Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  She was embarrassed that she still had to have a welfare worker on set, irritated that she had to study with a tutor, and indignant that the studio was required to use a double for her when shooting after midnight. Ray tried to hire Jackie to be Natalie’s welfare worker, until Warner Brothers realized that Jackie was in the eleventh grade. Ray finessed it so that Tom Hennessy, a tutor for the studio, served as both Natalie’s teacher and welfare worker, and got a “special dispensation” from Maria authorizing Hennessy to stand in for her as Natalie’s guardian on the set.

  Hennessy, a handsome former football player who sometimes worked as a stunt man, was as straight an arrow as Ray was “a free spirit,” in Hennessy’s words. He recalls Natalie “could be moody. She resented the fact that the other ‘kids’ were out there doing their thing… when she had to be restricted to the schoolroom or trailer, but basically she was cooperative.” Natalie later told Look that she and Mineo, Hennessy’s other charge, “would tell him that we had arranged interviews for [him for] an acting job… we made up the interviews to get rid of him.” Skolsky remembers, “She just wanted to grow up. She wanted to be eighteen so she could be out of her mother’s reach. And she was always trying to sneak a smoke.”

  Hennessy took it as his responsibility to shield Natalie from the Rebel gang. “He had a big meeting and he told the producers and Nick Ray that we were smoking and swearing around Natalie, and that we were a bad influence. We just howled, because she smoked more than we did—and swore!”

  There was an absurd, Fellini quality to the illusion of Natalie being under the protection of a studio welfare worker, when she was sexually involved off-set with the forty-three-year-old director. Faye Nuell, a pretty dancer with a passing resemblance to Natalie, whom Ray hired as her double, became Natalie’s friend and used to go to Ray’s bungalow with her at all hours. Nuell was aware that Natalie was involved with Ray, but “she didn’t really talk about that stuff very much. I mean she adored him—that was very clear… I think it was hero-worship on her part.” Nuell considered Ray’s involvement with Natalie “ego” driven: “She was an adorable, sexy young girl. We, of course, thought he was an old man—a sexy old man.”

  According to Nuell, Ray’s affair with Natalie was taboo on the set. “If it was thought about, it was whispered and nobody wanted to talk about it. She was underage. To my knowledge, people didn’t really know at the time. It was years later that Natalie was a little more open about it.” Others described it as a quiet buzz. “We all knew,” Doran said in 1999. “Jim [Backus] and I talked about it.” Backus told Doran, “Well, I hope she doesn’t get pregnant.”

  Hopper, who had been persecuted by Ray since filming began, came to the conclusion Ray was using him as a smokescreen for his illegal affair with Natalie. “The day of the chickie run scene, Natalie’s parents had arrived on the set, and Nick suddenly started yelling at me and sent me to my trailer, in front of her parents. Which is when I realized that the reason I was getting into this kind of a problem with Nick was because of Nick Ray’s relationship with Natalie and my relationship with Natalie.” Hopper figured that the studio or her parents had complained that Natalie was having an affair, and Ray told them it was with Hopper. “I realized that I could be expendable in Nick Ray’s world. And he could blame me and get off. And I wasn’t gonna let it happen.”

  That night, before the chicken run scene, Hopper took Ray aside. “I said, ‘Nick, I know that you’ve been fucking Natalie. You’re now using that against me. I know that you’ve now told the studio that I’m having an affair with her. This has gotta stop… [or] I’m gonna beat the shit out of you right now.’ And I took some sort of boxing pose.” Hopper would never forget Ray’s response. “He said, ‘See, that’s your problem. You have to use your fists. You can’t use your brain. Someday you’re gonna have to start using your brains.’ And he turned and walked away.”

  Whether the studio did know about Ray’s affair with Natalie is unclear. Hennessy, who was working for Warners as Natalie’s chaperon/tutor and on-set guardian, “was suspicious” because of her frequent night and weekend rehearsals at the director’s bungalow, “but she gave me the impression that there wasn’t much that I could do about it.” Since Hennessy wasn’t legally required to be at Ray’s bungalow, he felt “it was up to her mother and her parents to be in charge.” Natalie’s increasing control over her mother was apparent by the fact that Maria delegated her guardianship of Natalie on the set to Hennessy, who recalls, “Her mother wasn’t around all that much.”

  The tutor was on “friendly relations” with Maria, who considered it in her best interests to be polite to anyone affiliated with the studio. To the Rebel gang who had minor roles, she was “such a bitch. She used to throw us out of the dressing room if she wanted to take a nap. I remember being very intimidated by her.” In her middle age, Maria had cut her bush of hair into a severe Dutch bob she dyed until it was the color of indigo ink; the contrast against her Russian-pale skin, and the intensity she projected, gave her the appearance of a prison matron in a film noir. “She seemed very stern, with the black hair, and the way she looked.”

  Maria’s lack of outward affection was a mirror of what Natalie was experiencing playing Judy, whose father slaps her when she tries to kiss him on the cheek. One of the gang recalls, “I never saw Natalie hug her mother and chat with her mother, and her mother certainly never associated with any of us.”

  Natalie had powerfully deep and conflicting emotions about Mud. As Faye Nuell would observe, “She kept trying to keep a distance, she very much wanted to be her own person,” but “there was an incredible bond there.” Nuell, who was privy to Natalie’s feelings about Maria, perceived their mother-daughter symbiosis as a uniquely Russian, “strange, mystical connection.” Natalie told Nuell many times about the gypsy’s warning, “Beware of dark water,” as if she and the prophecy were somehow entwined, even though it was said to her mother. She revealed to Nuell the secret she and Mud shared: that it was Natalie’s destiny, as Maria’s second-born child, to be known throughout the world as a great beauty. Nuell found it all mystic and fascinating, “but Maria wasn’t my mother.”

  Fahd, who got a job as a carpenter on miniature sets at Warners through Natalie’s connections and Mud’s finagling, “somehow seemed to know that he wasn’t important” by comparison to the gothic drama of Maria and Natalie. Nuell could tell that Natalie loved her Fahd “and he loved Natalie tremendously… but I don’t think she respected him then.”

  Natalie embraced Nuell as part of the magic circle of Nick Ray, as she did Hopper, Adams and actor Perry Lopez, who were disciples of Dean and whom Natalie viewed as extensions of Dean. She told biographer Albert Goldman years later, “They were the gods. I just wanted to be exactly like them.” They frequented foreign films, Hopper recalls, “trying to find another way of, like, working… we were very ambitious to change things.” The Dean acolytes adopted angst as an artistic affectation, and Natalie cheerfully suffered with them: “What we used to talk about was how unhappy we were. Whoever was the unhappiest, whoever came closest to suicide the night before, he was the winner.”

  She hinted at their other exploits, saying that Nick Ray had taught her about books, while Hopper and Adams offered a fast course in cigarettes, drinking and cussing—their imitation of “wild, crazed Hollywood icons,” reveals Hopper.

  “All three of them—Natalie, Dennis, and Nick Adams—had a leaning to the wild side,” remembers Natalie’s tutor. Adams later told a magazine, “Natalie thought that being grown up meant being free of the rules… for a few months, she spent most of her time rebelling against everything and everybody.” Nuell believed that Natalie’s fast life with Adams and Hopper was an attempt to exorcise the superstitions and gypsy magic Mud had brainwashed her into believing.

  As its only female member, Natalie became the golden goddess of the cult to Dean. Adams loved her as if under a spell. Hopper said later of his friendship with Natalie, “It’s one of the best
relationships I’ve ever had in my life.” What Hopper admired most about Natalie was her honesty, audacity, “and her balls. I mean she really had balls.” Lopez remembered Natalie as “up for anything.” She filled a room with her tinkling laugh, sparkling with creative energy.

  Natalie also gave her complete attention when she listened, fixing her expressive velvet eyes on whoever was talking, mirroring that person’s emotions. “Hopper and Perry Lopez… these guys were all running in the fast lanes, and getting themselves messed up. And bless her heart, for hours and hours and hours she would sit and just be consoling. She always had time for them.” In his old age, Lopez, a handsome bit player in Rebel, would cry at the mention of Natalie’s name, saying, “Meeting her was the best day of my life. I still think of her twice a day.”

  Some questioned whether the ambitious Adams and Hopper had additional reasons for getting close to Natalie. “I remember being in Dennis’ dressing room with Nick [Adams] and Natalie,” states actor Jack Grinnage, one of the gang members in Rebel. “I don’t know which one of them said this—it was Nick or Dennis—but he said, ‘We’re gonna hang on to her bra straps.’ Meaning up the career ladder.” Natalie’s tutor, who knew Hopper and Adams off set, said, “Both of those two guys were all over her… because they could see that this movie was going to be a big thing for Natalie… they were game for anything in order to be noticed and to get ahead in the business.”

  Opinions were passionate, and divided, about the two actors. Ann Doran considered Hopper “an opportunist” but liked Adams (“he was a nice kid, very straightforward that he wanted to be an actor”). Skolsky and Long championed Hopper, calling Adams “an asshole” whose “motives were never pure.” Natalie openheartedly adopted them both; the comical Adams became a best friend. “Natalie was very naïve in many ways,” observes Steffi (Skolsky) Sidney, “and she didn’t realize he was such an operator.”

  As part of their desire to make their marks in the history of cinema, the triumvirate of Hopper, Natalie, and Adams fancied becoming their era’s romantic icons, patterning themselves after notorious screen legends from the past. “We were always envious of the generations before us,” reveals Hopper. “People think that we were wild, but man, we had a lot to come up to, in our opinion, from the generation that had just, like, disappeared—the John Garfields and the Lana Turners, Ava Gardners. In a strange way, we were trying to emulate some sort of past glory.”

  One night, possibly after Rebel, they decided to have an “orgy,” because they read that Garfield had them. Natalie’s Hollywood-glamour idea of an orgy was to bathe in champagne. As Hopper recalls, “I think she had heard that Jean Harlow or somebody had had a champagne bath.” Hopper and Adams eagerly rushed out to buy several cases of champagne, pouring the contents of the bottles into a hot bath at Adams’ cabin in La Cañada. Natalie put a dainty foot into the tub and smiled, imagining herself as Harlow. When she sat down in the champagne bath, she let out a scream and jumped out, her vagina burned from the alcohol. “That stopped everything,” Hopper would remark.

  Natalie laughed about the “orgy” afterward with Nuell. “Natalie was adventurous about sex and life. She was going to explore it all. She thought it sounded so glamorous—they bathe in champagne—and her whole vagina was burned by the alcohol!”

  Nuell considered Natalie’s sexual adventurism a form of rebellion. “I saw the fights with her mother in the house a lot. It was, ‘You have to be home by such and such time.’ ‘No, you can’t wear this.’ ‘You are wearing too much makeup.’ If Maria could have kept her a baby forever, she would have been very happy.” The mixed message to Natalie from her mother—that it was acceptable to have sex with middle—aged, married men with power in Hollywood, but not with boys her age-created moral confusion in Natalie.

  Nuell observed, “I think there was an amorality with Natalie. There was a big thing about breaking the rules: she wanted to break the rules. She followed whatever her feelings were and it wasn’t about making judgments. That’s not always the healthiest thing to do, or the smartest. That was her modus operandi. That was her appetite, too. She would become fascinated with somebody and the sexual part of it was just the natural part of wanting to get to know them.”

  Hopper felt that Natalie was living out “the goddess syndrome, and the outrageous behavior of the female stars during the forties and so on.” She had been trained for this idolatry since she was two, pasting pictures of Hedy Lamarr, Veronica Lake and other forties’ glamour girls into the family scrapbook of stars.

  In the case of her behavior with Hopper and Adams, Natalie was also fueled by the desire to belong to the kingdom of James Dean. “She went along with things, thinking she was being the ‘in’ person—naïvely, with these guys, who were on the make for everything. She was very enamored of that whole—the legitimacy that title gave: you know, ‘method acting.’ ” Hopper contends, “It was almost that we were naïve to the point, ‘If people did drugs and alcohol and were nymphomaniacs, then that must be the way to creativity, and creativity’s where we wanna be. We wanna be the best.’ She always wanted to be the best.”

  There was a schizophrenic quality to Natalie’s life. In reality, she was having an illicit affair with a director her father’s age, participating in wild escapades with Hopper and Adams; for fan magazines, her publicist would send a young, wholesome actor to her house, accompanied by a photographer, and the trio would travel to a restaurant, where Natalie and her arranged escort would be photographed on a “typical date.”

  Actor Ben Cooper, who got the assignment more than once, kept photos from one choreographed evening. In the first photograph, Cooper, a boyish twenty-two, stands in front of the Gurdins’ open front door, as a smiling Maria—in a mink-trimmed dress—kisses a pony-tailed Natalie goodbye. In the second photo, Natalie, wearing an evening gown, and Cooper, in a three-piece suit, feed each other cherries off the top of a hot fudge sundae. That was the image of Natalie Wood press agents created for the public.

  Not surprisingly, “Marie was an expert at the set-up date,” observes Robert Hyatt, who witnessed her in action when he and Natalie were at Republic. Mud, who took credit for inventing Natasha’s star persona, considered herself to be “Natalie Wood,” as much as her daughter. If Natalie got dressed to go to a premiere, Mud put on a formal gown as if she were going. Mary Ann recalls, “Natalie and I used to laugh about it all the time. Natalie would say, ‘Well I think I’ll wear this… unless Mom’s gonna wear it!’”

  Cooper, Natalie’s staged date that spring, became friendly with her, howling over the fan magazine’s “screamingly funny” demand they share an ice cream sundae. Once the photographer was gone, “we went out and had a bite to eat, and talked.” Cooper, who had starred on Broadway as a child and worked with Nick Ray the year before in Johnny Guitar, had a similar enough background that he and Natalie related, though Cooper was a conservative, “kind of mature for my age.”

  Cooper found Natalie to be “just a terrifically nice, sweet person” who was being consumed by insecurity and drive, “to do more, to be the best,” which she equated with Dean and the Method. Cooper got the impression Dean and his followers had her under a Svengali-like spell, “that they were manipulating and controlling her, and that she would do just about anything, at anytime,” which distressed him. “Here she was, a fabulous actress—just incredibly good, from the time she was a child, devastatingly good, and well-known—and it seemed that she needed more, and was allowing herself to be used by this group of guys, as if that was her acceptance. I felt that she felt she had to go along with whatever they wanted.”

  Cooper drove Natalie home, “trying to see if I could get her to kind of pull away from Jimmy Dean and that group. Not for me, I just felt she was caught in a quagmire, and I really liked her very much.”

  The second time Cooper was set up with Natalie, he spent a few minutes with her mother, giving him a glimpse into the reason behind Natalie’s secretly sybaritic lifestyle. “Her mother
was firm, Russian: ‘You vill do this, you vill do that.’ ” Cooper found it revealing that Natalie “didn’t tell me anything unhappy about being a child actor. She shied away from talking about her mother. It was almost as if, ‘No, I’d rather not.’ ” Cooper analyzed that Natalie participated in Dean’s cult as the only way available to rebel, “because in film, the work is so structured you can’t be too rebellious there, or they’re not going to use you. So where else could she?”

  Natalie’s sometime beau, Rad Fulton, was dismayed by the change. “It was like looking at a pretty little girl on one page, turn it over, you see an adult. She became a nasty little girl, as far as morals. Sometimes she spoke like a truck driver. Kind of hard to fathom, that happening that fast.” Actress Debbie Reynolds, who was twenty-two then, remembers seeing sixteen-year-old Natalie at parties, often with Nick Adams. Reynolds thought of her as “a woman with a young girl’s face.”

  Jackie, who was with Natalie almost daily, began to worry that her behavior “sometimes felt destructive.” She noticed that Natalie needed to be the center of attention, in the midst of clamor, at all times. “If she was at home and the phone wasn’t ringing, she was unhappy—but it was always ringing—and if we were out someplace, she’d call her mother a hundred times to see if anybody had called. Like she wanted to fill her life with people so she didn’t have to think about anything.”

  There was something vaguely melancholy about Natalie to Bev Long. “She always seemed a little tentative, a little frightened. She was sweet and lovely, and I never heard her say a bad word about anybody, but she was not a boisterously happy person. She was kind of delicate. I always felt she was vulnerable, and sensitive—which she was.” Long, who was only slightly older than Natalie, “felt terrible” when she found out Natalie was intimate with Ray. “So many times I wanted to say something, like, ‘God, Natalie…’ I used to think, ‘God, she doesn’t need to do that, why is she doing that?’ ” Long observed that Natalie always had to be with somebody, “particularly men.”