“I didn’t dream it,” I remember thinking to myself. “This was real. My mom, her love for my dad and for me, our house, our happiness, it all existed.”
After that first visit, I made countless trips back to the storage unit. A regular pilgrimage of sorts. I entered the space, and, for a few hours, time stopped moving forward. My mother’s belongings were so distinctly hers, radiating everything that I loved and missed about her. In some strange way, I felt as if she had been patiently waiting all those years, like Sleeping Beauty, for someone to come and awaken her memory. Had she been hoping for me to come and rediscover her?
During those hours in the unit, memories long ago pushed away surged to the front of my mind. There were moments when I found myself overcome by a sadness so all-consuming that I wondered if I had made a mistake ever coming here. Leaving the building, I would put on dark glasses to mask the hot tears brimming in my eyes. My car was usually parked close by. I knew as soon as I opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat, I could let go and cry. What a relief that was. Glendale is about forty-five minutes from my home in Venice. Those emotional drives were part of my journey—my journey back to her.
I began to arrange the pieces of my mother’s life, the stories of my childhood, the photos of our family, our home movies, the letters she saved, the datebooks where she recorded the details of our days. I made a gallery wall of sorts in my mind. These are the pieces that make me the person that I am.
PART 1
With
Chapter 1
Natalie and Natasha at home on North Bentley Avenue, 1971.
My first memory is an awareness of comfort and love, a feeling of being held in the cocoon of my mother’s embrace. All is right with the world. I can see her face above me, her velvet brown eyes, doe-like, smiling down at me. Her dark hair falls in my face in soft waves as she bends down to kiss me. The unmistakable scent of her gardenia perfume. Her sweetly musical voice she uses just for me, “Hello, my little Natooshie, I love you,” the sound of it sighing slightly upward. These are my earliest sensations.
My mother loved to sing, and I loved to listen. At night, when she tucked me into bed—or anytime I was tired or upset—she sang a lilting Russian lullaby called “Bayushki Bayu.” Later, I learned the song was about a wolf that comes in the night and drags little babies out of their beds and into the forest. My mom’s parents were Russian immigrants and she had grown up hearing the language all around her. She could speak it a little, although not fluently, but when she sang to me, the sounds seemed to come to her naturally. Other times, when we were driving in the car, she sang “Frère Jacques” or “My Favorite Things” or a silly song called “Fried Ham.”
When I picture my mother during the days of my childhood, she isn’t dressed up for a party or working on a movie set. She’s at home, in her favorite white cotton nightgown with the pink or blue rosettes, or wearing soft, gauzy dresses in Indian printed fabrics, or down by the pool with a caftan thrown over her bikini. Her skin is tawny and lightly freckled. Her hair is tied back. She rarely wore much makeup, maybe a dab of gloss on her lips. If people came over, she would do her eyes, but even then, makeup wasn’t a form of armor, just a natural extension of her routine, like brushing her teeth or putting on her perfume.
Her hands were pale and slender, with long, delicate fingers that always glinted with a fresh French-tip manicure. Mommie not only spoke with her hands, fluttering them like butterflies to express her meaning and mood, but she was forever touching me with a loving caress. If we were in the same room, her smooth hands would be stroking my forehead, playing with my hair, brushing gently against my face. Ruby and sapphire rings adorned her fingers like Christmas tree lights, her gold bangles and charm bracelets tinkling as she moved.
On her left wrist she wore a larger gold or silver bracelet, more like a cuff, to camouflage an injury she’d gotten as a child while working on the film The Green Promise. I knew that my mom had been working as an actress since she was a little girl and that in one of her movies, she had to run across a wooden footbridge that was supposed to collapse when she got to the other side. Instead, the bridge caved in too early, while my mom was still on it, and she broke her wrist. The bone had never been set properly and so she wore the cuff on that arm. “I have this horrible bump on my wrist and I like to keep it covered,” she used to say. I never thought the bump was that terrible. I liked it. It was part of her.
My mother named me Natasha. Before Hollywood renamed her Natalie Wood, she had been Natasha Gurdin. She was Big Natasha, and I was Little Natasha. We were Natasha. She was Mommie and I was her “Natooshie.” She also called me “Natashinka,” or her pet name for me, her “petunia.”
For as long as I can remember, people told me I took after her.
“You look just like your mother when she was a little girl,” friends and even strangers said.
“Natasha, you’re just like me,” my mom repeated, taking my face in her hands, smiling.
We did closely resemble each other, especially as children. Aside from a few slight differences—her eyes were larger, while mine were more almond-shaped—we were both petite, elfin brunettes with the same turned-up nose, tall forehead (although mine was taller than hers), and high cheekbones.
The first time I saw my mother in a movie was a TV broadcast of Miracle on 34th Street one Christmas. I was about four or five. I remember sitting cross-legged in front of the screen while my mom stood behind me buzzing with proud excitement, watching me watching her on TV. In the film, she played Susan Walker, a little girl who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, even when she meets him. After each scene, my grown-up mom looked at me expectantly, to see how I was reacting. Was I smiling? Was I laughing? Was I scared? “That’s me when I was your age,” she told me. “See how much you look like me?” This little black-and-white girl shooting skeptical looks at Santa Claus did resemble me. I remember getting up and walking behind the television set to see how she managed to get in there. Was the girl on the TV me or was she my mother? Once Mommie explained it to me, I tried to hold these strange slivers of conflicting information together in my mind. This is Mommie when she was little, thirty years ago. She looks more like me than Mommie, but it’s not me. It’s her.
Besides our looks, we mirrored each other in temperament. We were both readers who loved to curl up with a book. My mother had gotten hooked on books as a child when she was working on movie sets. For her, reading was a way to refresh herself in between scenes and setups. As soon as I learned to read, books became my reset button as well. If a lot of people were at our house or a playdate had lasted too long, I took myself up to my room and crawled into bed with my book. Other times, Mommie would read to me as I sat in her lap: Russian fairy tales, Caldecott’s fairy tales, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wizard of Oz, stories by Dr. Seuss, or one of my favorites, Rapunzel, the tale of the beautiful princess locked in a high tower. She once gave me a copy of her favorite book, The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, inscribing it with a beloved, often quoted line from the book: “Dear Natasha, remember: ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’ ”
We both loved to bathe, the feeling of the water and bubbles on our skin, the wrapping up of ourselves in soft towels afterward. I was always welcome to come into her bathroom when she was in the tub, to ask her a question or try to make her laugh. Mommie would be lying there, bubbles up to her neck, as she read a book or talked on the phone, the long, curly telephone cord resting on the frothy soapsuds. She loved telephones and we had one in almost every room. The phones seemed to like my mother too because they were always ringing, and she was forever talking and laughing into a receiver. She had the most delightfully uninhibited mix of a giggle and a guffaw that could be heard throughout the house, impossible to avoid and completely infectious.
We were both fond of order, tidiness, structure. As a child, I actually enjoyed straightening up my room. I would observe my moth
er fussing with the heights of books in our bookshelves, repositioning them so they stood more aligned, and then I would imitate her in my bedroom, lining up all my stuffed animals and porcelain dolls in a row on my bed and bookshelves, arranging them from highest to lowest.
We looked so much alike and had so much in common. Where did the mother end and the child begin? We were so completely connected—and she was so sharp and perceptive—that I sometimes believed she could see right into my mind. She could anticipate my needs, those times when I was on the verge of a tantrum or meltdown, and would take me for a rest or sing me a song. Sometimes all it took was a hug from her and I would feel calm again.
* * *
I was born at Cedars of Lebanon in Hollywood on September 29, 1970. It was a Tuesday. That day, my mother wrote in her small spiral-bound datebook, where she recorded all the details of her daily life: “Natasha born 9:11 p.m. 6lb. 8 ounces.” It was an easy labor. Only six hours, then one push and out I came. Later she wrote in a letter to my godmother, the actress Norma Crane, that I had my father Richard Gregson’s legs and dimple, and a combination of both of their noses: “A small, tender toughie.” In a photo of my mother leaving the hospital a couple days after my birth, she is a vision of beauty—beaming, her famously expressive eyes painted to perfection, holding me in her lap in the front seat of my British dad’s brown Mercedes. No car seat or seat belt back then to keep me safe, just my mother’s loving arms. My father once told me that during the first few months of my life, my mother hardly ever put me down. “You two adored each other,” he recalled. “She was like a panther, ready to spring if anyone said anything about you which she didn’t like.”
I know about these early months of my life because my mother captured every detail in my baby book, which was bound with the same smooth ivory cover and embossed with the same gold lettering as the binding on her film scripts. She called it Natasha’s Book. My baby book reports that my first distinct words were “ha ha.” After that, I began adding new words to my vocabulary: “Mama” and “good girl.”
My parents separated when I was eleven months old. I don’t have any memories from the time they were together, and perhaps as a result, I have always had a hard time picturing them as a couple. My father was an Englishman, reserved and levelheaded. My mother was the complete opposite, all feeling and passion. In hindsight, their separation seems inevitable. At the time, it must have been devastating for both of them.
My parents met in LA in the mid-1960s, at a dinner party given by a PR company. My mother was at the height of her fame, having already starred in some of her most iconic adult roles, as Deanie Loomis in Splendor in the Grass, Maria in the movie version of the musical West Side Story, and Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy. She had three Academy Award nominations to her name. She was a sharp conversationalist, and she could be a little intimidating. My dad was “an English top dog,” as he put it, a well-dressed, elegant man with almond-shaped hazel eyes and prematurely gray hair. Born in India and raised in England, he was evacuated during the war and sent to boarding school in Canada. He began his career in London, working for a literary agency in the film and TV rights department and later established himself as a Hollywood agent. I’m sure my mother was drawn to his intelligence and charm, as well as his confidence. He was interested but didn’t fawn over her. That evening, she was smoking a menthol cigarette through a long, black plastic holder. “A woman of your beauty and style and distinction should have a jade holder,” he said. “I’ll buy you one.” And that’s how it started.
Soon they were spending all their time together, going to parties and to the Daisy nightclub in Beverly Hills. He repeatedly said, “Let’s get married,” and she repeatedly said, “No.” She was reluctant to rush into a commitment. My father had already been married once and had three children, Sarah, Charlotte, and Hugo, with his first wife, Sally. My mother was drawn to all three of his kids, relishing the potential role of stepmother. Finally, she went to visit him on the set of the movie Downhill Racer in Wengen, Switzerland. Richard was producing the film for his client and friend Robert Redford, who was shooting his scenes on the slopes. On a day off from filming, my parents went skiing and my mother had a fall, fracturing a bone in her leg. She was back at the hotel, elevating her plaster-encased leg and resting in bed, when she said she wanted to have a talk with my dad. Something (other than a cracked bone) must have shifted for her.
“How come you never ask me to marry you anymore?” she said.
“Because you always say no,” he replied.
“Ask me again and I’ll say yes.”
They got married at the Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles on May 30, 1969. Robert Redford was best man. Edith Head designed my mother’s white-and-pale-yellow silk gown, basing it on a dress worn by an eighteenth-century Russian princess. My mother wore a white-and-yellow flower-decorated tiara with ribbons flowing in her hair. At the time, she was more than ready to settle down and become a parent. Her movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had become one of the highest-grossing films of 1969. She had points in the movie (in other words, she got a percentage of the film’s gross income), and had made a lot of money as a result. The following year it was nominated for four Academy Awards. She was in a good place to put her career on hold and focus on starting a family.
According to my father, I was conceived in the Oscar Wilde Suite at L’Hotel in Paris on New Year’s Eve 1969–70. Who knows if that is true, but soon after, my mom discovered she was pregnant and the Gregsons settled down in a white brick house my mother owned on North Bentley Avenue in Bel-Air. My dad would tell me she repeatedly stated during her pregnancy, “I’m having a girl and her name is Natasha,” even though there was no sonogram or ultrasound technology in those days. Somehow she knew. She didn’t give me a middle name. I later asked her why. She told me, “I thought Natasha was such a beautiful name, it stood on its own.”
After I was born, right away, my parents clashed over their differing styles of parenting. My dad’s wealthy British mother had been remote and non-maternal, the polar opposite of how my mother had been raised. Her Russian mother—my grandmother Maria—loved her daughter with a passionate sense of eternal devotion, and Mommie lavished me with the exact same degree of focus and attention. My mother had gone through a difficult transition to adulthood. She had been a working actor since the age of six, cosseted and accompanied everywhere by her mother, who also served as her manager. Growing up in a world of Hollywood fantasy and illusion, where she was adored, not just by her overprotective mom, but by the millions of Americans who were her fans, it was hard for my mother to figure out who she wanted to be. Everyone has to figure out their identity as they shift from childhood into the adult years, but my mother had to do it while watched by gossip magazines, studio heads, her adoring fans, and her parents, who monitored her every move.
In her early twenties, she started seeing a therapist and began her long journey to discovering who she was, independent of the image she projected on the movie screen. It wasn’t easy. My father later confessed to me that, early in their marriage, he didn’t understand my mom’s moods, those times when rages and nameless fears would apparently consume her. He also derided her dependence on psychoanalysis. “At that time, the English thought LA brain scrapers were a joke,” he explained. By the time I knew her, my mother had benefited from a lot more therapy and from a stable marriage. To me, she never seemed anything less than wholly secure, a woman who knew who she was and what she wanted.
But it was different in those early days of my life. Even during the pregnancy, her love for me had bordered on obsessive, and she shut out her husband so much that he later joked, “It was as if the Immaculate Conception had come to Hollywood.” Every ounce of the dedication she had previously reserved for her acting career she now aimed at the life growing inside of her. My dad felt pushed aside and irrelevant. Once I was born, I took over completely as the main object of her affection. My father dealt with feeling negle
cted by starting an affair with my mother’s secretary. My dad was by nature a stable, family-oriented kind of guy. If my parents hadn’t gotten married at the height of the sexual revolution—when having a fling was all the rage—I find it difficult to imagine that he would have cheated on my mother so blatantly. But that’s exactly what he did. My mom was apoplectic when she found out. She kicked my dad out of the Bentley house, then she called her beloved older sister, Olga, and her best friend Mart Crowley and asked them both to come with us to Europe. We left on the SS Raffaello ocean liner. Mart recalls the trip as “a nightmare.” He says my mother was painfully thin. She was so distraught she wasn’t eating enough, and he was concerned for her health. They docked in Naples and flew to the island of Sardinia. Here, she spent a lot of time resting and recovering, while Mart and Olga took care of me.
After we returned home to America, my mother and I went to live in the house on North Bentley Avenue in Bel Air. Only one week after we returned from Sardinia, she threw my first birthday party in the backyard. In her datebook, she scribbled the names of the five little friends who attended my party from noon to 3:30 p.m. Daddy visited me at 4 p.m. For the first several months after she left my father, she allowed him brief visits but kept him on the outskirts of our world. She even kept her parents at a distance. She was my only caretaker for a while, and she had no intention of sharing me.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 2