Although she could not accept his behavior, Natalie “never got over R.J.,” Lana observed. Family friend Jeanne Hyatt, who saw Natalie during her hideout, felt “she was still in love with Bob Wagner, even though she had seen that horrid thing happen… she always carried him in her heart.” Or as Mary Ann analyzed, Natalie cherished the illusion of what R.J. represented. “Natalie didn’t want to get a divorce,” Wagner said in 1986, “but people said, ‘Go your separate ways and see how it feels.’”
The Wagners’ then close friend Prudence Maree remembers, “R.J. was destroyed by that first separation. He’d just sit and look in the distance, which is not like R.J. at all, he has great charm, great charisma, and he was stunned. And never talked about it, but just sat in our home and I’d take care of him as best I could.” Years later, Wagner said, “I should have hung in there, and things probably would have been different. We never wanted to break up, and we thought we would get back together, but there were lots of interventions—our careers, other people… but that feeling between us was there. The love was there.”
Their ambivalence and affection was evident in a two-paragraph statement issued by the Wagners’ publicist four days after Natalie went underground, announcing a trial separation with “no immediate plans for divorce. Both are hopeful the problems that exist between them can be worked out satisfactorily.”
The news of Natalie and R.J.’s separation hit Hollywood like a bomb, a foreign correspondent would observe. Variety commented the Wagners had “fooled everyone”; the Los Angeles Mirror reported show business circles as “baffled”; their friend Elizabeth Taylor was reputed to be under sedation, holding Natalie and R.J. as her role models for a happy marriage. No one in Hollywood had any idea why its golden couple had split up. “Natalie, come out of hiding,” implored The Hollywood Reporter.
Warner Brothers executives were frantic to find their missing star, needed for wardrobe tests for the ironically titled Lovers Must Learn, set to shoot in Rome in a few weeks. Natalie finally checked in with the studio on June 23, asking that her whereabouts be kept secret. She called Louella Parsons a few days later, telling Parsons she hadn’t spoken to anyone because she “had the flu” and had lost weight. Natalie told the columnist that what had occurred between her and R.J. was “too personal to discuss,” admitting she was “not up” to meeting with anyone at Warners about her new movie.
“Louella Parsons and they were all looking for her,” remembers Jeanne Hyatt, “and she was sick. What she saw made her sick—and taking those pills.” She was also afraid to be seen looking anything less than the glamorous “Natalie Wood,” Robert Hyatt remembers.
On June 30, Warren Beatty, who had been in New York for several weeks to promote Splendor, returned to Hollywood, just as Natalie “really felt I might crack up.” She temporarily moved back into the Beverly house, and as she later told the story, “R.J. came back home one night to pick up some things and we both had our guard up. We said some hurtful things and he left. I started to shake. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and I was ready to let go. In another minute they would have had to carry me out. But I said to myself, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t let it happen.’ And I got through the night.”
From then on, Natalie would need someone to keep her company through the night, and on airplanes, no longer comforted by her toy tigers or storybook dolls. She began to turn to secretary/companions who stayed with her, the first being Mart Crowley, who eventually wrote The Boys in the Band in Natalie’s guesthouse. “He, in a significant way, was taking care of Natalie after the breakup,” asserts Bob Jiras, her friend, makeup man, and occasional fill-in for Crowley.
Natalie was emotionally unable to star in Lovers Must Learn, or any other picture. On July 3, Warner Brothers sent her a legal letter accepting Natalie’s request for a leave of absence without pay for an undetermined period for “reasons personal to her,” eventually casting Suzanne Pleshette in Lovers Must Learn, renamed Rome Adventure. (Troy Donahue would be grateful for costarring with Pleshette, whom he married.) Natalie admitted, later, she was almost “over the edge.” She moved out of the white dream home on Beverly (“too many memories”), into a small, hidden house along a curve on Chalon Road in Bel Air Estates behind an imposing brick wall, a metaphor for her private torment.
Mid-July, Natalie and Warren Beatty began bumping into each other at parties. By a coincidence, Beatty’s romance with Joan Collins was coming to an end, an outcome hastened by Natalie’s sudden availability. Collins observes, “It amused me actually, because knowing Warren was the most ambitious person I’d ever met, a sizzling romance with the hottest film star helped him enormously. Don’t forget he dumped Jane Fonda for me and I introduced him to everyone I knew in Hollywood.”
For Natalie, the suddenly unattached, talented, devastatingly handsome Beatty was a godsend for her shattered sense of self-worth. After saying she found R.J. with a man in their own home, “she went through, ‘It’s my fault. What’s wrong with me?’ Fortunately Beatty came along,” comments Mary Ann. “The timing was good and he was what the doctor ordered. And he was a nice guy, and he had a brain in his head.”
On July 27, Beatty took Natalie to an early screening of West Side Story, their first public date. Within a few days, her elderly analyst died. Though she would quickly replace him, “it hit me at a crucial point in our marriage, like the death of a father,” Natalie said later, “and shortly after that, the marriage sank like a ship going down for the last time.” Natalie signed a friendly property settlement with R.J. on August 15, evenly dividing their assets, and she and Beatty were together constantly from then on, though Natalie still had not filed for divorce, an indication of her emotional ambivalence about severing the relationship with R.J.
R.J. fled to the comparative anonymity of Europe, undergoing psychoanalysis, taking small roles in pictures by respected Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, hoping to transform himself and his career, saying, “My life went into a tailspin.” Wagner would later credit therapy, which he had feared during his first marriage to Natalie, for “curing” him. “Lots of years of analysis,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1977. “I had to learn a great deal… first I had to learn to like and respect myself, to find security within me, and in that way to achieve a kind of emotional strength I hadn’t known before.” R.J. rented a flat in London, and then took a penthouse apartment off Rome’s Via Po.
By happenstance, Joan Collins was in London shooting The Road to Hong Kong—a movie that Natalie, with whom she was friendly, helped her get—when R.J. arrived in the U.K. to begin filming The Longest Day. Much was made in gossip columns of the fact that R.J. and Collins were seen in London having dinner while their exes, Natalie and Beatty, were romantically involved in Hollywood. The “dates” between Collins and R.J. were nothing more than old friends and costars spending time together, for Collins was in ardent courtship with Anthony Newley, soon to be her husband. She scoffs at the gossip that was published then, painting her as a woman scorned. “I never resented Natalie dating Warren… I was madly in love with Anthony Newley, so I couldn’t have cared less!”
The fact that Natalie—still technically a married woman—was conducting a public romance with rising star Beatty, vacationing with him while he was on location in Key West for All Fall Down, created a furor of gossip. According to Mary Ann, Natalie was suicidal at the time, “destroyed” by the dissolution of her dream. “She didn’t even think about the outside world, how it looked or anything. She was just trying to survive. I didn’t think she was ever going to pull out of it. And Beatty just happened to fall in, which was good, it helped her.”
With only whispers about what really ended the Wagner marriage, Louella Parsons and other columnists at first offered ridiculous theories, mostly centering on “the horrors” of Natalie and R.J.’s “white elephant” mansion, “literally falling down around them.” When Natalie began dating Beatty, the gossips seized upon a new explanation, speculating the two c
ostars must have begun a “secret” affair during Splendor, tarring Beatty as the playboy predator who broke up the Wagners’ idyllic marriage, and casting Natalie as the scarlet woman.
Natalie selflessly accepted the false rumor that she was the one who had an extramarital affair, thereby protecting R.J. from further speculation. The Natalie-R.J.-Warren triangle would become part of the Natalie Wood Myth, with Natalie’s explanation for the breakup of their marriage known only to an intimate few. Mart Crowley, who was glued to Natalie from Splendor on, conceded in 1999, “Their marriage did not end because Warren Beatty came along,” hinting, “There were problems between the two of them that they needed help in working them out… sometimes love is just not enough.”
The illogic of the gossip that Natalie left R.J. because she fell madly in love with Beatty is apparent in all of the articles about Natalie at the time, characterizing her as wounded, sad, and distrustful of marriage, already recognizing with poignancy that the free-spirited Beatty would not be a permanent part of her life. Asked by one reporter if she had found happiness, Natalie looked wistful. “Doesn’t everyone search for happiness? I think most people search for what makes them happy… but I guess I haven’t found it yet.” Natalie equated happiness, at the time, with finding someone to love. “Love is the most important thing there is. I don’t see how people can exist without love, let alone work without it.”
Despite the fact that she was the fragile victim, Natalie’s image, suddenly, was as a “callous,” heartless glamour girl who discarded her husband, stole Joan Collins’ fiancé, and would stop at nothing for stardom.
When Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story had gala New York openings nearly simultaneously in mid-October, Natalie and Beatty became the most-photographed celebrity couple in the world. They appeared, arm-in-arm, at the glittering premieres: Russian-dark Natalie, lush in white mink and white satin, her bust pushed to the skies by Hollywood magic, holding on to a sultry, sensual, formally attired Beatty as if he were her life preserver, which he was. They were the breathtaking gods of the movies, almost too beautiful to be real.
On December 5, Natalie placed her handprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, as she had vowed at sixteen, when she and Jackie Eastes took Dennis Hopper to gape at the movie star signatures. She laughed gaily for the television cameras filming the ceremony, holding her hands up to show the wet cement, cocking her head to the side, flashing a Natalie Wood smile, but Natalie’s animation seemed like a wind-up doll, and her dark, dancing eyes appeared troubled.
Her career kept soaring. By Christmas, Splendor and West Side were playing across the street from each other on Hollywood Boulevard. West Side Story would play continuously in the same Paris cinema for seven years.
Natalie began the year 1962 with an Oscar nomination for Splendor in the Grass and a role she had been coveting for eighteen months, Gypsy Rose Lee. Natalie was driven by demons to play the stripper with the stage mother of all stage mothers, Mama Rose—played in the film by Rosalind Russell—viewing Gypsy as the catharsis for all her years as a child star under the tyranny of Mud. Lana recalls, “She used to kid that Rosalind Russell was actually portraying our mom.” Maria raved against the movie—even The Hollywood Reporter ran an item about it—recognizing, though she would never admit it, that she was Mama Rose.
Three major magazines dispatched reporters to Hollywood to interview Natalie for cover stories during the filming of Gypsy that winter —Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post, and Show—with all three journalists delivering unflattering profiles of her as neurotic and driven, mocking her perfectionism with asides about “rehearsing for Gypsy as if it were Otello.” Her friend Henry Silva, a well-known screen villain, remembers Natalie as “crushed” by what was written about her in Newsweek. She complained, later, that the Saturday Evening Post writer only spent nine minutes with her.
Morgan Brittany, the then nine-year-old actress who played Dainty June, spent hours on the set observing Natalie, whom she idolized, noticing every nuance of her dress, behavior, and mien at the peak of her career. “I didn’t know charisma at the time, but when she walked in the room, everything stopped. I remember her coming in with high, high heels, like four inches, Capri pants, and an angora sweater, white, with white pearls. She always wore a bracelet—sometimes it made a lot of noise, rattling. She loved to sit and watch us rehearse… she smoked, constantly smoked. I never saw her without a cigarette, ever.” Brittany never noticed Natalie not look like a star. “It was the furs, the cigarette, the sunglasses, jewelry, pearls, the bracelet.”
Brittany recalls Natalie as fragile, insecure that her voice would be dubbed after what happened to her on West Side Story, constantly being reassured by director Mervyn LeRoy that her character “wasn’t supposed to be a good singer.” She was nervous that her breasts would not look voluptuous enough, intimidated by playing a big-boned stripper nearly six feet tall. “She had a tough time doing the numbers, worrying that she wasn’t doing a good job. I remember she had a problem with the last strip tease number; she wanted only one brief shot when she got down to next to nothing on.”
Orry-Kelly, the famous dress designer, employed the same artifices as Nick Ray had with Natalie on Rebel, padding her hips and the base of her brassieres to give her curves, using a French cut on the costumes to optically lengthen her legs.
Harry Stradling, a respected director of photography known for the flattering way he photographed female stars, made sure tiny, delicate Natalie was alone on stage when she did her strip tease so she would not appear dwarfed by the other statuesque dancers, and photographed her from low angles, shooting up.
Still, “there was a lot of tension,” acknowledges Brittany, who remembers everybody, including Rosalind Russell, “walking on eggshells” around Natalie. “She’d get into moods and smoke and smoke. She was Queen of the Warner Brothers lot, so she had a lot of power then, and she’d get angry about something, and go off to a corner, stomping her feet.” When Warren Beatty came to the set, “she’d sit on his lap and she’d whisper in his ear and he would reassure her,” observed Brittany, who wondered what her idol saw in Beatty, who wore thick “Coke bottle” glasses. “She just had this power over him. He adored her.”
Preteen Ann Jillian, who played Baby June, had a similar experience:
I always used to look at Natalie and, “Oh my Lord, she’s so gorgeous, and she’s so petite and beautiful, and everything is so feminine.” And I would watch her when we started filming, and how she would put on her makeup, her eye makeup particularly, with one little pinkie up.
And I was standing there one time watching her, and I felt the presence of a man come in, and I turned to the side, and I didn’t know who he was, and he was watching the same thing I was. And I looked at him and I said, “She’s so beautiful.” And he said, “Yes, she is.” And I later realized that was Warren Beatty.
Costar Karl Malden, who had worked with Natalie when she was a boy-crazy teen on Bombers B-52, observed, as many in the industry would, how “as Natalie grew up, she became more beautiful, and more beautiful.”
Malden knew that Natalie struggled with the musical numbers. “It was challenging for both of us. I’m not a singer and a dancer, she wasn’t a singer and a dancer, and we both went at it. She wanted to do it badly, and so did I. It was something we never would have gotten a test for if we hadn’t been under contract with Warners, so we said, ‘Let’s do it.’ In a crazy way, but we did it. The one place where she was really scared stiff was when she did the strip number. She was scared stiff that Gypsy Rose Lee was there and was gonna tell her things, and that she was having to strip. And I thought she was magnificent.” Malden recalls only one piece of advice the famed stripper offered Natalie: “Gypsy would say, ‘When you take the sleeve off, don’t do it fast, take time, take all the time in the world.’”
Child actress Ann Jillian, whose mother grew up in Russia and was Lithuanian, felt a kinship with Natalie, sensing an ineffable sadness, a “br
ooding,” that touched her. “Children can have a sense in that way. On the top there was this wonderful giggle she had that was so endearing and delightful, but her eyes said something else.”
As it had been since she was a child, Natalie’s star shone in the quiet, poignant moments, such as when, as the young Louise, she tenderly sang “Little Lamb.” Jillian recalls Natalie being terribly nervous beforehand, “and Mervyn had to tell her, ‘Everything’s gonna be fine.’ He comforted her in telling her that exactly what she was feeling was exactly what was needed for that scene.”
Natalie brought all the pathos of her lost childhood to the song, touching Jillian. “Because it was such a plaintive little song. You know: ‘I wonder how old I am, do you think I’ll get my wish, little lamb, little lamb, I wonder how old I am.’ And then the little breath that she took at the end—’little lamb…’—on a sustained note, and the way her voice kind of trailed off and slightly, almost very delicately, broke off.”
Jillian could sense “there was so much more behind that. You could feel the depths from where she was bringing it. She was very childlike, and I could tell she was calling up certain things, like what comes earlier:
Little cat, little cat, and why do you look so blue
When somebody pets you? Or is it your birthday, too?”
“I think she had to come to grips that she was a used child star who missed out on a childhood,” Lana said later of Natalie’s experience on Gypsy. “The resentment toward my mom for all the pushing and the long hours and the this and the that.”
Watching from the wings, as she had since Natalie was six, on Tomorrow Is Forever, stood Mud, fixing her compelling gaze on her star, unfazed by the tear in her daughter’s voice singing “Little Lamb,” or the anguish behind her eyes.
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