Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  If you think about it, Fred was a very brave performer; he was always trying new things, and he never played it safe. It didn’t matter if it was utilizing innovative special effects for a dance number, recording a jazz album, or getting on a skateboard at the age of seventy-eight. Fred was always trying to do something more.

  The blessing for me was that Fred’s knowledge of the business and what was needed to survive it helped me become better. When I would get down about the studio or my career, he would take me aside and tell me, “Don’t let them get on top of you. Don’t ever get negative. There are a lot of bumps in the road; you’ve got to keep your chin up. The most important thing is to keep going.”

  None of this is profound, but all of it is true, and the fact that it was coming from Fred Astaire forced me to take it seriously. So many truly talented people fall by the wayside because they get discouraged and lose their joy, their intensity. It was Fred who impressed upon me the permanent value of maintaining a positive attitude.

  We stayed close for the rest of his life. In the mid-1970s, he fell in love with the jockey Robyn Smith, who was more than forty years younger than he was. Fred asked me what I thought. “Look,” he said, “everybody thinks I’m crazy to want to marry this woman. What do you think?”

  I remembered how much I had loved Barbara Stanwyck; I knew that age was no barrier to love, and I told him I was 100 percent for it. Actually, I told him what Spencer Tracy had told me: “Are you happy? Then that’s all that matters.” By 1980, when they finally got married, Fred was eighty and Robyn was thirty-six. I believe that, while Fred was alive, she was absolutely great for him.

  FIFTEEN

  “SHE WAS WITH ME FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE.”

  The second time around, and never happier: Natalie’s and my second marriage. My sister, Mary Lou, is next to me, and my daughter Katie is the flower girl. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

  Television helped me a lot as an actor because I didn’t have time to think. It’s fast and totally reactive. I couldn’t be Cary Grant or Greg Peck, I had to be me, and I discovered that the audience bought it.

  I became very close to Lew and Edie Wasserman. Nobody knew this about Lew, but he liked to barbecue, and he would invite me to his house to eat the chicken and ribs he loved to cook. When we weren’t eating, we were playing Ping-Pong. Like most people in show business, he was very competitive at everything he did. He liked me, and we had some wonderful family times together. I always felt honored because very few actors were welcomed at his house. The influence he had on my life was tremendous: he was the archetypal big-picture guy, and he had a very specific vision of my career that, in large part, came to pass.

  My career was back on the upswing, and I loved it. In 1969 I did Winning, with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It was a good part—I was a charming but weak race car driver who seduced Joanne—and a good picture. Paul and Joanne are both quality people, and I have endless admiration for the way they’ve built their lives and careers. Long before Joanne met Paul, I pushed her off a building in A Kiss Before Dying. We had babies at the same time, and we’ve remained friends for a lot of years. They live in Connecticut, and I’m in California or Aspen, but we stay close.

  In 2007 Paul announced that he was retiring from acting. On one level, I understood. What’s he got left to prove? He was on Broadway just a few years ago, he’s made a dozen great movies, he’s raised tens of millions of dollars for charity. He doesn’t need to sit on a set with material and coworkers who may not be up to his standards and implicitly ask for their approval. Let’s face it, acting doesn’t get any easier as you age, emotionally or physically.

  Yet, I would bet you that if a great part comes along that Paul likes, and it’s something he would be great in, he’ll take the tap shoes off the wall and go into his dance. That’s what actors do; that’s who they are.

  Paul once said about me, “If I’m in the trenches, this is the guy I want next to me.” Right back at you, pal.

  Throughout these years, a part of me was always with Natalie, but in the cold light of day, I never believed I’d get her back, especially after she married the producer Richard Gregson. In June 1970, Marion and I were invited to a party at John and Linda Foreman’s house. Linda also invited Natalie and Richard, which was fine with me; the Foremans had maintained their friendship with Natalie just as they had maintained their friendship with me, and they always had our absolute love and trust, together or singly.

  The day before the party, Marion wasn’t feeling well and called Linda to tell her that she wouldn’t be coming but I would still show up. As it turned out, Richard Gregson didn’t show up either because he’d gone to New York on a movie matter. Natalie was six months pregnant at the time and spent most of the evening sitting down. I went over and sat at her feet. We never really discussed Subject A, but everything we did discuss had overtones of our feelings for each other. After the party, I drove her home, and we sat there for a minute.

  “I guess I shouldn’t come in,” I finally said.

  “I guess you shouldn’t,” she said. She got out and went in the house. I drove down the street, then had to stop. I was crying, and I couldn’t see the road anymore. I sent flowers the next day, and Natalie sent me a thank-you note. She gave birth to Natasha on September 29.

  To be blunt, my feelings for Natalie constituted unfinished emotional business for me, and I have no doubt those feelings affected my relationships after we divorced, not to mention my relationships after Marion and I separated and divorced.

  The first time I saw Natasha was a couple of days after she was born. My mother and Natalie had always been close, and she wanted to see the baby, so I tightened my belt and took my mother to Natalie’s house. My mother and I sat there while Natalie sang Natasha to sleep. (Natasha has always hated to go to sleep.) And while we sat there and watched Natalie nuzzling her daughter and singing, my mother fell asleep!

  To see Natalie with her child by another man was difficult, but I realized that I had never seen her happier at any time of her life. I felt a sense of contentment for her, as well as of loss for myself.

  It was while I was doing It Takes a Thief that I began to stray off the marital reservation. Partially, I think this was because I felt that TV was a wedge back into success for me, and I threw myself into the show in a way I hadn’t done before. I was so intensely focused on the show, and on my resurgent career, that I was less focused on my marriage. Marion, Katie, and I were living in Palm Springs, which was too far for a daily commute, so I stayed at my studio apartment four nights a week.

  I was literally living at the studio; on top of the twelve-hour days, I was on a nine-month schedule, because we were making thirty-two episodes a year compared to the twenty or twenty-two they make today. You’d have a final dubbing session on a Thursday for the show that was running on Sunday—the print the public saw was still wet, and this went on week after week for nine months.

  The suite at Universal made it easier to indulge in behavior I had never indulged in during my previous marriage, and that I wouldn’t repeat with my later ones.

  The public sees the results of the pressures of show business marriages, but I don’t think most people understand why so many end in divorce. For one thing, when an actor goes to work, he’s usually working with very attractive people, which is not necessarily the case at the insurance office. Besides that, it’s emotional, intense work; when you’re acting, you expose everything you are, and there’s somebody right there who’s collecting it and giving it back to you, and that doesn’t happen in other fields either. Take emotion, add intensity, compound it with the fact that all of this takes place in the media hothouse, and you have a dangerous combination.

  Nowadays, of course, it’s much worse. Because of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, people literally can’t walk out the door without having a camera or cell phone shoved in their face, and there are wolf packs of photographers staking out every store, restaurant, and beauty parlor. It’s in
sane—how can anyone live like that? Why would they want to?

  TV was a much more grueling regimen than movies, but honesty compels me to admit that wasn’t the problem. I had always been able to resist extramarital gopher holes before, but not this time. My relationship with Marion had been initially passionate, but that passed, and in our case friendship wasn’t enough to sustain the marriage. If I had to ascribe my infidelity to one thing, I would say that it was the times. Everybody was going crazy, and I felt I had to make up for lost time. That’s an explanation, not an excuse.

  On some level, Marion knew about what I was doing—wives always do, although they may choose not to acknowledge it—and she got involved in a serious relationship with another man. When that happened, things cracked wide open. At one point she accused me of having an affair with Jill St. John! Her intuition was correct, but premature by more than ten years.

  Marion and I separated at the end of 1970 and spent most of 1971 haggling over settlement terms. Marion wanted far more money than I was willing or, for that matter, able to pay. Finally, on October 14, 1971, the divorce went through.

  When ABC abruptly canceled It Takes a Thief after three years, I was surprised and disappointed. The show was a success, the format was perfect, and it was already one of the strongest shows in the history of syndication for Universal. But there was a new regime at ABC, and they wanted to clear out some slots for their own shows. Good-bye, Alexander Mundy. I loved playing him, but there was no sense moaning about it; I kept working.

  I had some time left on my contract with Universal, and they made some noises about having me work out my contract making guest appearances in other Universal TV shows. Universal was a great believer in moving its people around. If you were under contract, you could be doing The Virginian one month and Ironside the next month.

  But I wasn’t about to do guest shots on other people’s shows. I had top-lined a successful show of my own and wasn’t going to take a step back into being a jobbing actor. Universal backed off. I suspect I got away with my stand because Lew Wasserman always took my side; if I told him I didn’t want to do something, I didn’t have to.

  For a time after my divorce from Marion, I was involved with Tina Sinatra, Frank’s youngest daughter. Tina was very young, but Frank always liked me and he was okay with our relationship. One day I told Frank that I didn’t think it was going to work long-term but that it was fine for the time being. He was all right with that too. When it came to matters of the heart, Frank was not judgmental and surprisingly open. For that matter, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Frank and Natalie had a thing during the period when we were divorced. She never alluded to it, but he was obviously crazy about her, and what Frank wanted, Frank usually got.

  At one point, Tina and I double-dated with Frank when he was dating Jill St. John. The woman who became my wife could have been my mother-in-law. Feel free to frame whatever jokes you can imagine; believe me, I’ve made them all.

  At the same time I was going through my divorce from Marion, Natalie’s marriage to Richard Gregson exploded. He had fallen into an affair with their secretary, and Natalie was in the pool and picked up the house phone and heard him coming on to her employee. Natalie went berserk and cut her hand up trying to get back into the house and get at him. She threw him out and never wanted to see him again.

  Natalie could turn off on people just as quickly as she could turn on to them, and when that happened, there was rarely any road back. I think she learned to act that way out of self-preservation, because of her family. When she closed the iron door, there was no getting it back open, and she was certainly not a woman to forgive infidelity.

  It was John and Linda Foreman who provided the setting for our reconciliation. It was a party at their house, and both Natalie and I were there, unescorted. In retrospect, the fact that John invited both of us was probably not an accident. I looked at Natalie. She looked at me. As always, there was something there—a light that went on in both of us. The next day I called her and told her she looked lovely.

  “I hear you’re going out with Steve McQueen,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m with Tina Sinatra.”

  “How long do you think you’re going to be with her?”

  “I don’t know. She’s a wonderful girl.”

  “Well, if the situation changes, maybe we could get together.”

  “Maybe we could. Let’s see what happens. And if it happens, I hope it happens before winter.”

  So we were back in touch, although we didn’t see each other at that point. I stepped back with Tina. She was twenty-two, and I was forty-one. Tina was a lovely girl, and now she is a lovely woman, but she wanted more out of me than I was capable of giving. Frankly, I was always a little concerned about the age difference between us. Not at that moment, but in terms of the future—I had seen relationships with a similar differential collapse as time went on, and the last thing I needed was another failure. In retrospect, I was too emotionally cautious when it came to Tina; she meant a great deal to me, and she deserved better.

  Just before Christmas 1971, I dropped by Natalie’s house on North Bentley with some Christmas presents for her and Natasha. There were other people there, so the things that were said were said with our eyes, which seemed to be enough at that point.

  Finally, I moved out of the apartment Tina and I had in Century City and moved into Watson Webb’s guesthouse for a while. It was Christmas, and I was feeling lonely. I called Natalie and told her what had happened. And then I made my decision. I went back to the house in Palm Springs that I had kept after Marion and I divorced. I called Natalie and asked her to meet me in the desert. She didn’t hesitate, just said, “Yes!” and got on the next plane. She was with me in Palm Springs from then until the end of March.

  Put it another way: she was with me for the rest of her life.

  This began the most exciting, paradisical time of my life. At first, not a lot of people knew that Natalie and I were together again, just the Foremans and a few others. For the first couple of months, we hid out at my house in Palm Springs or hers in Lake Tahoe. Natasha stayed in Los Angeles with her governess, a wonderful woman named Nyoko, who took superb care of her. Natalie and I both knew that this was a crucial moment in our lives, and we didn’t want to blow it a second time.

  It was a quiet, rich time. We were alone, sitting by the pool, ordering food in, taking long walks. We talked about falling in love with each other again. At night we’d go to restaurants in town we had liked during our marriage—Don the Beachcomber’s, among others. We may have been seen, but we managed to avoid being noticed. Night after night we gazed at the stars in the dark desert sky.

  Natalie felt that the first time around there had been a sense that we were kids acting out a script—that we deliberately hid our weaknesses from each other because they didn’t fit into the plot that we had in our heads. This time we were both determined to be more open with each other, and we weren’t afraid to be what we really were.

  On those occasions when people saw us together, they’d say, “Huh?” On February 10, 1972, we left Palm Springs to stay at her place on North Bentley Drive for a couple of days. Natalie threw me a forty-second birthday party at her house and invited a lot of people. That served as the official announcement that we were back together, and that was emphasized in April when we went to the Academy Awards and watched Roger Moore and Liv Ullman present the Oscar to Marlon Brando for his performance in The Godfather. Or, rather, they presented the Oscar to someone calling herself Sacheen Littlefeather. Marlon, in a typically eccentric gesture of contempt for his own profession, had instructed her to reject it for him in case he won.

  What surprised us about that night was the explosion of cameras that greeted us around every corner and the way everybody congratulated us as if we were newlyweds. It seemed as if both the public and the people in the industry were confirming that we belonged together, hand in hand.

>   I had been doing well financially, but the divorce and an income tax matter had pretty much cleaned me out. It was at this point that Cubby Broccoli did me the great honor of suggesting that I should play James Bond. George Lazenby had replaced Sean Connery, but while On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had been a good picture, it hadn’t done anywhere near the business that the Connery films had. There was no formal offer, but Cubby thought I was a viable candidate to replace Lazenby. I thought about Cubby’s suggestion for about two seconds, but realized it just wasn’t a good fit. “I’m too American,” I told Cubby. “James Bond has to be English. Roger Moore is your guy.”

  I had known Roger since I was under contract at Fox and he was under contract at MGM, then Warner’s. Once, when I sold a car to Gore Vidal, Roger drove it all the way to the East Coast so Gore could pick it up. Roger has always been blithe, charming, hilariously funny—an adorable man.

  Roger, if you’re reading this, please make the check out to “Cash.”

  As it happened, because of her percentage of the profits of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Natalie was in fine financial shape. She couldn’t have cared less about the financial disparity between us. All either of us cared about was that we were rediscovering the most crucial relationship of our lives.

  That said, there was always an odd seesaw effect in our careers. When I was hot, she would be marking time, and vice versa. At just about the time we picked up our relationship, Natalie hadn’t made a picture in two years because a couple of projects had fallen through, although producers were still throwing scripts over the back wall. Because we had suddenly hit this incandescent moment, neither of us had believed would happen again, she didn’t mind.

  A few days after the Oscars, we boarded the Queen Elizabeth II for a trip to London. I had to promote Madame Sin, a TV movie I had produced with Bette Davis, and Natalie went along for the ride. We discovered that Arthur Loew and his wife Regina were also making the crossing, so we settled in for a fun time. Unfortunately, the morning after we sailed a terrible storm blew up. The swells were more than seventy feet high, and the winds were just about as strong as the swells were high. Natalie was nervous and wondered if there was any way off the ship. I explained that we would get blown off the deck before we could even make it to a lifeboat. She didn’t even blink; she just ordered another bottle of champagne and some caviar. Because of the storm, we were two days late into Southampton, but we were alive and exceedingly well fed.