I Loved Her in the Movies

by Robert Wagner

  There was a time when I loved Debbie, but I never quite tumbled all the way. I’ve always been a little more casual about life than she was, and I wasn’t sure we’d mesh well together.

  Her attitude toward MGM was similar to my attitude toward Fox—our employment wasn’t servitude, but a God-given opportunity. She was getting free acting, singing, and dancing lessons. If she paid attention and worked hard, she could become expert in all those areas, an all-around entertainer hirable into old age. She was being featured in movies with show-business greats, which in and of itself constituted a compounded opportunity. She was getting a good salary that eventually became a great salary.

  What was not to like?

  Debbie could sing, and Debbie could dance, and Debbie could also act. She was by far the best thing in Paddy Chayefsky’s The Catered Affair, which featured Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine. Her costars were both projecting, both acting, while Debbie was being—yearning and sad, emotions she had certainly experienced in life.

  Debbie has always been one of those people striving to make lemonade out of the most bitter lemons, and there have been some doozies in her life. Bad marriages—I know she paid off Harry Karl’s debts, which were considerable—and bad business decisions, including a bankruptcy when she opened a hotel in Las Vegas that was too far off the Strip to get traffic.

  For Debbie, the hotel was primarily an opportunity to display the astonishing collection of Hollywood memorabilia she’d built up over the years, so she sold off the gambling license. That might not have been the greatest financial option, but it was typical of her integrity. The hotel became a place where other performers would drop in after they’d done their shows for the night. She was always there, greeting people and encouraging them to have a good time.

  Whatever landed on her doorstep, Debbie always managed to bounce back—the Unsinkable Debbie Reynolds. Her honorary Oscar in 2015 was a recognition of her talent, but also of her spirit.

  A few years ago she auctioned off her collection of Hollywood costumes for tens of millions of dollars. I know that she did it with mixed feelings—she had always wanted to open a lavish Hollywood Museum, but nobody else was as interested in that prospect as Debbie, and the value of the costumes had escalated to such an extent that she had no choice but to take advantage of their market value.

  One of the joys of Debbie is her industriousness. Besides her costume collection, she and Ruta Lee founded the Thalians, a great show-business charity. Because she’s been around for so long, Debbie has lately been taken for granted, somewhat in the same way that Mickey Rooney had been. A performer whose career has endured for sixty-odd years, or, in Mickey’s case, ninety years, can fade simply because of overfamiliarity.

  When Albert Brooks couldn’t get Nancy Reagan to star with him in Mother, he hired Debbie, and she was remarkable in the title role—steely and tough and unyielding and funny and, underneath it all, endearing, just as she was playing Liberace’s mother in Behind the Candelabra. If she was overlooked in the latter performance, it was because between the heavy makeup and a convincing Polish accent—Debbie has a great ear for voices—most people didn’t know it was her.

  I respect her talent, but what I particularly adore about Debbie is her gallantry. Like everybody else, she can get depressed, but she never lets the audience see her that way. When the light hits her, she’s on, and the audience is going to have a great time, or Debbie’s going to discover the reason why not. She wants to make people happy, which is why she’s one of the great show-business professionals.

  NATALIE

  People often ask me what Natalie Wood was like, and that’s a question that’s difficult to answer succinctly. She was a complicated woman, which is just one of the reasons I loved her. You could never really plumb Natalie’s depths.

  For one thing, she was not calm by nature, which I attribute to her childhood. From her earliest days, Natasha Gurdin—her real name—was the family breadwinner. The story of Natalie’s discovery traces back to Ann Rutherford, who was making a picture in Santa Rosa called Happy Land. The trailer Ann was using on location had been rented from Natalie’s parents, and Ann met Natalie’s mother when she was cleaning out the trailer. A bit later, Nat’s mom managed to wangle a bit part for her daughter in the film. In the shot in which Natalie appears, she is holding an ice cream cone, and her half sister, Olga, has her other hand. The girls’ mother instructed Olga to knock the ice cream cone out of Natalie’s grip to make her cry—the idea being to attract the camera’s attention.

  Irving Pichel, who directed Happy Land, also made Tomorrow Is Forever, a film Natalie made that starred Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles. One of the reasons I loved Claudette was that she adored Natalie. Whenever I saw her, she would always talk about how gifted Natalie was as a child—a little girl, only five years old, with her hair dyed blond and a German accent, working with Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles. God-given talent.

  The assistant director on Tomorrow Is Forever was a man named Artie Jacobson. He was going to work on Miracle on 34th Street, which had been cast except for the juvenile lead. That little girl had to be able to indicate that she was old for her years, and strong-minded.

  One night at four in the morning, Jacobson was running over the outstanding issues that had to be addressed before the picture could begin shooting when it suddenly hit him: “Jesus God, Natasha!” He called George Seaton, who was directing Miracle on 34th Street, and told him all about this child prodigy who spoke English, Russian, and a smattering of other languages and had stolen a picture out from under Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles. Artie called Ann Rutherford, who told him how to get in touch with the family. George Seaton met with her, and that was that.

  Within the Gurdin family, if Natalie got an acting job, she was great, everybody’s darling, the apple of their eye. If she wasn’t chosen, they wanted to know what the hell went wrong.

  Even if she did get hired, there were stresses she hadn’t bargained for. Natalie told me that on one of her early pictures, an assistant director—not Artie Jacobson—stuck her with a pin to get her to cry on camera. This sort of dehumanizing thing went on more often than you might imagine in those days. Actors—even child actors—were considered a commodity, and they were treated as such.

  So, in Natalie’s mind, work soon came to be equated with success. As with Barbara Stanwyck, she became more animated when she was acting; the light inside her suddenly shone brighter.

  After Miracle on 34th Street, Natalie worked regularly with people the caliber of Stanwyck and Bette Davis. Both older actresses thought she had almost unlimited potential, which she demonstrated by doing a lot of live TV. She was working hard to open up her image from that of a conventional child actress. She signed a contract at Warner Bros., where she made Rebel Without a Cause with Jimmy Dean, which brought her to a different level.

  Natalie Wood

  By the time I met Natalie, she had already developed a tremendous ability to recognize good material, although in the early days at Warners there wasn’t a lot of it to go around. Jack Warner gave her grindhouse stuff like Bombers B-52—the title alone tells you what type of film it was.

  Because of the quality of scripts that Jack assigned her, and an overall feeling that he didn’t give her a lot of credence as anything more than a juvenile favorite, she never really trusted him. As a matter of fact, she didn’t trust a lot of people; she had her own idea of what was right and wrong for her, and had faith in her own judgment.

  Then and later, she approached scripts not as a reflection of her own career needs so much as an overall dramatic extension of her emotional life. Natalie would read a script with great intensity. She looked for an arc, which is actor talk for a character who goes through changes and emerges a different person at the end of the picture than they had been at the beginning. When she found a script she wanted to do, she would break it down very methodically. As m
uch as any actress I’ve ever known, she had a tremendous concept of quality, not just of what was good for her.

  Her family hadn’t wanted her to do Rebel Without a Cause, but she went after it with all of her heart, which was huge, and got it.

  The same thing happened with Splendor in the Grass, where she beat out some very fine actresses for the lead role, including Jane Fonda. The reason that Elia Kazan chose her over Fonda was that Natalie admitted to him that she was ambitious, and Fonda wouldn’t. Kazan wanted an actress who wasn’t afraid to be great. Natalie wanted to be great, so she was.

  Before Splendor in the Grass, Natalie’s control over her pictures was hit and miss; after Splendor, she had as much control as she cared to exercise. Once she had achieved a position where people listened to what she had to say, she would rely on her director for guidance until he proved he couldn’t be relied upon. Splendor wasn’t a totally great experience for her. She put herself completely in Kazan’s hands, acquiesced to him. But she was slightly uneasy about the experience; on some level she felt that Kazan had tricked the performance out of her, and she resented it. She was excited to work for him, and she liked the film, but she felt that he was devious; he had agendas that he didn’t let her in on.

  She was great in Splendor in the Grass, but Warren Beatty was great in it, Pat Hingle was great in it, everybody was great in it because Kazan directed it. (For the record, my favorite performance of Natalie’s is This Property Is Condemned.) I’ve always believed that at that particular stage of his career, Kazan was the best director working in America. I was on the set for most of the production, and Gadge and I liked each other immediately. We stayed friends for the rest of his life, and I’ve seldom met anyone who was so perpetually dissatisfied with his own accomplishments.

  Gadge moved toward conflict in his art and in his life as if it were a magnet. He was so talented, so interesting. He was the best director in the world, and yet he was completely unpretentious. He’d ask, “What do you think about that scene?” and it seemed that he really did want to know what you thought.

  Of course, not every movie is Splendor in the Grass. Natalie always felt that Gypsy should have been more than it was. It wasn’t that Mervyn LeRoy did a bad job, but he didn’t do an outstanding job, either. He was slightly passé at that point, and Natalie and I both thought the picture reflected that. LeRoy was an odd choice on Jack Warner’s part, as there were far more appropriate talents available: George Cukor certainly, George Sidney or Vincente Minnelli possibly.

  But Mervyn had been around Warners for years, during the 1930s and since the late 1950s. He had a cast-iron contract, and had worked in vaudeville as a young man, so Jack gave him the picture. The problem was that the core of Gypsy is ferocious need and frustrated ambition, and Mervyn hadn’t made a picture that reflected those qualities since I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Five Star Final, thirty years earlier.

  Natalie and I worked together several times, once in All the Fine Young Cannibals at MGM, and in the TV movies The Affair and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; she also made a guest appearance in the pilot for Hart to Hart. She was a spectacular co-worker, and my being her husband made no difference in how she treated me as a colleague—she was demanding and rightfully so. She could be high strung—when she was into the character that was all she thought about. At the production stage, her emphasis was on remaining faithful to the material and not letting it get watered down.

  When Natalie became a mother, she found the absolute fulfillment she had been waiting for. Acting filled her up, and with good reason. When the camera rolls, it’s exciting. Wardrobe, makeup, the crew focused on you, the camera moving in on you. Because of the intensity of the work, many people in show business have trouble adjusting, not to the work, but to life.

  But to our mutual joy, Natalie was swept away by motherhood. It was a total home run for her. She was devoted to our girls. Years later, when Natalie’s daughter Natasha had her own child, she had the same mothering instincts as Natalie, which moved me so deeply. Natasha named her little girl Clover, after Natalie’s movie Inside Daisy Clover, which is one of Natasha’s favorites of her mother’s films. I don’t think Natasha has ever taken her eyes off Clover. Her mother, my wife, would have been so proud of her daughter. The torch had been passed.

  When Natalie died, I thought my life was over. Luckily, I had the help of a great many people who loved her and who loved me as well. Fred Astaire. Cary Grant. Gene Kelly. Delphine Mann. David Niven. Our children. My mother. And John Lindon, a great psychiatrist who helped. I remember he once drew a picture of a heart for me. “This much is gone,” he said, gesturing to the picture. “But this much is left, and that can be enough. It has to be enough—for your girls and for yourself.”

  And that is the way it worked out—for the girls and for myself.

  JILL

  With many of the actresses I’ve written about, you can get a sense of who they really are just by attentively watching them on-screen. That won’t work with Jill St. John, my last—I promise—wife.

  I had worked with Jill three times before she came into my life at its lowest point. The first picture we worked on was called Banning, and then we were paired on a TV movie called How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Years later, she appeared in the pilot of Hart to Hart. In all these cases, our relationship was purely professional. If someone had taken me aside and told me that one day I would fall in love with her, I would have had them committed. I thought she was pleasant and a good actress, but there was no spark between us.

  I didn’t really get much of an insight into who she really was until years later, soon after Natalie’s death. Jill had sent flowers to the house, and I called to thank her. Six or eight months later, I asked her out. She called our mutual friend Tom Mankiewicz, who was a creative consultant on Hart to Hart, and asked him what he thought she should do.

  “Well, if you don’t go out with him, someone else will,” he said. You can’t argue with crushing logic like that, so she accepted my invitation. And that was when I figured out that she was actually the reverse of the characters she played. Her mother had nudged her into show business and she went along grudgingly; she didn’t run after movies, they ran after her.

  I remember her apartment in Beverly Hills was decorated in Italian Modern, which surprised me. And then she told me, “Come to Aspen, and you’ll see a whole different side of me.” So I did, and I saw how Aspen was the place where Jill relaxed and allowed her authentic self to emerge. In Aspen, she blossomed in front of me. She’s a Cordon Bleu chef, she’s a superb gardener, she excels at skiing and handling dogs and everything in general. Whatever she undertakes, she masters.

  Jill St. John

  And beyond all that, she reads everything and is ridiculously smart, one of those people who sees the endgame while other people are still mulling over their opening move.

  People who know Jill only through movies like Come Blow Your Horn or Diamonds Are Forever don’t have a clue. Hollywood typecast her as a sexy bombshell, and Jill got bored with that very quickly, because the gap between what she played and who she is was so vast. She is as attached to the earth as anybody I’ve ever met. Whether it’s flowers or love, she has the ability to create an environment where things grow. She can bring the world around her to its fullest possibilities.

  If somebody sent her a good script today, she’d probably do it, but she doesn’t really care about acting—it doesn’t fill her heart the way living in Aspen does; it doesn’t satisfy her the way cooking or gardening does.

  And here’s my deepest truth: We’ve been together for more than thirty years, and I still have a sense of discovery with her every single day that accompanies an underlying feeling of security and contentment—the best of both worlds.

  I owe her everything.

  THE EIGHTIES (AND ON)

  No discussion of the actresses I’ve worked with would be complete without
Stefanie Powers. In my memory, there are so many ironies connected with her. Nobody wanted her for Hart to Hart, except for Tom Mankiewicz and me. Stefanie had had a major flop with The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. years before and the TV business had never forgiven her.

  As for ABC, their preferences were, first, Natalie—a total nonstarter, because we would have had no private life at all—and second, Lindsay Wagner. They thought the tagline “Wagner and Wagner” was just too good to pass up.

  I thought they were idiots.

  But Stefanie and I had worked together a few years before, and I knew that we meshed. Her timing complemented my own. Finally, it got down to my saying, “It’s her, or there’s no show,” and since I held a lot of cards at that time, they gave in.

  Irony number one.

  Then we made the pilot, and Sidney Sheldon took his name off the show as the creator. It was Tom Mankiewicz who was ultimately responsible for so much of the success of that program. He rewrote Sheldon’s script for the pilot, and when it went to series he ran the show.

  In any case, Sheldon put his name back on the show after it became a big hit. In spite of the fact that it was widely thought to be a potential smash—Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg didn’t make a lot of bombs—getting it on the air was a tortuous process, but it never showed in the final product.

  Irony number two.

  To this day, people think that Stefanie and I were actually married, or should have been. Of all the dozens of actresses I’ve worked with, Stefanie is the one people most often associate with me. The truth is that the success of the show was a tribute to the mysterious nature of screen chemistry. Stefanie and I meshed beautifully as actors, but we’ve never had that much in common as people; we’d do the work and then go our separate ways.