Natalie Wood

by Gavin Lambert

  In the past, Mart commented later, Natalie had sometimes drunk too much, but he’d never seen her lose control before. Hindsight suggests a connection between the return of her “career demon” and the wildness that too much alcohol would continue to arouse from time to time in the future.

  The third event was Natalie’s appearance as Maggie the Cat, with RJ as Brick, in a TV production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Taped in England six months before the San Francisco tribute to Natalie, it would not be aired in the USA until six weeks later, on December 9.

  Cat was a co-production of NBC and Granada in Britain, and part of a TV series of outstanding twentieth-century plays with Laurence Olivier as host, actor and “artistic director.” The series had opened with Alan Bates, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Olivier in Harold Pinter’s The Collection; and Natalie was “astonished and delighted,” as she said later, not only by Olivier’s invitation to star herself and RJ in the second play, but his admiration for her talent as a film actress.

  For RJ, the role of Brick was his first serious acting challenge in a long while, and so important to him that he persuaded Universal to suspend production of Switch for two months. Like all the plays in the series, Cat was rehearsed and taped as an actual stage production, act by act, and RJ had never worked this way before, unlike Natalie, with her experience of live TV that began in the 1950s.

  After two weeks of publicity interviews and costume tests in London, followed by a month of rehearsal, the cast moved to Granada’s studio in Manchester for nine days of taping by four cameras. The day of the dress rehearsal, Natalie felt that “we could have gone onstage and played it,” but the American director, Robert Moore, was disagreeably surprised by the rigid British union rules. “When Bob asked for overtime, it was refused,” according to Derek Granger, who produced the series. “Even when he explained that he hadn’t finished the scene, the union representative wouldn’t budge. As each scene was taped in a long take, it wasn’t always easy to sustain the emotional continuity.”

  And Natalie was surprised by her makeup artist, who proved far less cooperative than Bob Jiras and others she’d worked with in Los Angeles. One day, Granger recalled, “she was very tight-lipped, and at first didn’t want to tell me when I asked what was the matter. But finally it turned out that Natalie had asked for a particular brand of foundation and the makeup woman assured her it wasn’t available in England. So she went to Boots [drugstore], found it, came into the makeup room and shook it in the woman’s face.”

  Unlike the movie version with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, which Williams disliked because it omitted every reference to Brick’s guilt over a latent homosexual attachment in the past, the TV production respected the original text. Although Natalie found it ironic that “things you couldn’t do in movies in 1958, you can do now on television,” no reviewer commented on this when Cat aired on NBC. Most reviewers, in fact, were extraordinarily hostile, scoffed at the idea of a couple of movie stars in a Tennessee Williams play, and dismissed both leading performances; and as Williams had fallen out of fashion by the 1970s, some dismissed the play as well.

  Interviewer: How do you feel about negative reviews? Does it bother you a lot?

  Natalie Wood: No. After the first few suicide attempts, you get right over it.

  In fact Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a strong production with strong flaws, notably sets that fail to convey the Delta plantation style of a mansion that Williams defined as “Victorian with a touch of the Far East,” and the miscasting of Olivier as Big Daddy. He lacks the vulgarity of the self-made patriarch, and also the swaggering power, partly because illness has begun to deplete his own power as an actor. He’s at his best in moments of reacting rather than acting, notably in the last act, when Maggie claims that she’s pregnant with Brick’s child. “He played it differently every time,” Natalie said later. “Once he just looked at me. And looked and looked.” It was the take that Moore chose, although Natalie conceals her reaction when the look “went on so long that I began to feel faint.”

  Sudden, unnervingly enigmatic looks had become one of Olivier’s most effective devices for the camera (Wuthering Heights and Carrie are full of them), and as Maureen Stapleton, who played Big Mama, told Natalie: “Honey, when you’ve been looked at by Olivier, you know you’ve been looked at.” Stapleton’s own performance is occasionally uncertain, as if she can’t decide whether she’s playing Big Mama or little Birdie in The Little Foxes, but she’s splendidly pugnacious in the climactic family brawl. And RJ is very persuasive in conveying the two sides of Brick, his air of weary detachment and the moments of emotional disorder that contradict it.

  “Natalie was even better in the dress rehearsal, when her nervousness added to the tension,” according to Derek Granger; but in the taped performance she seems electrically charged, powered by the kind of role she’s longed for over the past ten years. And in the final scene with Brick, as Maggie realizes “I’m stronger than you,” there’s an echo of Natalie’s favorite actress, Vivien Leigh. “Oh, you weak people, you weak beautiful people!—who give up with such grace,” Maggie says as she switches off the lamp at Brick’s bedside. “What you want is someone to take hold of you—Gently, gently …” Gently, yes, in the delicate seductiveness that both actresses shared; but less gently in the fierce determination they so exquisitely conveyed.

  A year later, when Olivier came out to Los Angeles to make The Betsy, the Wagners often entertained him at 603 North Canon, and Delphine Mann had a strong impression that “he saw the young Vivien in Natalie.”

  THE ONLY MOVIE offer that Natalie had received by the spring of 1977 was for Meteor, a late and (as it turned out) mediocre offering in the big-budget disaster cycle. Two actors she liked, Sean Connery and Karl Malden, had accepted the other leading parts; and she was also tempted by the chance to play her first Russian role, as interpreter for a group of Soviet scientists who cooperate with NASA in an attempt to liquidate “Orpheus,” a meteor heading toward earth. But the special effects were the movie’s real stars, and literally overwhelmed most of the cast when a hefty chip off Orpheus devastated part of Manhattan and buried them up to their necks in mud.

  Natalie had learned from experience that it wasn’t quality of performance, Academy Awards or nominations that kept you in demand, but your record of appearing in movies that consistently made money; and when she ventured into blockbuster country for the first time, she hoped for a commercial success that would restore her value at the box office. She approached the chore with her usual professionalism, took a crash course to polish her Russian (which she spoke “very fluently,” according to Natasha Zepaloff, “with a slight but definite American accent”) and even called Vladimir Zacharenko at the Westinghouse Corporation in Sunnyvale to make sure the Russian technical terms in the script were correct.

  With cigarette holder and bracelet, c.1970 (illustration credit 6.6)

  MGM’s enormous Stage 30, which had once housed the world’s largest swimming pool to accommodate the aquatic spectaculars of Esther Williams, was converted to an equally spectacular set of a New York subway terminal, complete with train, that would later collapse under a million tons of mud. At Paramount, NASA Control Center was reproduced on a set only marginally less huge, to be deluged in its turn with another million tons of mud. The script called for the three leading players to be stuck in it, and they endured seven days of filming in the studio tank, trying to keep their heads above mud until a rescue team arrived.

  Meteor began shooting on October 31, and it soon became clear that both schedule and budget ($17 million) were inadequate. The movie exceeded both by several weeks and several millions, and although Natalie completed her role at the end of January 1978, the remaining scenes took another two months, special effects another six months, and Meteor wasn’t released until October 1979. By that time Natalie was more creatively employed, and distance had erased a disagreeable memory.

  Meteor became an equally disagreeable memory for its
director, Ronald Neame. “I left after principal photography, and was appalled when I saw the third-rate special effects, the only thing that could have saved the picture.” Natalie’s role, according to Neame, “was forced into the script by the producers.” Dissatisfied with the way it was written in the first draft by Edmund North and the second by Steven Bach, “I came up with the idea of making her a Russian interpreter, and worked closely with Stanley Mann on the final draft.”

  But the role still lacked color, and Natalie’s two “romantic” scenes with Connery’s NASA scientist (married, of course) were beyond tentative. After the movie completed production, Neame was surprised when “RJ deliberately cut me at a party.” He claimed to have no idea why, and could recall “only one moment that might have given Natalie offense. She seemed overly concerned about the way she looked, and one day took so long worrying about her face that I got a bit impatient and said, ‘It’s more important to worry about the character you’re playing.’ ”

  In Natalie’s view, she had no character to play or worry about, and Neame’s attitude struck her as devious and patronizing. “She didn’t like it when people blew smoke at her,” according to RJ, “and she felt that Neame blew a lot.” He also had a personal reason for the cut: “I’d recently been on a panel with Neame, who remarked at one point, ‘You have to treat actors like children.’ I found this an offensive thing to say in front of an actor, and it also made me understand why Natalie was unhappy working with him.”

  METEOR WAS not the only frustrating experience for Natalie. She’d recently been passed over for two roles she longed to play. The first was a TV drama, Sybil, about a girl whose childhood traumas had created a case of multiple personality. Stewart Stern had written the script, and she hoped for his support in her bid for the part. But although Stewart inclined to an unknown actress—“like an ordinary-looking woman you might see getting off a bus”—he was careful “not to take sides” when Natalie was under consideration. “Then Sally Field came in, wearing glasses, did an extraordinary audition playing two Sybils, and everyone agreed on her.”

  As Maggie, with RJ as Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (illustration credit 6.7)

  With Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy (illustration credit 6.8)

  Convinced that Stewart had talked against her, Natalie accused him of betrayal. Although he denied it, she refused to speak to him anymore. “But we soon reconciled, and with the generosity that was so typical of her, she offered to help me decorate the house I’d just bought.”

  A few weeks later I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which Natalie had once hoped to make with Simone Signoret, became the first film of TV and stage director Anthony Page. He disliked the existing script and asked me to rewrite it. When Natalie proposed herself for the role she’d offered Signoret, and asked me to discuss the idea with Anthony Page, I was placed in the same situation as Stewart. Although I’d often hoped to work with Natalie again, I couldn’t see her as an ordinary-looking European psychiatrist on the brink of middle age. Neither could Anthony, and when I told Natalie that he wanted an older, less beautiful actress (which was true), she accepted the news gracefully.

  By this time, I realized, her “career drive” was in high gear, but it was a drive for parts that excited her. Acting had become a creative experience as essential to her life as psychoanalysis.

  Sydney Pollack: Natalie was very fulfilled as wife and mother, but increasingly restless because she was finding it difficult to get worthwhile parts just when she was really blossoming as an actress. And after being put on a pedestal when she was young, she became a victim of changing times, when the new stars were “people like ourselves” rather than iconic.

  It was one reason that she began to drink more heavily. The other was her anxiety about approaching the age of forty, when iconic stars were considered over the hill. But until her final movie, she never drank during a shoot, exercised beforehand to make sure she looked her best—and, as Tom Mankiewicz commented, “heavy” drinking in Natalie’s case was relatively light. “Being so tiny, she filled up so quickly, and could get seriously drunk after a fourth glass of white wine.”

  In November 1977, Natalie heard that Julia Phillips, co-producer of The Sting and Taxi Driver, had acquired the film rights to Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying. She asked Arnold Stiefel to arrange a meeting with Phillips over lunch at La Scala, and although Phillips expressed interest in discussing the project with Natalie, she arrived forty minutes late. “That showed how things had changed,” Stiefel commented. “A few years earlier, the producer would have been waiting for Natalie.”

  During lunch, Phillips sprinkled cocaine on her side plate, broke off the filter from a cigarette, dipped it in the cocaine, then inhaled. After she left, Natalie (who had never been part of the drug scene and knew almost nothing about it) asked Stiefel: “What was she doing?” When he explained, “Natalie was appalled that a producer would be smoking coke in public during a meeting.”

  Phillips, whose addiction had brought her career to the cusp of decline, was unable to set up Fear of Flying; and in late March 1978, Natalie took Natasha and Courtney to Hawaii, where RJ was filming Pearl, a miniseries about Pearl Harbor. Two weeks after she arrived at the house he’d rented on Diamond Head, she was offered the role of Karen in an ABC miniseries based on From Here to Eternity. (Mysteriously, Pearl Harbor was in and on the air that year.) At first “there seemed something wrong about playing Deborah Kerr’s part in a TV remake of a famous movie,” but when Natalie weighed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof against a movie industry obsessed with sharks, volcanoes, earthquakes and (especially) meteors, it seemed that TV had more to offer.

  During the first week of June, when From Here to Eternity began filming, Tom Mankiewicz flew in from Los Angeles to offer Natalie and RJ the leads in another Spelling-Goldberg production. It was based on an unproduced script by Sidney Sheldon that Spelling had signed Tom to rewrite and direct as a two-hour pilot for a TV series. Although RJ liked the pilot script of Hart to Hart, he told Tom that Natalie didn’t want to get involved in a regular series, and that he didn’t want her to. “But I’m happy to do a series,” he added, “and make enough money for Natalie to feel she has to work only when she really wants to.”

  Natalie read and reread James Jones’s novel as well as the TV adaptation, then went to look at some of the places it described—downtown Honolulu streets, Schofield Barracks, the Moana Hotel. She made a lot of notes, not only on Karen’s character, but “things that I felt could be incorporated in the scenes that I had.” They reflect her habit of typically detailed preparation, cover more than twenty handwritten pages of an exercise book, and concentrate on the development of Karen’s relationship with Milt (William Devane in the Burt Lancaster role). In their first scene together, “She’s attracted to him but not wanting him to see through to her pain, trying to maintain icy calm and control.” During a phone conversation soon afterward, “She’s trying to be the aggressor—new color—more open, tantalizing, less sure of herself, trying to keep her defenses but letting them down.” And their love scene in the ocean demands “false brightness, revealing deep insecurity, total spilling of all emotions.”

  On a cold day in L.A. Left to right: Kate Wagner, RJ, Natasha, Natalie and Courtney (illustration credit 6.9)

  For the following two-hour segments of the six-hour series, the notes chart Karen’s gradual disillusionment with Milt. “Frustration at affair leading nowhere” leads to their “bittersweet” parting, which Natalie compares to the “last scene in Splendor.” There are also notes on her costumes, and on two scenes that she considers “absolutely unacceptable” (underlined) because they “emasculate” Karen’s character.

  When she discussed From Here to Eternity at the AFI seminar, Natalie mentioned that the director, Buzz Kulik, was “very open” to all her suggestions, and William Devane “had his bible [the novel] and I had mine, and if we ever had a problem with a scene, we would always refer to the book.” She was also relieved to find
Don McGuire’s adaptation very different from Daniel Taradash’s screenplay: “I hadn’t seen the film recently, but my husband had, and I said, ‘I’m afraid to see it,’ and he said, ‘You shouldn’t feel that way, because you’ll see that it’s very different.’ He’d read the script also, so it really wasn’t a problem, and Kulik and the producers were very aware of the fact they didn’t want to be imitative of the film.”

  Partly because the TV adaptation is more faithful to the book, and includes several important scenes omitted in the movie, and partly because censorship was far less powerful in 1978, the relationship between Karen and Milt becomes more complex. The TV version emphasizes the social gulf between them, and Karen’s painful insecurity, most powerfully in a scene when she explains how she contracted gonorrhea and had a hysterectomy that left her “feeling unwanted as a woman.” At the same time, Milt becomes more nakedly crude in his sexual rapacity, as well as more bitter in his hatred of the officer class.

  Natalie and Devane bring excitement and urgency to these scenes, but they caused a violent disturbance in the Wagner marriage. When Natalie first arrived in Hawaii, Natasha remembered, “She was very solid and safe as a mother.” But then her frustrated career drive began to take its toll, and she drank heavily. “It was sometimes scary. When she was really drunk, she didn’t know who we were.” After RJ completed Pearl, and the children went back to Los Angeles with Willie Mae, the Wagners moved to the Colony Surf Hotel. There RJ began to drink heavily out of frustration at Natalie’s frustration, and in another seesaw effect, Natalie went on the wagon to begin costume fittings for From Here to Eternity.