Ted’s mother and Connie Marshall’s mother talked about Maria privately, concerned that her behavior might cause permanent damage to Natalie, whom everybody liked, even Chapman, who said, “She was such a darling child, very polite and very professional.” According to Donaldson, “She seemed to be-I don’t want to say repressed, but I got the sense of things being held in, of being forlorn. It was a subject of talk among many people on that set. We thought she was a lonely kid, and we all ascribed this to the mother.” Part of it was Natalie’s fawnlike appearance. Jeanne LaDuke was struck by the difference in their sizes at ten. “I’m just a healthy farm kid… Natalie was very delicate and small.” “She was adorable as a child because she looked so lonely and so waiflike,” observes Donaldson, who perceived a “sadness” in Natalie. “I’m thinking now of a scene—we’re on the back of a truck, in between shots or something—and we’re singing songs and she’s enjoying it, she’s enjoying the camaraderie of making films and of being with people, even if these two [kids] that she’s with are five years older than she.” He caught glimpses of Natalie’s spirit and a sense of fun “when she let herself go,” which was rare with Maria around. In the film, Natalie’s character has several scenes with her pet black lambs, which she is seen tenderly caressing. “That’s probably the freest, most open, most Natalie expressing who she was, [was] at those moments,” assesses Donaldson. “I remember a certain kind of glow, and giving over to the moment with them. That was a very genuine thing.”
The climax of The Green Promise was a harrowing sequence that takes place at night, during a thunderstorm, when Susie, Natalie’s character, sneaks away from a children’s costume party at a neighbor’s farm to go home and rescue her lambs. Natalie, wearing her bunny costume, has to cross a precarious wooden bridge over raging water through wind and rain. The instant she steps to the other side, the bridge is rigged to collapse. According to Chapman, who was in a separate thunderstorm scene, Russell shot the bridge scene the last week of filming, when they were back in Hollywood on stage A or B at the Goldwyn lot. “That’s where we did that godawful scene. It was wet and damp with this rain. Stormy. Great big wind machines. What a godawful set.”
Natalie was petrified to do the scene, knowing the bridge would crash and she had to cross dark water. Her mother promised her nothing would happen to the bridge until she was on the other side, assuring her that she was safe. “They had huge airplane propellers blowing rain onto the set… and there was a waterfall and rushing water underneath,” she said later. Natalie started across the bridge in her bunny suit, covering her face with her hands as the wind machine whipped her back and forth, movie lightning streaked through the black sky, sound effect thunder rumbled, and manufactured rain blinded her. “They were telling her to hurry across, because the bridge is going to collapse,” recalls Lana. “When I was halfway across,” Natalie said later, “somebody pulled the lever prematurely and I was thrown into the water.” She managed to catch hold of the collapsing bridge, clinging to the edge as the current pulled her in the direction of the waterfall. “My mother leaped forward crying, ‘My child!’ ” Natalie later told a reporter, “and the director said, ‘Keep the cameras rolling! Keep the mother back!’ ” Natalie’s left wrist was broken and she nearly drowned. “I don’t even remember them fishing me out.” “It was so traumatic for her,” observes her later confidant, Mart Crowley. “She’d been lied to, for one thing. And then there she was, fearful of her life.” Ted Donaldson, who was off-set, remembers, “Something happened. I do recall that she did seem to be hurt. It seemed to me they continued shooting.” The incident was hushed. Marguerite Chapman, who was in her dressing room, never knew Natalie had been injured, or that a stunt had gone wrong. “Natalie told me… whoever was timing it thought she was on the other side and she wasn’t,” relates Lana. “It was an accident.”
Mud concealed Natalie’s broken wrist from the producers and Natalie finished the film. “Marie told me she was not going to tell the studio, [that] it was her secret,” recalls a friend. “She should have taken Natalie right away to get the bone cast.” Olga explains why: “She didn’t complain and she didn’t sue because if you sued the studio you were blacklisted.” Mud still refused to take Natalie to a doctor when filming was completed, telling Natalie doctors were evil. “I never like doctors,” she said once. “I cure myself with my own remedies.” There were hidden motivations behind Maria’s refusal to fix Natalie’s left wrist, Olga reveals. “My mother was afraid the doctors were going to talk. She was worried about Natalie being blackballed. And Mother was just worried about having operations.”
NATALIE WAS NEVER THE SAME AFTER THE bridge collapsed on her during The Green Promise. She had recurring nightmares in which she saw herself drown, so many they haunted her, commingling with the gypsy’s warning to her mother. Her fear of water, especially water that was dark, turned phobic. “It was a combination of injuring herself and thinking she was going to drown that really put this major fear of water in her mind,” suggests a friend from that period. “The most water she’d get in is in the bathtub. That was probably not a full bathtub.” She added thunderstorms and heights to her litany of fears. Child actor Bobby Blake, who met Natalie about this time, found her riddled with demons.
She continued to seek solace in her menagerie of pets, including a new bird she named “Gregory Peckwood,” after her favorite actor. She began to fantasize having her own horse, with a pasture where she could ride. Fahd (or “Deda,” as Natalie sometimes called him) showed his tender, artistic side to his troubled daughter. “When I had nightmares, Deda would talk to me in the middle of the night and draw me pictures of the corral or box stall he would build for my dreamed-of horse. And by his love and understanding he would fix my worries.”
Natalie’s relationship with Mud shifted, for the worse. In her view, her mother had forced her to do a terrifying movie scene, then lied to her that she could not get hurt, even though the bridge had collapsed too soon. The accident changed the way Natalie perceived Mud. She was no longer a “god” whose every wish must be obeyed or Natalie would suffer the torture of the damned. Maria had been exposed to her as a ruthless stage mother willing to risk her safety and then ignore her injury for the sake of a movie role. Natalie felt used by both her mother and the studio. As the bone on her broken left wrist began to grow into place unnaturally, “she blamed my mom for not having the wrist properly set, taken care of by a doctor… she was angry about that,” relates Lana.
Mud’s gypsy magic, Russian folklore and old wives’ tales took on ominous connotations for Natalie because of her malformed wrist, though a part of her still believed. Maria’s superstitions were the house rules, as Lana relates. If she or Natalie broke a mirror, “we would have to go out and throw it over our shoulder into a yard.” There were dozens more. “You don’t put hats on beds or shoes on tables. You don’t walk around opposite sides of a pole with someone because you’ll have a fight with that person. You don’t give sharp objects as gifts. If you give a ring or slippers, you have to give somebody money, otherwise you’ll split up. You don’t give scarves as gifts—they’re bad luck. If you sing before the sun comes up, then you’ll cry before the sun goes down—which used to drive me crazy, because I love to sing. You can’t let the moon shine on you at night—it’ll cause bad dreams, moon madness, insanity. Old European superstitions. Natalie really didn’t want to believe that any of these things held a grain of truth, ever.” But she did believe. Her mother’s mysticism was too imbedded in her subconscious. “Natalie was scared of peacock feathers,” recalls Lana, “because those were [supposed to be] evil… and whistling in a dressing room-she never did that.” Maria’s gypsy influence was inescapable. She told her daughters’ fortunes from cards she insisted remain untouched for twenty-four hours, which she sat on or held in her hands before reading. “She was always right, but she was only predicting things in the very near future—receiving letters, receiving news, becoming ill, taking a trip, things li
ke that. Natalie didn’t like it.” Bobby Hyatt, who re-entered Natalie’s life a few years later, remembers Maria reading his and Natalie’s palms at the studio “all the time,” though he claims she wasn’t accurate. “Natalie would never let her [mother] read the palm with her damaged wrist though, I noticed that. That was very interesting.”
Natalie’s feelings of bitterness and disillusionment toward Mud and the studio after her traumatic injury filtered into her feelings about acting, and about her life. She went through a kind of existential crisis at ten, wondering, suddenly, who she was. “I found it very difficult… to figure out if I was just responding to a situation as though it were a scene or whether it was how I really felt about something.” She realized as an adult that “from ages ten through twelve or so, I barely remember anything.”
Natalie spent seven months in the deserted studio school before starting her next picture. She became aware of how lonely she was, of “missing out.” “I did feel more comfortable in the company of grownups, because I wasn’t around little kids very much. So I went through a period feeling probably inordinately shy with kids my own age.” Ted Donaldson, who was fifteen, described her as “ten going on sixteen or thirty.” She considered herself a child freak, creating new paranoias. The thought of returning to public school “terrified” Natalie, especially speaking in front of a class. “I could do a scene, in a movie, and learn dialogue and do that with a fair amount of confidence, but… if I had to stand up in front of my own peers, kids my own age, and deliver a poem or speech, I just died! I was mortified.” After years in the studio with a tutor, in the constant company of adults, Natalie felt disconnected from children her age. She existed in a kind of twilight zone between fantasy and reality, movie life and real life.
Olga got married in February to Lexi Viripaeff. The formal Russian ceremony, which featured crowns for the bride and groom in an incensed Russian Orthodox church ablaze with candelabras, seemed fairy-tale romantic to ten-year-old Natalie, who wore her first long dress as her sister’s bridesmaid. It was Olga’s final disconnection from Hollywood, a bittersweet moment for Natalie’s overshadowed older sister. Olga settled into domestic life in San Francisco with Lexi, near her father and Lexi’s parents, whose house would eventually become theirs. Natalie sent her a black-and-white publicity picture when Olga returned from her honeymoon, inscribed “Dearest Teddi… from Natalie Wood.” They were in different worlds now.
The fact that Natalie gave her sister an autographed picture of herself was disturbing proof of Natalie’s confusion about who she was. Her constant nightmare, she said later, was that she had no identity—that her personality depended on the part she was playing. “I didn’t really have a very clear perception of myself. I was always Maureen O’Hara’s daughter or Claudette Colbert’s daughter… I was sort of discombobulated.” Fox assigned Natalie to play O’Hara’s daughter again in a picture called Father Was a Fullback in March, ending her half-year of lonely isolation at the studio school. The picture was like a family reunion for Natalie. She got to see “Mama Maureen” from Miracle on 34th Street, and spent time with her friends Richard Sale and Mary Loos from Driftwood, who cowrote the script and were now married. The set was homey, as O’Hara describes: “You’d just sit around and have a good time and enjoy each other and gossip and chat and tease. It was different than today.”
The cast’s bonhomie was evident in the film, an occasionally hilarious comedy with O’Hara as the wife of a small-town college football coach (Fred MacMurray) who is frustrated by his team’s losing streak and unable to cope with his teenage daughter’s budding sexuality. A Broadway ingenue named Betty Lynn played the lovestruck daughter; Natalie was her smart-alecky kid sister, a character similar to Bean. Though the part wasn’t large, Natalie had the movie’s funniest lines, which she delivered gleefully, a challenge according to O’Hara, who remembers the director, John Stahl, as “difficult to work with because he shot sometimes as many as fifty takes. You’d say, ‘Mr. Stahl, is there something we should change?’ and he’d say, ‘No, no, no, do it again.’ And then you’d be shocked because he might print take three and you’d think, ‘What was he looking for?’ He would be the same with Natalie as he was with me and Fred MacMurray.” MacMurray later commented he’d “never seen a child of such energy and delightful innocence” as Natalie, “and yet she knew everything.” Natalie’s happiest memory of the movie was wearing Betty Lynn’s false eyelashes and makeup.
While she was filming, Glenn McCarthy staged a celebrity extravaganza in Houston to jointly promote the opening of his grand hotel, the Shamrock, and his first film, The Green Promise. He entreated another Texas millionaire, Howard Hughes, who owned RKO, to persuade Darryl Zanuck at Fox to allow Natalie to participate. She and Maureen O’Hara were flown to the premiere and a torchlight parade “with more national known figures… than have been in Houston since the National Democratic Convention.” Jeanne LaDuke, the 4-H child who had a small part in the movie, remembers a young Houston girl so overcome at the parade she had to be restrained. The Texas showman whipped civic organizations into a similar frenzy, eliciting raving endorsements for his farm movie from every institution from the PTA to the Girl Scouts to the Daughters of the American Revolution, in addition to 4-H clubs. Film critics disparaged McCarthy’s publicity as “ballyhoo” and dismissed his movie as “schmalz.” Natalie’s superior work as a child actress was once more lost in a mediocre film. As one critic wrote, “She plays the role with rare sensitiveness, changing moods from blissful dreaminess to crushed disappointment at an instant.” Her desperate struggle to keep from drowning as the bridge collapsed remained in the film, a memento of her lost innocence.
Natalie received positive notices again that summer when Father Was a Fullback was released, though the film failed to impress critics, the pattern of her child acting career. In August, Samuel Goldwyn hired her from Fox to play yet another busybody kid sister in an issue-oriented low-budget drama called Our Very Own. Ann Blyth, a popular star of twenty-one, was cast in the lead as Natalie’s oldest sister, a high school senior who learns from a conniving middle sister that she’s adopted. Goldwyn wanted actress Jane Wyatt, who had just turned thirty-eight, to play their understanding mother. “I was so thrilled to be in a Goldwyn picture, but I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the script,” she recalls. “I wanted to be in something that was a really, really typical Goldwyn script.” Wyatt’s true concern was portraying a mother. “I’d just finished playing opposite Gary Cooper and Cary Grant! I remember Mr. Goldwyn telling me, ‘Don’t be so silly, little girl. This is just right for you.’ ” One day when Wyatt stepped off the set of Our Very Own, still in costume, a producer named Gene Rodney happened to stroll by, striking up a brief conversation. He contacted her out of the blue several years later, asking her to play the mother in a television series called Father Knows Best, for which Wyatt would win three successive Emmys. “So that’s how I happened to be in Father Knows Best. He always remembered this little encounter.”
Natalie took a day off filming Our Very Own to attend a televised ceremony in which California’s Lieutenant Governor Goodwin Knight presented her with a silver cup as “Child Star of the Year” for 1949. The event was sponsored by an organization called the Children’s Day Council to draw attention to a newly created “Children’s Day.” It was Natalie’s last hurrah as a child star. Driftwood and The Green Promise, the two films in which she was the lead, had failed to ascend her to the rarefied ranks of Shirley Temple or Margaret O’Brien, despite her emotionally complex performances. She hadn’t been in a genuine hit since Miracle on 34th Street. The reality was painfully evident as she accepted her silver cup as Child Star of 1949. Mud put Natalie in a frilly dress with puffed sleeves and braided her hair into pigtails as if she were still five. Natalie, who had turned eleven that summer, appeared gangly and uncomfortable, her face frozen into an expression of forced gaiety.
“I found myself surprised when I heard that Natalie was actually eleven,
because she looked more like a really little nine-year-old,” remembers Joan Evans, who played the jealous sister. “That was one of the things that Mrs. Gurdin did, was to make sure that the makeup and the hair and the clothes accentuated the little girl.” Maria forced Natalie to dress like a child so she could continue to play children’s parts, though she was years past her chronological age of eleven, as Jane Wyatt observed. “She was dignified. It was funny seeing a little kid dignified like that, but she was.” Wyatt was startled when Natalie walked over to a piano on the set, “and she played a whole Beethoven sonata. I was so impressed—this little girl, whirling through this very complicated piece.”
“She was definitely very solemn, very quiet,” confirms Joan Evans, who was fifteen then. Evans was shocked when Natalie transformed into an annoying chatterbox in her first scene, pestering a TV repairman. “We were all surprised in that little opening scene at how funny and cute she could be. Because it wasn’t the child that we saw.” Natalie’s acting had begun to seem forced at times, even manic, like a child overly desperate to please. Ann Blyth got the sense that Natalie “wanted to be good, she wanted to do the best work.” Between scenes, Maria would only permit her to talk to the director. “Her mother would usually sit in the doorway of whatever she had in the way of a dressing room on the set. The minute the scene was over, that’s where Natalie went. And her mother was standing there waiting…. I don’t know what her mother felt was going to happen, but everybody thought her mother was very strange.” Jane Wyatt and Ann Blyth felt there was something very touching about Natalie, an “endearing” quality the camera captured. As Blyth, who also had been a child actress, remarked, “You can’t teach that to someone. That is something that owns you, and she had that ability.”
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