Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Jimmy sensed, after a while, that Maria was using him. “I think she manipulated me in some of the things that she wanted me to do for Natalie’s protection.” What Mud hadn’t counted on was the depth of their teen romance, something Mary Ann noticed at once. “This was like the storybooks… you know how two people look at each other and there are stars in their eyes?” Jimmy and Natalie behaved as if they were under a spell. “She was special,” is the way he would still describe Natalie years into the future. “She was an absolute joy—humorous, spontaneous, not stuck up at all. We’d come up with some of the raunchiest jokes that you’d ever want to hear.” The instant Natalie got home from filming the series, she and Jimmy were typical teenagers in love. “That was work time. When we went out, that was party time.” Since Jimmy’s license had been suspended, Natalie used her permit to drive them on dates, giving the wheel to Jimmy to park the car. He was a jazz fan, and took Natalie to jam sessions, introducing her to Benny Goodman. “She loved to go to movies, and we’d go to a lot of movies, and she’d get caught up in them and get very emotional. She’d play the part as we were watching the movie.” When there was a mistake, Natalie spotted it. “The tears would be coming down her eyes, and all of a sudden she’d say, ‘Look at that,’ and she’d see the microphone on screen, or a shadow on the wall, something that was out of whack.”

  There was one movie Natalie did not take Jimmy to see. Sometime after Christmas, she arranged for her mother and Jeanne Hyatt to take her and Bobby to a matinee of Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef, starring Robert Wagner, the beautiful contract player she had passed on the Fox lot when she was eleven. In the four and a half years since Natalie had taped his eight-by-ten glossy to her bedroom wall, Wagner, now nearly twenty-four, had inched his way up the ranks of Fox bit players. His break came the year before in With a Song in My Heart, starring Susan Hayward as Jane Froman, a singer crippled in an airplane accident who performed for American troops. Wagner played a shell-shocked paratrooper in a wheelchair seen in the audience as Hayward performs the title song for a battalion of disabled soldiers. Although his face appeared on screen for only a few moments, something in Wagner’s poignant expression as he reacted to Hayward touched a chord, “and people went out of Song asking, ‘Who was that guy?’ ” The studio began to receive five thousand letters a week for Wagner from infatuated teenage girls, motivating Fox to cast him in larger parts. Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef was Wagner’s first romantic lead, distinguished mainly for his movie star looks and the illusion of an off-camera romance with his leading lady, starlet Terry Moore, who played along with the publicity, even though she was secretly involved with middle-aged millionaire Howard Hughes.

  Natalie was ecstatic to see her fantasy husband starring in a movie, pulling Bobby aside excitedly after the matinee to find out what he thought of Robert Wagner. “I just went to the movie because Natalie and I were becoming very good friends and she was fun to be with… I didn’t realize that she had this plan: she wanted to get my opinion about him.” Bobby was brutal in the manner of fourteen-year-old boys. “I told her that Wagner was a stiff and awkward actor with a fake voice and he looked like a pretty-boy fruit ball. She punched me in the ribs and announced that she was going to marry him.” “Well then, what’d you ask me for?” Bobby teased back.

  By January 1954, Natalie’s relationship with Jimmy had become so intense they worried about the power they held over each other. Natalie sought guidance from her sister Olga, who seemed to be preparing her for some fatalistic, bittersweet denouement, consistent with the reckless undertone of their teen love affair. “Olga didn’t try to get her to break up with me, she just told her that it would come to an end, and that that wasn’t bad—that we all have relationships at that age and they generally end, and the first relationship that you have like that, you never forget.” Natalie took Olga’s words to heart as if they were an omen. “She told me that, I can tell you, a dozen times… that her sister told her that it was going to end, but she’d never forget it.”

  Mud tried to frighten Natalie from having sex with Jimmy by instilling irrational fears, most of them related to Natalie’s size, repeating the caveat that she would die if she gave birth. Maria offered horror stories of her own teen abortions in China as illustrations, lending a pseudo-legitimacy to her ghoulish claims. She warned Natalie that if she had sex with a well-endowed male, she was so petite the penis would puncture her internal organs. “Whatever it took,” affirms Mary Ann. “Oh, ‘Mama’ was very good at that. Anything she could dream of.” Even at fifteen, Mary Ann understood why Natalie’s mother was stigmatizing sex, and why she tried to obstruct Jimmy. She wanted Natalie under her control, at home, making movies, “because you see, ‘Mommy’ was living through Natalie.” And Natalie was supporting her.

  When Jimmy dropped out of eleventh grade in January, frustrated by an undiagnosed reading disorder, Mud’s paranoia reached crisis proportions. Natalie’s TV brother witnessed showdowns on the Pride of the Family set, when Jimmy would show up to see Natalie and she “terrorized her mother that she was going to go into her dressing room and lose her virginity.” Natalie told Bobby she sometimes sneaked out to see Jimmy, until one night “her mother caught her crawling out the window. That was the end of that. That boy was forbidden.” Despite Mud’s dire warnings, Natalie had lost her virginity to the boy who cut off her pigtails, forfeiting the prize her mother was hoping to offer to some powerful Hollywood player. Natalie hid her phobias about sex when she was with Jimmy, though she talked to him about how worried she was about getting pregnant. “But there was no chance that she would. We made sure.”

  As the teen romance escalated, Mud offered to buy Natalie’s best friend Mary Ann “whatever she wanted” if she could help break them apart. The relationship spun wildly, fueled by Maria’s attempts to suppress it. Jimmy, who was not quite seventeen, and Natalie, still fifteen, secretly talked about marriage. She told him she wanted a family, and children, how much she wanted to get away from her mother. Jimmy was crazy in love, willing to do anything, less concerned than Natalie by Olga’s warning they were “too close.” He gave Natalie an engagement ring in February and she accepted it, though they didn’t have specific plans when they were getting married. “At that age,” he posits, “how do you think that far?” He was prepared to elope, knowing Natalie’s parents would be opposed to their engagement. “I’d have married her in a heartbeat.”

  When Natalie wore her engagement ring home, the situation took on an electrical charge. “That’s when it started. Her mother saw the way it was going, and she couldn’t tolerate that.” Maria’s plans for “Natalie Wood,” her movie star alter ego, did not include a domestic life as a dairy farmer’s bride. She and Natalie had the confrontation of their lives. Afterward, Natalie drove Mud to the dairy where Jimmy worked. Mud stayed in the car while Natalie walked up to Jimmy, handing him her engagement ring. “She made her give it back to me.” Jimmy looked over at Natalie’s mother, who was watching from the car to make sure Natalie returned the ring. “I went out and challenged her. I told her I loved Natalie, and I was going to marry her whether she liked it or not, and she couldn’t do anything about it.” Maria “just sat there and listened.”

  As he watched Natalie and her mother drive away from the dairy farm, Jimmy had a foreboding. “I’m not sure what Natalie thought, but I think I knew that there was no chance that we’d ever marry. I didn’t think her parents would ever allow it. And we were both too young, we just couldn’t run off and get married, that’s not practical. And I am and I was a realist, and I probably knew it was coming to an end.”

  Sometime in March, the high school boy who double-dated with Jimmy and Natalie approached Jimmy. “He asked me if he could take Natalie out, that she needed to go out with other people.” Jimmy realized it was a setup by Natalie’s mother, “and I got so mad I almost took his head off.” Jimmy suspected, at that point, the future he and Natalie had planned “would never happen.” A few nights later, Natalie w
ent out with Jimmy on what was to be their last date. “She told me that night that she needed to date other people.” Natalie was strangely silent; Jimmy eerily calm. “It didn’t break off in a mean way. For whatever reason, it had come to an end, and I realized that.”

  According to Olga, Natalie almost eloped with Jimmy. “I said, ‘Well, do you really want that kind of a life? Is that something you want to try doing? Living on a farm?’ ” Natalie returned the ring, relates her sister, because she didn’t have enough money to elope. “All she had was an allowance.” In Mary Ann’s assessment, Natalie was not strong enough to break away from her mother, as Olga had done. “Jimmy came to the cause, and he stood up to ‘Mama.’ Even at that age, he had the character and the stuff to do it.” Natalie was too kind to hurt her mother, her friend believed. She avoided conflict, Lana noticed; one of the consequences of seeing their mother run through the house, screaming, as their father chased after her, drunk, waving a gun.

  At fifteen, Natalie had little choice but to capitulate to Mud, who restricted her from any further contact with Jimmy. Bobby Hyatt was spectator to a “huge fight” between them over Jimmy outside Natalie’s dressing room, a battle in which Maria prevailed. In the final analysis, Natalie had too many fears, too deeply instilled, to overcome Maria, even for Jimmy. According to school friends, she was devastated.

  Jimmy went home from their final date, found a rifle, and tried to kill himself. The blast was nearly fatal, leaving him with permanent physical damage and another scandalous headline. Mud refused to let Natalie see him. “It was a terrible thing. The whole thing was so horrible,” as Mary Ann relates. Natalie blamed herself. “I mean you go through all these awful—the guilt and the this and the that. She couldn’t have done anything, it was beyond her control. What could she do?” Mary Ann held Maria culpable. “Of course I never got along with the mother anyway. But boy, she wasn’t gonna have any of that messing around. If she would have just let it alone, it probably would have burned itself out, part of growing up, first love.”

  Jimmy joined the service and left town, marrying a girl he met that year in Kentucky, using the ring he intended for Natalie. He stopped by Natalie’s house once more, that August, to get his collection of Benny Goodman records. Maria brought them to the driveway, as Jimmy waited outside. He never saw Natalie again. “I cut it off. I had to. It wasn’t any good for me, it wasn’t any good for her.” As years passed, they would both protect their first love. When Natalie became a movie star, realizing her mother’s dream, she would tell journalists she “never dated a high school boy,” guarding her relationship with Jimmy as something private. Jimmy kept his suicide attempt over Natalie a secret through forty-five years of marriage, two children and two grandchildren he “wouldn’t trade for anything, even Natalie, as much as I loved her.” In her yearbook inscription to Jimmy in 1953, the first time they were kept apart by her mother, Natalie foreshadowed how the relationship would end. She wrote:

  Jim—

  It’s kind of hard to write what you want to say on the annual of someone you like very much, so I’ll just wish you all the luck in the world, always, because I think that you’re the best guy in Van Nuys. The best in the world. Always be as fine as you are, Jimmy, and I hope that your life will be smooth, filled with happiness, and may your every wish become true.

  I’ll never forget the wonderful times I’ve had with you.

  Yours always for more fun,

  All my love, Natalie

  Natalie’s broken love affair with Jimmy was “like a movie script,” Mary Ann would later comment. It paralleled, almost eerily, the story of Deanie and Bud, the star-crossed high school sweethearts Natalie and Warren Beatty would play six years later in Splendor in the Grass.

  NATALIE’S LIFE MIGHT HAVE TURNED OUT differently if she had not been forced to end her engagement to Jimmy. She was bored with the series and had little interest in being an actress. “I kept thinking that each year might be the last. I would get up every morning and go to the studio—what else did any kid do? was all I thought, if I thought about it, which I didn’t.” Natalie’s fantasies involved Jimmy, and having a family. “Her mother disturbed all those dreams,” observes Mary Ann. According to a later boyfriend, Natalie “loathed” Mud for years for “ruining her life. Her mother just said, ‘You do this or else.’ Whatever the ‘or else’ was, I’m not sure.”

  After Jimmy left town, Natalie staged a coup, telling Mud, “I earn the money and I’m going to do what I want from now on.” The two arrived at a Faustian understanding implicit in their relationship from then on: Natalie would dedicate herself to becoming a star, and Mud would permit her to come and go as she pleased, do what she pleased, with whom she pleased. Bobby Hyatt observed the shift in power, as Natalie approached her sixteenth birthday. “That’s when she really started to rebel.” She took up cigarettes, a classical form of teenage rebellion, though in Natalie’s case, they served a dual purpose, “quieting my nerves,” she said later.

  Natalie’s “nerves” were becoming a problem. She was developing insomnia after years of being afraid to sleep alone, talking to dolls. Her drowning nightmares continued. Jimmy had noticed she needed “to be around people,” but was unaware of what Mary Ann knew, that Natalie was incapable of functioning on her own. With Jimmy gone, Natalie’s daredevil behavior ended forever. She reverted to her childhood fears of airplanes, fast cars, heights, doctors, thunderstorms, earthquakes, snakes, sharks, large male sex organs, childbirth, gypsy superstitions, kidnappers—and drowning, the one phobia even Jimmy could not temporarily exorcise. Her mother, the underlying cause of her neuroses, continued to hold a power over Natalie, to Mary Ann’s frustration. “You have to get to the point where you finally make a decision to stop letting people hurt you, but Natalie believed all the fictional things about motherhood and this wonderful love, and she wanted to think that of her mother.” She and Mary Ann made an appointment for Natalie to see a psychiatrist, but went ice-skating instead, “so that was our therapy.” Natalie used Mary Ann as “a sounding board, and I think it helped her a little bit.”

  Natalie began to wear heavy makeup, despite portraying a “typical” teenager on television. Mud’s only stipulation was that she look pretty. Natalie was meticulous about her appearance, cognizant from her mother’s constant reminders that she had an “image” to uphold. “She was almost sixteen years old, and she was getting all this fan mail from kids around the world saying, ‘Oh you’re beautiful,’ and she was totally upset because she had no breasts,” her sitcom brother recalls. Before one of their scenes together, Natalie took Bobby into her dressing room, sharing a secret: a bra that inflated by blowing through a straw. “Blow ’em up real big,” Bobby coaxed. When they were called to the set, Natalie put her hot-air bosom on, under a tight sweater. “As we’re walking through this dim area to get to the soundstage, all of a sudden Marie comes out of the shadows, making growling noises in a Russian accent… that was the end of the blow-up bra.” Natalie reluctantly let the air out of her inflatable breasts and did the scene “like a little soldier.” In desperation, she began to stuff napkins from the craft service table down her brassiere, acutely self-conscious of her small chest. “Finally, she and her mother made a compromise. Her mother bought her foam rubber breasts with a little nipple that she fit inside her bra,” recalls Hyatt. Filming was delayed for half an hour one day when Bobby “stole one of her tits.”

  Natalie refused to let Bobby see her deformed left wrist, destroying publicity stills from the TV series where the bone was visible. “I told her it was all in her mind and tried to get her to go in front of the camera without a bracelet for one day, just to try it out. She started to, but as soon as somebody else came into the dressing room, she grabbed her bracelet and put it back on.” “Don’t talk to me about it anymore,” she told Bobby sullenly, and left the room. He never saw Natalie’s left wrist again.

  Two of Natalie’s other closely held secrets were nearly exposed in early April, whe
n Fahd was in a head-on collision driving her to the studio, demolishing the Republic limousine. The accident made Louella Parsons’ gossip column, where she reported that Natalie “walked away from the studio car without a scratch.” Parsons did not mention the chauffeur was Natalie’s father, or that he had a history of alcohol-related car accidents. Bobby shrugged it off as “one of Nick’s wrecks,” but Fahd’s driver’s license was temporarily suspended, reducing his job description to babysitter, an ignominious turn of events that plummeted Natalie’s father deeper into vodka.

  Later that month, Natalie dragged her pal Bobby to another Robert Wagner movie, the highly anticipated Prince Valiant, with Wagner in the title role, dressed in medieval tights and a Dutch Boy hairpiece. The expensive costume drama, costarring Janet Leigh, was expected to make Wagner a star. Instead, the picture received bad notices and Wagner was ridiculed for “reading his lines in a vacant monotone… with the skittish air of a man trying to be funny in a lady’s hat,” wrote a New Yorker critic. Bobby ribbed Natalie about her “boyfriend with the bad wig,” which Wagner himself would later poke fun at, calling it his “Bette Davis look.” Natalie and a million other girls swooned anyway, preserving Wagner’s status as a teen heartthrob. Since she had lost her real love, Jimmy, Natalie fixated on her screen idol, determining that she was going to marry Robert Wagner. She came up with a plan to fire Famous Artists and hire Wagner’s agent, Henry Willson, so he could introduce her to her future husband. “That was her mission,” declares Jeanne Hyatt, who witnessed Natalie in countless conversations trying to persuade her mother to sign Willson, hearing about it later from Maria, who vigorously opposed the idea.