A few days later Nick Gurdin, weakened by alcoholism as well as coronary artery disease, was hospitalized after another serious heart attack. Natalie, who visited him almost every day, was particularly touched to find him reading a Russian edition of Anna Karenina. When it became clear that he would never recover, Nick asked to die at home, and she arranged for a hospital bed and round-the-clock nurses at the Goshen Avenue condominium. “Natasha,” he said one day, “you are a good girl,” and she was also touched by this belated recognition.
After Nick died on November 6, Mud begged Natalie to let her stay at 603 North Canon for a few days. The afternoon of her arrival, Liz Applegate found her lying on the bed in a guest room, “hands and feet shaking in convulsions.” She informed Natalie, who was reading a book in the master bedroom. “She’ll be all right in a minute,” Natalie said calmly, then continued reading.
Linda Foreman: “What did your father die of?” I asked Natalie. “My mother, I think,” Natalie said.
But during Nick’s funeral service at Westwood Village Memorial Park, there was a noticeable crack in Natalie’s calm. “She was very emotional,” her daughter Natasha recalled, and Natalie’s eulogy was a mixture of things she truly felt, things she wished were true and the impression of a united family that she felt compelled to give in public.
She talked about Nick’s wife, “who loved him and shared his life for over forty years, and was the love of his life.” She recalled “the supreme pleasure of watching and listening to him play his balalaika,” smoothed over his alcoholic rages as “rich, wonderful Russian explosions,” remarked (truly) that “his underside was soft and gentle,” and concluded by reading the lines from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” that the schoolteacher quoted in Splendor in the Grass:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, but rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
The depth of Natalie’s emotion makes it impossible to believe that she ever suspected Nick Gurdin was not her father. But by yet another of those recurring coincidences in the lives of everyone concerned, a remark by the Captain to Natasha Zepaloff would soon convince her that he was unquestionably Natalie’s father. Zepaloff’s second wife had also been called Natalie, and after she died, he was moved to comment: “How curious. Now there have been three Natalies in my life.”
It would have been out of character for the Captain to identify the third, but the number of times he repeated the comment (in conjunction with all the other hints that both he and Maria had dropped) left no doubt in Natasha’s mind. All the same, she confided in no one except her mother.
“Is your mother going to live with you now?” Linda Foreman asked Natalie, who threw up her hands in horror. “No way!” A few days later Mud had another convulsion before agreeing to return to her condo, and in early December Natalie took her daughters to a memorial service for Nick in San Francisco, where he had bought a plot for himself and Maria in the Serbian cemetery, the only Eastern Orthodox burial ground in California. Although they seldom attended services at the Protection of the Holy Virgin Church, the rituals of their homeland’s religion had a nostalgic appeal for the exiled couple; and they liked the idea, as they saw it, of a return to their native earth. Nick’s brothers, Vladimir and Dmitri, were present at the service, also the Liuzunies, and “Natalie was very moved by them,” according to Peggy Griffin, who accompanied her. “After the service she took Natasha and Courtney to meet them, wanting them to understand where she came from—’the real world,’ as she called it.” Vladimir later wrote Natalie and RJ to ask for a copy of her eulogy at the service in Westwood, and wrote again to thank them for sending it, as well as “for the beautiful poinsettia plant” delivered to his house on Christmas Day.
By the time Nick died, Natalie had not only understood the roots of his alcoholism and violence. He seemed to her a profoundly Russian character, and she identified his extremes with her own. Out of a growing desire for closeness with her Russian side, she invited the Liuzunies for a visit shortly before Christmas, and Constantin recalled that “both Natalie and her husband were wonderful, and RJ took us to the set of Hart to Hart and gave us a studio tour.”
On December 31, the last New Year’s Eve at the Wagners’, the guests included Paul and Betsy Mazursky, George Segal and his wife, Gil Cates, Mart Crowley and myself. It was not formality that made the Wagners request black tie, but the occasion itself, which they felt was worth dressing up for, and those parties made it a pleasure to wear a uniform that I usually resisted. “There was always a very special feeling about them,” Mazursky remembered. “If you were invited, you knew you were a real friend.” And from that last New Year’s Eve I remember another of RJ’s toasts to Natalie, and her smile, and again the feeling that everything would always be fine between them.
IN THE SPRING of 1981, Natalie’s current agent, Guy McElwaine at CMA, became aware that she’d developed a habit that he found “very strange.” When she left a message on his answering machine, she sometimes identified herself as Natalie, sometimes as Natalie Wood, and sometimes as Mrs. Wagner. He soon realized, of course, that “Natalie” was calling as a friend, “Natalie Wood” as his client, and “Mrs. Wagner” as RJ’s wife; but the habit continued to puzzle him.
Many people have multiple selves, the private, the public, the sexual and so on; many of them are aware of it, and it’s only a problem when the separate selves are unaware of each other. Jung described them as fragments of the unconscious that broke off and took possession of the conscious mind. He called the result “psychic infection” and believed it was curable “only when we know what is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come.”
Was Natalie’s occasional habit of splitting herself into Natalie, Natalie Wood and Mrs. Wagner a sign that her personality had started to fracture in the last year of her life? Other signs make it seem very likely. In the past, she’d been strongly fascinated by Sybil and the fractured personality of the girl in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. And in the spring of 1981 she became equally fascinated with Zelda Fitzgerald after reading Nancy Milford’s Zelda. (Coincidentally, Jung had been approached by Scott Fitzgerald to treat Zelda, but by 1938 he’d decided not to accept patients that he considered psychotic.) Natalie took an option on the book in partnership with William Storke, longtime friend of both Wagners and co-producer of Treasures of the Hermitage; and John Irvin, whom she chose to direct Zelda, found her “increasingly drawn to playing wildness and exploring the dark side. She attributed part of this to being Russian, which she was very proud of.”
But “the dark side” had another source, and Natalie wasn’t proud of it. Toward the end of April, she left an “emergency message” with the answering service of Jeffery Rochford, who had recently founded the holistic Rochford Clinic, asking for an appointment at the clinic on the following Saturday, when it was closed. Today the clinic offers personal counseling and various “alternative” treatments, including acupuncture and reflexology, has many clients from the movie industry and not a few troubled children of Beverly Hills families; but in 1981 its reputation had only just begun to grow. Natalie, always quick to learn about new methods of therapy, became its first “celebrity client,” and as Rochford remembered: “She was very charming, and on the surface self-possessed. But I noticed that her eyes were not focused, their pupils too dilated, and I detected that ‘buzz in the body’ when people take drugs. When Natalie told me that she had headaches and neck pain, I asked what medications she was taking. She hesitated, then said: ‘Some medications for pain. I need help to get going in the morning.’ She also mentioned ‘anxiety’ and ‘needing help to sleep.’ ”
As well as studying Chinese medicine, Rochford had acquired expert knowledge of the use of drugs to control pain as a hospital worker and assistant at surgical procedures. He knew that “addicts are even more expert than pharmacists,�
� and soon realized that “Natalie knew exactly how to manipulate herself by adjusting doses so that she never got too high or too low, but achieved the state of mind she wanted to be in.” He also knew that “people in Natalie’s situation don’t understand that the results are not quite what they imagine. Long-term use of pain medications screws up the nervous system.”
Natalie returned to the clinic for four more sessions, during which she began to reveal the extent of her addictions. She said that she “needed help to sleep every night,” and when Rochford asked if she’d had to increase the dosage over the years, she admitted it. “But then she shut up.” Their final session was the frankest. Natalie confided that she drank wine every day, at first admitting to “just one glass,” then saying that “sometimes” she drank more, and “she also needed more and more adrenaline to function as an actress.”
With RJ on the swim step of Splendour, 1980 (illustration credit 6.14)
Her eyes also told Rochford that “Natalie’s liver was challenged,” even though he knew that “the Russian liver,” with its genetic legacy of several centuries of heavy drinkers, was extraordinarily resilient and had adjusted to metabolize large quantities of alcohol: “But it seems I got too frank about drug use and addiction to alcohol. I realized I’d gone too far when Natalie’s expression suddenly changed. A look of withdrawal came over her face, she didn’t say anything, but she never came back.”
And never told RJ that she went there.
ALSO TOWARD the end of April, when Natalie and I met for lunch, I had no idea that I would never see her again. She began by mentioning that her forty-third birthday was not far away, and asked if I thought she looked her age. (“To stay on an even keel,” Tom Mankiewicz said to me later, “Natalie needed all her cards, and she was very afraid of losing her beauty card.”) I told her that she looked wonderful, although a different kind of wonderful from the Natalie of Love with the Proper Stranger. It pleased her in one way and disappointed her in another. Did Vivien Leigh, she asked, ever consider a face-lift? Yes, I said, and decided against it, “because if you’ve been famous for your beauty, everyone knows.”
Although Natalie saw the point of this, she was very aware of the fate of “older” stars in Hollywood, and very afraid of sharing it. She told me how Barbara Stanwyck, who admired her and invited her to dinner at her house, “seemed so bitter and lonely, and dismissed so many people we talked about, particularly actors and writers, as commies or fags.” The experience determined Natalie “never to end up like that,” and she made the same resolution after Bette Davis dined with the Wagners at North Canon Drive. The more drunken Bette became, the more egomaniacal, and while talking about her career (well past its prime but still almost her only subject), she mentioned The Star. “But of course you’re too young to remember it,” she told Natalie. “Bette,” Natalie reminded her, “I played your daughter in that picture.” No hiccup of surprise, and not even a sign that the star had heard what Natalie said.
Natalie also knew that Rita Hayworth and I had been friends until Alzheimer’s disease incapacitated her, and recalled my account of her desperation at the way movie producers dismissed her as an over-the-hill Gilda. All these things, and the experience of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Natalie said, had started her thinking about the theater. And she decided to talk about doing a play with Robert Fryer, a movie producer who was also on the board of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. They considered and dismissed several possibilities, and shortly before Nick Gurdin died, Fryer sent her a copy of Anastasia, the romanticized story of Anna Anderson, a stateless refugee whose memory was wiped out by a powerful trauma during World War II, then partly recovered in a Berlin hospital, when she believed herself to be the only Romanov who escaped execution in 1917. “It clicked,” Natalie said, “with where I came from.”
ROBERT FRYER HAD also agreed to produce Zelda, and while waiting for him to set up the movie, Natalie and RJ took advantage of his spring break from Hart to Hart by spending the last two weeks of May in Paris. During the second week John Foreman called her from Los Angeles with the offer of a role in his forthcoming production of Brainstorm at MGM. He began by outlining its story, about two research scientists who develop a sensory device that enables all kinds of personal experiences, memories, dreams, fears, even the taste of foods, to be transferred from one subject to another. Then he hoped Natalie would agree to play the wife of one of the scientists, whose immersion in work strains their marriage until his device hooks them up to experience each other’s feelings, and they become close again.
Zelda remained Natalie’s first choice, but when she returned to L.A., Fryer reported a lack of interest in the studios he’d approached so far; and she told McElwaine that she’d accept the role in Brainstorm. He read the script and thought the scientist’s wife “a nothing part, but Natalie wanted to work, there was nothing else on offer, so I made the deal.”
She had asked for Edith Head to design her costumes, but Edith became ill at the end of June, and Foreman engaged Donfeld, who remembered that “the reunion with Natalie was joyous. She took the initiative by saying, ‘Weren’t we awful to each other on that Blake Edwards picture?’ And right away we were friends again.”
Don told her that “a fashion statement” would be out of place for Karen in Brainstorm, and he wanted “less of everything—movie-star hair, jewelry and accessories.” Natalie agreed, but when he criticized a bracelet she was wearing, she refused to take it off. “I asked her why and she said, ‘I can give you two reasons. One, Jimmy Dean gave it to me during Rebel and I’ve never taken it off. Two, I had a fall roller-skating when I was a little girl and fractured my wrist.’ Then she smiled and asked which story I liked best. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you’ll get much mileage out of a little girl roller-skating.’ ” The real reason, of course, was yet one more example of Natalie, in RJ’s phrase, “sitting on” anything that would threaten the official story of her “normal” parents and “normal” childhood.
Foreman also proposed to cast Christopher Walken as Karen’s husband, Michael, and asked John Irvin (who had directed Walken in his latest movie, The Dogs of War) to arrange a dinner for the Wagners to meet him: “Chris was a theater actor who lived in New York, and Natalie thought he was New York real, New York honest. But she had a very romantic fantasy of New York—creative, dangerous and artist-friendly as opposed to Beverly Hills with its sprinklers and endless movie talk. Chris encouraged this, was very dismissive of Hollywood, and very early on, I think, RJ sensed there might be trouble.”
At first, according to John Irvin, Natalie romanticized Walken for what he represented, “a symbol of the daring, free-spirited actor,” rather than for himself. She had seen him in The Deer Hunter, a performance that won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, was even more impressed by his talent after Foreman arranged a screening of The Dogs of War, and became “genuinely excited” when they discussed the script of Brainstorm. Walken, who was openly contemptuous of it, encouraged Natalie to be “creative” and improvise. “He’ll make this film important,” she told John, who recognized the signs of an intense “fixation” and likened Natalie to “someone driving a car so fast that she was in danger of losing control.”
By this time it was clear to John that she found Walken personally attractive, and he felt sure that “it suited Chris’s sense of fun and mischief to encourage her. He made her laugh, and he carried himself like a toreador, always prodding, probing and teasing.”
“Sometimes addicts get too high,” Jeffery Rochford discovered from treating them, “and then they go for danger.” Natalie had previously gone for danger in the person of Nicky Hilton, when she was already seriously involved with Richard Gregson and addicted (to a lesser extent) to various medications. Ten years later, although dangerously close to “the dark side,” she could still pull back and become briskly professional. At MGM, where she met Donfeld for costume fittings, she told him matter-of-factly that she’d gained a few pounds, but w
as going on a diet, and as usual would cut out liquor during the shoot. “By the time Brainstorm went into production,” he recalled, “I didn’t even have to use the waist suppressor we’d made for her.”
As well as dieting and not drinking, Natalie employed a personal trainer; and according to Asa Maynor, she was “typically alert to the times” in following the new exercise routine called Pilates, imported from Britain, which involved holding on to a pulley while raising her legs above her head. But her confidence was temporarily jolted when she saw the costume, makeup and hair tests shot by the Brainstorm cinematographer, Richard Yuricich. Donfeld reassured her by insisting it wasn’t her fault. He found Yuricich’s work for the tests “pitifully inept,” and would see no improvement during production, when he realized that the director, Douglas Trumbull, chosen for his brilliant special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was far more interested in technology than in how actors looked or performed.
ON SEPTEMBER 18, when she left for the weekend at Esalen, Natalie was unaware that an ambulance had arrived at a hacienda-style house only a few minutes away on Coldwater Canyon, to take Edith Head, eighty-three years old and suffering from a progressive blood disease, to Good Samaritan Hospital. At Esalen, Donfeld remembered, “Natalie bonded instantly with Stan and Christina Grof,” but he wondered if it was a sign of things to come when she broke her rule by drinking two glasses of white wine at dinner.
September 28 was Natalie’s first day of location filming in and around Raleigh, North Carolina. The schedule had been rearranged so that she’d be free the next day to fly back to Los Angeles for Natasha’s birthday. And to her family, she seemed the tender, playful wife and mother they loved so much; but in mid-October, when RJ took a weekend break from filming Hart to Hart and flew to Raleigh, he became very uneasy about the situation with Walken. “It crossed my mind that they were having an affair, but I wasn’t sure, and didn’t say anything about it to Natalie.” A few days later, during one of the regular phone calls she made to her family, something else disturbed him: “Some kind of change seemed to be coming over Natalie. She told me about helicopters hovering over the hotel and dropping a net over it for a scene in the movie. But I knew there was no such scene.”
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