By this time Mart Crowley had arrived as their guest and buffer zone, and he soon realized that Natalie was developing a “fixation” on William Devane. So did RJ, who became increasingly jealous and made a point of visiting the set for their scenes together. Although several of them had a high sexual charge, and there was a sexual element in Natalie’s fixation, it went no further than “swishing her tail.” But this was enough to arouse RJ’s suspicion, “particularly when she didn’t want me around watching her nude love scene in the ocean with Devane.”
James B. Sikking, an actor friend of RJ’s, was also making a TV movie in Honolulu and staying at the Colony Surf. One evening at the Outrigger bar attached to the hotel, he remembered, RJ’s jealousy drove him “to get as drunk as you can get before you lose consciousness.” Natalie, completely sober and increasingly on edge, retired to the Wagners’ suite on the eighth floor. “How could she do this to me?” RJ asked Sikking, then wandered out to the beach, “flailing, weepy-eyed, so totally irrational he could have walked out into the ocean. Anything!”
Sikking persuaded him to come back to the hotel and, with Mart’s help, walked him to an elevator, then up to the suite. Natalie, who had an early call, was getting ready for bed. But RJ’s jealousy flared up again, as Mart recalled: “ ‘Don’t lie to me about Devane!’ he said. Natalie got furious, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door. In a drunken dramatic gesture, RJ ran to the window as if to throw himself out. While Jim and I pulled him back, Natalie came out from the bedroom. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ she said to RJ, then we locked the windows and put him to bed.”
James B. Sikking: At that time, drinking was the bane of RJ and Natalie’s existence. But next day RJ sent me a message of thanks, and everything seemed fine between them again. As angry as they could get with each other, there was always this bond.
One year earlier, Natalie was on board Splendour with Sarah Gregson, David Niven and Olivier’s son Tarquin, but without RJ, who was taping an episode of Switch. After discussing the recent death of Elvis Presley, they moved to the inevitable subject of Hollywood marriages and divorces. “I’ve never been unfaithful to RJ,” Natalie said. “I don’t believe in that.”
Laurence Olivier was unable to join the others because he was filming The Betsy, but during his stay in California the Wagners threw a party for him in the garden of 603 North Canon Drive. As usual, George Segal remembered, “They provided the glitter, and Natalie put on a real Hollywood performance for Olivier—green bikini, scarf around her waist, clicking around the pool in high heels to make sure everyone had drinks. He clearly adored her.” And once again “everything seemed fine” with the Wagner marriage.
IN THE LAST week of November 1978, Natalie began filming exteriors in Cleveland, Ohio, for another TV movie. Four days later the production unit moved to California and began shooting interiors at the Veterans Hospital in West Los Angeles. In The Cracker Factory, which seemed to Natalie like a reward for losing Sybil and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, she played a Cleveland housewife in severe midlife crisis: alcoholic, Catholic, with a repressive mother, three children and a husband who “understands” but can’t help her.
The opening scene shows Cathy suddenly disoriented in a supermarket. Back home she attempts suicide; she is forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward and given heavy sedation. “Don’t you have anything to look forward to?” the psychiatrist (Perry King) asks at their first session. “Only menopause and senility—and with my luck they’ll probably overlap,” Cathy replies. The rest of the movie dramatizes her treatment, relapses alternating with progress until she’s well enough to return home, and although the format is familiar, the writing and direction are exceptionally sharp, and Natalie’s performance is not only one of her finest, but her bravest.
In many ways it’s a “new” Natalie, not the still famously beautiful actress of Cat and From Here to Eternity, but a woman of forty who looks as if she was still very beautiful only a few years ago. “We had two things that we called ‘Ugly Number One’ and ‘Ugly Number Two,’ ” Natalie remembered. “And there were certain distorted lenses when I was really supposed to look bad.”
When she first read the novel by Joyce Rebeta-Burditt, Natalie unhesitatingly embraced the idea of opening her own Pandora’s box, tried to option the rights, then discovered that ABC had already acquired them. And her performance embraced Cathy’s wide range of moods, formidable when bitter and angry, endearing when funny, pathetic but never sentimental when helpless and childlike. The psychiatrist diagnoses Cathy as “arrested emotionally,” and the director, Burt Brinckerhoff (who had played Natalie’s brother in the 1955 TV show Miracle at Potters Farm), perceived “the inner child that Natalie managed to bring with her, although she still had to deal with interior demons.”
From Here to Eternity. William Devane as Milt, Natalie as Karen, in the love scene in the ocean (illustration credit 6.10)
When an actor not only chooses but pursues a role, one reason is obviously professional, but there’s often an intimate personal motive as well. In Garbo’s case, Queen Christina: the bisexual sovereign who lived alone and eventually abdicated, like the star of MGM. In Natalie’s case, The Cracker Factory: an autobiographical novel that became an autobiographical film for actress as well as author.
Burt Brinckerhoff: Natalie’s fear of dark water reminded me of an account of Tolstoy’s wife in a biography I’d recently read. It described her as always about to throw herself into dark water, then waiting for someone to save her.
In March 1979, Natalie’s performance in From Here to Eternity won a Golden Globe award for best actress in a TV series. (Although her even more impressive performance as Maggie the Cat had been nominated for an Emmy two years earlier, there would be no nominations for The Cracker Factory.) TV coverage of the Golden Globe event showed Natalie’s genuine astonishment when her name was read out, RJ’s no less genuinely proud reaction during her acceptance speech; and the couple looked not only as if everything was fine between them, but always would be.
Executives at ABC had been eager to exploit the high ratings of From Here to Eternity by turning it into a weekly series, and pressured Natalie to repeat her role. Wisely, she refused, and accepted instead an offer to appear on the big screen in The Last Married Couple in America. But it proved a case of choosing a rock over a hard place. The movie’s only interest is as a reflection of changing times, a kind of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice ten years later, sanctimonious dialogue about “the new morality” replacing sly human observation, wretched jokes about premature ejaculation and prostate problems instead of wit. Unfortunately, Natalie convinced herself that the script was better than mediocre because she liked the director, Gil Cates, and her co-star, George Segal, and the idea of a romantic comedy about a storm-tossed marriage that finally made safe harbor.
But less than midway through the shoot, she had a premonition of failure. “After a while,” she said to Segal, “it gets to be just one damn clapper board after another.”
Her final clapper board on The Last Married Couple was struck on March 18, and five days later the Wagners flew to Leningrad for Treasures of the Hermitage, a TV documentary on the famous art museum. Natalie and Peter Ustinov had agreed to act as tour guides, and the American-British co-production, with a mixed British and Russian crew, was planned to coincide with a telecast of the Moscow Olympics. But soon after taping was completed, the Cold War grew even colder, the USA withdrew from the Olympics, and NBC put the documentary on ice until April 1981.
Although the idea of visiting the homeland she’d never seen fascinated Natalie, Mud predicted a descent into hell; and it provoked a major disturbance in Fahd, who once again recalled the horrors of the revolution. But Ustinov, another Russian born in exile, was as fascinated as Natalie. He’d never met her before, was “amazed that she spoke Russian better than I did,” and found her “very agreeable to be with.” Unfortunately, they had little time to exchange impressions, because for reasons that he neve
r understood, “We were kept more or less apart when we weren’t taping the show.”
At that time in Soviet Russia, Ustinov added, “You were very closely supervised and limited in where you could go.” Natalie soon found herself too closely supervised. Although she had an agreement with the Soviet authorities that she could phone Natasha and Courtney once a day, she soon realized that the calls were being wiretapped. She insisted that an interpreter put through an urgent call to the minister of culture in Moscow, then took the phone and informed him she would leave the country, and NBC would halt production, unless the wiretaps stopped at once. They stopped.
Ustinov recalled Natalie’s excitement, during their tour of the museum’s treasures, at the collection of van Goghs, Gauguins and Cézannes, and his own at an authenticated Leonardo da Vinci that had never been seen outside the country: “It was known as the ‘Madonna Benois’ because it had been bought by my great-grandfather Benois from itinerant Italian peddlers from Astrakhan.” Also included in the documentary was their visit to “a two-thousand-year-old man from Siberia, packed in powdered ice with steam rising from it. He was desiccated but preserved with more vitality than a mummy, reddish hair and eyelashes, mouth open as if about to speak, and all except two teeth still there.”
Like Ustinov, every Russian that Natalie met was astonished by how well she spoke their language. “To them,” she remembered, “I looked very typically American.” The only American movies playing in Leningrad were The Apartment (1960) and Cleopatra (1963), so “they were quite behind and nobody recognized me in the streets.” Her most vivid impression of “old Russia” occurred when she was allowed to enter a church where a christening was in progress. The sacristan came over as she watched, she spoke to him in Russian and explained that “my parents had been born in Russia and I had learned the language as a child. So he took us around and showed us more about the church, places that were not open to the public.”
RJ photographs Natalie at work on The Cracker Factory. (illustration credit 6.11)
The Cracker Factory. Left to right: psychiatric patients Donald Hotton, Delia Salvi, Natalie “Ugly Number One” and Sidney Lassick (illustration credit 6.12)
Another memory, no doubt reflecting a personal preoccupation, was how quickly Russian women seemed to age, looking worn and tired soon after they turned thirty.
THE WAGNERS returned to Beverly Hills on April 10, three days before Nick Gurdin had a serious heart attack. He recovered, but was very diminished for the rest of his life. Vulnerable as ever to feelings of guilt where the Gurdins were concerned, Natalie connected the attack with his emotional disturbance over her trip to Russia. By then Mud and Fahd were both sixty-eight years old, and she decided to move them to a rented condominium on Goshen Avenue in Brentwood, where they would have fewer household responsibilities.
Nick’s declining health also seems to have aroused thoughts of mortality in Natalie. On April 18 she instructed her lawyers to draw up two documents, “Instructions Regarding My Medical Care” to her family and physician, and a “Directive to Physician.” She approved and signed both of them. From the first:
I am not conscious of any fear of death. It is as much a part of the human scene as the beginning and the middle span of life. So, do not try to postpone the inevitable termination, for I do not believe that such is the proper goal of medical science. A departure from this world which is artificially delayed to no purpose, increasing the span of disability, discomfort and expense, is not a proper exercise of human judgment and intelligence.
The second attested that in the case of incurable injury or illness, Natalie did not wish her life to be artificially prolonged, and directed that “all life-sustaining procedures be withheld or withdrawn, and that I be permitted to die naturally.”
THAT SUMMER Richard Gregson was living in Malibu with his new wife, Julia, and as Natasha recalled: “My mother, who could be fiercely protective, was very easily threatened by my blossoming relationship with Daddy Gregson and Julia, who was quite bohemian then. When I realized Natalie was jealous, I’d tell her how I enjoyed the different atmosphere. She wanted me to have a good relationship with my father, but anxieties would overtake her. Sometimes she’d ask, ‘If you had to choose between us, who would it be?’ And of course I’d say, ‘You.’ ”
When the Gregsons took Natasha horseback riding, she enjoyed it so much that (with Natalie’s permission) they enrolled her in riding school for a week. “When Natalie drove me there the first day, the woman who ran the school told her she couldn’t call me during the week. My mother got very angry. ‘I spent three weeks in Russia,’ she said, ‘and was allowed to call Natasha every day. Don’t tell me I can’t do that in Malibu.’ The woman backed down and agreed she could.”
LANA WOOD added a characteristic footnote to Gurdin family history that summer, as Liz Applegate discovered when she went shopping for Natalie in Beverly Hills: “At one store they asked me when Miss Wood was going to pay her bill, and it turned out that Lana had been telling the store to charge her own purchases there to Natalie.” It came as the reverse of a surprise to Natalie, but enough was enough. She consulted with RJ, then told thirty-three-year-old Lana, “You have to get your act together. I’ll pay for a psychiatrist.” The prodigal daughter consented, then called Natalie after two sessions: “I’m cured. I don’t have to see him anymore.”
IN JULY, Tom Mankiewicz directed the pilot of Hart to Hart with RJ and Stefanie Powers as married sleuths in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles; and in September RJ and Natalie went on vacation to Paris and the south of France. In Paris they met Mart Crowley, who had been living there for three months, “moving around from New York to Rome to London to Paris, depressed by the failure of my last play, and drinking my life away.” Over lunch RJ mentioned that the Hart to Hart pilot had been sold and the series would start shooting in October, but he was very disappointed in the scripts he’d read. “Mart!” Natalie said. “You’re not working, and if you were a true friend you’d come back to L.A. with us, stay at our house and rewrite those rotten scripts.”
And having paid for the first six months of psychoanalysis that led Mart to concentrate on writing The Boys in the Band, Natalie helped him again “by finding me a second career.” At first he worked as “executive story editor” of the series, and when the producer left, he took over that job as well. And after the series completed the first season of its five-year run, he moved to an apartment of his own, then started going to AA.
IN NATALIE’S next and last TV movie, The Memory of Eva Ryker, she played the mentally disturbed daughter of a billionaire whose mother was drowned when a German U-boat torpedoed a cruise ship in 1939. Her father hires a journalist to investigate why the liner was attacked and other survivors died later “in mysterious circumstances.” And under hypnosis, Eva has a recovered memory of her mother’s death.
Natalie played two parts, mother and daughter; and the story touched two exposed nerves: her interest in mental disturbance, and Maria’s often repeated account of the Gypsy in Harbin who had prophesied her death by drowning. But the director (Walter Grauman) was unable to breathe life into a poorly contrived script that included a scene of Natalie’s life-and-death struggle in the dark water of a studio tank. And when she saw the movie (shortly before CBS aired it on May 7, 1980, to dank reviews), she found it even harder to endure than those two hours in the tank.
By then Natalie had been offered a big-screen role in The Mirror Crack’d, as part of an ensemble cast that would include Angela Lansbury, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Geraldine Chaplin. She liked Barry Sandler’s adaptation of a Miss Marple mystery by Agatha Christie, as well as the role of a movie star furiously jealous of a rival (Kim Novak), and invited Sandler to lunch at La Scala. “I was immediately captivated by Natalie,” he remembered. “Unlike so many stars, she didn’t want to talk about herself. In fact we hardly even talked about the script. The movie business hadn’t insulated her, she was personally
very curious about me, and we talked mainly about my life.” This, of course, had been Arnold Schulman’s experience on Love with the Proper Stranger and mine on Inside Daisy Clover. A positive relationship with a writer, director or actor was often a deciding factor for Natalie in choosing a project, and a few days later she invited Sandler to 603 North Canon: “Again we talked about many things before discussing her role, and finally she said she would do the picture. Then the doorbell rang. ‘That must be Larry,’ Natalie said. She took me by the hand to the hallway, where Olivier was waiting, and laughed as she introduced us: ‘Larry—Barry. Barry—Larry.’ ”
With Peter Ustinov in Leningrad for Treasures of the Hermitage (illustration credit 6.13)
But a week later, Richard Goodwin (co-producer of The Mirror Crack’d) called Sandler with the news that “Natalie’s leaving the project. She and [director] Guy Hamilton had a bit of a row.” Goodwin gave no details, but Sandler had already found Hamilton “very dogmatic,” as well as underendowed with humor; and as Natalie explained later, this time the deciding factor was a negative relationship: “Barry, I’m very sorry, but I realized I just couldn’t work with Guy Hamilton.”
Elizabeth Taylor replaced her.
ON JULY 16, RJ celebrated the eighth anniversary of his wedding to Natalie with a party at the Bistro. John and Linda Foreman were among the guests, and Linda remembered that “after RJ proposed a charming, elegant toast to Natalie, she turned and whispered to me: ‘He always takes my breath away.’ ” And once again the couple looked as if everything was and always would be fine between them.
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