Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Natalie, according to Mary Ann, had the vision to see Rebel’s potential. “She recognized it when she read the script. She was the one that really had the foresight. Everybody saw her as a young girl, but she had years of so much experience… she was perfect for it and she knew it.”

  Natalie stood up to Mud for a second time, threatening to “run away from home and become an actual juvenile delinquent unless I was given the chance to test for the part,” implicitly modifying their tacit pact so that she had control over her career. “For the first time, I got serious about my work and vowed to derive some satisfaction for myself. I was no longer going to do what I was told if it conflicted with my instincts.” Fahd was a silent observer. As Lana would note, “My father… just sort of threw his hands up and said, ‘I don’t like it. Nothing I can do about it,’ and my dad, unfortunately, began to drink even more heavily.”

  Natalie would consider her stand on Rebel one of the most critical decisions of her life. “I’d allowed studios and my parents to guide my life and career… I was rebelling against being overprotected.”

  It was a development that would create a permanent schism in Natalie. For the rest of her acting career, she would struggle to reconcile her own inclination toward serious filmmakers she respected versus the powerful influence of Mud and the studio system, pulling her toward mainstream Hollywood material and stardom for stardom’s sake. She launched her campaign to be cast in Rebel with an altered perspective. “I don’t know if I wanted to be a star,” she said later. “I just wanted to be great.”

  Mud acquiesced, partly because she realized that a lead role in a Warner Brothers picture, even a controversial one, was the vehicle she and Natalie had been on a quest to find since the TV series. Maria wanted her back in movies—so they could both fulfill her destiny—with the same life or death intensity that Natalie coveted the part of Judy. “I would have done anything to get the lead in Rebel Without a Cause,” Natalie told starlet Joan Collins a few years later.

  According to actor Nick Adams, who would play a gang member in Rebel, Natalie showed up at the Warners casting office clutching a script and begging to read for Nick Ray—dressed in opera pumps, a tight black sheath, and a black-veiled hat. She would tell columnist Sidney Skolsky that people in the industry still thought of her as a girl in pigtails then, “and I wasn’t about to become an ingénue.” Under Maria’s über-Hollywood influence, she believed that her “Natalie Wood” persona would convince Ray that she was a star, and dramatically illustrate she was not in pigtails.

  Natalie later would tell her stand-in that by the time she and her agent met with Ray, she was so nervous to be in his presence, her knees shook and her voice gave out. Panicking, “she jumped up and started pounding on his desk, ‘I am Judy!… you can’t give the part to anyone else… you must let me do a test!’ ” Ray later wrote, “I wasn’t going to cast Natalie Wood in the picture because she’s a child actress, and the only child actress who ever made it as far as I’m concerned was Helen Hayes.” Then he became intrigued. “After Nat’s interview, she left, and outside waiting for her was this kid with a fresh scar on his face, so I said, ‘Let’s talk again.’ She seemed to be on that kind of a trip.” Ray’s idea—unknown to Natalie—was to test her for a part as a friend of Judy’s.

  Adams, who became a pal after meeting her in the casting office, noticed that Natalie was worried she would not hear back from Ray. According to the star-struck Jackie, who became her lady-in-waiting throughout Rebel, she and Natalie “ate, slept, and drank” Judy. When the trades reported that Terry Moore and Lori Nelson were being considered for the part, Natalie took action in Mud’s aggressive style. “We kept going to the commissary at Warners, so she could run into Nick Ray.”

  Both sixteen-year-olds were in awe of the iconoclastic forty-three-year-old director. Natalie flaunted her star image during these seemingly casual encounters, desperate to appear older after Ray’s disparaging comment about child actors. Jackie remembers, “I wore white bucks and pencil skirts and sweaters—I mean, I looked like a kid—and she would dress up, with the high heels, and she’d be all decked out like a movie star.” British pinup Joan Collins, who met Natalie in this period, observed, “She always dressed and behaved like the ultimate star. Spending money with abandon on clothes, furs and jewelry… she was incredibly insecure as a person and about her physical attributes. She always wore high-heeled shoes to maximize her height, and she always wore a thick gold bracelet to cover a slightly protruding bone in her wrist.”

  She got Ray’s attention. One day as Natalie and Jackie strolled into the commissary, Ray was on his way out. He told the maitre d’ to put the girls on his tab, and invited Natalie to have lunch with him the next day. As soon as he was gone, Natalie asked Jackie to go with her. “She had the life I dreamed of, and always included me when she could—and I think she was a little afraid to be alone with him. I know I was terrified.” Ray inspired strong reactions. He was physically imposing—tall and lanky, like Abe Lincoln, with a long face and drooping features that gave him a slightly doleful expression. He dressed like an elegant bohemian, occasionally directing in his bare feet. Hollywood’s Old Guard considered the East Coast director odd.

  Lunch with Nick Ray was a mystical experience for the two teenagers. “There was something about Nick,” Jackie tried to explain later. “First of all, he was probably the most intelligent human being I ever met. Very well read. He had a way of making you feel that you were the most important person in the world to him. He concentrated on your every word.” Natalie was flattered that Ray wanted her thoughts about the script, and the way teenagers behaved. Throughout lunch, Jackie noticed he kept staring at Natalie’s face. When he asked Natalie why she was wearing makeup, “she looked at him quizzically.” Jackie, who sensed that Ray disapproved, came up with the excuse that Natalie had just come from a Max Factor layout.

  By the time the check arrived, Natalie had fallen under Ray’s spell. “I was madly in love with him, too,” states Jackie. “It wasn’t that he was a particularly handsome man, but he had such charisma. Nick Ray was probably the most exciting, sexiest man.”

  Natalie shared her Nick Ray experience with Mary Ann, who remembers her as “very, very adoring of him—because of his position, because of his experience, because of him being who he was… he was extremely different and charming and really knew his business, which she respected very highly in a man.”

  For several days afterward, Natalie haunted the Warners commissary hoping to see Ray, “all made up like a sophisticate.” Finally, Jackie pointed out to her, “If you want the part of Judy, you’ve got to go in there looking like a teenager.” Natalie returned to the commissary in flats, a skirt and a sweater, wearing very little makeup, her hair in a ponytail. Ray did a double take, telling her she looked beautiful and suggesting she stop by his office, where he invited her to dinner to discuss the part. Natalie “drove directly to the House of Seven and Nine and bought a new four-hundred-dollar wardrobe.”

  Jackie stopped by her house that night to assist in Natalie’s ruse that Ray had invited them to meet him at the Chateau Marmont, a hotel resembling a castle on the Sunset Strip where Ray had rented a bungalow and conducted script sessions. Natalie dropped Jackie off at home and went to the Chateau alone; Ray took her to dinner at a restaurant called the Luau. She went to dinner alone with Ray several times after that, according to Jackie, who continued to tell the Gurdins she was with Natalie.

  Natalie brought her Rebel script along when she met Ray, with her notes written in the margins. She was bursting with observations, ecstatic that Ray was interested in her comments, delirious at the possibility of playing Judy. “He was helping her, because she’d practice and read [with him],” recalls Mary Ann, who went to Ray’s bungalow with Natalie a few times. “And he spent a lot of time with her.” According to Mary Ann, Ray and Natalie were on similar intellectual planes. “Natalie’s head was always clicking with ideas, and all of a sudden here’s some
body who thinks the same way.” Natalie said later Ray was the first director “who wanted my ideas.”

  The relationship turned romantic quickly. In Mary Ann’s view, “the affection and everything started because of the mutual respect for each other.” Natalie was clearly enthralled by Ray, who stimulated her intellectually, introducing her to the works of Hemingway, Poe, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, as well as The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a magical French fable about the innocence of childhood that would remain Natalie’s favorite book the rest of her life.

  She was close-mouthed about her sexual relationship with the forty-three-year-old director, even with close friends, though she and Jackie sighed like the high school girls they were at the romantic way he seduced her. Natalie told Jackie that Ray had taken her to a tiny, candlelit restaurant with pink tablecloths—Natalie’s favorite color—where they drank champagne. After dinner, they went back to Ray’s bungalow, where he told her, “I want to make love with you.” Natalie found Ray’s prelude to sex eloquent. “She said, ‘All the other guys just want to screw me. He wants to make love with me.’ It had a different connotation and it touched her. She said that when she had her first experience with him, she felt like a virgin for the first time.” Natalie was nervous about undressing with the much older, revered Nicholas Ray. “She felt like she had never done anything before. It was just a very special thing.”

  Ray gave Natalie the key to his bungalow, and told her he wanted her to read for the part of Judy. Natalie, hoping the role was hers already, seemed upset. Ray continued to test other actresses through January and February—Moore, Nelson, Patricia Crowley, Kathryn Grant, Gloria Castillo—keeping his relationship with sixteen-year-old Natalie secret. “Nick Ray did not want anyone to know they were having an affair, and he wasn’t about to disclose this. Nor was Natalie. She was jailbait.”

  Mud knew that Natalie was sexually involved with Ray, but she had lost the power struggle preceding Rebel—the dynamics between mother and daughter had changed and Natalie was in semi-control. “She was a little crazy about it at first,” concedes Lana. When Natalie left the house at night to meet Ray at the Chateau Marmont, Mud would sneak out, taking eight-year-old Lana with her to spy on her older sister. “Mrs. Gurdin was a shrewd woman,” as Jackie would observe. “She was out to protect her meal ticket.”

  Maria parked on a side street with a view to the pool area adjacent to the Chateau, and would fix her piercing gaze on Nick Ray’s bungalow, waiting for Natalie to emerge. “She used to drag me out at night and we’d sit in the dark car, on the street, and watch the time—see when Natalie went in, when Natalie came out,” Lana recalls. “I used to fall asleep in the back seat, praying that we could just go home and I could go to bed.” At the first sign of Natalie leaving Ray’s bungalow, Mud would rouse Lana from her slumber so they could scrutinize Natalie’s appearance for evidence of sexual activity. “‘What condition? Was her lipstick messed up?’ I felt like a detective on a stakeout.”

  Her mother accepted the affair with Ray, observes Lana, “because it was helpful to Natalie’s career.” “Believe me,” observes Robert Hyatt, “if Marie did not want Natalie in there, she’d have gone in there, grabbed her by the hair and yanked her out. This was a break of a lifetime for Natalie and they knew it. The professional movie mother of all movie mothers said, ‘This is it, you’re a star, go get this picture—do anything with anybody.’ ” Interestingly, the normally garrulous Mud kept this aspect of her management of Natalie to herself, though close friends such as the Hyatts knew about it. “Marie didn’t want to talk about promoting Natalie to date older men for her career purposes.” Jeanne Hyatt, her good friend, was aware Maria supported Natalie trying out for Rebel, though Mud kept to herself Natalie’s trysts with Nick Ray in Bungalow #2.

  Fahd played out his tragic role as a tormented Russian soul, turning a blind eye to his teen daughter’s love affair with a twice-married director the same age as he. “He knew, but you see what you want to see,” as Mary Ann would describe Nick’s response, “and he had had a heart condition.” “I remember my dad being really angry,” Lana said later. The sad truth was that Fahd was a shadow figure in his own household. As Hyatt would observe, “Nick never had a thing to say about any of it.”

  Natalie and her teen friends romanticized her affair with Nicholas Ray, even the straightlaced Margaret O’Brien. None, including O’Brien, believed that Natalie was sleeping with Ray so he would cast her as Judy. “She did fall in love with Nick Ray, there was no question about it,” declares Jackie, who lived the experience vicariously. The worldly-wise Mary Ann felt Natalie “knew going in” the involvement was not permanent. “We all experience those love affairs where ‘who cares about next week, today is wonderful,’ which is part of growing up. And he was a very kind man, and he taught her a lot more than just the film.” Years later, Natalie would describe Ray’s impact on her life by saying, “He opened the door to a whole new world for me. It was just glorious.”

  Natalie took inspiration from the great literary heroines in her borrowed novels from Ray, especially those of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She identified with Fitzgerald’s brilliant but tragic wife, Zelda, enamored of Zelda’s brazen sexuality and daring behavior, comparing it to her affair with Ray. “She became aware of these sort of historical female figures in romantic novels and so on—the independent woman.”

  Natalie costarred with Gigi Perreau, her child actress rival, in a CBS Four-Star Playhouse called The Wild Bunch in February, where they played sisters, as they had in Never a Dull Moment. Gigi, who at fourteen still considered herself a child, was astonished at the change in Natalie in four years. “She was very beautiful, and seemed very exciting and very glamorous. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I will not ever be that old.’ ” The constant, for Perreau, was Natalie’s drive. “She announced many, many times, ‘I will do anything to be a star.’ Usually you have other things in your life that you want—it’s not such a burning, such a single goal.” Jackie reveals: “She wanted to win the Oscar—oh God—more than life itself.”

  She clung to Ray during preproduction for Rebel Without a Cause. When he was busy, Natalie took her acolyte, Jackie, to sunbathe by the Chateau Marmont pool using Ray’s key, dressed in a leopard bikini and ogling his reclusive neighbor, Marlon Brando. Once, when they were poolside while Brando swam, Natalie “dismissed” Jackie to talk to a cast member. “She realized later she was ‘playing the star,’ and then she realized it wasn’t a kind thing to do. She said, ‘I’m very sorry, and it will never happen again,’ and it never did.” Typically, Natalie was kind to a fault. When Nick Ray telephoned one morning to invite her to Romanoff’s and Jackie had spent the night, Natalie included Jackie in the lovers’ lunch, buying her a new dress to wear. She waved her hand and laughed, “You can pay me back when you’re rich and famous!”

  The luncheon was a young girl’s fantasy. Ray kissed the sixteen-year-olds’ hands as they walked into show-bizzy Romanoff’s, ordering them screwdrivers. During lunch, he studied Jackie as if she were “under a microscope,” asking for suggestions to make the teen characters in Rebel more realistic. The big news was that Ray had made arrangements for Natalie to screen-test. Because James Dean was in New York, he wanted her to do the test with Dennis Hopper, an eighteen-year-old he had just cast as a gang member. Ray raved about Hopper’s talent, and asked Natalie if she and Jackie would “show him around town,” handing Natalie five hundred dollars.

  Natalie arrived for the test in full Natalie Wood makeup, facing “an assembly line” of Warner Brothers actresses, all reading with Hopper. According to Hopper, Natalie called him the next night. “She had to identify herself to me over the telephone for me to know which one she was, because I tested with about ten women that day.”

  As Hopper relates the story, Natalie propositioned him almost before he said hello. “She was really funny. She told me she thought I was great looking and she really liked me and she wanted to have sex with me—which never happ
ened before or since. Helluva line.” Hopper was instantly fascinated. “In the fifties, to be aggressive like that as a woman was really amazing—it was an amazing turn-on to me, for one thing. But it was certainly contrary to any kind of movement, or idea, at the time.” Natalie told him later she was emulating Zelda Fitzgerald.

  Hopper relates that he picked her up at the Chateau and they spent the evening in the car necking, talking passionately “about acting, and wanting to be the best, and our place in history.” It was the beginning of an intense friendship between Natalie and Hopper, tainted by Natalie’s disclosure—which Hopper states came as they prepared to make love—that she had just left Ray’s bed. “I thought it was weird, okay? At the time. I was eighteen years old! I thought it was strange, I thought it was weird of her to be doing it… he was having an affair with a minor. It was illegal for me, too, but at least I was only a couple years older.” Hopper asserts they made love that night.

  Natalie’s friend Jackie, who knew nothing about Natalie’s tryst with Hopper, expected, from Ray’s description, to meet someone Rock Hudson-handsome, with electric presence. Jackie found Hopper sweet and shy, with “interesting” looks, Kansas-naïve, with “this wonderful little boy quality that melted your heart.” Jackie remembers him hanging on Natalie’s stories about Hollywood, asking to see the movie star handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater; Natalie compared her hand size to Elizabeth Taylor’s, announcing, “One day I’m gonna be here.” They showed Hopper the Hollywood hangouts—Googie’s, the Villa Capri, the Luau—accompanied by Natalie’s pal, Nick Adams. After a few days, they were all fast friends.

  Hopper asserts that he and Natalie were “boy/girlfriend” from the time they met through the end of filming. “She was seeing Ray, but she was with me.” Natalie’s close friend Mary Ann believed that Natalie was interested in Hopper “as a friend, as a coworker,” the same impression Jackie and the cast of Rebel would have. Their perception was that “Dennis was just madly in love with Natalie,” and she considered him a pal. Hopper responds, “I wasn’t in love with Natalie. I loved her. She was my best friend. But I wasn’t possessing her, as an object, which I do know about. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. It was really much more complicated, and much more interesting, and much more involved kind of relationship for two young people.”