Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  The next day, Wagner, the perfect gentleman, sent Natalie flowers to thank her for the date. She put them in a vase and went to the backyard to burn an effigy of her studio welfare worker, in ritualistic celebration of the fact that she was eighteen, and the law no longer required a guardian for her on the set.

  Years later, Wagner seemed defensive about the impression he made on Natalie. “I was a different type than she was used to… she was running around with Jimmy Dean and those guys—you know, part of the rebel movement. Me, I was around the elite of Hollywood. Power, Webb, Stanwyck… Bogie, Betty, Coop—these were the people I was going around with, and it was a whole new world to her.” After sending the flowers, Wagner made no attempt to contact Natalie. It was just another date, he told columnist Sidney Skolsky the next year.

  Natalie spent the next few days making plans for an imminent wedding to Marlowe, “And she made the mistake of telling her mother,” he recalls. “I think Barbara was gonna be the maid of honor, Barbara Gould. Natalie wanted Nick [Adams], and I just said, ‘No.’ ” Their plans were to have a simple ceremony, with just a few guests.

  That week, Marlowe was called to New York to do a play, putting the wedding in limbo. Natalie aligned herself with her anti-establishment fiancé. He recalls, “She told Warners she wouldn’t go to any premieres again, or do publicity, and they got really insane. They got really crazy.”

  Natalie’s second bold move was to fire Henry Willson, who had served his original purpose: setting her up on a date with Wagner. Willson was “screwing her career,” in Marlowe’s opinion, because he was too attentive to “his boys, the Rock Hudsons and so forth.” Natalie’s chief complaint was that Willson had not been aggressive enough.

  Jackie Eastes was at Natalie’s house when Willson phoned for the last time. “She wanted Marjorie Morningstar, and he wouldn’t go to bat for her. He said, ‘You’re not right for the part.’ And she said, ‘If you don’t get me this part, you’re fired.’ I’d never seen her so forceful.” Years later, Natalie would ridicule Willson to the London Times, saying, “There was a Hollywood agent who made up names for his actors—Race Gentry, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter. He knew what he’s doing, I guess, but Tab’s the name of a soft drink. Low calorie.”

  A desperate Maria implored Nick Adams to persuade Natalie to delay marrying Marlowe. Adams further assisted by “planting” a story in Army Archerd’s August fifteenth column in Daily Variety, stating that he and Natalie “might elope,” to Las Vegas, a “set-up” about which Natalie later bitterly complained.

  She succumbed to mounting pressure from Warner Brothers and Mud, demonstrating the part of her personality that craved stardom, by participating in a month-long publicity tour to New York, Chicago and St. Louis with Tab Hunter to promote the release of The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind, arriving at the Los Angeles airport on August 21 in a plunging neckline, carrying her good-luck toy tigers to make it through the flight.

  Natalie and Hunter were mobbed at the New York premiere of The Burning Hills, with fans swarming them like bees at each city Warners arranged for them to visit. “The tours we went on were phenomenal,” as Hunter recalls. “That kind of exposure when the studio gets behind you, it’s incredible… they wanted to make stars out of the both of us. We were the last of that sort of era.”

  While Natalie was in New York, she had lunch at the society restaurant Twenty-One, with author Herman Wouk, hoping to convince him to cast her as the title character of his novel, the demure Marjorie Morningstar. She dressed for the luncheon with the same display of allure she had when she met Nick Ray to campaign to play Judy—mistakenly believing that glamour, rather than authenticity, would sell her, an influence of Maria’s that would stay with Natalie her life long. Wouk would write:

  It was obvious to me, almost from the moment I saw her, that she was wrong for the part. This was not my “Marjorie”… she had a precocious, worldly look and an assured, fetching manner, which made her entirely different from my poor Central Park West dreamer. She wore a seductively cut red dress, a little too chic, I thought, for her age. Her hair was arranged in smart black bangs. Her make-up was stunningly smooth.

  In answers to my questions about her background and her career she gave a fine performance of girlish demureness; too good a performance.

  My Marjorie would have been stammering and feeble talking to a novelist 20 years older than herself. She would have said the wrong things. She would have spilled coffee, or dropped a fork. Natalie Wood carried off the interview with unshaken aplomb. She took charge…

  An hour or so later, talking to the producer of the picture on the telephone, I advised him that I had met Natalie Wood, that she was probably a very good actress but, in my opinion, was out of the question for the role of Marjorie Morningstar.

  Natalie’s seriously artistic side revealed itself in New York, as she sat in on classes at the Actors Studio, which Marlowe had arranged for her. Later, she would compare Stanislavsky’s teachings to “the way I’d been working all along. ‘Emotion memory’ is recalling something sad when you have a sad scene to do, and very early on I used to get myself in the right mood by thinking of a pet dog that died.”

  Natalie returned from her star-making Warners tour the first few days of September, joining Marlowe for a “hideaway at the beach, to get away from her mother.” They rented a cottage in a Malibu hotel for a few days, resuming their discussions about getting married, a possibility that created panic in Maria and alarm in Warner Brothers executives, who were desperate to sever the maverick Marlowe from Natalie’s life.

  While they were in Malibu, Nick Adams “appeared at our hotel,” Marlowe would recall, bringing his newest famous friend, Elvis Presley, to meet Natalie. Adams had encountered Presley, then twenty-one, a little over a week before on the set of Presley’s first movie, Love Me Tender. Presley, who deeply admired James Dean’s acting, knew every line in Rebel Without a Cause, and wanted to meet Natalie Wood because she had worked with Dean.

  Presley, Natalie and Adams instantly became “almost a threesome—having a lot of fun together,” Natalie said then. They were spotted that week at a cinema in Hollywood called the Iris, seeing Hot Rod Girls and Girls in Prison, the day before Presley flew to New York for his historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, turning him into a cultural phenomenon.

  With the world’s most famous singer expressing an interest in Natalie, Maria exerted the full measure of her power over her daughter to end her romance with Scott Marlowe, abetted by equally potent pressure from Warner Brothers. Natalie Wood, the movie star, relented. “I don’t know if you can imagine those days,” Marlowe later would reflect. “Everything was geared to publicity. Studios got together and made people’s lives, and had clauses in their contracts: what time they could go out, what time they had to be home, what they had to wear, what their hair was, what their photographs were like. They dictated how they lived or not lived. They said, ‘You do this and you’ll be okay; you don’t do this and things will be bad for you.’ And they meant it.”

  The effect of Natalie’s enforced breakup with Marlowe was as devastating, in its way, as her broken engagement to Jimmy Williams, her earlier opportunity for a “real” life. “The mother just fucked it—just screwed it all up,” remarks Marlowe. “I was kind of a fort for Natalie. I just was there for her all the time.”

  After the breakup with Marlowe, Natalie took her first trip to New York without her mother or a chaperone, to appear on The Perry Como Show. The experience was so disconcerting, she decided not to move out of her parents’ home until she got married. A friend she made that fall, actress Judi Meredith, noticed that Natalie needed to have “someone around her all the time.” “And when they are not,” Meredith said at the time, “she keeps in touch by phone. That’s why she calls her mother practically every hour, why she calls me at three and four in the morning, why she constantly talks to her agent, to the studio, a dozen different people. Even at home she can’t be alone fo
r a moment.”

  Natalie wanted to escape from Mud and her dysfunctional family, but the very neuroses Mud had instilled—primarily the fear of being alone—bound Natalie to her mother, as if Maria were a snake coiled around her neck.

  With Marlowe exorcised from her life, Natalie spent more time with Elvis Presley and his companions from Tennessee, who had taken over part of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as their stomping grounds. Lamar Fike, a Presley pal with a rollicking Southern sense of humor, adored “the raving ingénue,” as he later described Natalie. “We used to call her the Mad Nat. Elvis and I thought it up. Natalie used to get so dramatic! I came in one day to his room at the Beverly Wilshire and she got up on the windowsill and opened the window up. And I said, ‘Elvis, Jesus Christ, she’s going to jump!’ And he said, ‘No, no,’ and then he said, ‘Nat, come and sit down and quit being so dramatic.’ And he was right. So we called her the Mad Nat.”

  Her mother “pushed” the relationship with Presley, according to Hyatt. Maria visited Presley on his movie set with Natalie and struck up conversations with his mother, Gladys. Even Fahd liked Presley, according to Maria, who would remember her husband buying Elvis Presley records that fall. “Natalie was crazy about Elvis,” she claimed in later years. Natalie bought matching velvet shirts for herself and Presley, sneaking into movies with him throughout the late fall, finding him “complex and lonely,” not unlike herself. “Natalie was attracted to dark personalities,” Marlowe observed.

  Her school friend Jackie, who was still friendly with Natalie, remembers Natalie telling her “what a polite, wonderful human being” Presley was, but “he was not what she wanted romantically.” Later in life, Natalie gave an interview to Presley biographer Albert Goldman, discussing her relationship with the singer:

  He was the first person of my age group I had ever met who said to me: “How come you’re wearing makeup? Why do you want to go to New York? Why do you want to be on your own? Why don’t you want to stay home and be a sweet little girl? It’s nice to stay home.” We’d go to P.C. Brown’s and have a hot fudge sundae. We’d go to Hamburger Hamlet and have a burger and a Coke. He didn’t drink. He didn’t swear. He didn’t even smoke!… I thought it was really wild!

  At the height of her friendship with Presley, in October, Natalie was sent to New York to appear in a live television drama called Carnival on NBC’s Kaiser Aluminum Hour, costarring Dennis Hopper, directed by George Roy Hill. Natalie played the daughter of a drunken carny worker who takes a job as a “cooch dancer” in a desperate bid to save her father’s job, then lies to cover for him. She would later refer to it as her best work as an actress, perhaps because she related to her character, who was supporting her alcoholic father.

  Ironically, Scott Marlowe was NBC’s first choice to play Hopper’s role as the carnival barker in a tender romance with Natalie’s character. “I was doing a television show, and I couldn’t do it. My heart was wrenched.” Marlowe, who was still in contact with Natalie through “secret” phone calls she made to him through friends, watched her perform that night. “She was brilliant. The camera came in close and she had this big, big scene, she had to burst into tears—and she did it and she was brilliant. She burst right into tears. God, she was magnificent.” Daily Variety agreed with Marlowe, calling Natalie “touching and effective.”

  She returned to Hollywood from her television triumph to begin dating an intense young actor she met before she left town, when she saw him perform onstage in End as a Man. Her companion that night was Ben Cooper, who recalls their reaction to actor Robert Vaughn, when they met him after the play at a small party: “Bob played a real rat, just a despicable bastard. And I told him, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you later; right now I still hate you.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘Thank you very much.’ He was just magnetic. You would hardly remember any of the other actors who were in the play. So when he and Natalie met, there was a lot of electricity.” Vaughn would say, “Being a reasonably sensitive fellow, it was apparent from the git-go that the girl and yours truly would see each other again—she had that look.”

  By the time Natalie returned from New York, Vaughn had been signed to a two-picture-a-year deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and moved from a one-room apartment shared with his mother “into a magnificent three-story, ten-room penthouse on Orchid Avenue overlooking the lights of my newly discovered Hollywood.” Natalie introduced him to Hollywood’s haunts, as she earlier had Hopper. “My first Hollywood premiere was with Nat, who as a result of Rebel, was now the toast of Photoplay and Modern Screen, etcetera.” Vaughn simultaneously went out with Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith, “[and] since neither Judi or Natalie seemed to be concerned about the other’s role in my life—that life was good.”

  Natalie was juggling Vaughn with Elvis Presley, who invited her to Graceland, his Memphis home, over Halloween. According to Marlowe, “She did a weekend, to make me jealous, with Elvis. That’s all it was about. She wanted to get back with me and so she took off with him.”

  Natalie left town abruptly, without telling the studio or her new agency, William Morris, missing a publicity event and flying under an assumed name. Her “secret” visit to Graceland was captured by photographers moments after Nick Adams picked her up at the airport in Memphis, where she and Presley were stalked by fans everywhere they went: riding on his motorcycle, tooling around town in his Lincoln Continental, stopping at the Fairgrounds or for ice cream. Presley’s later friend Jerry Schilling remembers, “I was fourteen years old, playing touch football, and who should drive up but Elvis on a motorcycle, and who’s sitting behind him but Natalie Wood! All I could do was just stand there and stare.”

  Presley allowed his fans to do almost anything, even look through his windows. He explained why to a bewildered Natalie, who recalled, “I hadn’t been around anyone who was religious. He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people, otherwise, God would take it all away.”

  Both Lana and Maria would later say that Natalie phoned home toward the end of her visit, asking Mud “in code” to call her back on the ruse that Warner Brothers needed her in Los Angeles. Presley’s friend Fike, who was in Memphis, claims that was “a lie,” that “Natalie really cared for Elvis,” though he acknowledges “it just didn’t work out” between them. “She just didn’t like the whole set-up, didn’t like the guys around, which most girls didn’t.” Faye Nuell, Natalie’s friend from Rebel, still a confidante, felt Natalie, who preferred “worldly” men, had always considered Presley more a friend than a boyfriend.

  Natalie flew back to Hollywood from Memphis in tight toreador pants, clutching her stuffed tigers, greeted at the airport by Robert Vaughn and by photographers, eager to snap Elvis’ “new girlfriend.” Pictures of Natalie Wood, smiling ebulliently, waving to her fans, appeared in newspapers across the world the next day. Michael Zimring, her new William Morris agent, saw Natalie privately, “and when she came back she looked like a rat that died. I don’t think she’d been to sleep for a week.” Zimring took Natalie to task for leaving town without informing him or the studio, though he felt sorry for her. “I tell you, she had a tough family thing. She was a good kid. She was a little wild, but basically she really was a good kid. I really was fond of her. She took care of her family: I mean let’s face it, she supported them. Her father was a mess.”

  Marlowe recalls, “She appeared at my door the following weekend,” still hoping to marry him. “She wanted to be married badly-to somebody—I know. I think she just wanted out—of that mother, and that relationship. And out of feeling suicidal so much.” Natalie and Marlowe gave it a last go, but it was “not meant to be,” they would both say. “Barbara Gould tried to get us back together, but we split up.”

  In the end, Scott Marlowe, like Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s true loves, represented a too extreme break from her codependent relationship with Maria, and their s
hared Hollywood fantasy, movie star “Natalie Wood.”

  Robert Vaughn briefly filled the void in Natalie’s life through November. He remembers her then as “a full blooming late teenager, with all the passion, humor, vulnerability and craziness that time suggests. She could also drink a Volga boatman under the table. She introduced me to the ‘way of the world’ in Hollywood’s last glamorous days, and I shall treasure our fleeting time upon that ‘wicked stage’ all of my days.” At the same time, Vaughn had a strange premonition about Natalie, a disturbing feeling that something was wrong. “Even then, I had some concern, based on her zest for life, that she might not realize her full ‘Biblical’ four score and ten, and said so to my friends.”

  When Vaughn escorted Natalie to a party given by Elvis Presley that December at the Santa Monica Pier, which Presley had “bought out” for his friends for the evening, “Natalie, with profound sadness, stared at the black waters, and told me how deeply afraid she was of drowning.”

  NATALIE FINISHED THE HEADY, TUMULTUOUS, high-pressure year of 1956 in a burst of fame, winning a Golden Globe as Outstanding Newcomer (shared with Carroll Baker and Jayne Mansfield), after being named “Most Popular New Star of 1956” by Modern Screen in a ceremony hosted by Louella Parsons on Sunday, December 3, broadcast live from CBS in Hollywood to The Ed Sullivan Show.

  At one event, the movie star whom Natalie told her close friends had raped her sat near her during a ceremony, flashing his charismatic grin as if nothing had ever happened. Natalie Wood, the always-beautiful, always-happy star, beamed radiantly throughout the event, pretending to adore the famous actor beside her whom she despised.

  Dennis Hopper would later observe that Natalie did her best acting “playing” Natalie Wood. Natalie worried about the fact that she was lost inside her screen persona, telling her sister Lana she felt that “very few people liked her just for her. They liked her because she was ‘Natalie Wood.’ Including guys. That was always foremost on her mind.”