Natasha

by Suzanne Finstad

  Privately in deep despair, Natalie went through daily psychoanalysis with Dr. Lindon. Pollack remembers “seeing her blue Mercedes dart away at lunchtime, and come back afterwards, and the back of her dress would be all wrinkled from lying down on the couch.” He knew “she worried about being an actress and being single and getting to be thirty years old and not having a child… she wanted children badly.”

  At Christmas, Natalie suffered a blow when early reviews of Inside Daisy Clover came out prior to its February release. Critics praised the performances but demeaned the picture as a “failure,” a “not-bad idea gone wrong,” diminishing Natalie’s hopes that her poignant portrayal of Daisy would lead to the Oscar she needed to validate her artistic talent, and wanted as the ultimate symbol of stardom.

  Pollack soothed his leading lady through the remaining weeks of This Property Is Condemned. Thirty-three years later, with the wisdom of experience, he would say:

  It’s very rare to meet an actor or an actress who doesn’t have a very neurotic side, and sometimes that neurosis is a big part of what gets transformed in their work. I had a teacher once who said that talent was a kind of liquefied trouble.

  Natalie wasn’t neurotic in the sense that she made trouble on the set, but she was a very emotional young lady. She was really Russian to the core, and had that sort of Russian sense of tragedy. Sobbing, and the sort of conventional attitude you get from Dostoesvky.

  There was a fragility in her, and the emotions were very close to the surface: scratch her and get to an emotional color right away. There’s something breathless about her, and you feel it, you can feel a kind of quivering just below the surface, a very appealing and vulnerable part of her. She had it in person. I’ve only seen that color twice in actresses. In her, and years ago, I sat at a dinner table with Elizabeth Taylor, and she had the same thing. There was a kind of breathless vulnerability. You want to say, “It’s going to be okay.”

  And Natalie had that quality, along with this volatile emotionalism.

  During the Christmas season, Natalie lost her long-time secretary, Mona Clark, who got married. She replaced her with an affable Englishman named Tony Costello, the son of her live-in housekeeper of several years, Frances Helen McKeating, whom she called “Mac.” Costello joined his mother at Natalie’s mansion, coincidentally ushering a “British” phase into her life. That December, she was introduced to Michael Caine, who took her on a few casual dates, a diversion from her increasing depression.

  Natalie’s deepest emotional connection was with the solidly married Sydney Pollack, who plainly “adored” her, recalls her secretary-in-residence, Costello. When filming on This Property Is Condemned came to an end toward late January, Natalie no longer had the character of Alva to inhabit, or Pollack and her movie family to provide emotional support, leaving her alone with her demons.

  “I was aware that something very bad happened, just right before I was to do the dubbing, where you come in and do the looping of the voice for the picture,” remembers Pollack. “Because there was a period of time when I was not able to reach her to try to schedule this. I knew that something had happened, I knew she’d been hospitalized. And there was a rumor around that she’d taken some pills… I heard from her girlfriend, who was Norma Crane, that she had been very upset. I didn’t ever know if it was a real serious attempt, or if it was one of those dramatic attempts.”

  Costello reveals it was his mother, Mac, Natalie’s live-in housekeeper, who called Norma Crane after finding Natalie overdosed, characterizing it as “a bid for attention. She was on Valium and Librium and God knows what else. She kept a good supply on hand.” Mac was also present for Natalie’s suicide attempt at the end of The Great Race, when she began to put a single gardenia, Natalie’s favorite flower, in a shallow bowl beside her bed. “Most of the occasions were quietly hushed up. My mother would never discuss any details, even to me. My mother did say to me that all of the attempts were for attention and not in earnest, except for one occasion when Natalie cut herself, which was probably deep depression.”

  Costello, who considered Natalie “delightful,” did not believe she wanted to die, “She loved life too much. She was a brave woman.” He and his mother, Mac, kept the overdose in early 1966 under wraps. “Her family had no idea. It was call a friend, come on over, discreetly head to the doctor. When in doubt, call Norma.”

  Norma Crane, who had a brief, long-distance marriage to New Yorker Herb Sargent, lived across the freeway from Natalie and was frequently around, recalls Costello, who saw her skinny-dip with Natalie, possibly the only time Natalie went in her kidney-shaped pool. Scott Marlowe, who had introduced Crane to Natalie, felt, “Natalie, in a sense, used Norma as a mother—the mother she never really had. That’s how the relationship evolved—neither one really saying that was the reason, but it was. Norma was a very loving person and it fulfilled them, each for each other.”

  Natalie’s overdose catalyzed her into drastic changes that winter, orchestrated by her analyst, whom she hoped could help her resurrect Natasha, the self she had lost at six to “Natalie Wood.”

  “It was mainly a matter of getting to the point where I could say, ‘Hey, I’m not such a bad person to hang out with.’ I had a lot of monkeys to get off my back.”

  At Dr. Lindon’s direction, Natalie banned Mud from her house on Bentley. Maria’s only contact with her daughter that winter was a package of publicity photos for fans that Mud received from Costello each week, to autograph as Natalie Wood.

  Fahd’s visits to the house were restricted, and when he came, Natalie locked the bar. “She just didn’t like to see her father when he was drinking,” Costello declares. “When her father called, she would say, ‘Have you been drinking?’ ” Costello never saw Natalie drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and she became almost militant about alcohol. “She did not approve of my drinking.”

  Natalie and her analyst came up with the idea she audit night classes at UCLA, taking subjects she was interested in as a child. By an odd irony, one of her first assignments in her English Literature class was Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Natalie would recall, “That carried me right back to the classroom scene in Splendor in the Grass, where the teacher was reading the same poem.”

  Typically, she went to extremes, listening to classical music by Sibelius “until I liked it,” quoting Prufrock, reading Thoreau, Kafka and Erich Fromm, studying art, collecting paintings by Bonnard, Courbet and Matisse, donating artifacts to UCLA. Hollywood columnists satirized Natalie, designating early 1966 as her “culture-vulture period,” missing the point that she was trying to learn, not impress; as her friend Robert Blake observed, “For Natalie it was life or death.”

  “I really didn’t know how to be, other than acting,” she reflected. “I didn’t really know what pleased me. I sort of had to figure all that out.” Her secretary’s 1966 memory of Natalie, at home, is curled up, lost in a book, or listening to music. The articles about her in movie magazines then featured Natalie posing in her house, showing off rooms she decorated herself. She developed an obsession to star in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about a girl who had lived in an imaginary world struggling to achieve reality with the help of a psychiatrist, another character that mirrored her life. It was the first of several projects related to mental illness that would captivate Natalie, another being actress Frances Farmer’s memoir, Will There Really Be a Morning?

  Natalie’s epiphany, in analysis, was that “Natalie Wood” may have craved stardom, but she always desired a family, the dream denied her when Mud banished Jimmy, forging their pact to make Natalie Wood a star. Her constant refrain was, “It took me ten years of analysis to help me find what I wanted.” When she talked to Olga now, Natalie would tell her married sister, who had three boys and an insurance broker husband who adored her, “You’re the lucky one.”

  That March, Natalie re-met an analytical young actor who aspired to write plays, named Henry Jaglom, with w
hom she became intrigued in November, after an introduction at a summer party in Malibu. Jaglom, who studied with Strasberg and viewed Hollywood warily, fascinated Natalie as the sort of artistic maverick she had admired since Dean and Marlowe; while Natalie Wood, the movie star, resisted.

  Jaglom witnessed the schism in Natalie’s personality early in their affair. When they were at her home, “she was this sweet, lovely girl—open and vulnerable and probing and curious.” If they went out in public, he noticed, she would put on her bracelet, and “she became somebody else. Sort of fake and formal, and had this smile.”

  As “this unemployed actor kid” with strong political opinions, Jaglom was alternately excited and repelled by the “glittering, glowing, jeweled unreality” of the Old Hollywood parties Natalie was invited to attend, with guests like Rosalind Russell, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, Cary Grant, Van Johnson. He encouraged Natalie, who was only twenty-seven, to seek a younger crowd, visit The Actors Studio West, smoke pot. “Which, at that time, shocked Natalie. I actually introduced her to pot. Her reaction was the same as my mother: ‘It didn’t do anything.’ I didn’t smoke a lot of dope, it’s just that I was so anti-drinking at that point. I remember parties at Dean Martin’s house, dinner parties, and they all got totally loaded, and it was boring and stupid. And it was compounded by the fact that nobody paid attention to the fact that there was a war. They were talking about tennis games, and cutlery.”

  The two had an intense, “push-pull” romance, with Jaglom imploring Natalie to reject Penelope, a glossy romantic comedy that he warned her would be “another Sex and the Single Girl.” Natalie’s decision to accept the role—for $750,000, the use of a white Rolls-Royce, and thirty-five lavish Edith Head costumes—was a signal that the Maria aspect of Natalie’s personality would be dominant, and of the futility of her relationship with the avant-garde Jaglom.

  One night, Jaglom confronted Natalie about the way she behaved in public, discovering an astonishing thing. “She said there was her, and there was ‘The Badge.’ ” The Badge was “Natalie Wood,” her star persona. “She would say, ‘I’m putting on The Badge,’ which was her movie star role. She talked about it as if it wasn’t her. We went to a movie theater once and I got in line, and she said, ‘Well, we don’t have to get in line. Watch. I’ll just use ‘The Badge.’ Walked to the front, walked in line—I felt really weird! I was still in my sixties sensibility then.”

  Natalie eventually became embarrassed by Jaglom’s rebel attitude at Hollywood events. “She’d say, ‘Why’d you have to say this to So-and-So?’ ” Not only was part of Natalie drawn to that world of Old Hollywood stars, noticed Jaglom, she also could not handle confrontation. “Natalie hated that, hated it, because I would inevitably get into some sort of tension. Her hatred of tension, any kind of tension—it was unbelievable.”

  Lana traced this to their experience as children, having to escape to neighbors’ houses when a drunken Fahd chased Mud with a gun. In 1966, Jaglom wrote this about Natalie in his journal, observations that would take on greater meaning after her drowning: “She turns off cold if there is any unpleasant vibration within her sensory reach. If it comes to a head between two other people, she cries. If it happens between her and somebody else, she stabs.” Jaglom further noticed, that summer, how Natalie had an inability to relax, carrying her tension between her eyes. “There was a frown there, and I used to rub it and say, ‘Okay, let’s try to relax …’ And she thought it was funny, and then got annoyed, of course.”

  Jaglom’s ill-mannered behavior at Natalie’s A-list events made him “the bad boy” to her Hollywood friends. “They thought I was obnoxious, and bad for her.”

  That spring, Natalie and Jaglom spent a long weekend in Palm Springs, where he noticed “a white car following us, driven by a goon.” When they got back to Natalie’s house on Bentley, they discovered it was someone sent by Sinatra. “The phone rang, and Roz Russell was on the phone. And Natalie did what she always did, which was whisper, ‘Come here!’ and motioned for me to get on. And then I hear Roz Russell warning her that Frank is very concerned about me, and she’s checking to make sure that Natalie is okay. And she got all the wrong information—that I was some street kid who did drugs.”

  Jaglom decided not to go out with Natalie in public anymore, frustrated by her Hollywood lifestyle and by her alter ego, The Badge. “I finally just said to Natalie, ‘Look, I don’t want to go to these huge things where everybody talks about nothing.’ ” He moved into her house for a few weeks to write, where he had a strange encounter with Sinatra, whom Mud, by phone, was encouraging Natalie to marry. “I remember going downstairs and saying to Sinatra, ‘Natalie’ll just be five minutes.’ Then he’d look at me, thinking, ‘Is he a homosexual or something?’ He couldn’t quite figure it out.” When Jaglom offered Sinatra a drink, “he said, ‘I know where the bar is!’ Very adolescent, like a kid who had a thing for her.”

  According to Costello, Natalie was rejecting Sinatra, because he was then involved with her friend Mia Farrow. His continuing surveillance and protection of Natalie even extended to Lana, who remembers a Sinatra employee following her through Europe. Composer Leslie Bricusse, who cowrote the title song for Penelope and was a friend to Natalie and Sinatra, knew there was “a little ring-a-ding” between them, analyzing Sinatra’s behavior toward Natalie as vintage Frank. “He was like a huge father figure, he was a great taker-carer of people… and I think probably, the other part of Frank, is that he was probably keeping his options warm with Natalie.”

  Sinatra, Jaglom, and Michael Caine were only three of Natalie’s “boys of 1966,” as Costello called them. She also reportedly received a car as a gift from millionaire Del Coleman, spent a week in New York with actor Stuart Whitman during location shooting for Penelope, received ardent calls from author William Peter Blatty, and dated a handsome young lawyer named David Gorton, whom she met at UCLA as part of a Career Day panel. “Anyone who came in contact with her fell in love with her,” recalls Costello, including himself, by the way “she made you want to protect her.”

  Gorton, who had never been around a movie star, was surprised to find Natalie a little nervous. “In a way, it was charming, because rather than being arrogant, she seemed more just like a normal person.” They spent a weekend on a yacht off Catalina, talking, ironically, about their “shared fear of drowning.” It was Natalie who suggested the excursion. “On a boat like that, we felt pretty safe. I don’t think either of us would have gone out on a dinghy.” Gorton didn’t expect their relationship to go further, sensing Natalie “needed somebody a little more sensitive and with more presence.”

  None of the men in Natalie’s life, nor anyone in connection with Penelope, were aware of an overdose she had that summer, though director Arthur Hiller recalls, “There was an insecurity. And you had to be daddy, pat her on the back, sometimes slap her wrist. I was almost like father-and-child with her. It makes sense looking back and looking forward… I had to be daddy.”

  “The attempt in the summer of ’66 was discovered by my mother,” recalls Costello. “And she made a phone call, I don’t know who to, but I would say Dr. Lindon, Paul Ziffren, Mart, or Norma. I was out for the night and knew nothing until the following day.”

  Lana heard about the suicide attempt from a catatonic Maria, who asked her to take clothes to the hospital for Natalie. Mud was barred. When Lana arrived, she could hear Natalie and Dr. Lindon shouting. Natalie told her, “I didn’t want to live.”

  In the years after her drowning, the Natalie Wood lore would assign the blame to Warren Beatty for her suicide attempt during Penelope, based on a conversation between Lana and Mart Crowley. Lana recalls Crowley, who was not fond of Beatty, telling her that he heard the “raised voices” of Natalie and Beatty before she overdosed, implying that something Beatty said provoked Natalie to try to kill herself.

  Tony Costello, whose mother found Natalie after her overdose and who lived at Bentley, remembers her blaming Dr. Lindon. “She w
as ranting and raving at the hospital, shouting and cursing at her therapist.” Costello never heard a word about Beatty. “This was a very tough summer for Natalie. Property was a stinker and she knew Penelope would flop, so her self-esteem was at a low point.”

  Beatty was around Natalie that summer, hoping to coax her into playing Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde, his pet film project, which she resisted. Natalie was so friendly with Beatty that she and Jaglom double-dated with him and a Bolshoi ballerina named Maya Plisetskaya in June, with Natalie acting as a translator for Beatty and his Russian girlfriend. Jaglom, whose 1966 journal recorded his contact with Natalie, recalls her as “joking and comfortable” with Beatty throughout the summer.

  In 1968, Beatty spoke fondly of Natalie in an interview, mentioning his last conversation with her about costarring as Bonnie to his Clyde, revealing nothing to suggest an argument. “We met at her house, and she kept on taking phone calls while I tried to tell her about the picture. I guess I wasn’t too persuasive; at that point I wasn’t getting a lot of offers and Natalie was riding the crest of her career. Well, it didn’t take long to see she wasn’t interested in doing a picture with me. Besides, she figured the idea didn’t have a chance.”

  In later years, Natalie would say that she turned down Bonnie and Clyde because it was filming in Texas and she couldn’t be apart from her analyst, a decision she would regret. “I loved the script and I loved the part,” she said in 1969, “but I had personal reasons. I didn’t want to go to Texas on location and well, Warren and I are friends, but working with him had been difficult before.”