Nick struck out on his own when he was twenty, mining for gold in the Rockies. Dmitri, who briefly joined him, described a tortured artist playing balalaika part-time with an orchestra, railing against Communists during drunken binges on vodka. “He worried about and hated the Communists so much… it kills you instead of the other guy.” Nick’s anger came out in fistfights, when “he’d just lose his temper and threaten some guy. He’d never back down.”
Alex Tatulov saved Nick’s life in such a brawl before he brought him home to dinner. Natalie’s mother, who thrilled to strong and handsome men, and to drama, may have found Nick Zakharenko’s furies exciting at the start. They also shared a fanatical attachment to the royal family and a frenzied paranoia about Communists. Maria ended her “arrangement” with Alex and set up housekeeping with Nick, taking Olga. She filed for divorce in October 1935, identifying herself as Maria and as “Marie,” a name she began to use arbitrarily. The new setup with Nick did nothing to deter Maria from carrying on her flirtation with George Cetalopv, the captain she considered her true love.
Maria became pregnant with Natalie in October 1937, six months after her divorce from Olga’s father. She and Olga, who was nine, lived in a cubbyhole apartment in an alley with Nick, who was working as a janitor at Standard Oil. The conception was noteworthy, for Nick thought he could not have children, according to Maria, who was still romantically involved with George Cetalopv. The baby, from all accounts, was Nick’s. He and Maria were married on February 8, 1938, in a small Russian Orthodox cathedral in the neighborhood, witnessed by Nick’s artist brother, Vladimir. Why she waited until she was four months pregnant with Natalie to get married is one of Maria’s mysteries. “George went on a trip because he was captain of the ship,” recalls Olga. “When he came back, she was married to Nick.” Olga wondered, then and later, why her mother married Nick and not George Cetalopv, the love of her life. “I asked her that once. She said she liked George too much, that she’d always be jealous of him. But who knows her story? Nick was very attractive… much more attractive than George.”
Maria may have delayed marrying Nick because of his alcohol problem, which concerned her. “He drank a lot,” she said later, “even when I married him. He was wonderful man—when he was not drinking.”
Her choice of Nick Zakharenko over George Cetalopv would prove prophetic to Maria, despite its disturbing consequences. She was glad she married Nick, she said at the end of her life, because he gave her Natalie.
MARIA BELIEVED SHE WAS CARRYING DESTINY’S child, the world-famous beauty the gypsy in Harbin had predicted as her second-born. She ingratiated herself to a rich, childless Russian couple, Theodore and Helen Loy (originally “Lopatin”), whom she met through friends in the immigrant community, asking them to be godparents, assuring wealthy patrons for the unborn child she was convinced fate had chosen for fame. Natalie, a childhood friend would observe, was stage-managed by her mother “from conception.”
The Zakharenkos, who were struggling to pay the obstetrician’s bills, managed to move out of the alley to a cheerful duplex nearby at 1690 Page Street by the time Maria went into labor the morning of July 20, 1938. True to the fortuneteller’s prophecy, her baby, a girl, resembled “an exquisite, perfectly formed china doll,” said a neighbor. Maria granted the wealthy Helen Loy, the fairy godmother, the manipulative privilege of naming her star-child. Loy chose “Natalia,” for the pretty blond daughter of a friend in China. It was Americanized to “Natalie” on the birth certificate, which omitted the Russian patronymic “Nikolaevna” (daughter of Nikolai). The petite infant with flashing dark eyes carried the ponderous name Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. She was called, simply, “Natasha.”
“As soon as she was born, she brought us some luck,” Maria boasted later. According to Maria, Nick placed a small bet on the Chinese lottery while she and Natasha were still in the hospital, winning “exactly the amount” owed the doctor. “She brought money, even when she was born!” her mother crowed.
Robert Wagner, the man Natalie would marry twice, said after her death that Natalie was born to be an actress, “as if she had the word ‘movie star’ written on her birth certificate.” If so, the handwriting was Maria’s. Maria raised Natasha to be a movie star, as she brazenly told a reporter later. She breast-fed Natasha at the movies, whispering in the darkness how she would be famous like the gypsy predicted; safeguarding her from imagined dangers as if she were the Lindbergh child. Maria would have crawled inside Natalia’s skin if she could.
Nick simply adored Natasha. Astonished at having fathered a child, he treated her as if she were a fragile figment of his imagination, insisting that visitors wear masks so they wouldn’t breathe on her. “He just went goofy over this little girl,” an acquaintance noted. Natalie returned the affection in her eulogy to her “Fahd” years later: “I never knew anyone so brave,” she said. There could be little doubt Natasha was Nick’s daughter; she was a miniaturized version of him: tiny but perfectly proportioned, with his striking features. The quality uniquely Natasha’s was in her eyes; deep, dark pools of sensitivity that seemed “to go way back to Russia or beyond.”
Natasha’s earliest memories were of the Romanovs, seen from her crib. She slept in Nick and Musia’s bedroom, where the walls were a picture gallery of the Russian royal family, hung with care by Nick, a skilled artisan. Natasha, whom he called “Meelaya,” Russian for “dearest,” was his grand duchess Anastasia. “He went out and bought this absolutely ostentatiously beautiful carriage, and everybody in the Russian colony just thought he was totally googy to spend all that money,” said an émigré friend, who wondered how Nick, then an elevator operator, could afford it. “They didn’t have a penny to their name really.” Natasha was baptized in the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church on Fulton Street in a christening gown and gold cross provided by the Loys.
Maria paraded her in front of the other immigrant mothers in Golden Gate Park each morning in her royal carriage, “and everyone oohed and aahed” over adorable Natasha. “She was a Russian-American princess,” younger sister Lana would say later. Maria’s purpose in life was to promote Natasha; to the exclusion of her daughter Olga, who was ten when Natasha was born, “old enough to take care of herself,” in Maria’s pronouncement. Olga, who had the disposition of a saint, accepted it without complaint. Cast adrift by her mother at two, she had attached herself to her friend Lois and retreated into fantasy, cutting out pictures of movie stars. She was proud, later, she had been permitted even to babysit Natasha. “My mother didn’t let anybody else.”
Olga’s affection for her favored half-sister was a credit to Olga’s generosity and to Natasha’s endearing personality. Like young Maria, Natasha was a tiny bird of a child. Marusia, with her piercing eyes and blue-black hair, called to mind a raven; Natasha was a trusting sparrow. She connected emotionally with her “Fahd” or “Papa” or “Deda,” her nicknames for her father (she called her mother “Mud”), snuggling beside him at night, enchanted, as Nick read to her from the Russian fairy books of his childhood—fanciful tales of firebirds and wild animals transformed into princes. Natalie would carry this romanticized image of her father, and of Russia, throughout life. “He loved to read,” she said later. “Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Turgenev… he was a scholar.” Natasha, “a smart little thing,” absorbed her papa’s passion for language and for Russian novels. “She was such a brilliant child. It was amazing sometimes,” said Maria. “My husband, he was so clever, you ask him any questions, he always knew every answers, and she was like him.” Natasha learned to speak in Russian and in “American,” as she called it. “We never talked baby talk to her,” said Olga. Natasha, as a tiny child, was an old soul.
When Natasha was one, her father, weary of being at the end of the alphabetical cattle call of immigrant laborers, changed the family name from “Zakharenko” to “Gurdin,” a friend’s surname. “Nick thought Zakharenko was too Russian,” explains Olga. “During the end of the Depression,
there would be great big long lines for work and there was discrimination. The people with the most comfortable names to call were called out for jobs.” The effect of living in near-poverty, forced by his immigrant circumstances to take menial jobs, took its toll on a man of Nick’s sensibilities, contributing to his escape in vodka.
“Mud,” not “Fahd,” was the disciplinarian in the Gurdin household, which Natalie would unhappily recall as “very strict European.” She and Olga were instructed to curtsy, forbidden to use “foul language,” forbidden to ask questions. “My parents felt children should be in the corner, sheltered from listening to or understanding what the grownups were talking about,” she said as an adult. Maria was an austere taskmaster, seldom demonstrative or affectionate. Nick, when sober, was the tender parent. “He loved life,” Natalie eulogized. “He loved music, singing, dancing—and he was never embarrassed to let his feelings show.” Little Natasha listened delightedly as her Fahd played the balalaika; thrilled when he gathered the family for “an adventure.” He was also violent. “I remember him getting very drunk one time and breaking the balalaika,” recalls Olga. “I didn’t know whether he was going to get a pistol. He would, periodically.” No one knew when, if, or why Nick’s demons would be unleashed by vodka. Olga believed he was tormented by witnessing his grandfather buried alive during the revolution. Natalie, after years in analysis, would characterize her beloved Fahd as “complicated,” possessing a “Russian soul” she likened to “a volcano that just had to erupt from time to time.” To the child Natasha, the extreme chiaroscuro of his personality—the shifts from his “soft and gentle underside” to drunken “Russian explosions”—was frightening.
Nick’s “rampages,” as Olga referred to them, were often provoked by Maria, who “knew how to get to him.” The house was a battlefield, with Olga and Natasha in the crossfire. Natasha, from earliest childhood, hated confrontation.
Her favorite word was “pretend.” Olga wrote and performed playlets with Lois, using the communal garage as a make-believe theater with sheets as curtains. Olga and Lois occasionally cast toddler Natasha, whose sun-dappled brown hair formed curls not unlike Shirley Temple’s. The sisters, twelve and two, performed together for family, including cousins by Maria’s older half-sister Kalia, who had immigrated from China to San Francisco and was married with children by a Russian named Sergei Liuzunie. “At that time they didn’t have television, so we would both be into the performing,” recalls Olga. “Turn on the music and dance and stuff.” Natasha obligingly played along with her big sister; whereas Olga had a passion to perform. She loved to sing, especially Russian music, and had an appealing voice, teaching her precocious baby sister hand movements to popular songs. Olga kept a scrapbook of her ninety-four favorite movie stars, collected over years of matinees with her movie-mad mother.
Maria ignored Olga, whispering to Natasha their secret: Natasha was going to be a famous star… a fortuneteller in China foretold it. “When we walked down the street, Mother would put coins on the sidewalk when I wasn’t looking and when I found them, she’d tell me it was magic, and that I was destined to be someone magical. For years I believed in magic,” Natalie said years later. “She brainwashed her that she was this special child,” a friend confirms. When Mud took Natasha to the movies and the camera, at the end of the newsreel, pointed to the audience, she would whisper dramatically: “Natasha! It’s taking your picture!” “I’d pose, and smile,” recalled Natalie, who thought the camera was directed at her. “My mother told me all these things and I’d believe them.” By three, Natasha sat through two-hour films without moving.
Natasha’s personality—intelligent, eager to please, and “dutiful,” the word she later used to describe herself as a child—formed the tragically ideal combination for Maria’s manipulation. “It was easy with her,” Maria once chillingly admitted. Mud patched Natasha’s dresses to pay for a piano to prepare her for stardom, pushing Natasha into lessons at three. “The teacher didn’t think she was old enough,” Maria recalled once. “She did beautifully. Whatever she does, Natalie does to perfection. Always.”
The irony in their mother’s fixation on Natasha was that “she was different,” her sister Lana concedes. “It’s like when you watch a film, a TV show, a commercial, see someone walking down the street—and they have something special about them.” Natasha had a touching orphan’s quality in her brown eyes that communicated a hunger to be loved. What part of that was Natasha, or the result of witnessing her troubled home life, is impossible to know.
Maria kept the fortuneteller’s prediction that Natasha was destined for stardom their secret. The other half of the prophecy—that Maria was going to drown—was family legend. “Mother thought that she would die drowning because the gypsy told her,” confirms Olga. “She was terrified,” concurs Lana. “She wouldn’t get in the water.” In her dramatic whisper and heavy Russian accent, Maria would hypnotize little Natasha, conjuring up visions of stardom and magic in one ear; warning, “Beware of dark water,” in the other. “She really created an impression in her mind,” relates Olga. Natasha was afraid to learn to swim; frightened even to have her hair washed, because her head would be submerged in the bath water. “She was always afraid of water, like I am, especially if it’s dark waters,” Maria said later. “My mother contributed to her fear of the water, because my mother was afraid of the water,” corrects Olga. “My mother was afraid of swimming, and she was told that she’d drown. So this communicated itself to Natalie.”
Natasha grew up in a house of paranoia—fear of Communists, gypsy curses, hysterical convulsions, drunken demons. Her mother was like a fictional character written in magic realism, with her accounts of mystical reincarnation and resurrection, guiding her life by superstitions and instilling them in her daughters. “Peacock feathers or pictures of peacocks are bad luck,” recounts Olga. “You don’t pass the salt, you put it down, otherwise you’ll get into an argument. If you give somebody tablecloths or sheets, you’re wishing for them to go away.” As an adult, Natalie would remark that she “didn’t like mystery” as a child, how Russian superstitions had created paranoia in her she did not want her children to have. Her mother trusted only Natasha’s father and Olga to babysit her; Fahd refused to allow her in crowds because she was so tiny.
Fear was in the air Natasha breathed.
WHEN THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR in December 1941, the paranoid Nick believed they would bomb San Francisco, so he moved the family to the outskirts of the city, in Sunnyvale. The Gurdins lived in the low-income projects, Natasha’s fifth apartment by the age of three. Nick found work at the naval yard as a draftsman and Maria took a part-time job babysitting, entrusting Natasha to Olga.
Maria and her daughters’ diversion from this charmless existence, apart from movies, were holidays near the Russian River in the picturesque wine country, a two-hour drive north. Families, most of them Russian, shared rental cottages the immigrants referred to nostalgically as “dachas.” One such holiday, in September of 1942, Maria, Olga and Natasha took a scenic drive with a Russian friend through the nearby town of Santa Rosa. As the friend turned down a country road at the edge of town, Maria’s eye seized on a new bungalow. She asked her friend to stop the car. “I want that house,” Maria announced. She found a carpenter inside and engaged him in conversation, learning that the owner was in despair because his wife had run off with the contractor. Maria entreated the carpenter to phone the owner, who struck a deal with her that afternoon, selling his heartbreak house to Maria for a down payment of $100, all the money the Gurdins had. “She conned him into it,” marvels Olga. “I think he even gave her money to buy furniture.” Maria, who didn’t drive, forged her absent husband’s signature. “How she managed to get a loan, I don’t know,” said Olga. When Nick arrived to take Musia and the girls back to Sunnyvale, “I said, ‘Nick, we’re not gonna go back home. We have a home here,’ ” she recalled. Flummoxed by his wife’s machinations, concerned about the long drive
to the shipyard, Nick was no match for the formidable Maria. The Gurdins’ deed to the property at 2160 Humboldt was recorded on September 28, 1942, at a purchase price of $5400, making the immigrants homeowners and establishing Maria as the business head of the family.
Maria’s almost mystic acquisition of the bungalow in bucolic Santa Rosa proved, ironically, to be a determining factor in Natalie’s Hollywood career. Director Alfred Hitchcock had discovered the charms of the Sonoma Valley just before Maria, selecting Santa Rosa to represent an idealized small town in his suspense thriller Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock began shooting in Santa Rosa in August, the month before the Gurdins moved to town. That September, a second picture, The Sullivans, a drama about five Iowa brothers recruited in World War II, set up location shooting. The timing was either synchronistic or Maria knew the two movies were being filmed in Santa Rosa and maneuvered the house purchase to be in proximity. In either case, she took her four-year-old golden child by the hand and followed the film crews. “She went to all of the locations. I don’t know how she found out,” said Olga.
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