Hyatt’s affection for Marie Gurdin did not alter his severe opinion of her as an immigrant who wanted to make a million dollars in America using her daughter as “the family’s ticket to fame and fortune.” Bobby Hyatt and his mother watched Maria scavenge for film roles at Fox while Natalie was on the lot shooting The Big Heart and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir that winter, as Hyatt recalls:
In those days lunch was a social event at the studio commissary. Between twelve and two, there would be waves of people coming from different soundstages on other movies and you could meet up for lunch. The mothers would sit together and us kids would eat together and visit. Natalie was never allowed to do that. Her mother would read Variety and find out what movies were coming up, or she would go to the casting office and say, “Anything coming up for a kid?” Then she would find out who the director and producer were and she would go to the commissary and try to reserve a seat at their table, or if she wasn’t able to do that she would manipulate the seating so that she would get the table right next to them so that Natalie was right there. Natalie was supposed to smile and wave at them and look cute. And that’s how she got jobs.
Mud’s commissary politics probably led to Natalie being cast that February in a Fox picture called Summer Lightning, a leaden farm drama about two stepbrothers, one good, one evil, competing for a mule team and the local beauty, played by June Haver. It was based on a novel called Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay, a phrase used to drive mules, the eventual title of the film. Darryl Zanuck had been developing Summer Lightning for Fox with screenwriter and first-time director F. Hugh Herbert since the summer before, and had already recommended child actress Connie Marshall to play the part of Haver’s spirited kid sister “Bean.” Just before filming, Natalie edged out Connie Marshall for the role, her third Fox film in three months. Bobby Hyatt, whose mother was too polite to aggressively promote him, half-admired Marie Gurdin’s naked, wily ambition, for as Jeanne Hyatt admits, “Natalie’s mother saw to it that she got the parts.”
Bean McGill, Natalie’s character in Summer Lightning, her first color film, was a know-it-all tomboy who eavesdrops behind bushes, inside clotheslines, and around barns to meddle in her sister’s love life, providing comic relief from the heavy-handed melodrama. To play Bean, Natalie wore overalls, braids, and worked with a dialogue coach to talk like Ma Kettle, displaying a clever, spunky charm and natural comic timing. (In one scene, cranky character actor Walter Brennan, who plays a neighboring farmer, catches Natalie’s character spying and confronts her. “Don’t you know what happens to little girls what snoops?” he asks menacingly. Natalie, as Bean, looks him square in the eye. “Sure!” she says brightly. “What?” barks Brennan. Natalie/Bean cocks her head to the side and answers smartly, “They get hep to things!” Brennan, watching Natalie, barely suppresses a smile.) Most of Natalie’s scenes were with actor Lon McCallister, the heroic brother, who wins Bean’s sister (June Haver) and the mules with the help of Bean’s practiced snooping. An unknown starlet named Marilyn Monroe appeared briefly in a scene with Natalie and Haver as a barely seen friend, Monroe’s film debut.
Since the story took place on a farm, the exterior scenes for Summer Lightning were shot at a ranch owned by Twentieth Century Fox. Natalie was in animal heaven, feeding chickens and riding mules. In one scene, she got to milk a cow. Another required her to swing over a shallow part of the river from a rope attached to a tree branch and jump off at the river’s edge. Though Natalie barely got wet, she had to learn to swim enough to paddle convincingly on-screen, the only motivation that would get her in water. She had such fun with the farm animals shooting Summer Lightning she told a Fox publicist in February it was her favorite movie so far.
When Oscar nominations were announced that month, Natalie was overlooked for her inspired, naturalistic performance as Margaret in Tomorrow Is Forever, probably because the film had not been embraced by critics. The oversight had little impact on her burgeoning career, due to Natalie’s talent and Mud’s canny exploitation. For a spell, in February 1947, Natalie was acting in three pictures at the same time—The Big Heart, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Summer Lightning—shuttling back and forth between the Fox lot, Palos Verdes and Century Ranch, slipping in and out of so many accents, costumes, and characters she had a difficult time remembering whom she was playing. One day she became disoriented making the transition from Anna Muir to Susan Walker. “In one I was a sweet kid, in the other a bratty kid. That can be very difficult for an eight-year-old to handle.” Natalie’s English accent faltered in her performance as Anna, the only tangible evidence of the identity crisis she was experiencing drifting in and out of three fictional personalities. Between Bean, the Missouri farmgirl, Victorian Anna Muir, and pretending to be Margaret O’Brien portraying sophisticated New Yorker Susan, “I was playing so many parts, I had a hard time finding me.” Natasha, her true self, was submerging into the characters “Natalie” was impersonating. At times, she would remember, “I took on their characteristics, emotionally at least… I was young enough to be impressed by their personalities.”
Natalie spent so much time playing movie characters, the movies she was in began to seem real. Occasionally she got confused, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. In the signature scene in Miracle on 34th Street, Natalie (as Susan) tugged on Edmund Gwenn’s beard and discovered it was real, concluding he must be Santa Claus. “I still vaguely believed in Santa Claus,” she said later. “I guess I had an inkling that maybe it wasn’t so, but I really did think that Edmund Gwenn was Santa. And I had never seen him without his beard—because he used to come in early in the morning and spend several hours putting on this wonderful beard and moustache. And at the end of the shoot, when we had a set party, I saw this strange man, without the beard, and I just couldn’t get it together.”
The pressure of being eight years old and playing three different characters in three movies, providing financially for her parents and two sisters, manifested itself that winter. Natalie awakened one morning paralyzed. She had overheard her parents whispering about a polio epidemic and was convinced she had been stricken with the disease. Her mother later told a magazine writer Natalie was “always frail and subject to small illnesses, and when she does not have a real illness, she imagines one.” Mud dismissed the psychological implications of her daughter’s hypochondria, which she had fostered by her paranoia and overprotectiveness. On a deeper level, Natalie’s psychosomatic paralysis was a warning sign that she was overwhelmed, a distress signal her parents ignored. “It was terrible for that kid,” observes one of Natalie’s first loves. “I don’t know how she survived it… being forced to cry, forced to laugh. Every night, the nightmare she would go through to learn lines, to have the mother on the edge of the bed, pretending to be nice—and all she cared about is that Natalie delivered the lines exactly, didn’t screw up, and that everyone said, ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ and ‘She’s as good as Elizabeth!’ or whatever they would say. For Natalie, that was such a big, big event: she would get her mother’s approval-this ogre, this monster.”
Natalie obediently returned to work after her polio false alarm. Robert Hyatt remembers her walking past the Fox soundstage with her mother, gazing wistfully as he and his mother played canasta with the studio teacher. Maria swiftly guided her to the dressing room. Natalie passed the time between scenes sequestered with her mother, knitting or drawing—following Mud’s Chinese maxim to use her hands to exercise her brain. “She wanted to play,” recalls Hyatt. “She would wait and smile at me when I would see her. Her mother would not allow her to mix and mingle with anybody.” Natalie never complained, observed Hyatt. “She always did what her mother told her.”
* Best played the housekeeper.
NATALIE’S CAREER SUDDENLY, UNEXPECTEDLY skyrocketed in May, as she was completing, ironically, Summer Lightning. The modest little film she made over the Christmas season with Maureen O’Hara and Edmund Gwenn, now known as Miracle on 34th Street, was given a preview screening by Fox a mont
h before its June release. Louella Parsons, who attended the preview, described the audience reaction as “unbelievable.” Parsons gushed over Miracle on 34th Street in her column before the movie came out, pronouncing Natalie “just about perfect.”
Twentieth Century Fox was desperate to sign Natalie Wood to a contract, offering substantially more than her salary at Universal-International, where she was still under contract for another six years. Maria asked Fox to keep the offer a secret and made an appointment for Natalie to see Bill Goetz, the head of Universal, coaching Natalie ahead of time what to say. Natalie, accompanied by her mother, told Goetz that she was tired of acting and didn’t want to do it anymore. Maria feigned maternal concern. Could they, Maria pleaded, break their contract in a “friendly” way? Goetz, faced with the unpalatable possibility of forcing an eight-year-old to work—unaware Fox had made her a better offer—suggested they think about it for a week, according to Maria. “He thought in a week I gonna come back and cry and say I want it back. I play very naïve and stupid, and he thought I didn’t know anything about law or anything.” At the end of the week, Mud rescinded Natalie’s contract with Universal and immediately instructed Famous Artists Agency to commence negotiations with Fox. “It was very dirty trick, you know?” she admitted later. “But with Lana born, we need[ed] the money.”
Olga’s commencement from Hollywood High was in June, offering Natalie a rare chance to see her older sister, who was still living on her own in a rented room. Natalie eagerly dressed up and pinned on a corsage, but Fahd was too drunk to drive them to the ceremony. Olga graduated from high school as she had spent most of her eighteen years, without family to support her.
Natalie’s home life was nightmarish. “My earliest recollections of my mom and dad’s relationship were frighteningly stormy,” recalls Lana, who was a toddler then. She and Natalie played in the backyard in Burbank, where Nick built a swing for them; Svetlana splashed in an inflatable wading pool during the hot summer months in the San Fernando Valley. “The thing that always stayed with me was being in the pool, seeing my dad carrying a gun chasing my mom around the pool,” Lana relates. She and Natalie would watch their parents’ fights escalate until “Pop,” as Svetlana called Nick, lost control and became violent. “We were usually right in the middle of it. My mom was busy grabbing us and pushing one of us out the door and one out the window and then climbing out and screaming at my dad and saying to us, ‘You run back’ and ‘You hide’ and ‘You run’ and ‘You do…’—you know, it was bad.”
Child actor Robert Blake, who had a brother/sister relationship with Natalie from the time she was ten, learned about her house of horrors from Natalie. Making movies, he believes, saved her. “Being in show business was never her problem. That was her solution. Her problem was away from the camera. Her problem was a thing called family, love, security. I think the camera became her parents. It was her security blanket.” Blake suspected Natalie was a sexually abused child. “I never talked to her about it but I always got that feeling. Coming from that place myself, I can usually smell those kind of people.” Natalie’s first serious adult boyfriend, an actor named Scott Marlowe, had similar suspicions throughout their relationship. “All the signs were there. She would never never say anything about anybody. I’ve suspected her father. I’ve suspected a lot of people. A lot of producers. I suspected Irving Pichel even. You just don’t know, with that mother.”
Maria filled Natalie’s head with bizarre superstitions and medieval fears about sex from the time she was tiny, hissing when she tucked her into bed at night to “keep her hands outside the bedcovers” as if it were evil. She whispered gruesome stories in her low Russian growl about how her bones had cracked and stretched for a week when she gave birth to Olga, narrowing her eyes to slits and telling Natalie she would die if she had a baby because she was “too small.” Natalie listened, terrified, assimilating her mother’s sinister suggestions about sex and childbirth as she had her gypsy prophecies portending fame and warning of dark water.
Fahd was an enigmatic, tormented shadow figure. A childhood friend of Natalie’s who visited the house in those years remembers him “in the background, as if he didn’t exist.” Outside the house, he would pretend, at times, not to understand English. Nick wanted to disappear, from an existence he deemed wretched and a wife who “drove him crazy.” Vodka was another means of escape. “Until he’d finally get totally drunk and he would flip out. Then everything would calm down, Marie would run squawking around, fluffing her feathers, ‘He’s a bad man, he’s a bad man,’ and then she’d start in on him again. This was like a cycle.” Their father’s drinking and violent behavior was a sensitive topic as they were growing up for Natalie and Lana, who regarded Fahd tenderly, like a wounded wild animal; their mother, they believed, was the provocateur. Both sisters bore emotional scars from the domestic violence. “I still have an intolerance for people shouting,” declares Lana. Natalie hated confrontation of any kind.
Olga, who had grown into a sweetly pretty eighteen-year-old, met with a producer acquaintance of Natalie’s after graduation to see about getting into the movies. The experience left her disenchanted. Her father, Alexei, Maria’s handsome ex-husband, now a doorman at a San Francisco hotel, surprised Olga with a high school graduation trip to the Russian River near Santa Rosa, where she had spent her happiest years. While she was there she met a tall, good-looking college student, Alexei Viripaeff, who knew at a glance he wanted to marry “Teddi,” though she had her eye on someone else. At the end of the holiday, Olga made the choice to move in with her father in San Francisco and enroll in college, surrendering her fantasy of a Hollywood life. She reconnected with “Lexi” Viripaeff on campus and this time, it clicked. Lexi’s Russian-American background appealed to Olga, whose first language was Russian, and who felt an affinity for the music and adhered to the rituals of the Russian Orthodox church. “I was more Russian than my sisters,” she avers, “because I was more exposed to it.”
Natalie was almost nine and Svetlana only a year old when Olga left the fold at eighteen. The three sisters were almost from different generations, growing up in disparate contexts of their mother’s life. “Marie tried to encourage Natalie and Lana to speak Russian so they would be bilingual,” a friend recalls, “but they were more like American kids. They wanted to speak English. They did know a few Russian words, especially Natalie. If her mother and father were yapping in Russian, she could decipher what they were saying.” Once Natalie was born, Mud took an interest in cooking. Natalie’s comfort foods were rich, traditional Russian delicacies her mother prepared from family recipes: piroshki (tiny meat pies filled with cream cheese), beef stroganoff with kasha (buckwheat kernels), tvorojniki (cheesecake pastry). Maria instilled a fairy-tale romanticism in Natalie about Russia, telling her stories about “dachas hidden in forests” and other wonders of her childhood in Siberia before the revolution. The Gurdins’ house in Burbank, where Natalie spent several years of her childhood, was a colorful, eccentric fusion of her mother’s Russian-Chinese past. Mud dressed like an Oriental high priestess in floor-length kimonos and occasionally bought kimonos for Natalie. The house was an explosion of imitation Chinese furniture, Oriental bric-a-brac, exotic birds, three turtles, a Doberman, and a German shepherd.
For Natalie, home was just a place to sleep, learn her lines for the next day, and practice piano (she was playing Rachmaninoff now). Ballet class was her only activity outside the studio. Her goal was to be the best ballet dancer in the world. She didn’t have a single friend.
While Famous Artists and Mud were negotiating Natalie’s new contract with Fox, a director of legendary status named Allan Dwan selected her for the starring role in a picture he was making for Republic Studios in June. Screenwriters Mary Anita Loos and Richard Sale had written an unusual, mystical screenplay called Driftwood, about an eight-year-old orphan who drifts into a small town from the desert and disarms everyone by speaking only the truth, quoting passages from the Bible. The
waif—dismissed as “driftwood”—is viewed with suspicion until the end of the film, when she almost dies from a virus and her genuine goodness is appreciated. The role of Jenny, the innocent-but-wise orphan, showcased Natalie’s strengths as a child actress: her perceptive intelligence, sweet charm, and sadly beguiling quality. Allan Dwan, who had been making movies since the silent era and twice directed Shirley Temple, told an interviewer years later what “intrigued” him about Driftwood was the opportunity to direct little Natalie Wood. “She had a real talent for acting, an ability to characterize and interpret, and she was a natural.”
Dwan shot the film in black and white, using religious imagery, which gave it an apocalyptic quality. He presented Jenny as a Christlike figure who suffers and then offers redemption. Dwan was so impressed with Natalie’s subtle performance, he would later claim (like Orson Welles) that he had discovered her.
In fact, Natalie’s child acting career was at its pinnacle when Dwan was directing her in Driftwood. Miracle on 34th Street came out in June, creating a sensation, just as Louella Parsons had predicted, making Natalie Wood a household name. “It was literally a sleeper,” recalls co-star Robert Hyatt. “Nobody thought that it was going to be a classic. Nobody thought that it would make Natalie a major star.” As one reviewer noted, “Miracle on 34th Street is, in short, something of a miracle in picture-making….” The prestigious New Yorker devoted a full paragraph to Natalie:
The most appealing of the lot, it seems to me, is a girl named Natalie Wood, who turns in a remarkably accurate performance as a progressive-school product indoctrinated against the whole idea of Santa Claus. My guess is that you’ll find yourself refreshed by this neat little lassy.
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