agency, Natalie accompanied him. Her contract with William Morris had expired at the end of May, and as she’d never forgotten or forgiven Joe Schoenfeld’s behavior to Guy McElwaine over their attempt to form a company, she moved to the Freddie Fields Agency. Fields was in London when Natalie arrived, and a few days later received a call from one of his clients in Los Angeles. Paul Mazursky had written a script, in collaboration with Larry Tucker, that Fields had sold to Columbia; and he called with the news that Mike Frankovich, the studio’s head of production, had agreed to let Mazursky direct. But there was one condition: Natalie Wood in the leading female role.
In spite of his doubts (“She’s gorgeous, she’s sexy, but will she do it, and if she does it, can she handle satire?”) Mazursky asked Fields to give Natalie a copy of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. One of his doubts was quickly resolved. “She’ll do it, she’ll play Carol,” Fields reported. “It’s the first script to excite her in two years.” Then he told Mazursky (this is the kind of situation that powerful agents love) to catch the next plane to London.
The three of them met for lunch at Claridge’s. “I liked the fact that she was punctual, and of course that she loved the script,” Mazursky recalled. “And when the two of us took a walk together in Hyde Park after lunch, I fell in love with her, the way we all did.”
He told Natalie that Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice would be his first feature movie as director, but he’d worked in the theater, taught acting; and that Charles Lang, whom Natalie knew and admired from Inside Daisy Clover, had been engaged as cinematographer. She seemed “enthusiastic about everything,” talked of her love for Richard Gregson and their plan to marry as soon as his divorce became final, then mentioned that she’d met Robert Wagner a few times since their divorce and still considered him “a wonderful friend.” This was Natalie’s way, Mazursky realized, “of establishing a genuine relationship with her director when she agreed to do a movie.”
The modest budget for Bob & Carol made it impossible to offer Natalie her current salary of $750,000, but she accepted the deal proposed by Fields, “$50,000 up front and 15 points in the picture,” according to Mazursky. “And as a result she made an enormous amount of money”—reportedly, around $3 million.
As Bob & Carol was due to start two weeks of rehearsal on October 15, and Richard was still involved with the dismantling of London International, Natalie returned to Los Angeles alone. In London with Richard, she had frequently called Dr. Lindon, and in Los Angeles without him, she called Richard as frequently as she saw her analyst. Her experience with analysis was one reason why she appreciated the humor of the script, whose original idea had occurred to Mazursky after reading an article in Time magazine, “The New Therapy,” illustrated with a photograph of art dealer Fritz Perls in a hot tub at Esalen with six nude girls: “I went up to Esalen for a marathon weekend with my wife, Betsy, and our experience became the first scene in the movie. A group of us, all couples, began explaining what we felt about our relationships, and after four hours Betsy became upset. She complained that I ‘didn’t let her breathe,’ and some of the others attacked me.”
For the first week of the shoot, Mazursky remembered, “Natalie seemed nervous. She was working with a first-time director, and with three actors playing leading roles in a movie for the first time—Elliott Gould, TV star Robert Culp and Dyan Cannon.” He also suspected that after the failure of Penelope, Natalie had doubts about her talent for comedy. “Then she relaxed, and was great, and we all knew it was going to work.”
The only major problem erupted late in the shoot. The New Permissiveness was a by-product of the New Therapy, and the movie’s climactic scene occurs in a Las Vegas hotel suite, where the two couples (Natalie and Culp, Cannon and Gould) decide to swap mates. Mazursky had planned to open the scene with a four-shot: in foreground, Natalie and Gould seated at the bar counter and “clearly doubtful about the ‘orgy,’ ” and in the background, Cannon suddenly starting to strip and Culp to unzip his pants. Natalie objected that she didn’t want to play her scene with Gould while the other two prepared for action in the same shot. “I explained that the humor of the scene depended on the visual contrast between one couple saying no in the foreground while the other couple are saying yes in the background. But Natalie was adamant. ‘I won’t do it this way,’ she said, ‘and I won’t finish the picture unless I can do it my way.’ Then she retired to her trailer.”
When Mazursky informed Frankovich and Larry Tucker of the problem, they came over to the set and pleaded with Natalie, but she refused to budge. By then it was time for the lunch break, and she agreed to take a walk with Mazursky. On the spur of the moment, he found himself telling her “the story of my life,” his Brooklyn background and determination to break into the theater. “I guess I was really trying to explain how I always followed my instincts, and if you ignore them you’re lost.” As usual, Natalie’s radar was quick to pick up signals. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Okay!” They embraced, and when he shot the “orgy” scene, with the four of them in a king-size bed, “she had no problem at all.”
THE DISSOLUTION of London International had left Richard Gregson with no American income when he returned to North Bentley while Natalie was filming Bob & Carol. And as British currency restrictions were still in force, he could transfer only a few hundred dollars to the United States. He had planned to become a producer in Hollywood, but his reputation as a tough, aggressive agent meant that he was greeted with a series of cold shoulders. Then Robert Redford, who had formed his own company to make Downhill Racer, about a fanatically competitive professional skier, offered Richard the job of producer.
The marriage between Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie) starts to unravel during group therapy in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. (illustration credit 5.13)
On January 20, 1969, the movie began shooting in Kitzbühel, Austria, and Mart Crowley described Natalie’s situation there as “ ‘the producer’s wife,’ although they weren’t married yet.” Crowley had moved to New York shortly before The Boys in the Band began its successful off-Broadway run a year earlier, and he arrived in London for its opening night there on February 11. Natalie flew in to join him, they had dinner afterward with Billy and Audrey Wilder, and she gave Mart the impression that “although she enjoyed her ‘role’ on location at first, she was growing restless.”
At the end of March, after Downhill Racer completed shooting, Richard was at last legally divorced: “And over drinks in the bar of the hotel, she suddenly said, ‘I’ve got to talk to you. I think it’s time we got married.’ I asked her, ‘What made you suddenly make up your mind?’ And she told me, ‘Because I think it’ll work.’ I said, ‘Okay. When do you want the wedding to be?’ And she said, ‘As soon as possible. Can I go and arrange it?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ ”
Natalie’s first call was to Norma Crane, whom she wanted for her matron of honor, and her second to Paul Ziffren, who offered his Malibu beach house for the wedding. But she had decided on a traditional Russian ceremony, and asked Olga for details of her own Russian wedding in San Francisco.
Fifteen years before Ermolova, the Gurdins and the Lepkos arrived in Hollywood, several thousand White Russian refugees (including Rasputin’s daughter Matryona) had settled in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. Like the San Francisco immigrants, these tsarist army officers, nominal aristocrats, artists, engineers and other professionals formed their own clubs and created a demand for Russian restaurants: Boublichki, the Moscow Inn, the Two-Headed Eagle. But by 1969 all traces of the original colony had vanished, apart from the Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church, built in 1928, an ornate and nostalgically detailed replica of a cathedral in the motherland.
Looking as beautiful and happy as I’d ever seen her, the bride walked down the aisle of the church in a wedding gown she’d designed with the help of Edith Head. It was also a replica, based on an illustration of a dress at the cour
t of Catherine the Great that Natalie had found in a book on Russian costumes. In the same book she found an illustration of a Russian wedding, where the bride decorated her long hair with blades of wheat, the Russian symbol of fertility. Natalie copied this as well, and also gathered a strong Russian contingent for the ceremony: Maria and Nick Gurdin, Olga and Lana as bridesmaids, the Viripaeff family and Nick’s brothers, Vladimir and Dmitri.
The two sides of Natalie’s life, Russia and the movies, were united on May 30, 1969, along with the bride and groom. Robert Redford and Gareth Wigan shared the honors of best man; the guests included two more movie stars, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie; and I was among the group of Natalie’s Los Angeles friends that included Mart Crowley, Edith Head, Howard Jeffrey, Hope Lange, Tom Mankiewicz, Roddy McDowall and Guy McElwaine.
Just married: Natalie and Richard Gregson, May 30, 1969 (illustration credit 5.14)
“NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE, from our time in Kitzbühel to New Year’s Eve in Paris,” Gregson recalled later, “was our happiest together.” Natalie wanted to rent a boat in the Caribbean for their honeymoon, was recommended a company that provided a boat with a German captain, and they sailed to a privately owned island. “Disaster!” Gregson recalled. “No provisions, nothing. A couple supposed to be working for us who behaved more like guests. After three days, when we wanted out, the couple demanded full payment and things got hostile. It made Natalie very nervous. ‘How do we know they won’t come for us in the middle of the night?’ she said, and burst into semihysterical laughter. Then she called Claudette [Colbert] at her house in Barbados. We had a great week there, then went back to L.A.”
Almost immediately they went on publicity jaunts for Bob & Carol and Downhill Racer in Los Angeles, New York and Paris. Natalie had recently read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg’s autobiographical novel about a young girl under treatment for schizophrenia in a mental hospital, and it became the first project to excite her since Bob & Carol. In Paris she met with Simone Signoret, who agreed to play the girl’s psychiatrist, and Natalie planned to ask Guy McElwaine for help in setting up the movie when she returned to Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, on New Year’s Eve, the Gregsons attended a party given by the oil sheik Adnan Khashoggi, with a guest list of fifty that included “at least a dozen oil-sheik colleagues and Joan Collins.” In the early hours of 1970 they went back to L’Hôtel, where “Natasha was conceived.”
Seven weeks later, Natalie was “thrilled” to discover she was pregnant: “rich and pregnant,” as Richard described her after Bob & Carol became a popular success. But impending motherhood put all thoughts of a movie career, even of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, on hold.
At the same time Downhill Racer barely made a profit and failed to advance Richard’s prospects as a producer in Hollywood. “Guy McElwaine tried to help me out by organizing an executive position at MGM, then another at Fox,” he recalled, “but they weren’t real jobs, Natalie was against them, so I turned them down.” And with a career as blocked as his British bank account, “my situation became very difficult, I began to feel very low and frustrated, and inevitably it affected my relationship with Natalie.”
6
First and Last Things
There’s nothing quite like finding out for the very first time that you’re pregnant. There’s nothing ever quite as miraculous as that.
—NATALIE WOOD
Although Natalie took time off to be a mother and devote herself to her family, I would watch her when we sometimes went to the movies together. It was like watching a racehorse seeing another racehorse get to the gate first.
—TOM MANKIEWICZ
Dearest, Here’s to smooth sailing for us from now on! I love you with all my heart and it belongs to only you.
—NATALIE WOOD,
EASTER GREETING TO ROBERT WAGNER, 1975
I didn’t go to the mortuary when they were preparing Natalie’s body, or when they finished. I knew if I saw her dead, I couldn’t take it.
—ROBERT WAGNER
DURING THE LAST WEEK of June 1970, John and Linda Foreman, friends of Natalie and RJ’s during their first marriage and of each of them separately after the divorce, gave a Saturday-night party for about fifteen guests. When Linda called to invite the Gregsons, she told Natalie that RJ and Marion Wagner would also be coming. “I had no ulterior motive,” Linda insisted. “We were friends of both couples, and they didn’t object.”
The day before the party, Marion called Linda from the house that RJ had bought in Palm Springs to say that she wasn’t feeling well and RJ would be coming alone. And on the night of the party Natalie arrived alone. She explained that Richard had left for New York with his partner, Gareth Wigan, to discuss an offer to form a production company with Wall Street capital.
Natalie, who was six months pregnant, went to sit in an armchair. A few minutes later, RJ arrived. “The moment he saw her, he went over and sat at a stool at her feet,” Linda remembered. “As it was the kind of party where everybody could sit where they wanted, and talk to whomever they wanted, those two were never apart the whole evening.” RJ couldn’t recall in detail what they talked about, except that it was “like a replay of all our previous chance meetings, lasted much longer, and was far more intense.” He’d heard rumors of “problems” in Natalie’s marriage, his own marriage ties had started to loosen, “and we found ourselves sharing memories of all our good times together.”
It was a rainy night, Natalie had arrived by cab, and John Foreman offered to drive her home when the party broke up. Then RJ said, “Why don’t I drive you?,” and she accepted. Once again he couldn’t recall specifically what they talked about, no doubt because once again the subtext was more important than anything they said. But by the time he pulled up outside the bouse on North Bentley, they were both at “emotional high tide.”
“I guess I shouldn’t come in,” he said, and after a moment Natalie said, “I guess you shouldn’t.” Then they said goodnight, and after driving half a block down the street, RJ stopped the car and began to sob.
In her living room, Natalie told Linda soon afterward, she “burst into wild sobs and wondered how she could ever have been so stupid.” She was still crying when Sophie Irvin (wife of TV and movie director John Irvin, a friend of Gregson’s), who was staying with Natalie at the time, came into the room. “What’s wrong?” Sophie asked. “I’ve fallen in love,” Natalie said.
Next day a bouquet of roses from RJ was delivered to the house. Natalie sent him a brief note of thanks, and there was no further contact between them for over a year. On September 29, Natalie gave birth to her first daughter, Natasha; and the memory of her latest encounter with RJ, as well as her anxieties about Richard’s future, receded for a while. “The first experience of motherhood,” Leslie Caron recalled, “made it seem the most important thing in Natalie’s life,” and David Lange joked that “she adopted a Madonna-and-Child hairstyle, parted in the middle and drawn back chastely behind her ears, that made Natasha seem the result of an Immaculate Conception.”
By the end of 1970 the deal for Richard’s production company in partnership with Gareth Wigan had fallen through, leaving him with “nothing to show for three years of work and only two hundred dollars in the bank.” Natalie, he remembered, was “supportive but helpless—not working and completely into motherhood.”
In February 1971, Richard read The Headshrinker’s Test, a novel that he thought had strong possibilities as a movie with a good role for Natalie. She helped him secure an option, and with her name attached, “both Warners and the Richard Zanuck–David Brown company at Fox expressed interest.” At Natalie’s suggestion, he sent a copy of the novel to Robert Moore, who had directed The Boys in the Band and was currently working in television in New York. Moore also expressed interest, and agreed to come out to Los Angeles in July to meet with Richard and Natalie.
Meanwhile Richard’s son and two daughters came over from England, and as there wasn’t
enough room for all of them at North Bentley, they spent the month of June in a house at Lake Tahoe that Natalie had bought a few years earlier. Sarah, who was eleven years old at the time, became especially close to Natalie and remembered her as “very into being a wife and mother. The rest of us went snowmobiling, but not with Natalie. After Natasha was born, she didn’t come out to play.”
A new housekeeper had succeeded Mac, whom Richard remembered as “a holy terror. Natalie fired her after a God-almighty row, mainly to do with drink—Mac liked a drink, as they say—and a little misuse of housekeeping money.” Natalie also had a new secretary, twenty-two-year-old Ann Watson, “with long dark hair, and a round face with a John Lennon look,” according to Sarah. “My father used to call her Mo, and one day I saw him put his arms around her. I told him it wasn’t right, and he had to stop it.”
Natalie seemed unaware of what was happening, but Guy McElwaine believes “she’d begun to suspect the situation” after Richard’s children went back to England at the end of June and the Gregsons returned to North Bentley. “I was at the pool one day with a few other guests,” he recalled. “We were all in swimsuits. Ann came out of the house in a mumu and Natalie said, ‘You’re one of the family, why don’t you change into a swimsuit?’ The girl said she didn’t have one, Natalie told her to wear one of hers, Ann went back to the house, then returned still wearing a mumu—none of Natalie’s suits fitted her, she said. Natalie insisted she take the mumu off, and although Ann was fairly ordinary-looking, in her underwear you could see she had a great body.” Although Natalie was “friendly and charming on the surface,” McElwaine sensed an undercurrent of tension in the way she insisted that her secretary undress.
Natalie Wood Page 27