That just made me determined to be better. I didn’t want to be a joke; I wanted to be real. There was a snobbery about some of the people who gravitated to the Method that I objected to. They loved to talk about acting, then talk some more, but I’m not sure acting should be talked about that much. You can learn a lot more by doing than by talking, and acting, after all, is doing. And by doing, you learn.
For instance, I watched Cary Grant working on An Affair to Remember for Leo McCarey. He came offstage after doing a scene and told me, “I learned something interesting today. I learned how to breathe in a scene.”
Now, this is 1956, and Cary Grant was, well, Cary Grant; he’d been doing it with a matchless grace for nearly a quarter-century at that point, and he had just realized that a lot of times when you’re acting you’re unconsciously holding your breath waiting for your cue, and that’s not a good thing.
Cary, of course, is the ultimate example of what I’m talking about. He had to work very hard to acquire the sense of ease that he displayed as an actor. The process by which Archie Leach of Bristol, England, became Cary Grant of Hollywood can’t be broken down by endless conversation. Yet Cary wasn’t just smooth; he was emotionally real and always present. Watch him in a scene and notice how focused he is, how intently he listens to the other actor. To acquire all that skill and to make it look easy is enormously hard.
The great thing about the studio system, of course, was that it was a classic apprenticeship system. I watched Gary Cooper and Cary work, and I always had this subliminal feeling that, if I worked hard enough, someday I’d be standing where they stood. But I never had a sense of entitlement, which a lot of young actors—and a lot of young people—do today.
After Barbara there were a lot of women, but the one who stands out was Elizabeth Taylor. I had met her at one of Roddy McDowall’s parties before I was in the movie business, and like every other male animal around the world, I was crazy about her. People always talk about her spectacular beauty or her violet eyes, but emphasizing those features overlooks her emotional appeal, which I think is centered on her vulnerability. She is a wonderful woman in a very unusual way—great humanity and great sensuality are not commonly packaged together, but when they are, the whole world knows it.
Some beautiful women are passive in the bedroom. They’re gorgeous, they know they’re gorgeous, they know that you know they’re gorgeous, and they don’t feel the need to do anything above and beyond being gorgeous.
Elizabeth was not one of those women. Being with her was like sticking an eggbeater in your brain.
I loved her, and I think she loved me. But on the practical level, Elizabeth was not the woman I needed in my life. With Elizabeth, there was a great deal of maintenance. This is not a woman who gets up in the morning and fixes breakfast. By the time she comes downstairs for breakfast, it’s time for dinner. She’s not floating in the pool with you on a lazy Sunday afternoon, handing magazines back and forth. Elizabeth’s life is built completely around Elizabeth, and she needs a man to service her life 24/7.
She also has the most spectacularly bad luck in terms of illness I’ve ever encountered, and it needs to be emphasized that Elizabeth is far from a hypochondriac. Just as there are people who are accident-prone, there are people who are illness-prone, and Elizabeth is certainly one of them. One time when I was visiting her, she was getting into a car and the man helping her slammed the door. It blew out her eardrum. Just thinking about Elizabeth’s physical troubles is exhausting; I can’t imagine what it must be like to have to live with them.
In any case, this was a period when I was enjoying my freedom. I first saw Anita Ekberg when she came to RKO as a starlet. This was long before Federico Fellini made her, Marcello Mastroianni, and the Trevi Fountain immortal in La Dolce Vita. I took one look at Anita and was reduced to the level of a hormonal schoolboy. Luckily, she responded to me the same way I responded to her. The fact that she had been staked out by Howard Hughes was irrelevant to me.
Anita and I were enjoying ourselves in an apartment in Westwood when there was a knock on the door. I looked out the window and…Sweet Jesus!…it was Howard Hughes. His truculent reputation preceded him; he was not a man you wanted to get into an argument with. I threw on my clothes and went out the back door, with Howard Hughes running after me. I remember very distinctly that I was running across the lawn when I kicked a sprinkler head, opened up a very nasty slash in my brand-new shoes, lost my balance, and tumbled ass over teakettle. I was not only young, I was nimble; I sprang up and kept running.
I would like to go on the record as saying that an afternoon with Anita Ekberg was worth the destruction, not just of a pair of shoes but of an entire wardrobe and probably a Mercedes-Benz showroom as well.
During the few months when I was hot and heavy with Anita, my mother noticed that she wasn’t seeing me much. “What are you doing with your weekends?” she asked me out of the blue one day. My mind was a million miles away—probably on Anita—and I blurted out something about playing tennis at the Bel-Air Hotel.
She gave me a strange, amused look and pointed out that the Bel-Air Hotel didn’t have tennis courts.
Busted.
I got a copy of Frank Nugent’s script for The Searchers, which John Ford was going to direct for Warner Bros. The part of Martin Pawley leaped out at me. It was a part I could play, and I knew it; had he hired me for The Searchers, Ford could have knocked me on my ass on a daily basis. I just loved that script; I had enough sense to know that it would make a wonderful movie, especially with Duke Wayne as Ethan Edwards and Ford directing. The greatness of that picture, its dramatic strength, was already evident on the page. I could see it, and I knew Ford’s visual splendor would put it over the top.
You’ll remember that Ford had called me “Boob” and treated me like a dog on What Price Glory? No, let me rephrase that. There are no conditions under which I would treat a dog as badly as John Ford treated me on that picture. Actually, Ford liked dogs a lot more than he liked actors. I knew all this, and I swallowed my pride and scheduled an appointment with Ford.
There’s a certain reality of show business that the public doesn’t understand: it’s a business for whores, especially when it comes to actors. We have to put ourselves out there for those few good parts that come along, even if those parts are controlled by people we don’t like, and who may not like us. But we put on our best clothes and smile and go out and try to sell ourselves. Not pleasant, but reality.
I took a deep breath and went to see Ford.
“You’d like to play the part, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Ford.”
He didn’t waste my time or his. “Well, you’re not gonna play it. Jeff Hunter’s going to play it.”
I knew John Ford well enough to realize there was no way you were ever going to argue him out of a casting decision, or anything else. I thanked him for his time and got up to leave. I got to the door and Ford spoke up.
“Boob?”
“Yes, Mr. Ford?”
“You really want to play the part?”
“Very much, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, you’re still not going to!”
That was John Ford, and whether the actor in question was Duke Wayne, Jeff Hunter, or me, you learned to accept him for what he was: a great artist with a personality that could keep you up nights—for years.
One day near the end of 1956, Spencer Tracy took me over to Humphrey Bogart’s house. I had known Bogie for years because of our shared passion for boats and the sea. Bogie was distinguished as an actor by an unusual combination of dramatic power and a light touch—he could suggest dramatic and character points gracefully, and he could bring humor to heavy material. Bogie called his boat the Santana, and she was a sleek thing of beauty—a yawl. On board the Santana, Bogie was pure—not an actor on a boat, but a sailor on his boat.
Everybody in Hollywood knew that Bogie was dying, shrinking day by day from cancer. Every afternoon he would be bun
dled into a dumbwaiter and brought down to the first floor of the house for an hour or two of conversation with his friends, after which he would be bundled back into the dumbwaiter and return to bed.
It was an amazing experience—a salon held by a dying man. Bogie must have been in terrible pain, but he never let it show. The mood was light and mostly humorous. The conversation was about boats, pictures, and people—who was doing what. Even dying, Bogie had humor, and he gave me a touch of the needle. He asked Spence, “What the hell are you doing giving this kid costar billing?”
I took it as a straight line. “Listen,” I said, “when we work together, I’ll be happy to give you costar billing.” He laughed.
When he died in January 1957, there was no coffin, no body at the funeral. The centerpiece was simply a model of the Santana. People have always paid tribute to Bogie’s professionalism, the way he was a stickler about his work—one of the traits he shared with Spence. But he was also a nicer man than he liked to let on. And that model of the Santana showed that there was something else he took almost as much pride in as his acting: being a good sailor.
EIGHT
“AND THEN I MET NATALIE.”
At the train station in Los Angeles, on our way to being married in Arizona. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
These were years in which I didn’t have a steady girlfriend, so I named my new boat My Lady with more than a touch of irony. I didn’t have a steady lady, I had a boat. My Lady was a perfect bachelor’s boat, a twenty-six-foot Chris Craft. Ray Kellogg, the head of special effects at Fox, helped me take her out for a shakedown cruise. I docked her in Newport, near Claire Trevor’s boat. I was happy in my career, and I was happy aboard My Lady. I thought I had everything I wanted.
And then I met Natalie.
The first time Natalie Wood saw me, I didn’t see her, or at least I don’t remember seeing her. It was the spring of 1949, at Twentieth Century Fox, and Natalie was making Father Was a Fullback, with Fred MacMurray.
As she told the story, we passed each other in a studio hallway. We didn’t speak, but she always said I smiled at her. As we passed, she turned around and watched me go by, but I didn’t turn around. I have to take her word for this episode, which she mythologized over the years, because I honestly don’t remember it.
She was ten years old, I was eighteen, and she told her mother, who was walking with her down the hallway, that she had seen the man she was going to marry. And she also told the screenwriter Mary Loos, who was on the set of Father Was a Fullback, that she had just fallen in love with an incredibly handsome man, but she didn’t know who he was.
As the years went by, I would occasionally see Natalie around town, at parties and at premieres, but she never seemed like she was particularly interested in me, let alone interested in marrying me. What I didn’t know at the time was that she had retained Henry Willson as her agent simply because Henry had also been my agent, which was all she needed to know.
For the most part, we moved in entirely different social circles. While she was making Rebel Without a Cause, she was having an affair with Nicholas Ray and hanging around Jimmy Dean and Dennis Hopper, and I was with a much older crowd who generally regarded Nick and Jimmy as the barbarians at the gate.
We talked about that period a lot in later years. There was nearly a thirty-year age difference between her and Nick Ray, so the relationship was kept quiet, but I think she was looking for a father figure, and Nick was always happy to play the part of the all-knowing guru. Her family had been very opposed to her doing Rebel; they didn’t understand the part, or the film, but Natalie had worked with Jimmy Dean in a General Electric Theater TV show right after he shot East of Eden but before it was released. She knew about his gifts, which were primarily those of brilliant inventiveness and unexpected power. They had bonded before they did Rebel Without a Cause.
Natalie sensed what a break Rebel could be for her. She always had a wonderful ability to recognize life-changing moments when they presented themselves. Besides that, she was desperate to get away from the girl-next-door parts that Jack Warner was putting her in, and she was equally desperate to get away from her family, who had viewed her as a meal ticket since she was a toddler, which oppressed her practically as well as emotionally.
So Rebel spoke to all sorts of needs that Natalie had—career as well as family. Not only that, but within the film itself was a recognition that the families we make for ourselves are often far more meaningful than the families we are born into, which was something that would also have appealed to Natalie at that point in her life. At that stage, all she wanted was to get away from her biological family, so Nick, Jimmy, and Dennis Hopper formed a new family for Natalie.
I met Jimmy Dean a couple of times; I especially remember having drinks with him one night at Patsy d’Amore’s, but I can’t claim any insight into his character. Natalie never specifically alluded to it, but my impression of him was that he was bisexual; certainly, that was the scuttlebutt around town. At that point, Jimmy was always charging around on a motorcycle with Pier Angeli. I had worked with her sister, Marisa Pavan, on What Price Glory?, but for the most part he and Natalie were with an entirely different group than I was.
After Natalie made such a breakthrough with Rebel Without a Cause, Jack Warner showed his complete lack of understanding of what he had by teaming Natalie with Tab Hunter for a couple of pictures. To say that they didn’t strike any sparks was an understatement. By this time, Natalie was clearly maturing into something special. She had that same riveting, sexual quality that Ava Gardner or Elizabeth Taylor did, but in a smaller, subtler package—more of a gamine than an earth mother.
The first time I really remember talking to her was in June 1956, when we were both attending a fashion show at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and we were asked to pose for a few photos together. Again, she was pleasant and quite beautiful, but she made no particular moves in my direction that let me know she had maintained a mad crush on me.
A month later, on July 20, I took a leap and invited Natalie to the premiere of The Mountain. What I didn’t know at the time was that July 20 was her eighteenth birthday. I remember being unusually nervous before I picked her up. It was a big studio premiere, but that wasn’t it; I was excited about taking Natalie out, and I was also anxious about what Spencer Tracy would think of her. I needn’t have worried; he liked her very much.
At dinner afterward, we both sensed that things had changed. Time had altered the emotional dynamic, and we sparked to each other. I sent her flowers the next morning; then I called to tell her I had had a spectacularly good time. A little later, we went out again, this time for lunch, and she kept me waiting for three hours.
With anybody else, I would probably have left, but with Natalie…I waited. I think she was impressed by that, and by the fact that I wasn’t angry. The next night we went out again, to My Lady, and this time the sparks flew upward. It was December 6, 1956, a date we would remember all our lives. In her journal, Natalie wrote, “Our first serious date.”
I remember the instant I fell in love with her. Natalie had the most incredibly expressive brown eyes, dark and dancing and deep. One night on the boat, Natalie looked at me with love, her eyes lit by a Coleman lantern that was on top of the table. That was the moment that changed my life.
I was soon a part of Natalie’s family, who proved to be some of the most clinically interesting people I’ve known. Natalie’s mother was particularly bizarre. Her name was Maria, but everyone called her “Mud,” which I think was Natalie’s shortening of “Muddah,” a comic version of “Mother.”
I think Mud genuinely came to love me, but she had spun a terrible web of dependence around Natalie. Basically, Mud was afraid to let Natalie out of her sight, because Natalie was the breadwinner. It all began when Natalie was a child actress. Mud told her that a serial killer prowled movie theaters and stabbed young girls in the back. Result: Natalie didn’t like to leave the house to go to movies when she was a child. Nat
alie also developed a genuine fear of flying, although she eventually learned to cope with it.
Mud didn’t just tell Natalie these things as a means of controlling her; she was herself genuinely prey to irrational fears. For example, if a fire engine went by her house, Mud would rush over to see if Natalie was all right. That actually happened, and more than once. She was an interesting character, but more interesting at a distance. She was one of those people who always had to create tension. Everything was a drama. God, she was exhausting.
Mud wanted to control Natalie’s money and control her parts. She wanted to control who could be at one of Natalie’s parties, control who Natalie dated, control everything. For a long time she was a chaperone for Natalie, and a formidable one, always the first to announce, “Let’s go home.”
Around the time of Rebel Without a Cause, Mud finally relented and allowed Natalie out of the house by herself. But if Natalie went out on a date, Mud would look at her dress when she got home to see if it was wrinkled. And if Natalie didn’t get a part, it wasn’t because she was wrong for it, or hadn’t tested well; it was the agent’s fault, or the director’s, or the producer’s. Natalie lived in a cocoon, and the lives of the entire family revolved around her: Mud was the mother of Natalie Wood, Lana was the sister of Natalie Wood. Natalie struggled against these totally unhealthy relationships for most of her life.
For some reason, her mother wasn’t threatened by me. From the beginning, Mud responded to me very positively, as did Nick, Natalie’s father. But Nick was an alcoholic, and it was obvious that on the psychological level he had been cast off and didn’t matter. That particular family was a total matriarchy—a Russian matriarchy.
Pieces of My Heart Page 9