Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  In later years, Natalie would describe Beatty’s behavior filming Splendor more charitably, saying that he was “insecure.” The impression she left on the cast and crew at the end of the picture was as “a very nice, professional young girl,” in Kranze’s view. “Pert, likeable, lively, with it, can take a joke, friendly, vivacious.” Kranze perceived “that was not her personality, but that’s what I saw. I guess she was darker than I’m suggesting.” Production designer Dick Sylbert knew and liked Nick Gurdin from his carpentry work at the studios. “I always called her ‘Natasha,’ ” he said of Natalie. “That was my sort of name for her. She was terrific. Natalie was not a snob. She really liked the people who make movies.”

  One of them, a young “gofer” named Mart Crowley, who would eventually write the groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band, “fell in love with Natalie so much,” recalled Maria, “even if he is a homosexual. When she finish the movie, he start to cry and say, ‘Oh, I’m not gonna see you.’ So she said, ‘Okay, you gonna be my secretary,’ and so she took him to L.A.” Crowley became, as Mud would put it, Natalie’s “best girlfriend.” He also became her “caretaker,” Nuell said later, someone to hold Natalie’s hand during long, insomniac nights.

  Beatty and his fiancée, Joan Collins, who was back from London, went their romantic way, as Natalie and R.J. departed for Hollywood by train on August 19 for Natalie to start rehearsals on West Side Story. They arrived to find their white Scott-and-Zelda mansion in a state of lavish disrepair, with the floor sagging under Natalie’s sunken six-foot-square tub, and the extravagant staircases wobbling. She and R.J. fired the contractor and escaped to the haven of their boat for a week so Natalie could shake off the intense emotions from Splendor, before the taxing West Side Story shoot. R.J. was having problems with his studio, Fox, over changes they made to Solo, and his “phone wasn’t ringing” with offers.

  The Wagners’ new house on Beverly, which Natalie would later complain was unfairly maligned as “Miss Havisham’s mansion,” was beautiful, recalls Faye Nuell. Natalie and R.J. had purchased extraordinary pieces from Hearst’s castle at San Simeon, including antique balustrades, wrought iron gates, and an ornate fifteenth-century eight-foot bed with a massive oak headboard in the upstairs master bedroom.

  R.J.’s live-in butler, and an occasional daytime maid, completed the picture of the “mad young millionaires,” as Louella Parsons wrote of the Wagners. Bobby Hyatt recalls R.J.’s valet as “creepy. He was an elderly, thin guy with gray hair, and he had a tendency to wear a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he pulled his slacks up as high as he could and cinched the belt so that his testicles would be on display. When he’d swish by to his back room, Nat would whisper to me, ‘I hate him!’ ” Hyatt suggested that Natalie fire the butler, “and she said she couldn’t, that he belonged to R.J. That was a continuing argument—about the only thing they ever argued about.”

  Leonard Hirshan, the agent who guided Natalie through West Side Story daily, and socialized with the Wagners, remembers them as “terrific, a very nice, compatible, easygoing couple. They were fun to be with.”

  Natalie plunged into her new musical on a punishing schedule of twelve-hour rehearsals each day, trying to catch up to the cast of professional singer/dancers, many of whom were in the Broadway show, and who resented and envied Natalie as a “movie star.” Rita Moreno, a Tony-winning Broadway singer-dancer-actress who would win an Oscar playing the fiery Anita in West Side Story, recalls “a few groans from a few people” when Natalie arrived on set.

  The perfectionist Natalie, still emotionally drained from Splendor, felt insecure about her singing voice, her dancing, and her attempt to play a Puerto Rican, throwing herself into one rehearsal with such intensity she fell to the floor and Wise thought she was injured. According to Moreno, “She couldn’t get it right” during the mambo scene in the gymnasium, forcing everyone to repeat the dance many times without apologizing. “I remember at the time being rather dismayed that there seemed to be no acknowledgment of the work the other people were doing in this. Not getting it right was not really her fault, but she didn’t address it.” The other dancers—including Moreno—interpreted Natalie’s insecurity as “indifference… I don’t know that there was resentment, but there were sarcastic remarks.”

  “Natalie was miserable,” recalls Lana. “She loved Jerry Robbins and she liked that entire process, but she just didn’t get along too well other than that. She just was unhappy on it… it was very demanding, she was very concerned about the makeup, about the look, about people accepting her as a Puerto Rican—about everything.”

  Natalie asked Moreno to help her with her accent during one of the early rehearsals, “and I went into her room and started to tape record her dialogue, and somewhere along the middle she sort of lost interest. I made a tape for thirty minutes, and that was that.” Natalie’s Puerto Rican accent was “terrible,” in Moreno’s opinion. “Awful. It could have been really so much better.” At the time, Moreno thought Natalie was lazy, “but maybe when you feel you’re not up to the job, you sort of give up on it, you go through the motions, and it’s very possible that’s what she was doing.”

  Lana recalls Natalie as on the verge of a nervous collapse, missing work by calling in sick, spending lunch hours in her trailer, on the telephone with her analyst. When Jerome Robbins was fired as codirector in October, “Natalie was left without her guru,” as assistant director Relyea relates. Saul Chaplin recalls, “She was adamant and she threatened not to show up. But of course she not only showed up, she was terrific.”

  Natalie’s saving grace was Tony Mordente, one of the “Jets” dancers, whom Robert Wise and Natalie requested to work with her on the remaining musical numbers. Mordente “was hesitant about it,” perceiving Natalie the same way some of the other dancers had. “There were kids in the company who thought that Natalie was kind of a snob—same kind of feeling I got. I thought, ‘Oh, wow, she’s really a snobbish, standoffish, Miss Star, Miss Hollywood.’ But she was quite the opposite, very much the opposite.”

  Mordente spent every night, and weekends, going over dance routines with Natalie at her house on Beverly:

  And as it turned out, I found her absolutely—she was like a human Alka Seltzer, she was just the most bubbling, effervescent person, and she was so easy to work with. I mean she certainly had her likes and her dislikes, and she certainly knew what she wanted to do. What she needed me to do was to help get her to what she wanted to do. And she worked really hard, I think the first day we worked twelve hours. But the work was what she wanted to do, and what she wanted to do was get it right.

  And she really did a wonderful job, for somebody who was basically a non-dancer… and she was a lady who had rhythm, who could move.

  As Mordente spent more time with Natalie, he discovered how insecure she was in the part, and how much she wanted people to like her—just as she had at Fulton Junior High, with Mary Ann. “She was very genuinely worried about what the entire cast thought about her. She would always ask me, ‘What do you think? What do you think they’re thinking?’ In a sense, she was shy around the company. I said, ‘What are you worried about? They’re not even in the scene with you, forget about ’em.’ She was worried about other people’s perception of her as a person, and what they thought of her as a performer. She was so concerned that people like her, and she wanted them to think she was good.”

  Natalie talked to Mordente, for hours, about her Puerto Rican accent. “I know she worked on it all day long. She used to talk to me like that. We’d be out to dinner, and suddenly she’d be breaking into it. She was always concerned about it. She was always concerned that things were going to be exactly the way she wanted them. She wanted them to be perfect all the time.”

  If Natalie had a flaw, in Mordente’s opinion, “it would be that she wanted people to like her, and she wanted to be a great actress… she strived to be the perfect actress. There was no question. She wanted to be the best actress
in Hollywood, even the world, there was no question about that. The Academy Award was very big to her.”

  Mordente saw Natalie virtually every day from the time Robbins was fired in October, until the end of filming West Side Story in February. “I became friendly with Natalie, and R.J., and we spent a lot of time together, going to dinner and so forth. R.J. became a very good friend of mine. And he was going through a very tough period at the time, because he had been suspended by Fox… and I think R.J. had his ego, and his ego was being a little bit tossed around because Natalie was peaking, and he was sliding, at that time, in no man’s land, not knowing what he was going to do next.”

  Mordente considered the marriage “good,” though he allowed, “They had their problems. And I think their problems stemmed from Natalie really driving to stardom, and the possibility of winning an Academy Award, and R.J. saying, ‘Where’s my career going next?’ Natalie was a very ambitious lady, I make no bones about that.”

  While filming West Side Story, Natalie said positive things to Mordente about Warren Beatty as an actor, never mentioning him otherwise. Nor did Mordente see Beatty around Natalie from October 1960 to February 1961. Natalie’s intimate, Bob Jiras, who did her makeup on West Side Story, confirms Beatty was never there. In Mordente’s view, “there couldn’t have been” any personal contact between Natalie and Beatty during filming. “Because, I’m not going to exaggerate, Natalie and I spent five nights a week together. Going to dinner, or talking, or laughing, or playing games, or shopping, or going to the movies—and it was always with R.J., and Natalie, and/or Mart. Mart was always there.” Beatty, in fact, had been living with fiancée Joan Collins since shooting Splendor in the Grass, and left for Europe in December to shoot a movie, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, accompanied by Collins.

  Sometime during filming, Natalie was told that singer Marni Nixon was going to dub the high notes in Natalie’s song tracks as Maria. Nixon recalled, “They were telling her she was wonderful, and we on the sidelines were going, ‘Oh my God! How could they let that go on?’ They would turn to me and they would wink.” Natalie was deceived about her voice being used until the end of the film, when Wise and the producers informed her that Nixon would be dubbing all of her songs as Maria. “She wanted so much to do her own singing, but in the final analysis, her voice just wasn’t good enough,” reveals Wise. “She was more than upset,” relates Mordente. “She was pissed. She was steamed.” Mostly, Natalie was heartbroken.

  They had gotten their fawn in the forest, nearly destroying her, like Bambi. While millions of moviegoers, for decades to come, would be dazzled by the dancing and singing in West Side Story, it is Natalie who would move them, with her heartbreakingly vulnerable performance as Maria.

  After she finished West Side Story, Natalie was admitted to St. John’s Hospital for a tonsillectomy, which she had delayed for weeks. Mordente recalls her with a “throat problem” toward the end of filming, “and R.J. was saying, ‘Maybe we should get a doctor.’ ” According to Mordente, Natalie’s mother did not want her to see a doctor, an attitude Mordente felt bordered on “witchcraft.”

  During her April 7 tonsillectomy, Natalie developed complications and nearly died, hemorrhaging for four hours, according to reports published at the time. R.J. took an adjoining room at the hospital for two nights, holding Natalie’s hand while she recovered. She was released from the hospital in mid-April, missing an appearance as a presenter at the Academy Awards.

  Before she was hospitalized, Natalie turned down a picture that Warner Brothers was pressuring her to make called The Inspector (or Lisa). She spent the next few weeks of spring contemplating other movie offers and resting, as R.J. rehearsed for his first movie under a new nonexclusive contract with Columbia Studios. The picture, Sail a Crooked Ship, starring Ernie Kovacs, began filming in Los Angeles on May 1, 1961.

  Natalie visited the set of Sail a Crooked Ship occasionally in May and June, as she and R.J. coordinated their work schedules to go to Italy together in July, Natalie’s first time abroad. R.J. had arranged to meet with Darryl Zanuck in Rome to discuss appearing in the war drama The Longest Day, while Natalie filmed the Warner Brothers romantic drama Lovers Must Learn (later changed to Rome Adventure), costarring Troy Donahue, which she accepted the end of May.

  The Wagners kept up their glittering social schedule in June, as R.J. completed his film with Ernie Kovacs, sparkling together at a party the first week of the month, given by their friends Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher at Au Petit Jean, radiantly hand-in-hand mid-June at a Warner Brothers Jubilee dinner of stars, where they were a foursome with Warren Beatty and Joan Collins, who had just returned from Europe.

  A day or so later, R.J. completed Sail a Crooked Ship, with Natalie romantically anticipating their coming trip to Europe. After they went to bed that night, according to what Natalie told friends, she awakened to find R.J. missing. She went to look for him, and found him in a compromising position with another man.

  Natalie went into hysteria, screaming and running to the bar, where she picked up a crystal glass, squeezing it in her hand until the glass broke and blood oozed from her skin. She fled to a neighbor’s house in her nightgown and banged on the door, using their phone to call her mother.

  Mud got the phone call she had foretold from a shattered Natalie, who blurted out what she had seen. Lana, who was in junior high, remembers her sister arriving at the house in Van Nuys that night, frantic, her hand bleeding from cut glass, sobbing that her marriage was over. “She was really, really upset.”

  Natalie would not tell her sister what occurred that night. “My mom told me a couple of things that Natalie said,” reveals Lana, who “always heard” that Natalie discovered R.J. in a sexual encounter with a man. R.J., through representatives, denies this version of events and any allegation of bisexuality.

  Natalie shut herself in one of the bedrooms at her parents’ home that night, swallowing sleeping pills, “and I guess she had taken too many, because Mrs. Gurdin called my house immediately,” relates Jeanne Hyatt. “But I was asleep and Bobby answered the phone.” Robert Hyatt remembers, “It was late at night, and Marie started telling me everything, because she had been telling me for years, ‘I told her not to marry him, no good will come of this, it will be trouble,’ and she was right.” Natalie, he recalls, went into a coma from taking too many sleeping pills.

  Lana remembers Natalie’s overdose, which the Hyatts heard all about the next morning, when Maria telephoned Jeanne to tell her that Natalie “had caught Wagner in the act,” muttering “she didn’t know why Natalie ever married him in the first place.” Mud told her neighbor that Natalie was nearly out of her mind witnessing R.J. with another man. “To hear something is one thing, but to see it in action is another.” Mud and Fahd, according to Jeanne Hyatt, “took Natalie to the hospital and had her stomach pumped, they weren’t taking any chances. The poor little thing, I think that she was in such shock, that she took the pills to go to sleep, not to commit suicide. Of course in that state, she could have overdosed without even realizing it.”

  Natalie told Bobby Hyatt, sometime afterward, she “wasn’t trying to kill herself.”

  NATALIE STAYED IN HIDING FOR A WEEK, dropping ten pounds from stress. One of her first calls was to summon her old friend Mary Ann, whom she hadn’t seen since their difference of opinion over Natalie marrying R.J.

  “Oh God, it was awful. If you would have ripped her arms off, it would have been better. Why it didn’t destroy her—it was close, I’ll tell you.” Natalie, at first, was in denial concerning R.J. “I said, ‘Honey, you have to accept it now… you’ve got to face what we’re talking about here.’ I reverted to anger, because R.J. knew how fragile this was, he knew how much this meant to her.”

  In Mary Ann’s view, the end of her fairy tale marriage to R.J. was the end of a fantasy that had sustained Natalie since childhood. “It was the whole picture, it wasn’t just him as an individual.” Natalie discovered “there is no golden r
ainbow. And it was tough to say it’s all going to be better. And her demons were just going wild, because she was bright and she was smart… ‘but it can’t be, but it is.’ Ah, Jeez, it was awful.”

  Natalie “just lost it,” in the observation of Mary Ann. “Years later, I could see pictures of her and I could see her heartbreak—she never got over it.”

  Natalie’s lifeline was her analyst, whom she began to see every day from the night she left R.J., struggling to separate from the merged personality Maria had created between them, to overcome the fear of being by herself that her mother had fostered to keep Natalie at home. She would be in daily therapy for the next eight years. “My parents wanted me to come back to live with them, but I felt strongly that I didn’t need my parents,” she told author/actor Dick Moore in 1981. “I needed, in today’s words, to get my head together. I needed psychiatry. I knew I needed to be independent, but I was still terrified of being alone, and I went to stay with friends. I had always been dependent on someone—first on my parents, then on R.J. This feeling that it was somehow dangerous to be alone was deeply instilled.”

  Natalie subsequently kept secret what she said had happened the night she left R.J., seemingly worried about the effect on her image if her overdose and its cause were made public. “She even tried to protect R.J.,” recalls Mary Ann. After her initial disclosure, Natalie would never talk about seeing R.J. with a man, keeping it as private as her romance with Jimmy, knowing that at that time it would damage R.J.’s career. “The iron curtain went down,” as Robert Hyatt put it. “It was a big deal to keep it quiet. We were not supposed to tell anybody, and I never would. Natalie told her mother that if she leaked it, she would never speak to her again and would cut her off her salary, which Natalie provided. That kept Marie quiet.”