Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  The picture helps to solve the riddle of Maria’s true age, which would become the subject of whispered speculation once she came to Hollywood. From the time she was twenty or so, she gave her date of birth as February 8, 1912. On the back of the 1919 family photo, she is identified as “11 years, 1 month,” which would mean she was born in 1908—the same year recorded in the ship’s log when she immigrated to America. Both Maria and Kalia, Kalia’s son cheerfully admits, “lied about their age.”

  The photograph of Maria’s family, ironically, bears a resemblance to the romantic images of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, in formal portraits with their children, taken in the last days of the Romanov monarchy. Maria kept this family photo beside a framed portrait of the Romanovs in similar pose, to the day she died, prizing them as jewels. Aside from Natalie, her link to Russian aristocracy is what defined Maria to herself, true or false, for as one companion remarked, “She believed every word of it. That’s the mark of a good actress.”

  Musia, or Marusia, as young Maria was affectionately called, was pampered from the time she was born because of her diminutive size. One of her stories was that she weighed only two pounds at birth, nearly dying. In the family portrait, she is nestled into her mother, cradled to her breast, as Marusia peers out with the smug self-possession of the favored child. She has an elfin quality, her dark hair pixie-short, with penetrating, birdlike eyes she compared to her father’s as green, her daughter Olga describes as a changeable gray-blue, and those who considered her malevolent called “black and beady.” Her expression, even at eleven, suggests cunning. She was a mischievous girl. Her German nanny was fired for making Marusia kneel; she learned to swear in Chinese from the cook. When she did so in front of her father, it was the cook—not Marusia—who “got a talking.” The young Marusia adored jewelry (a bold bracelet leaps out from her tiny wrist in the family photo). She collected pictures and books depicting the royal family “because I worship them,” she would say later, “almost like a god.”*

  Kalia, Maria/Marusia’s older half-sister, supported her grandiose accounts of governesses and fur coats and seamstresses for their dolls, though Kalia identified the origin of the family’s wealth as a factory that produced vodka and textiles, while Maria later said their father manufactured candles, ink and candy.† Kalia was not heard to repeat Maria’s boast that the town where they kept their dacha was named after Natalie’s grandfather. (“Because he was such a generous man. If a peasant is nice and he likes him, he’ll give him house, he gives him horse, he gives him land.”) According to Maria, her parents’ marriage was arranged to merge Stepan Zudilov’s fortune with Maria Zuleva’s name. Neither Kalia nor Maria, once in America, had photos of the family’s estate, or their dacha, to authenticate living such rarefied childhoods, though according to Kalia’s son, they behaved like it. “Didn’t cook, didn’t clean, had other people do that.”

  This idyll, if it existed, came to a tragic end around 1919. A civil war erupted in Petrograd two years before, forcing Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. Bolshevik workers seized the Winter Palace by October, naming Communist Vladimir Lenin as their leader. The summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their five young children, Grand Duke Alexei and the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and presumably Anastasia.*

  Natalie’s grandparents kept an uneasy vigil at their home in Barnaul as the Bolshevik Revolution made its way toward Siberia. Sometime after March of 1919, the date they sat for their portrait, they were warned the Bolsheviks were coming. “They told us, ‘Run!’” said Maria, “because of Mother, the whole family would have been killed. They were killing aristocrats.” They left so quickly, she recalled, there was no time to find her favorite brother, Semen.†

  The Zudilovs, dressed as peasants, crossed the border into Manchuria, where they stayed a few days per Maria, a year by Kalia’s version. “Then the Czechs came and chased the Communists away,” Maria recounted, “so we came back.”‡

  Marusia and her family returned to Barnaul to find Semen hanging from the archway of their front door, a rope around his neck. Ten-year-old Marusia went into violent convulsions. “I was so little and I loved him so much—he was such a nice half-brother. When I saw him hanging there, with the tongue and everything, I start to have convulsions, starting with the neck, then with leg and hands, and then I just drop.” The episode, a family legend, permanently affected Natalie’s mother’s nerves, leaving her subject to “the fits,” she called it, damaging her psyche in ways unknowable.

  Marusia and her family remained in Siberia until the Bolshevik Revolution reached their door, when they fled for China, “because the Reds were killing everybody.” She and Kalia would provide essentially the same drama of the family’s escape: how they packed what jewels and belongings they could onto a train their father bought from the Chinese. According to Maria, Natalie’s grandfather buried “jewels and money and gold” worth “millions” in a waterproof box with a map of its location provided to everyone in the family “except me. I was young, they didn’t give me the plan.” A similar story surfaced from Kalia, though never, notably, the “plan.” Whether the tale of their escape and the buried family treasure is true remains cryptic. “The problem with stories from Russians,” one historian of the era observes, “is that they’re all probable.”

  According to Natalie’s mother, her parents changed everyone’s names because they were afraid Communists would find them, exacting a promise from each child never to reveal the family’s true identity—a reaction a Russian émigré friend considered extreme to the point of “demented.” “Stepan Zudilov” is identified as Kalia’s father on her 1905 birth certificate, before the alleged name change, and “Maria Kuleva” is the name documented as that of Marusia’s mother on family possessions prior to the revolution. These are also the names Natalie’s mother would use to identify her parents on legal records once in the U.S., leaving little room for doubt that Natalie’s grandparents were born Stepan Zudilov and Maria Kuleva; though Olga, Natalie’s older sister, still expresses uncertainty those are their true names, “or if they changed them when they ran.” Olga and Natalie’s mother remained haunted all her life by the fear that Communists would come after her and “kill me like killed my brother.”

  Once in Manchuria, little Marusia and her family stayed at a hotel in Qiqihar, where Natalie’s mother had the first of several alleged mystical experiences. As Maria later told the story, she “recognized” a house near their hotel as one she had lived in, remembering an outdoor playhouse and the ceiling of her bedroom, with “angels” on it. Her parents took her to the house, afraid she would have another seizure if they refused. Upstairs was a room with cherubim painted on the ceiling; in the backyard, concealed by spiders’ webs, Marusia found a decaying playhouse. Natalie’s mother believed in reincarnation ever after, despite the opposite position of the Russian Orthodox religion in which she was baptized, and to which she and her parents adhered. (“How can you explain that?” she would ask. “There was my angels!”)

  Natalie’s grandparents settled in nearby Harbin, China, where so many Russians had fled, neighborhoods appeared to have been lifted out of Siberia. The family lived in such an enclave, in a “good” part of town. Stepan, Natalie’s grandfather, is presumed to have managed a soap factory. Natalie’s mother, Marusia, attended an all-Russian girls’ school, though Marusia’s eye was on “pretty young boys.” She went to church so she could “look at the boys, and look at what the girls are wearing—is my dress better than theirs?” Marusia had thick, naturally curly, crow-black hair and was preternaturally tiny—just five feet—“But she carried herself as if she were seven foot tall,” said an acquaintance from Maria’s senior years. “She liked to talk about how she had been a great dancer, and how she had been a great beauty.” Natalie’s studio press releases would later describe her mother as a “professional ballerina” in China. “That was made up,” admits daughter Olga. Teenage Marusia too
k one ballet class in Harbin. “For grace,” she put it later, claiming her parents withdrew her, believing dancers and performers fell into a category with “prostitutes.”

  Marusia and her sisters placed absolute faith in Russian superstitions and “did gypsy stuff” using Romany magic, such as “looking in the mirror on a certain night between two candles and you can see the person you’re supposed to marry.” One day, the sisters had their fortunes read by a Harbin gypsy. The fortuneteller warned Marusia to “beware of dark water,” for she was going to drown. The gypsy also predicted her second child “would be a great beauty, known throughout the world.” Natalie Wood’s life, and death, would be dictated by the gypsy’s twin prophecies.

  The fortuneteller’s predictions held an immediate power over Natalie’s mother. She refused to go near water, “especially if it’s dark waters.”

  Marusia eloped in her teens, defying her parents by choosing a Russian-Armenian, the brawnily handsome Alexei Tatulov, originally “Tatulian,” the son of an Armenian Cossack who, legend has it, led a regiment against the Turks astride a white horse. Marusia was fleeing a father too strict for her ambition; her choice of a “ladies’ man” her girlfriends coveted revealed her vanity, and a competitive streak. (She told Olga, their daughter, she married Alexei “because he said he would kill himself if she didn’t.”) Natalie’s mother was not a true beauty, as she imagined, but her vivid personality was a magnet.

  She became pregnant in 1928; claiming, later, that she weighed only seventy-five pounds and doctors ordered her to abort. She would tell Natalie she had several abortions before this, because she was too tiny. By Maria’s later account, her mother took her to a French doctor experienced with “narrow” Chinese women, who agreed to deliver her baby. Alexei brought a priest, she would recall, “because he thought I definitely was gonna die.” Marusia gave birth to her first daughter, Olga, on October 28, 1928. She alleged that it was without anesthetic, that her labor lasted five days, and “it felt like my bones were cracking, they were stretching, it was horrible.” “My mother,” Olga would later sigh, “told so many stories.”

  Olga was originally called Ovsanna, christened in the Armenian Orthodox church. One morning, Stepan Zudilov took his infant granddaughter “for a walk,” secretly bringing Ovsanna to a Russian Orthodox priest, who baptized her in the Zudilovs’ religion, renaming her “Olga,” a Russian name. Olga/Ovsanna had her part-Armenian father’s dark eyes and gentle disposition.

  When Olga was a little over a year old, Alexei and Marusia Tatulov made the bold decision to leave Harbin for America, Alexei’s dream, according to Marusia, who saw America as “just this amazing land, and the Communists will never get there.” Alexei boarded a ship called the Taito Maru in Kobe, Japan, on January 12, 1930. He arrived at the port of San Francisco, California, fifteen days later, identified in the ship’s logs as an “auto mechanic.” He had no job, no prospects, and fifty dollars in his pocket.

  Marusia was rejected for the voyage, ostensibly underweight. She spent the next ten months in Harbin drinking a concoction of beer and milk to gain weight, a recipe she would one day give to actor Jack Lemmon, when Natalie starred in The Great Race. A Japanese nurse tended Olga while Marusia passed the time studying bookkeeping. She and Olga were issued their visas in November 1930, embarking on a grueling, month-long journey to the United States.

  Dispossessed of her child’s nurse, Marusia had no maternal instincts. She continued to breast-feed Olga, who was now two, and the little girl cried without ceasing as they traveled by train from China into Korea, then Tokyo, where they boarded a ship, the Asama Maru, sailing first to Hawaii, finally to San Francisco, sleeping on bamboo mats. Natalie Wood’s mother’s life of privilege, if it existed, existed no more.

  * Spelled “Zackharenko” on the birth certificate and by the family.

  * An “a” is added in Russian to the surnames of female children. Middle names derive from the father’s first name: in Maria’s case, “Stepanovna” for Stepan.

  * Grammar will remain uncorrected to reflect the speaker’s personality. †Maria’s version made more sense, according to a Russian scholar: the textile industry was based near Moscow then, far from Barnaul, and vodka was controlled by the Russian state, prohibited by 1914.

  * A rumor, crystallizing into myth, would surface that Anastasia escaped.

  † Kalia’s descendants recall it as Mikhael.

  ‡ Referring, most likely, to the Czech Army’s march across Siberia.

  MARUSIA AND OLGA’S SHIP, THE ASAMA MARU, arrived at San Francisco’s Port of Angels on the eleventh of December 1930. Alexei met them at the pier, informing his wife he had a mistress. He still loved her, he told Marusia, but Armenians were “passionate” men who could not survive a year without a woman.

  Marusia’s next shock was her home, one room in a bungalow co-occupied by a crowd of Russian immigrants who worked with Alexei at the nearby shipyards. “I thought, ‘What we gonna do?’ ” She had no money, a toddler, and spoke broken English. Marusia accepted the arrangement, consoled by the fact that she was further from Communists, about whom she was possessed by a terror bordering on the hallucinogenic.

  Natalie’s mother’s escape from her demons, and her poverty, was the movies. She was “movie crazy,” relates daughter Olga, who remembers how her father would give her mother money for food “and we’d go to the Temple Theater instead.” Flights of fantasy transcended Marusia from the reality of having seen a brother hanged, or the squalor of her life in America. They infused her with the cheerfulness of the deranged. “She would say, ‘Believe in the best, expect something good to happen, and it will.’”

  Ballet was Marusia’s secondary passion. She befriended Nadia Ermolova, a model who taught ballet to children, enrolling Olga in her class. Marusia danced alongside the little girls, “doing it more than we would.” Marusia left her toddler to her own devices. When she got a job as a church seamstress, lying that she knew how to sew, Marusia left Olga, then four, in the park while she went to work.

  She was remembered as a “social climber” in the Russian community of San Francisco, which socialized at a Russian Center off Divisadero, where an Invalids Ball was held each year. Marusia was twice Queen and twice Princess, chosen on the basis of having collected the most money for Russian veterans. “Here we all were,” recalls a neighbor, “not two pennies to rub together, and Marusia is standing around on the corners gathering money for the Invalidzi.” A 1936 photo of Natalie’s mother as Queen shows her sitting in a ballgown wearing her crown, a satin banner draped across her chest, trophy in one hand, a spray of flowers in the other, looking as if she had assumed her rightful place on the Russian throne. The gossip where Alex worked as a janitor was that he “took” the dress from the emporium where he worked and returned it after the ball. Olga remembers her mother hiring a dressmaker a different year she was Queen, “using all her money for this one dress.”

  Marusia began acting in plays at the Russian Center, then at the Kolobok, a Russian club, where she danced onstage, dragging Olga, who would “fall asleep on pool tables.” Marusia wanted to be an actress, in the opinion of her closest friend, Josephine Paulson, whose daughter Lois was Olga’s playmate, giving Olga the lifelong nickname “Teddi,” for Tatulov. Marusia read palms and threw tarot cards, “always into something.” She looked at apartments full-time, moving the family at whim.

  Though her husband continued to have affairs, Marusia became pregnant in 1932. She collapsed on the street and was rushed to Mt. Zion Hospital, where her second reputed mystical episode occurred. She hemorrhaged during a blood transfusion, lost the baby, and was pronounced dead, regaining consciousness as a nurse prepared her to be embalmed. Marusia lay on the hospital bed, unable to speak or move to indicate she was alive. Alex arrived to accompany her body to the morgue, carrying dried flowers from a religious icon, sent by Marusia’s mother. As he placed the flowers on Marusia’s neck, she felt warmth. “I open my eyes and I start to screa
m. The nurse fainted, then she run out and said, ‘She’s alive!’ ” Marusia’s friend Josephine, Josephine’s daughter, and Olga all confirm the incident, which Natalie’s mother would consider a miracle, reinforcing both her religion and her belief in the mystic.

  Marusia was still living with her husband, Alex, when she began dating a Russian sea captain, George Cetalopv, the “great passion” of her life. “My father had other interests,” as Olga explained, “and she had this interest.” One night Alex brought home for dinner a coworker from the sugar boats, a Russian immigrant named Nikolai Zakharenko. He was twenty-three; short, but well-built; with black hair, black eyes, and the refined face of a matinee idol. “God, he was so handsome,” Maria would swoon in her later years of the man who would become Natalie’s father. She continued to dally with her sea captain, but acquired Nick Zakharenko like a trophy. “All my girlfriends want him, and I thought, ‘If they want him, I have to get him!’”

  Nick and Musia, his pet name for Maria, made a dazzling couple on the dance floor, where they won prizes dancing together. He impressed Maria with his gentlemanly manners, for Nick had a poet’s soul which expressed itself when he played the balalaika, a Russian string instrument. He was also possessed by a dark force that could explode after too much vodka. “Nick would get very moody and would hurt somebody,” recalled Olga, who was seven when they met. “He would fight.”

  The underlying cause of Natalie’s father’s rage was not fully understood. His brother Dmitri believed it came from deep-seated hatred of Communists. The Zakharenko brothers—Nikolai, Dmitri and Vladimir—spent their childhoods in the eastern Siberian port of Vladivostok, where their father, Stepan, worked at a candy factory and their mother, the former Eudoxie Sauchenko, was known for her beauty. During the revolution, Stepan Zakharenko fought against the Bolsheviks. Nikolai, the eldest, was not quite ten when Communists killed his father. Eudoxie received financial aid from a brother who immigrated to California, enabling her to escape Vladivostok for Shanghai with her three handsome young sons. She remarried in China. Her new husband, a Russian naval engineer named Constantine Zavarin, determined to move the family to the U.S., far from Bolshevik forces. Their first stop was Vancouver, the end of 1927, when Nikolai was fifteen. By 1932 the family made their way south to Seattle, settling eventually in San Francisco. Dmitri and Vladimir Zakharenko survived their upbringing relatively unscathed; Nikolai emerged with psychic wounds even Dmitri considered an enigma. “He kept in touch with Russians that were in exile, and he read the Russian books—oh, and he was so proud of the Tsar’s family. I didn’t even think of them.”