Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  Three weeks later, another poolside scene proved him right. By that time Bob Moore had arrived from New York with his lover and assistant, George Rondo. “The four of us became very good friends,” Rondo recalled. “We made a couple of trips to scout locations in San Francisco, where The Headshrinker’s Test was set.” On the last Sunday in July, Moore and Rondo arrived for a barbecue around the pool, “and after greeting us, Richard said he had work to do until lunchtime and went back to the house.” While Moore lay in the sun, Natalie went into the pool, holding ten-month-old Natasha in her arms, and Rondo joined her. Then the poolside extension phone rang. Natalie handed Natasha to Rondo, picked up the receiver and listened for a moment. Then she said very matter-of-factly, “I’ll take this inside,” buzzed Richard on the house phone and hurried to the house without a word to Rondo or Moore.

  “I want you to know your husband is screwing my girlfriend.” This, Natalie told Sophie Irvin later, was the first thing the caller had said. And this, according to Gregson, is what happened in the house: “Ann’s ex-boyfriend, who was very jealous, had started to blow the whole situation on the poolside phone, and everything came out on the phone in the house when Natalie arrived. She reacted with a kind of anger I’d never seen before, and immediately called the police. They arrived within half an hour and gave me an hour to pack up my stuff and get out of the house.”

  “I’m sorry, the barbecue’s off, please go home,” Natalie told Moore and Rondo. Then, after calling Ann Watson and firing her, she ordered twenty-four-hour security guards for the house, gave them instructions not to admit Richard if he attempted to return, and sent for a locksmith to come over at once and change all the exterior locks.

  Actress Elizabeth Ashley, a friendly acquaintance of Natalie’s, admired her “for having the courage and strength to make the kind of decision right away that it took me far too long to make.” (At the time Ashley was having her own marital problems with George Peppard, who coincidentally had been writing drunken love letters to Natalie.) Leslie Caron found Natalie’s reaction to infidelity “rather extreme at first. Then she explained that because of Richard’s financial problems, it had become her responsibility to support the family, and she’d begun to suspect that Richard wanted her to work to pay for everything.” But here Natalie’s antennae picked up a false signal. Always alert to the possibility of betrayal, she was remembering the way her family had exploited her financially and imagined Richard was doing the same thing.

  But when David Lange and his (then) wife, Gillian, invited Richard to stay at their house for a few days after the breakup, Natalie’s reaction was truly extreme. It led, David remembered, “to a major falling-out, and we hardly ever saw each other again.” Perhaps she never forgave David because they’d been lovers. Although she accused Tom Mankiewicz of “betrayal” because he went out to lunch with Richard, she soon backed down. “I understand how you feel,” Mankiewicz said, “but I can’t live my life according to whom I’m supposed or not supposed to see.” Natalie thought it over, saw the point and apologized. And when she told Guy McElwaine, “I know you’ve been working for Richard, but now you either work for him or for me,” he remembered, “I told her to stop it, and she did.”

  Although Richard complained to Mart Crowley and Delphine Mann, among others, that he felt neglected on account of Natalie’s “obsession” with Natasha, Mankiewicz believed there was another reason for the affair with Natalie’s secretary. “She was quite attractive, but it wasn’t like Richard was betraying Natalie with Elizabeth Taylor. So maybe it was also a form of revenge because he felt overshadowed by her stardom.” In retrospect, Gregson felt this might be true, although he was unconscious of it at the time. It was only later that he realized “the dichotomy in Natalie. Sometimes, when we were married, she wanted to be another person—the producer’s wife—but couldn’t. In the end she was always a star.”

  Although the dichotomy certainly existed, many women with successful careers have felt it. There’s a nub of truth in that enduring cliché “Her career came between us,” and if Richard’s “fling,” as he called it, was partly a form of revenge, it was also an equally unconscious form of self-destruction. When Natalie agreed to star in The Headshrinker’s Test, it was his last chance for a career as a Hollywood producer.

  A very different side of Natalie, tender and generous, appears in a letter dated August 9, 1971, that she wrote jointly to Sarah and Charlotte Gregson:

  The only important thing I want you both to know is that I love you both and Hugo very much, and the failure of Daddy and myself together doesn’t in any way change my loving feelings towards you. Knowing you and being your “stepmother” and friend has been very important to me. And maybe when you are grown-ups you will be able to be more loving and compassionate toward the people you love than Daddy and I are able to be at this time. You are very young to be asked to forgive us for bringing unhappiness to you out of our own unhappiness and so I will not ask you to forgive us. Just know that I do love you. If you feel like it please let me know how you feel. And if you’re mad at me or at us tell me that too.

  Sarah’s “very sweet letter” in reply touched Natalie deeply. “In my heart I will always feel and be your loving stepmother,” Natalie wrote back, “and I feel quite sure that you and I will see each other again.” They did, more than once, and although a residue of tension subsisted whenever Natalie met Richard again, they had a “friendly” discussion not long after the breakup: “I said that I felt a professional failure, no money, no future in Los Angeles. She suggested I go back to England, and when I finally decided to start a production company there, Natalie offered to put money in it.”

  At the same time, according to Richard, the new maternal side of Natalie “made life very difficult for me, because she wouldn’t allow me to see Natasha.” Toward the end of August, in fact, she took their daughter to Europe, sailing from New York on the Italian liner Michelangelo with Olga and Mart Crowley as her guests.

  By then life had also become very difficult for Natalie. Soon after changing the locks on her house, she returned from a visit to Norma Crane, realized she’d forgotten to take her new keys, and cut her wrist when she had to break a window to get in. On the boat, Olga remembered, she seemed “devastated” by the collapse of her marriage, but also “very touched that RJ had called before she left to say how much he felt for her, and she was thinking about him a lot.”

  Mother and child, Natasha Gregson Wagner, age 5 months (illustration credit 6.1)

  Natalie had planned to stay at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, and as David Niven owned a house on the Riviera, she asked him to book rooms there. When he cabled during the crossing that the hotel was full, she decided to stay at Cala di Volpe, the Aga Khan’s recently opened hotel in Sardinia. They disembarked at Naples, took a train to Rome, then a plane to the island. To Natasha, one year old at the time, Cala di Volpe “felt like being in a dark house,” and her mother, who had lost weight, seemed “very fragile.” After a week, Natalie told Mart Crowley that she found the hotel too remote and isolated, and decided to return to Los Angeles by way of Rome.

  AT THE END of September, Natalie and Richard’s lawyers finalized their property settlement, whereby “each of said parties hereby waives any and all rights to the estate of the other.” Natalie was awarded custody of Natasha and granted Richard “reasonable visitation rights.” He also agreed to pay $200 monthly for child support until Natasha was twenty-one and to create a trust of $15,000 in her name. Of their community assets, Natalie retained her art collection and assigned two items to Natasha, “1 Maillol sculpture (of a crouching woman) and 1 Bonnard oil painting.”

  On October 14, RJ divorced Marion on grounds (which she didn’t contest) of “irreconcilable differences.” “We both knew we’d reached the end of the road,” RJ recalled. “At first we felt very passionately about each other, but when the passion subsided, friendship wasn’t enough to keep us together, especially as I spent so much time working in L.A.
, away from my house in Palm Springs.”

  By the time of the divorce, RJ had begun an affair with Tina Sinatra, “but we were never engaged, as the gossip columnists reported.” And three weeks later Natalie gave her first party at North Bentley since her marriage ended. Among the guests was Jerry Brown, the secretary of state for California. “We’ve been out on a few dates,” she told me. Not long afterward, when we had dinner together, she said: “It took a long time to happen, but a couple of nights ago it finally happened.”

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “If you mean ‘it’—like a wand.”

  Natalie had heard about RJ’s affair with Tina Sinatra, of course, and reacted by searching for diversion rather than love. Ironically, with the secretary of state soon out of the picture, Tina’s father picked up his cue as Natalie’s occasional lover, but he proved less of a diversion than she’d hoped. After one of their rendezvous, she told Asa Maynor: “Frank spent the whole time telling me what I could do for him.”

  “La Ronde” continued as Natalie began an affair with Steve McQueen, who recently had separated from his wife. By mutual agreement it was a sometime thing, and she hinted as much to RJ when he called from London. He had gone there to produce as well as co-star with Bette Davis (playing the Oriental head of an espionage ring) in Madame Sin, a pilot for a TV series that failed to sell. “I’d heard about the divorce, and after the usual condolences I asked Natalie, ‘Are you involved with anyone now?’ And she said (meaning Steve), ‘A little bit.’ Then she asked, ‘Are you?’ And I said (meaning Tina), ‘A little bit.’ And then I said, ‘But maybe we could sort things out and get together in the future?’ And after a moment Natalie said, ‘Maybe we could.’ ”

  By November she had started thinking about her career again, but although Guy McElwaine tried to interest several studios in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, it was considered “too risky,” even with the names of Natalie and Simone Signoret attached. Another project with Natalie’s name attached was Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, from a novel about a fragile, self-destructive nightclub singer with a sad and intimate voice in the style of Helen Morgan. Ray Stark had optioned the rights and commissioned me to adapt it for Natalie, but when he read the script, he decided to offer the role to Barbra Streisand, whose persona was far from fragile or self-destructive. Fortunately, she proved unavailable. Less fortunately, Stark shelved the project, and both Natalie and I knew why. She hadn’t made a film in over two years, and he doubted that she was still a major box-office draw.

  It was the first sign of changing times, but a more important change was in the wings. Just before Christmas, RJ returned to Los Angeles and brought presents for mother and daughter at North Bentley. “There were other people around, so everything was subtext again. But a couple of weeks later I broke up with Tina, Natalie broke up with Steve, and I called to invite her to my house in Palm Springs for the weekend—and she stayed until the end of March.”

  Before she joined RJ at the end of January 1972, Natalie worked for one day on The Candidate, playing herself in a political satire about an idealist running for election to the Senate, as a gesture of friendship to Robert Redford, the movie’s producer and star. It would be almost three years before she appeared on the big screen again.

  WHEN NATALIE and RJ decided to remarry, “the seesaw effect” of their careers, noted by Mart Crowley at the time of Splendor in the Grass, had left RJ on top. On the strength of his performance in Harper six years earlier, Lew Wasserman, head of Universal, had offered him the lead in one of the studio’s TV series. At first he was reluctant to abandon the big screen, but two things changed his mind. David Niven, who had produced a successful TV series in partnership with Charles Boyer, advised him that the small screen was a safer career investment for the over-thirties. Then RJ tested for the role of the husband in Rosemary’s Baby, and was deeply disappointed not to get it. (He would have been far more effective—as A Kiss Before Dying proved—than John Cassavetes, too saturnine to surprise anyone when he was unmasked as a Satanist.)

  Olga Viripaeff’s house in San Francisco, January 1972, A visit from Natalie, with Natasha, after the divorce from Gregson. Left to right: Olga, Natalie, Maria and Alexei Tatuloff (only a day before his fatal heart attack) (illustration credit 6.2)

  It Takes a Thief, with Fred Astaire as RJ’s father and equally elegant partner-in-crime, aired from 1965 through 1969. Although it made RJ a major TV star, he became involved in a lawsuit with Universal over residuals after its final season; and the studio secured an injunction to prevent him from working in TV until the suit was settled. He appeared in a theatrical movie, Winning, that did nothing to improve his prospects on the big screen, and was soon paying alimony and child support to Marion after the court granted her custody of their daughter, Kate.

  When Steve McQueen called Natalie and RJ in Palm Springs to say, “You’re back together again, that’s great,” she was a wealthy movie star with an uncertain future and only one recent offer (which she rejected) of a mediocre role in a mediocre film-noir parody, The Black Bird; and RJ was a financially strapped but successful TV star, whose career would not be stalled for much longer by Universal’s injunction. But after many ups and downs, they had both got off the emotional seesaw, and as Natalie said when she called me from Palm Springs: “We’re back where we started, and where we should have stayed.”

  TWO YEARS after they remarried, and were on vacation in Provence, Natalie wrote a letter to John Foreman: “I woke up in the middle of the night and started thinking about how great ’73 had been for me and RJ, and how really happy I am.” And then, the letter continued, she started thinking about “a certain night at your house” and realized that she owed her present happiness to the party John and Linda gave: “This is all by way of saying thank you for making that evening happen which made everything start happening for us. As things in life sometimes have a way of turning out, you’ve turned out to be my best friend and I just wanted you to know that I know it. And I hope you get everything you ever wanted—like I did!”

  On February 10, 1972, Natalie and RJ left Palm Springs to stay at North Bentley Drive for a few days. “She wanted to throw my forty-second birthday party there,” he remembered, “and invite our friends to make it official that we were back together again.” On April 10, when they arrived at the Academy Awards ceremony (where they jointly presented the Oscar for Best Actor to Marlon Brando for The Godfather), the almost hysterical media reaction astonished them. It was like a replay of the time when they were Hollywood’s golden young couple, and Mary Sale remembered that even the “valet parkers at Chasen’s, who had been very upset when they broke up, said to me and my husband, ‘Guess who just came in? They’re together again!’ ”

  On July 16 they were remarried on a chartered boat, Ramblin’ Rose, offshore from Catalina. No professional photographers were present, as they purposely chose a small boat that could only accommodate their respective families and a few close friends. “We honeymooned around the Isthmus, Avalon and Emerald Bay,” RJ recalled. “No fog this time. It was incredibly beautiful.”

  But they returned to an incredibly disagreeable surprise. Lana had begged Natalie and RJ to allow her current husband, Richard Smedley, to photograph the wedding ceremony, and they agreed on condition the photos were kept private. But no less than twenty-seven had been sold to a fan magazine. “I cannot begin to tell you how very hurt and disappointed RJ and I are to have found out that you have sold our personal photographs to Silver Screen magazine,” Natalie wrote Smedley. “Apart from our personal hurt feelings toward you as a relative, we are just astounded that you would do such a thing.” The letter also accused Smedley and Lana of “betraying our trust” and noted that she hadn’t even received copies of several of the photos they sold.

  It was not the first time that Natalie had accused Lana of betrayal. “In those pre-credit-card days,” according to Peggy Griffin, who was RJ’s secretary at the time, “Lana used to charge many t
hings she bought at department stores to Natalie’s account.” Even before her modest acting career virtually ended in the early 1970s, Lana’s persistent requests for loans had deepened their estrangement; and the tone of Smedley’s letter, which Natalie felt sure had been written with Lana’s approval, made it all but final.

  Smedley denied that Natalie “explained anything about privacy” and asked her not to consider him a relative. “From my observations of being a relative,” he wrote, “one must either be afraid of you, as your parents are, or bear the scars of past hurts as both your sisters do.” This was more wounding than Lana’s jealousy (at its crudest in her remark to Donfeld, “Nat’s got the brains, but I got the tits”) or the clothes charged to her account or the loans that were never repaid. It was bitter confirmation that Lana’s affection was as conditional as her mother’s.

  When Lana persisted with her demands for a loan, RJ advised Natalie to respond only in case of serious need; and over the years she often paid the school fees and medical bills of Lana’s daughter. But she seldom saw Lana again. Elizabeth Applegate, who became Natalie’s secretary in 1975, soon after Peggy Griffin left to work for director Gil Cates, could recall “only three times, until Natalie’s death, when Lana was invited to the house.” The estrangement caused Natalie the same feeling of guilt as her decision to keep Mud at a distance, although RJ (and no doubt Dr. Lindon) assured her there was no reason for it. In public, as usual, she remained loyal to both, and in private never told anyone, not even RJ, what Olga had confided about Lana’s father.

  Just remarried: Natalie and RJ on board Ramblin’ Rose, July 16, 1972 (illustration credit 6.3)

  “The second time around was mostly the best years for both of us,” according to RJ, “and the most deeply emotional time of my life.” As the Palm Springs house was only half-furnished, Natalie used her money and her decorator’s license to complete it; and when RJ’s lawyer advised him that Universal’s injunction could not prevent him from working in England, he was free to film a new TV series there. In December they sailed to England on the Queen Elizabeth II, and during January and February 1973 he starred in the first thirteen episodes of Colditz.