Ironically, it was a role that might have brought Natalie the artistic validation she was seeking. Her rejection of the gritty, realistic Bonnie and Clyde was a further indication she was hesitant to veer too far outside the Hollywood mainstream and the studio system that weaned her, Mud’s concept of what movie acting was all about. Natalie was being called “the last great Studio star,” a symbol of an era that was fading, superseded by independent filmmakers, and actors and actresses who eschewed glamour. At the same time, she still wanted to do serious work, as she had since meeting James Dean, breaking out in hives from playing the flighty Penelope.
Earlier that spring, prior to Penelope, the Harvard Lampoon organization named Natalie the “worst actress of last year, this year and next,” two months after she received a Golden Globe Award as World Film Favorite, illustrating that her stardom had eclipsed the perception of Natalie as a serious actress. She seemed amused by the Lampoon’s “Natalie Wood Award,” which impressed Jaglom. “She got it for the joke it was.” Natalie, tutored by the shrewd Maria in the art of publicity, came up with an inspired idea. “I decided to accept it in person, and delivered an Academy Award acceptance sort of speech, telling them I was moved to tears.” Her clever joke turned an embarrassment into a triumph. She appeared on What’s My Line? while she was on the East Coast, where panelist Bennett Cerf, a Harvard man, pronounced Natalie “the best sport in Hollywood.” The Lampoon Award would become a Harvard/Hollywood tradition, a tongue-in-cheek honor.
After her overdose, Natalie continued to be friends with Warren Beatty, making it even less likely he had anything to do with her suicide attempt. In fact, she would invite him to her next wedding.
Natalie was so adept at playing “Natalie Wood,” the glamorous, effervescent star, her attempted suicide that summer stunned even Lana. “She never seemed suicidal to me,” states her sister. “Ever. But Natalie was also very controlling of her feelings. That was why she needed analysis. She needed one avenue where she didn’t worry about her makeup. She spent an awful lot of time not being able to be exactly as she was.” Natalie’s “puffy, scared” face in the hospital, stripped of cosmetics, “didn’t seem real” to her sister, accustomed to seeing the mask of Natalie Wood.
So effective was Natalie at putting on The Badge, Sinatra, who dated her throughout her three suicide attempts and had known her from the time she was fifteen, would remember her as “laughing all the time,” saying, after her death, “I have never known her to be depressed. What used to amaze me about her was a wonderful warmth and sweetness all the time, I don’t care what conditions prevailed.”
Only an inner circle saw the real Natalie. Costello, who lived in her house, comments, “She put on a great front as being independent and a savvy lady, which she was, but she had a lot of demons… she did need constant support.” Costello was startled to find out, during Penelope, how uncertain Natalie was about her talent as an actress. “Lila Kedrova had a small part, and honest to God, Natalie was afraid that she was going to be upstaged, she was so in awe of Kedrova. Natalie knew she was a star, but she was unsure about being an actress. When you’re unsure in your own profession, and yet you’re a goddess, it’s really got to be tough.”
In the days after her overdose, Natalie talked to Jaglom about her desire to be “real,” the dream she had nurtured since childhood, when she longed for friends at a birthday party, enrolling in junior high to blend in. Jaglom remembers her, that summer, as “searching.” She appeared to be “yearning for more, very insecure and very committed to figuring it all out, and figuring out how to be happy.” Natalie occasionally invited her parents to dinner, against her psychiatrist’s advice. Jaglom, who was present, saw how “it would always be very complicated and hard for her to have them around, and yet she somehow wanted to be the good daughter. It would be civil, but there would be a chill. It was clearly very fraught.” Maria, he observed, was deferential to Natalie to the point of obsequiousness. “Her mother’s whole identity was wrapped up with—not Natalie actually, but with ‘Natalie Wood,’ the movie star.”
Jaglom became a quasi-therapist for Natalie, who revealed some of her emotional scars from being a child actress, which always seemed to come back to the trauma of being forced to cry on cue. “Natalie always said, ‘How do you expect me to be normal when I learned that the most attention I could get was the harder I cried? And the harder I cried, the more, technically, I felt sad—and the happier everybody around me was, and how they all loved me.’ So it was very clear that her sadness and her success and pleasure were all mixed up.”
On July 20, toward the end of the Penelope shoot, Norma Crane and Tony Costello gave a surprise twenty-eighth birthday party for Natalie around the blue pool at Bentley, inviting faces from her Hollywood past. “Norma put up the money. It was a stupendous party, out in her garden. When Natalie came home from the studio, B.J. drove her home. As he turned into the big horseshoe drive, we put all the outside lights on.” Once everyone yelled, “Surprise,” Costello sent Natalie upstairs to change into “a beautiful dress that Edith had made for her.”
There is a snapshot taken in the garden of Natalie, obviously moved, standing beside her birthday cake in her Edith Head dress with her eyes closed, smiling with the exuberant joy of a little girl.
One of the guests at the party that night was William Goetz, the producer of Tomorrow Is Forever, the picture that turned Natasha Gurdin into the child star, Natalie Wood. As she would later tell the story, “I remember him standing up and proposing a toast, ‘Here’s to Natalie! I’ve known her since she was five and I named her!’ ” Natalie would poignantly recall an angry voice from the back of the garden, coming from the normally shy Fahd, who disdained Hollywood gatherings. “My father immediately jumped to his feet and said, ‘I knew her before Mr. Goetz, and I named her first.’”
Natalie broke her contract with Warner Brothers that summer, after eleven years as Queen of the Warners lot, agreeing to pay the studio $175,000 to set herself free. That August, after she finished Penelope, she fired her agents, publicists, accountant, business manager and lawyers, drawing a black “x” through each of their faces on the famous Life magazine photo of her at the head of a conference table.
She forced herself to spend an entire night alone in her house, the first time Natalie had not had somebody to hold her hand, or talk her through the post-midnight hours that had frightened her since childhood, when she used to lie awake, afraid she would be kidnapped. The next day, she drove to Dr. Lindon’s office to announce, “I did it! I spent the night with nobody in the house!”
A few days later, Natalie asked Jaglom to drive her to the airport, where she boarded a plane, by herself, to fly to New York. When she arrived at her favorite hotel, the Sherry Netherland, Natalie received a telegram from her inner circle, congratulating her. “It must sound silly except to anyone else who never did anything for herself,” she told Thomas Thompson, “but to me, it was a step-by-step progression to normalcy.” At twenty-eight, she had made an astonishing forty films, and appeared in roughly thirty television productions, over the course of a career spanning a quarter of a century.
She returned to Los Angeles after a few days of shopping in New York, ready to begin a life outside the movies, as the person behind The Badge, Natalie Wood.
As Natasha.
NATALIE HIRED CREATIVE MANAGEMENT Associates, or CMA, to replace the William Morris Agency in August 1966, but her real focus was on finding a husband.
She was then at the height of her infatuation with Englishmen, which had begun with Tom Courtenay the end of 1964, carrying through to Michael Caine. In fall 1966, she tried to launch projects with British actors Alan Bates and Albert Finney, a “crush”; and she began a romance with English actor Richard Johnson, known as a ladies’ man.
That September, she was introduced to another British “Richard,” Richard Gregson, a suave London agent born in 1930, the same year as R.J., with similarly handsome features that, probably not coi
ncidentally, resembled Fahd’s. Gregson had recently established a Hollywood branch of his U.K. agency, partially to distract himself from a complicated divorce in London. One of his clients and a “very close pal,” English composer Leslie Bricusse, a recent friend of Natalie’s, played Cupid.
Bricusse recalls, “Natalie used to come to our house for parties, and she was always alone, and I got the impression she was lonely. And Richard was in the middle of his divorce and he had a bunch of kids in London, and had moved his life to L.A…. so he was wandering around.” The introduction took place at a party at Leslie and Evie Bricusse’s, attended by Natalie’s occasional publicist, Rupert Allan, who would mistakenly be credited with the matchup.
Bricusse had noticed, before setting her up with Gregson, Natalie’s tendency to seek refuge in Mart Crowley and Howard Jeffrey, “to have some gay friends to fall back on, so she had good company, she didn’t have to go out on a ‘date’ per se, she could be with people and yet feel protected.”
Gregson, as Natalie’s secretary Tony Costello observed, “was in the right place at the right time” for Natalie, arriving on the scene during her Anglophile period, when, as Lana put it, “she desperately wanted to have a child.”
Although Natalie later would be quoted as saying she and Gregson looked at each other and “that was it,” Lana remembers helping her sister draw up a list comparing the two Richards—Gregson and Johnson—so Natalie could choose which man to make her husband. “I remember going over all their different qualities, and Natalie said there was only one problem. She said, ‘I’ve slept with Richard Gregson.’ I said, ‘Then you’ve made your decision, haven’t you?’ Because that, to Natalie, meant something.” Gregson himself would refer to Natalie having a “high moral code,” something that would become a critical issue in their relationship.
Bricusse, who knew all parties well, felt that Natalie made a wise choice in the “more stable” Gregson, whom she settled on after a final date with David Gorton at a party on Bentley to which she invited the Bricusses, accompanied by Gregson. “Richard’s very low-key and quiet,” observes Bricusse. “Nice sense of humor, immensely bright, and I think Natalie absolutely adored him, she felt very safe with him. And he was, I think, good for her, because she had been kind of looking around, and I felt from the very beginning that she was a little girl lost, because she looked that part—you know, that face—she looked very much that role, so the relationship firmed up very quickly once they got to know each other.” Sugar Bates, Natalie’s longtime hairdresser, says simply, “She just wanted someone to love her.”
By October, Natalie was at Gregson’s side for the London premiere of This Property Is Condemned, taking up part-time residence at his townhouse in Pimlico, telling reporters she was ready to give up her career to marry Richard and have children.
Neither of Natalie’s sisters considered Gregson to be a great passion, though Costello describes her as “gushing” when they began dating. Olga recalls, “She said at the time that she wanted to have children, and that she wanted to step down. This was her choice. She was ready to be a mother and to live a good life. There must have been love there, to get married, but I don’t think that was a great love of her life.”
Natalie’s comments about Gregson, then, suggest that he was a father figure, someone who took care of business so she could have a private life. “I don’t have to make endless decisions anymore,” she said in one interview. “Richard is a strong man with integrity and good judgment. He assumes most of the burdens that were once mine. I don’t need work as a security blanket anymore. And the thought of going back to six nights of dates every week is quite sad. I don’t think I could go through it again.”
Her new romance with Gregson eased the pain of the reviews for Penelope (“a waste of comedy talent,” “flimsy and ludicrous”), which Natalie read during a trip back to New York from London that November, arriving at JFK in a leopard coat and hat like the movie star she was trained to be.
She spent the next two years patiently waiting for Gregson’s divorce to go through, dreaming of a honeymoon in Russia and of her longed-for child. Between October 1966 and October 1968, Natalie flew back and forth with Gregson from London to Los Angeles to New York, attending plays, dining out, doting on his school-age children, Charlotte, Sarah and Hugo. “I certainly overcame my fear of flying during those two years,” she later told a magazine. “I flew to London about once a month and Richard came here even more often, sometimes just to spend a weekend.” Natalie’s routine was to board the plane, set her watch ahead, and take a sleeping pill, waking up just before landing.
She took French lessons and tennis lessons, studied interior decorating, and enrolled in cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, approaching domesticity with the same perfectionism as she had acting, rejecting roles in Diary of a Mad Housewife and Goodbye Columbus. The only acting project for which Natalie displayed her former passion was to play the schizophrenic teenager in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which she tried, in vain, to produce with Sydney Pollack, who also tried to set her up in a film with Oskar Werner that never materialized, called Very Special People. “I have been working steadily since I was five,” she said later. “I had to have two years of just—just living. Catching up. And I was thrilled to discover that I didn’t have the need to work. There was a time when if I wasn’t working, I felt at a loss.”
Though she no longer had her coterie of attendants, Natalie still presented herself as an old-fashioned movie star, dressing up for her flights to and from London in high glamour, wearing Jackie Onassis oversized sunglasses, a variety of fur coats, and ensembles ranging from chic Yves St. Laurent and Chanel sixties mini-dresses to chocolate brown suede pantsuits, accessorized with bracelets, rings, necklaces and often dangly hoop earrings. She had let her dark hair grow long to please Gregson, and adopted mod sixties makeup, wearing several pairs of false eyelashes and eyeliner, painting individual black lashes below her eyes. On anyone else, the excess would have been garish; somehow, it suited Natalie’s dark Russian beauty and still-girlish face.
One of her teenaged fans in this period, a New Yorker named Diane Wells, used to meet all of Natalie’s flights into JFK or Newark, wait for her to emerge from the Sherry-Netherland, and follow her and Gregson to Broadway shows with a camera. Natalie signed countless autographs and posed endlessly for Wells, even letting the teenager up to her hotel suite to take pictures. “She was an angel,” comments Wells. In the suite, Natalie did whatever the thirteen-year-old asked, pretending to answer the phone, crossing her legs, putting on her sunglasses, taking off her coat while Wells snapped photos—behaving with the same doll-like, eager-to-please wistfulness she had at four, when she sat on Pichel’s lap and entertained him with her song.
Gregson, who was not a celebrity, occasionally became irritated by Natalie’s patience with her fans, tapping his feet while she posed for yet another picture. “My first wife wasn’t a professional,” he said later, “so Natalie was the first big challenge for me. I got very upset at her temper tantrums, I couldn’t cope with her ego. It took me three years to learn.” Natalie once hinted at the same thing, saying, “We both have tempers. We have some stormy fights. There are periods almost as stormy as with Warren. But for now, the void is filled.”
Not everyone in Natalie’s circle approved of Gregson. David Niven, Jr., who remained close to Natalie after their fling in 1965, as did his father, “didn’t see the warmth” in Gregson. “He was a very shrewd, tough agent. You can be ruthless and still have warmth and take off your ruthless hat at the end of the day and be decent.” Natalie’s secretary, Tony Costello, left her employ when she became engaged, as did his mother, Mac. “A lot of us didn’t like Gregson and we all quit.”
Natalie loyally supported her fiancé, hiring him as her agent and recommending him in 1967 to her friend Redford, who recalls, “It was really Natalie who came to me and said, ‘You oughta go with this guy.’ She suggested it, because I wasn’t happy with my ag
ency situation. And she said, ‘Look. Why don’t you go with this guy? He’s a hotshot guy from England. He’s taken the place by storm. He’s really cool. He’s very da-da-da-da…’ I met him, I thought he was suave, I said yes, he became my agent.”
Redford and his wife, Lola, developed what he calls “a good, really good friendship” with Natalie while she was involved with Gregson, spending time together as couples at the Redfords’ Utah ranch. Natalie and Redford talked about appearing in a play together, while he and Gregson discussed producing a movie.
In May of 1968, Gregson closed the L.A. branch of his agency, London International Artists. According to his friend Bricusse, “Richard made a lot of money very quickly. He sold his agency to a bigger agency, and the bigger agency was taken over immediately afterward, so he made a double killing. And I think he then decided to move on and do other things.” One of those things was to form a company with Redford, who wanted to produce and star in a film he admired called Downhill Racer, about a professional skier. “He was a pretty ambitious guy,” Redford states of Gregson. “And we formed a company called Wildwood. And since he was going with Natalie, that put us all in a triumvirate of sorts.”
Gregson and Natalie summered at David Niven, Sr.’s, villa on the Riviera, where they met up with Leslie Bricusse and his wife, Evie, with whom they spent a disturbing afternoon on the Mediterranean. Bricusse remembers, “We took Richard and Natalie out on our Riva speedboat. We were going to St. Tropez, and it was a very, very hot day, and halfway we stopped to have a swim, quite a long way out to sea. It was a beautiful day and the sea was perfectly calm. And we all splashed around, and suddenly Natalie panicked, really panicked, screaming and everything. When you’re out in deep water, it’s dark, the water itself, and I think she was just afraid of the water, and maybe what’s down there, that feeling. Richard and I got her back on the boat, and she was lying on her back, breathing very heavily. When Natalie could talk, she said, ‘I have this dream where I’m going to die in dark water.’”
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