In the opening scene of Inside Daisy Clover, shot on location in fairly broad daylight, Natalie appears as a truculent teenager in torn jeans and shabby sweater. At twenty-six, it’s a bit of a stretch, but she’s only required to keep up the pretense for another fifteen minutes, during which more persuasive lighting, in night scenes and/or interiors, takes care of the problem.
When the movie studio makes Daisy over, body but not soul, she plays up to her cutely lovable image as “America’s Little Valentine,” but manages to convey, through body movement, a person alive and well behind her manufactured persona. She wears her elaborate bridal gown as if it doesn’t really belong to her; dressed as a choirboy to sing Christmas carols as a publicity stunt, she gives a wonderfully eloquent shrug at her reflection in the mirror; and when she finally walks away from the life that’s been superimposed on her own, the tomboy stride returns along with jeans and sweater.
Athough the decision to remove almost all of her voice-over comments, Natalie said later, “was like cutting out half the performance,” the half that remains is among her finest, consistently inventive work. And in fact it’s more than half. The core of her performance remains, even if some of its comic edge has been peeled away.
Natalie, in a Romanov dream like her mother almost fifty years earlier, photographed by Michael Childers for the Anastasia poster. The production was scheduled to open in March 1982. (illustration credit 7.1)
Two scenes, early and late in the movie, are like points of departure and arrival as Daisy travels from scrappy teenager to unwillingly successful young movie star, and from betrayed wife to studio president’s mistress. When she first arrives to make a test at the studio, the teenager huddles in a director’s chair on the cavernous soundstage, blinking at the spotlight aimed directly at her face. Her posture is defensive, but the way she chews gum is defiant, and as the formidable studio head fires questions at her, she gives as good as she gets.
Much later, Daisy the star enters an almost empty soundstage, like the one she first entered as Daisy the teenager (and like Natalie at six). She wears a tailored suit, appears calm and walks briskly into the sound booth to postsynch her voice in a musical number. But as the same loop of her close shot in the movie appears over and over on the screen, she finds it difficult, then impossible, to synchronize its lip movements. Permanently out of sync with her star image on the screen, the real Daisy beats on the glass wall of her cage in a hysterical attempt at escape. Then she screams.
“Nobody could lose control on the screen like Natalie,” George Segal noted when he recalled this scene, Deanie’s breakdown in Splendor in the Grass, Angie on the verge of hysteria before leaving home in Love with the Proper Stranger and Cathy in The Cracker Factory.
DURING THE 1960S, Natalie reached her first peak as an actress with four widely different yet emotionally related performances. Deanie, Angie, Daisy, and Alva in This Property Is Condemned are all outsiders, at odds with convention and/or their families. But as winner or loser Natalie remained vulnerable, and when she survived, it was always at a cost: one of the reasons that “she appealed across the board,” in Arnold Stiefel’s view, “to macho men, women, girls, and particularly, because of all her best roles, to gay men.”
When Natalie listed the movie directors with whom she had a strong rapport, and for whom she believed that she did her best work, they were all (in varying degrees) “actor’s directors,” and some of them had been in analysis. Nick Ray, Kazan, Jerry Robbins, Robert Mulligan, Sydney Pollack and Paul Mazursky made her list. Those who did not were either “not psychologically tuned in” to an actor’s needs, like Mervyn LeRoy and Blake Edwards, or technicians like Robert Wise, who once said, “That was fine, but next time hold the scissors up a little higher so we can get them in the frame.”
IN THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED, Alva Starr is a more irretrievably lost girl than Deanie Loomis, and Natalie portrays her with the same delicate yet feverish sympathy. Like Inside Daisy Clover, the movie was a commercial failure on its first release, and although its central love story is weakly scripted, and Robert Redford is too dispassionate an actor to convey deep passion, it has strong incidental virtues.
The setting is a backwater southern town during the Depression. The exact year is 1932, as the marquee of the local movie theater advertises Kay Francis and William Powell in One Way Passage; and the train station that’s nearly always empty suggests somewhere close to the end of the line. James Wong Howe uses subtly desaturated colors to suggest a town with the life seeping out of it, and to point up the contrast of Alva in her defiantly gaudy costumes.
Wong Howe also creates an extraordinary close-up of Natalie (anticipating John Alcott’s similar effect in Barry Lyndon) by using only real candlelight to frame Alva’s face as she blows out the candles on her mother’s birthday cake. Its soft, flickering glow makes her look suddenly very young, almost childlike—but only for a moment. Then she turns away and becomes Alva a few years past her youth, flirtatious in a way that suggests she’s starting to run out of time.
As her domineering mother, Kate Reid provides another powerful antagonist for Natalie to use emotion memory to play against, and Sydney Pollack’s direction is particularly strong in their confrontations, and in the scene when Alva gets drunk before she agrees, as a way of escape, to marry a man she doesn’t love. “We started it in the morning,” Pollack remembered, “and it didn’t feel quite right. Not enough charge. So I decided to break early for lunch, and gave Natalie a glass of wine. She drank it, but said, ‘You son of a bitch, are you telling me I can’t play this scene without getting drunk?’ Then she laughed, and as the wine started to wear off, she asked for more. She drank six glasses in all, played the scene wonderfully—and threw up after finishing it.”
Reviews for This Property Is Condemned were generally tepid, and (not for the first or last time) one of Natalie’s best performances was overlooked. As with the reviews of Daisy Clover, she felt “an emotional sharp pain under the heart.” But it didn’t last long. She knew she’d done good work, and “it didn’t change anything” in the sense of making her wonder if she ought to have played the role differently.
ALVA IS the last of Natalie’s lost girls; and before portraying two lost ladies, she takes a three-year sabbatical from acting and concentrates on marriage and motherhood. When she returns to movies, it’s in the kind of comedy role that she’s often looked for and failed to find in the past. But Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, she recalled, was made by “a serious filmmaker.” In the opening “group encounter” scenes, when Carol (Natalie) almost breaks down as the relationship with her husband (Robert Culp) threatens to unravel, Paul Mazursky not only encouraged both actors to improvise, but recalled his own experience at Esalen with his wife, and as he got “very involved, he started to cry.” Like his love of rehearsal, it reminded Natalie of Nick Ray and Kazan.
Although the only star name in an ensemble movie, Natalie never acts like one, and her performance stands out by refusing to stand out. It’s sharp and funny, but not patronizing, like the movie itself. Affectionately indulgent toward his characters’ obsession with “self-realization” and “relating,” Mazursky could also be ruthless, notably in his portrait of a psychiatrist oozing with self-satisfaction and superior knowledge.
The final scene, at a hotel suite in Las Vegas, where the “liberated” quartet decides “to have an orgy, then go see Tony Bennett,” was not fully scripted. Mazursky and his co-writer, Larry Tucker, were uncertain what exactly was going to happen, but Mazursky closed the set and played Cheshire Cat to the cast. After encouraging the actors to expect “something very wild and sexual,” he started the scene with three of the four side by side in the king-size bed, waiting for Ted (Elliott Gould) to finish brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Then Ted got in bed next to Carol, and Mazursky told his actors, “Do whatever you feel like doing.” As he suspected, both couples eventually felt like putting the brakes on “sexual freedom” by not going through with the orgy.
And the decisive moment was a gesture by Natalie: “Almost at once she played the aggressor with Gould, who was shy at first but got warmed up. We had to work out her movements, to avoid frontal nudity which was not permitted in 1969. Then Elliott and Bob [Culp] decided to have a brief discussion about the stock market. It was followed by a funny, awkward silence that Natalie broke by doing something beautiful. She kissed Elliott very tenderly.”
When Bob & Carol opened in the fall of 1969, the old major studio heads were retired or dead. Conglomerates had taken over MGM, Paramount and Warner Bros., and their studios had become technical plants, with more than half their stages leased to TV companies or independently financed movies. Continuity of production, the mainstay of the old system, no longer existed; but the major TV networks created an approximate substitute with miniseries and “Movies of the Week.” They successfully courted older stars like Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, and at a time when Natalie had to make do with Peeper and Meteor on the big screen, the smaller one provided three of the best roles of her career.
These roles offered emotional continuity, in the form of conflicted characters with a wide range of the “turning points” she always looked for; and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, its opening scene virtually a six-page monologue by Maggie with a few brief interruptions from Brick, was particularly demanding. In a voice that Tennessee Williams describes in a stage direction as “rapid and drawling,” and that echoes Maggie’s frequent mood swings, she’s alternately fierce and disconsolate, driving and driven, “oddly funny” and “near-hysterical.”
Toward the end of the scene (played to four cameras without a break), Natalie gives a brilliant display, within the space of a minute, of the angry Cat who tells Brick that his indifference has made her go through “this hideous—transformation, become hard! Frantic! I’m not—thin-skinned any more, can’t afford t’be thin-skinned any more.” Then, suddenly tired, she stops clawing at him, becomes “a pleading child” and confesses in a low, clenched voice: “I get—lonely. Very!”
Natalie Wood: I often feel it’s such an odd chemistry between all of it when it goes well. But that’s your reward. That’s why you do it ultimately.
In From Here to Eternity, Buzz Kulik introduces Karen with an exterior shot as she walks to Schofield barracks, wearing a bright yellow halter and white skirt. It’s another wonderfully expressive walk: at once tired and determined, and the look on her face has the kind of hostility that disguises loneliness. During her affair with Milt Warden, Karen tries to play the aggressor, but it’s a mask to conceal her vulnerability, like the sudden blank expression that crosses her face after she starts to reveal herself, then cuts off.
The desperation underlying their affair, more naked than in the original movie, leads to a breakup that’s less sentimental. A few terse criticisms of the first-draft script in her exercise book show Natalie on the lookout for any sign of compromise with her character. (On Karen’s first scene with Milt: “Boring. No particular tension. In original [novel] they were adversarie.” And when the affair is almost over, she notes disapprovingly that Karen “starts to CRY. Wishy-washy!”) By the end of the movie, as Karen realizes she has no future with Milt, but fears she has no future without him, Natalie’s performance has come full circle. Karen is left emotionally as uncertain and inaccessible as she appeared in the opening shot.
In The Cracker Factory, she’s even more uncompromising: no attempt to soft-pedal the character’s bitter, angry, self-destructive side, or to flinch from the distorting lenses of “Ugly Number One” and “Ugly Number Two.” When Natalie started reading Richard Shapiro’s script, “on page four the love took place”; but as Burt Brinckerhoff recalled, she was at once deeply involved with the character and in full command of her technique. For “one very emotional scene, when she was walking along the corridor to her hospital room,” he decided to use two cameras for a single take, one pulling back in front of her, one tracking her from behind. When Natalie opened the door to her room and suddenly stopped, Brinckerhoff assumed she was preparing for “an emotional moment.” Instead, she turned back and said, “My slippers are in the wrong place.”
Brinckerhoff also recalled “Natalie’s flirtatious sense of humor” in the scene when Cathy returns to the hospital at night after getting drunk at a local bar: “She had a drunken grin on her face, but had to sneak past a nurse and wasn’t sure how to play it. She was wearing a woolen hat, and I suggested that she pull it over her face. She liked the idea, and when she did that, it was like a magician’s trick. After she got past the nurse, she raised the hat again—and her face was dead sober.”
NATALIE’S DEATH at forty-three was not only a personal tragedy. It cut off an actress in her prime. As well as knowing that the movie industry considered iconic female stars past their prime at forty, she was aware that the growing corporate takeover of Hollywood had increased the threat to creative work. But she also knew, as she once said, that “you have to keep up.” So her first reaction had been to try and make a new career for herself in the theater.
Would she have succeeded? It’s very possible, but not certain. Although vocal training had extended the range and flexibility of her voice over the years, it needed to acquire more projection for the theater. She knew this as well, and planned to take an intensive course of vocal exercises. But if Anastasia failed, Natalie was left with two choices: to accept forgettable supporting roles in forgettable movies, or to become a producer. The first would never have satisfied her; the second might eventually have proved a solution.
Over the past thirteen years she had done her most creative work on the small screen, and during the 1980s TV still offered hope for someone as committed as herself. Years of making “obligation” movies under assembly-line conditions had not worn down her talent, or the “something extra” that so often seemed to mirror Natalie’s own personality—radiant and edgy, stubborn and fragile. And the independent-film movement that gathered momentum by the end of the decade might well have decided her to become a producer and make the movies of her choice by setting up projects (like Zelda) that the major studios had rejected.
For the movie actor, “something extra” implies an emotional and physical transaction between the audience and an image on the screen. It’s instantaneous, like love at first sight, and in Natalie’s case the first shot of her in Tomorrow Is Forever sealed the transaction. A tiny seven-year-old walks hand in hand along a street with Orson Welles, who overshadows her physically, of course, and yet the eye is drawn to this mysteriously composed child. You want to know more about her, just as you want to know more about the adolescent at juvenile hall in Rebel Without a Cause, who wears too much makeup and seems as mysteriously tense as the child in Tomorrow Is Forever was composed. In the same way, the adult Natalie immediately catches the eye with a minimum of “acting.” In the opening shots of Love with the Proper Stranger, when she hurries into a New York theater crowded with jazz musicians, and looks around in a way that suggests she’s a stranger in that world, you wonder what brought her there and why she’s so anxiously determined. And sixteen years later, when the housewife in The Cracker Factory pushes her shopping cart along a supermarket aisle, why does the apparently simple act of hesitating about what to buy suggest that her confusion lies much deeper?
(illustration credit 7.2)
In an unusually reflective moment, Bette Davis gave her own definition of “something extra,” which she herself had in spades. “The real actor,” she said, “has a direct line to the collective heart.” It explains why, when Natalie Wood died, the collective and the personal loss became one.
NOTES ON SOURCES
(Not acknowledged in text)
Chapter 1: Out of Russia
Stella Adler epigraph: On Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov (Knopf, New York, 1999). Gerhardie: Dido Davies, William Gerhardie (Oxford University Press, New York, 1990). Bunin quote: Foreword to Wolves and Other Love Stories (Capra, Santa Barbara, 1989). Russia 1918: John Lawrence, A History of Russi
a (Meridian, New York, 1957). Zudilovs in Russia and Harbin: Olga Viripaeff and Constantin Liuzunie to author; Soren Clausen and Stig Dagerson: Harbin: The Making of a Chinese City (Sharpe, New York, 1995). Zacharenkos in Russia and Shanghai: Olga Viripaeff and Dmitri Zacharenko to author. Lepkos in Russia and Shanghai: Irene (Lepko) Agnew to author; Stella Day: Shanghai, The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (Morrow, New York, 2000). Maria Gurdin interview quotes: Georgia Holt and Phyllis Quinn, with Sue Russell, Star Mothers (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1988). Russians in San Francisco: Olga Viripaeff, Nina Jaure, Natasha Lofft, Constantin Liuzunie to author. Gurdins in Santa Rosa: Olga Viripaeff to author; Ed Canevari in Santa Rosa Democrat, June 17, 2001. Gurdins in Hollywood, Natalie’s test: Olga Viripaeff to author. Maria as driver: Olga Viripaeff to author. Maria on the set: Lon McCallister to author.
Chapter 2: Lost Childhood
Wagner epigraph: to author. Roddy McDowall on child actors: Starring Natalie Wood (TV) (Ellen M. Krass Productions, 1987). Welles on Pichel: Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles (Da Capo, New York, 1998). Lepkos and Gurdins in Hollywood: Irene Agnew to author. Hollywood and House Un-American Activities Committee: Otto Friedrich, City of Nets (Harper & Row, New York, 1986). Irving Pichel: obituaries in Margaret Herrick Library. Natalie as child actress: Lon McCallister and Maureen O’Hara to author. The Bride Wore Boots: Ella Smith, Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck (Crown, New York, 1974). Background to Driftwood: American Film Institute Catalog of American Films, 1941–50 (University of California Press, 1999). Natalie in Driftwood: Mary Sale to author; Allan Dwan in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It (Knopf, New York, 1997). Michael Panaieff and Tamara Lepko: Irene Agnew, Robert Banas to author; Larry Billman: Film Choreographers and Dance Directors (McFarland & Co., Jefferson, North Carolina, 1997). Andrew Paris letter: Natalie Wood private archive. Edmund Gwenn on dying: Natalie Wood, American Film Institute (AFI) Seminar, 1979. No Sad Songs for Me: Lawrence J. Quirk, Margaret Sullavan (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1986). Natalie and Nick Gurdin on Never a Dull Moment set: Peggy Griffin to author. Nina takes Natasha Zepaloff to meet Maria and Natalie: Nina Jaure and Natasha Lofft to author. The Green Promise: AFI Catalog of American Films, 1941–50. Accident on bridge: Olga Viripaeff to author. Jim Williams on himself and Natalie: Suzanne Finstad, Natasha (Harmony Books, New York, 2001). Olga Viripaeff’s rebuttal: Olga to author.
Natalie Wood Page 38