Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  As Irving Pichel left the house, he pleaded with Maria Gurdin to keep Natasha away from Hollywood, warning her that a child in the limelight will never be a normal child again.

  Mud immediately wrote to Pichel, in the guise of a letter from Natasha. Charmed to hear from his Russian pet, Pichel began what he considered to be an affectionate correspondence with Natasha, but was actually an exchange of letters with Maria, writing for Natasha, who was too young to read—a foreshadowing of Maria’s intertwining of their personalities. “She read me his letters,” Natalie would recall, describing it as “a big day” for Mud when a note arrived from Pichel. “Mother was excited,” affirms Olga.

  When Natasha was with Edwin, or her sister, she never talked about movies, or about Irving Pichel. Edwin remembered them starting school that fall, “just kids playing in the backyard on the swing and baking cookies.” Olga, who had begun dating Edwin’s teenage brother Gino, “could care less” about the letters from Hollywood.

  The correspondence, fueled by Maria’s ambition and Pichel’s fondness for Natasha, grew “quite voluminous.” The two began exchanging birthday and Christmas gifts, Pichel would recall, with Natasha receiving books, dolls and a record from the director. Maria followed closely through Pichel’s letters his upcoming movie projects, searching the plotlines for possible parts for Natasha, while continuing the artifice of an innocent exchange of letters from a child.

  Maria’s movie fever peaked in January, when Happy Land premiered on the West Coast in a special midnight screening one Saturday at the California Theater in Santa Rosa. “She told about thirty neighbors —everybody— that the movie was coming to town, they all had to come see Natasha.”

  Natasha’s film debut, though just a few seconds, was a showcase for her. Happy Land begins with a narrator folksily describing Hartfield as the camera sweeps Main Street, stopping at the storefront of Marsh’s drugstore. The next image is a close-up of Natasha’s dimpled legs, as an ice cream cone falls and splatters. The camera lingers in close-up on the sidewalk where the cone drops on the word “PHARMACY.” Natasha can be seen reaching down into the camera’s eye to pick up the cone, then hesitating. The camera stays on her legs and the fallen cone, as a pair of women’s shoes approach Natasha, silhouetted by the shadow of someone else’s legs walking by—the unseen Maria. Once Maria has passed, the camera returns to full body length, revealing Natasha being picked up by her screen mother. The image then widens to include several storefronts as Natasha’s movie mother carries her down the sidewalk. Olga and her film beau can be observed approaching the drugstore as the scene ends.

  Irving Pichel had managed to accomplish, through clever editing and camera angles, what Natalie would spend years in analysis attempting to achieve: extricating her mother. “All you saw was her legs—they cut her scene! Marie was so embarrassed.” The experience may have served to reinforce Maria’s role as starmaker as opposed to star, for she emerged from the theater singularly possessed with parlaying her daughter’s walk-on part into movie stardom. Mud’s obsession to make Natasha famous vicariously fulfilled her lost stardust dreams. As Lana would observe: “She was going to offer her daughter this incredible life, and she was going to get to live it with her as well.”

  If Natasha was excited about seeing herself on-screen, there is no evidence. Maria was the zealot. She walked two miles to work as an usherette, and on her days off she took her girls to watch the same movies all over again. Natasha may have been baptized Russian Orthodox, but movies were her religion, the cinema her place of worship. The Gurdins did attend an Orthodox church in Santa Rosa, but its influence on Natasha was minimal compared to movies. Before she was able to read, Natasha could identify all the stars in fan magazines the way other children might name characters in Bible storybooks. Maria filled Natasha’s head with fantastic visions of the Hollywood studios, where she would be a great actress, as temples of gold. Natasha invented a game called “going to the studio,” using the garage as an imaginary film studio. “I used to ‘check in’ every day and I would pretend to be Sonja Henie, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan or some other star.”

  That spring, as Natasha was completing school, Maria Gurdin toyed with the idea of moving to Hollywood. “Maybe she knew Pichel was doing a picture,” suggests Olga. Pichel was directing a movie in June, a war drama with Dorothy Lamour, called A Medal for Benny, as Maria almost certainly knew from his letters to Natasha. The story, by John Steinbeck, included the minor character of a young Mexican boy. The possibility that Natasha might be considered for the role, despite being Russian, female, and blond, was enough to lure Maria. Pichel, who opposed Natasha acting in movies, knew nothing about it, as evidenced by the fact that Maria turned to gypsy magic to divine whether to move to Hollywood. “My mother put little notes behind icons in the vespers everywhere in the house,” recalls Olga. “And actually the note said not to go, but she went anyway!”

  Ignoring the forebodings from Pichel and her own gypsy ritual, Maria did not even wait for the school year to end. “We just sold everything,” relates Olga. Nick, as usual, was a silent partner to his wife’s ambitious schemes. “Mother could work him,” was Olga’s appraisal of the dynamic between Nick and Maria. “This house gonna sell bee-uuuu-tifully,” the wizardly Maria purred to Nick, bragging later that she “got three times worth of what I paid for it.”

  Edna May Wonacott was the deciding factor in Maria’s brazen decision. “The Wonacotts sold their grocery store, they sold their house, they moved to Hollywood… and so Mother sold the house,” relates Olga. The distinction was that Edna May had a seven-year movie contract. Maria was uprooting her family to Hollywood on the gossamer hope of her five-year-old daughter’s friendship with a film director who disapproved of Natasha acting in the movies. “She decided to go, whatever her reasonings were then,” recalls Olga, “and we all went together.”

  Nick and Maria Gurdin appeared before a Santa Rosa notary to sign the deed granting their house to a couple named Mason and Abbie Ware on May 26, 1944. Natasha and the family would arrive in Hollywood a month before Pichel began filming A Medal for Benny.

  Before they left, Maria planted this item in the Santa Rosa newspaper:

  SIX-YEAR-OLD S.R. GIRL GOING TO HOLLYWOOD

  FOR ROLE IN MOVIES*

  Little Natasha Gurdin, 6-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas S. Gurdin of 2168 Humboldt Street, will leave shortly—probably about the first of the week—for Hollywood and her chance at a motion-picture career.

  Selected by Director Irving Pichel for a possible part in A Medal for Benny, Paramount film story planned to be made here in the spring, the little blonde, dark-eyed girl, will probably be given a screen test upon her arrival in the film center.

  If finally selected for the role her light tresses will be darkened, to fit into the proposed role of a Mexican child.

  Pichel met Natasha while he was here last summer directing Don Ameche, Frances Dee and Harry Carey in Happy Land. While he was here last week viewing proposed “locations” for the production company, Pichel visited Natasha and proposed the part in the new picture.

  The article was pure fantasy, a brash announcement of the shameless promotion of Natasha that soon would distinguish Maria within the ranks of Hollywood stage mothers.

  * Natasha was five.

  NATASHA’S CHILDHOOD, IF SHE HAD ONE, ended when she left Santa Rosa in the spring of 1944. She felt an oppressive burden, at five, to be a success in Hollywood, thinking she was responsible for the family’s upheaval.

  The move was wrenching for her and fifteen-year-old Olga, who would remember standing near the swing Nick built for them in the backyard, watching wistfully as their mother piled everything they owned into the car. Six-year-old Edwin walked over to say goodbye. “That killed me when they moved. I told Natasha I was going to miss her. I even gave her a hug goodbye.” Natasha’s last, flickering image of her childhood was of Edwin, her only friend, waving a forlorn farewell in front of the first house she and h
er sister had known. “I’m sorry we moved from Santa Rosa,” admits Olga, expressing the one regret she would convey from a childhood of injustices. “But even if we’d stayed, Natalie would have found her destiny, I guess.”

  So effectively had Maria subjugated the minds of both daughters and her husband, all departed for Hollywood convinced Natasha would be in the movies. Whether her eventual stardom was fated, or manipulated by Maria, is the existential mystery. “She was destined for this life, because of that mother,” suggests a close friend. “And the father. He was as guilty, he just was silent.”

  Natasha slept through her pilgrimage to the promised land, squeezed between Olga and the family belongings in the back seat of the car. Nick drove straight through the night, stopping to pick up a hitchhiker, a whimsy of Maria’s. Olga kept a picture, among her mementoes, of the hitchhiker, posed alongside Natasha and their mother.

  The Gurdins pulled into Hollywood around the beginning of June, 1944. They arrived virtual peasants: Nick did not have a job, they had no money, no home, no resources. The family’s hopes were pinned entirely on Natasha.

  Maria arranged for the Gurdins to stay with Olga’s former ballet teacher, Nadia Ermolova, who had a small apartment and dance studio on Fountain in the bowels of Hollywood. From there “she called Irving Pichel, and did some little sob act. That they were very poor in Santa Rosa, and Natasha loved him so much, and could they come see him?” Pichel was surprised, then dismayed, as he later wrote: “The family turned up in Hollywood, where, Mrs. Gurdin revealed to me, she was interested in a career for Natasha.” The director guiltily likened himself to “a modern Pied Piper who had, however unwittingly, piped the child out of her Hamelin town.” He had a long, sobering talk with Maria and Natasha about child stars, explaining how their families suffer and how child actors miss having normal childhoods. To do that to Natasha, Pichel advised Maria, would be a tragedy. “The mother, like the daughter, appeared to accept my judgment,” he wrote later. Within a week, Pichel began filming A Medal for Benny. Natasha Gurdin was not among the cast.

  The calculated kismet upon which Maria had gambled the house, the family’s security and Natasha’s mental health did not go as she had planned, or the gypsy foretold.

  Contrary to the impression she gave Pichel, Maria was neither chastened, daunted, nor persuaded by his alarm at the prospect of Natasha getting into movies. She simply determined to find another entrée. To that end, the Gurdins remained in Nadia Ermolova’s cramped apartment through the summer and into the fall. Olga wrote despairing letters from Hollywood to Lois, her childhood companion in San Francisco, who remembered it as “a hard move for my friend.” Natasha, who turned six that July, sent frequent, heartfelt scrawls to Edwin, suggestive of how lonely she was. Hollywood was not the kingdom of palaces her mother conjured. “When I first saw a studio I was five and expected red velvet and gold,” she later said.

  In a letter to Edwin that September, Natasha enclosed two photographs of herself, taken the same day in the front yard. Both are of Natasha in a full-skirted Russian costume with a head kerchief. In one photo, her mouth is painted with red lipstick and she playfully strikes a Russian dancer’s stance, mugging for the camera. The other shows Natasha without makeup, holding out the sides of her Russian dress in a stilted pose, a pained smile forced onto her desperately sad face. They illustrate the schism she was feeling about her life.

  The haunted expression behind Natasha’s eyes in the second photograph provides a glimpse into the pressures she was experiencing. Maria had discovered The Hollywood Reporter, and foraged it daily for a part for Natasha, assimilating industry gossip like an agent on the make. “She’d read all the trade news, and keep up with what movie was shooting and who was doing it,” relates Olga, who recalls her sister “trying for different things.” Natasha was competing for roles against experienced child actors with agents and show business connections while she was being led around town by her Russian mother on the lure of a thirty-second cameo in Happy Land. “When I would go on an interview for a part and not get it—to me it was a total rejection. I thought they were turning me down.” Natasha was guilt-ridden, feeling responsible for the family’s move from Santa Rosa, desperate to please her overbearing mother, mesmerized into believing she must have a magical life. When she said her prayers at night, Natasha asked God to please make her a movie star.

  The family made ends meet through Maria’s machinations. According to Olga, her mother got Nick a job as a carpenter at one of the studios, “maybe through Pichel or somebody, I’m not quite sure.” They scraped together enough money to move out of Nadia’s by the first of the year, relocating to a small stucco cottage at 9060 Harland, off Doheny in West Hollywood. Nick made a swing for the backyard, where Natasha could pretend, at least, that she was back in Santa Rosa.

  Maria had been unsuccessfully making the rounds in Hollywood with Natasha from June of 1944 to February of 1945 when she read in the trades about a movie Irving Pichel was directing called Tomorrow Is Forever. It was adapted from a popular wartime novel condensed in the Ladies Home Journal, based on a tragic, operatic poem by Tennyson called “Enoch Arden.” Orson Welles, a Hollywood wunderkind from his masterpiece of four years before, Citizen Kane, was cast as an Army lieutenant so disfigured in World War I he nobly chooses to let his wife think he has died. The wife, played by Claudette Colbert, discovers she is pregnant with her husband’s child at the same time he is presumed dead; after giving birth to a son, she remarries. Pichel was looking for a little girl to play the difficult role of an English-and-German-speaking Austrian refugee from the Second World War whom Orson Welles’ character adopts while recovering from his injuries in Vienna.

  “My mother got all excited about this,” recalls Olga, who participated in Maria’s strategy to get Pichel to cast Natasha as the Austrian orphan. Maria chose not to contact the director, knowing he would discourage her. She somehow managed to get Natasha’s name onto a list of six girls auditioning for Pichel at the end of February. “When I saw it there,” Pichel said later, “I was depressed.” The pressure on Natasha was mounting. Six years of Maria’s incantations had her believing the only thing that mattered in life was to be a great actress. “Ever since I was knee high,” she would say later, “I’ve been waiting for my break.” For months she had been paraded by Mud in front of casting directors who barely looked up. This was her friend, Mr. Pichel. She had to get the part; her family was depending on her. However burdened she felt, Natasha did not confide in anyone. Her desperation was internalized, hidden beneath the façade of the good little girl. As an adult, Natalie would tell Lana that most of her anxieties were from the pressures she felt at six to succeed in Hollywood.

  Prior to the casting call, Maria carefully assessed Natasha, as Olga, her forgotten daughter, would recall; plotting how she could present her so Natasha would stand out from the competition. The afternoon of the audition, five pretty, painted little girls sat in Pichel’s office wearing frilly dresses and Sunday curls. Natasha walked in with braids in her hair, dressed “the way she plays in the backyard,” giving her an air of naturalness. Maria claimed, later, Pichel had advised her to do this, but it was Mud. “She was very alert. If all the other mothers did one thing, she’d say let’s pick something that’s not gussied up.” In this case, Maria was emulating Margaret O’Brien, the gifted child star known for her dark pigtails and solemn grace—as Natalie would admit to O’Brien years later. “We kind of laughed about that,” confirms O’Brien, “pigtails and everything.” Maria was returning to her Edna May axiom: if a formula works, steal it.

  The role of Margaret Ludwig, the bilingual Austrian war refugee in Tomorrow Is Forever, demanded a child actress with the gifts of a Margaret O’Brien. The character has been traumatized by seeing both parents killed by Nazis and anguishes over the frail health of her guardian (Welles), who has spirited her out of Vienna to America. Little Margaret has several heartrending scenes. In one, she reacts hysterically when a toy makes a
popping noise, reminding her of the gunshots that killed her mother and father. The other occurs at the end of the film, when Welles’ character succumbs to pneumonia and Margaret sobs, “Everyone who belongs to me dies.” Pichel had chosen one of these scenes for the screen test, which had to be spoken in a German accent.

  According to Natalie’s eventual mythology, studio publicity, and her mother, her screen test was flawless. This was not so. “She played the scene and it was not very good,” recalled Pichel. It was frankly remarkable Natasha had not suffered a nervous breakdown, asked at six to perform an emotional scene using a German accent with no acting experience, believing her family’s welfare hinged on her performance, enchanted by Mud to expect magic. “I remember proudly telling my mother afterward that I hadn’t cried even though they asked me to,” Natalie said years later. “My mother got mad and said, ‘What do you mean, you didn’t cry?’”

  Pichel’s reaction to Natasha’s poor audition was relief. He explained to Maria that he needed a little girl who could cry at will. “I took her mother aside and advised her not to feel too badly but, on the contrary, to be happy about it, as I was.” His parting words to Maria were, “Natasha is too nice a little girl to be anything but a normal little girl.” There was no argument.

  Privately, Maria was frantic, remembers Olga, a witness to the crisis at home. After a night of “great commotion,” Mud commanded Natasha, anguished at her imperfection, to telephone Pichel and beg him for a second chance. Then Maria got on the phone. She told Pichel Natasha had been crying desperately because she lost the part, that she had been so happy to see him she could not play a sad scene, “but if you will give her another chance, she will, she knows, be good.” Pichel, moved by Natasha, agreed to another screen test.