That soon changed. Robert John Wagner (always known to my mom as R.J.) came into my life when I was a little more than a year old and stayed there. By seventeen months, my baby book states, my favorite new word was “R.J.” He was also my favorite new person. Apparently I was constantly saying “R.J.” and kissing his photograph. I don’t remember this. As far as I recall, I have always called him Daddy. Considering how close my mother and I were, I could have easily resented him as an intruder in our world, and yet I never felt that for an instant. His presence made my mom so happy.
To me, he was this sun-kissed man who seemed to radiate warmth. I remember he wore a gold chain around his neck and a gold ID bracelet on his wrist. When he held me, I jingled his chains, and he laughed. In photographs from that time, he’s dressed in denim shirts, silk ascots, flared slacks, or a denim shirt and shorts, and always the gold chains. In 1973, my mom told a reporter about our relationship: “That little girl and that man adore each other so that if I didn’t love them both so much, I think I’d be jealous!” R.J. became a real father to me, treating me just like his own daughter. I soon began to take it for granted that I had not one but two loving dads and I even came up with names for each of them. Daddy Gregson, who had moved back to England, and Daddy Wagner, who lived with us in California and was the constant caring presence in my daily life. It would be some years before I realized that not everyone had the luxury of two fathers.
* * *
When I was still a toddler, we moved to Palm Springs, where R.J. owned a stone-covered house in the Mesa neighborhood up in the foothills. I was still so young, but I have the impression of wide-open spaces, mountain views, and palm trees swaying above me. My mother brought her two Australian shepherd dogs along with us. Their names were Penny and Cricket and they were large shaggy creatures with light eyes; they looked like stuffed animals come to life. As a little girl, I couldn’t get enough of them.
She also brought her parents, my grandparents, Maria and Nick Gurdin. My mother had nicknames for everyone she loved and so she called them Mud and Fahd, short for “Muddah” and “Faddah.” To me, my grandmother was always “Baba,” short for Babushka, and my grandfather “Deda,” short for Dedushka, the Russian words for grandmother and grandfather.
Baba and Deda were often at our house, my grandmother taking care of me when my mom was working or out with my dad. I didn’t like it when Mommie was away from me. I wanted to always be close to her. During this time, she took a role in the TV movie The Affair alongside my dad. Whenever she was away on set, there was my grandmother in the long purple dresses she always wore, making me food, tucking me into bed, attending to my every need. I remember once my grandmother switched on the TV because my parents were appearing on a talk show together. When I saw them there, tiny and trapped in a box, I was so upset, I became inconsolable. I couldn’t understand how they had gotten in there. Baba had to turn off the television set so I would finally calm down.
In one of my earliest memories of my grandmother, I must have been around three years old, and we are in the sun-drenched kitchen of our Palm Springs house. She is making something. She pulls bottles out of the fridge, empties them into a bowl, and with a sharp twist of the whisk, froths the liquid, then pours it into glasses for the two of us. The drink is slightly sour with a hint of sweetness. I sort of like it, but I want to like it more because I want to like what she likes. Later my mom chastises my grandma for giving me beer.
“But, Natalie, I mix with milk,” my grandmother protests in her strong Russian accent. “Makes Natasha’s bones grow strong. You drank when you were little!”
There were always these squabbles, with me caught in the middle. In Palm Springs, I remember we had a swimming pool in the backyard. My mother loved hanging out by the pool. She was not a strong swimmer, and she wanted her daughter to be comfortable and confident in the water. I soon grew to love splashing around in the shallow end, and even holding my breath and sinking to the bottom to fetch my plastic Pokey horse. One day, my grandfather Deda decided to teach me how to swim.
“Come to Deda, Natashinka,” he told me. “I want to give you a hug.” I jumped in his arms. Next, I remember the fleeting feeling of security as he held me, and then, without warning, he dropped me in the deep end. I was plunged underwater and terrified. I think perhaps this was his old-world Russian way of toughening me up. He meant no harm. But Mommie was furious. She jumped in after me, carrying me to safety and calming my fears. As soon as I was on dry land, my mom flashed those intense brown eyes at her father.
“How dare you throw my baby in the pool,” she said. “Get out of my house.”
Before long Deda was forgiven, and my grandparents were invited back again, Baba always staying with me if my parents needed to go out for the evening.
When I turned three and a half, it was decided that I was ready for preschool. Each morning my mother dropped me at the door of the Leisure Loft, a small local nursery school. After she left, I missed her desperately. Why can’t Mommie stay with me? I wondered. “Natasha started preschool,” my mom wrote in my baby book. “She wants mother there ALL THE TIME!” It wasn’t only at preschool that I missed her. At night I didn’t want to sleep in my own bedroom. I’d often tiptoe through to my parents’ room so I could snuggle under the covers with them. My mother had to slowly train me to stay in my own bed.
Oftentimes, when she was out during the day, I’d wait for her, longing to hear our front door creak open, followed by her sweet, familiar voice rising up through the rafters. Her tone lifted an octave when she called out, “Natooshie, Mommie’s home! Where are you?”
I dropped whatever I was doing and raced down the stairs to meet her, her arms and her fragrance enveloping me as I hugged her, clinging so tightly that she used to laugh and say, “You’re trying to kill me!” I just could never get enough of her. To me, our whole house lit up when Mommie walked inside.
My mother was my mirror. When I saw myself reflected in her, it was a self that was bigger and better and brighter. If I ever doubted myself, she was there to fill me with confidence. I am just like her, and she’s okay. So I must be okay.
It also worked the other way around. I knew that I was my mom’s mirror too. If I was okay, then she was okay. Any uncomfortable feelings of my own created discomfort in my mom and I knew that.
In one of my earliest memories, I’m with my godfather, Mart, who is feeding me noodles. My mother is in another room. Somehow, I understand that my mom is feeling sad, which is why she can’t feed me herself. I am spitting the noodles out, enjoying the way they slip through my front teeth. Mart is trying to be patient but I hear the frustration in his voice. I am caught between enjoying the feeling of the slippy noodles and the awareness that someone I like is showing signs of becoming exasperated with me. Where is my mother? I want her to come back in the room. She will not find my noodle-slurping game to be irritating. She will laugh and talk to me in her adoring “just for Natooshie, my little petunia” tone.
But I don’t cry. I know I need to be a happy girl so my mom can be happy too. My success ensures her success. We are like the sweet peas tangled on a fence in the backyard, entwined.
Chapter 2
R.J. and Natalie, with baby Natasha, on the Ramblin’ Rose, on their second wedding day, July 16, 1972.
In the early spring of 1974, life was blooming anew. Roses and gardenias were budding in our Palm Springs backyard, our dog Penny gave birth to a litter of puppies, and my mom went away to the hospital and emerged with a baby.
There’s a home movie of me kissing her pregnant belly, so I’m sure my mom must have explained her pregnancy to me, but I was too young to understand and I don’t have any memories of that time. What I do vividly recall is the shock of suddenly seeing my mom arrive at our house in Palm Springs in an ambulance.
I was allowed to climb up into the ambulance to see her. She was resting on a stretcher and clutching a tiny swaddled bundle close to her chest.
“Nato
oshie, this is your new sister, Courtney, and she’s brought you a present,” my mother announced. I liked presents, but I was suspicious. What was the catch? I unwrapped the package tied up with a ribbon. Inside was a pretty new doll.
“Would you like to hold Courtney?” Mommie asked in a lullaby voice. “She looks so much like you!”
I peeked into the fuzzy blanketed bundle and saw a little sleeping face that looked more like Daddy Wagner to me. Who is this person in my mother’s arms? I’m supposed to be the only one in my mother’s arms!
I hoped we could work out a bargain. Could I keep my doll but send the baby back?
It soon dawned on me that, unlike Penny’s puppies—which we gave away to good homes—Courtney was here to stay.
Now that my parents had two children, they decided to move back to town and settle down in Beverly Hills. We rented a house there while my mom shot the comedy Peeper with Michael Caine, and then a place in Malibu, before moving into a house on North Canon Drive. My stepsister Katie—Daddy Wagner’s daughter from his prior marriage who was six years older than me—lived nearby with her mother and so could easily come to visit us.
Our new white Cape Cod–style two-story house was in the heart of Beverly Hills. Designed by the architect Gerard Colcord, it had dark blue shutters framing the windows and a tall sycamore tree shading the wide, flat front yard with its low picket fence. In the back was an oval pool with turquoise tile. Boughs of bright pink bougainvillea dangled over potted pansies, geraniums, and hibiscus flowers. In the fall, the lemons would ripen from green to yellow on our lemon tree. Bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds hovered year-round.
The house itself was large but not showy. My mom was very involved in the decor. Decorating was not just her favorite hobby; she even ran her own freelance interior design business for a few years—Natalie Wood Interiors—decorating houses for her clients, who were mainly her friends. My mother loved to make statements with bold patterns and colors, particularly her favorite, blue. There was floral-patterned wallpaper covering nearly every wall: blue laurel wallpaper in my parents’ bedroom, a pink-and-green rose pattern in my bedroom, and a motif of red, green, orange, and purple lilies in the hallway. It was as if she wanted to bring her favorite season, spring, inside. She loved when everything was blooming in the garden, and would often be outside, cutting roses and her favorite fragrant white gardenias to arrange in silver vases around the house.
I remember fireplaces in almost every room, with a picturesque, hand-carved marble fireplace in my parents’ bedroom. Heavy dark wood pieces sat alongside wicker furniture and big, upholstered chairs and sofas. Photos of family and friends in silver frames dotted shelves and long tables; on the walls hung framed Chinese needlepoint and works of art. Everything had a connection to someone famous or admired, or to a relative or friend. A Marcel Vertès painting of a ballerina hung in the living room, given to my parents by Jack Warner, my mom’s boss back in her Warner Bros. contract days. Our long travertine coffee table had once been owned by Marion Davies. She had been a famous movie star my dad remembered fondly from his childhood. The word that comes to mind when I think of this time is “bountiful.”
For my mother, having children was a do-over, a chance to raise us in a way she wished she had been raised, to give her daughters the childhood that she had missed. My mother had been working as a professional actress since she was six. She was a wunderkind, balancing her acting work with public appearances, school, ballet, piano lessons, Girl Scouts, and horseback riding. She was also the breadwinner for her family, supporting her parents and her sisters from a very young age. She didn’t stop working her entire childhood. She couldn’t. The prosperity of her family depended on it.
“I never got to have a real childhood,” she used to say, her voice sounding a little sad. “I grew up on studio soundstages.” Or, “I learned how to decorate my home from the sets on my movies.” She used to say she could concentrate on schoolwork only when someone was banging a hammer because she was so accustomed to studying on noisy, bustling movie sets.
The childhood she created for us at the house on Canon Drive was very different. Our home was alive with animals and close friends and family, yet our bedtimes were enforced, we went to regular school, and we kept regular hours. Dinner was on the table at six, and no ifs, ands, or buts, we took showers every night. Above all, we were given time to play and to simply be young, roaming the gardens, lost in our games.
As well as dogs, we had cats, guinea pigs, mice, and birds we kept in shiny cages in the small kitchen adjacent to our playroom. The animals were always having babies, and so then there would be puppies, kittens, and baby guinea pigs as well as tiny mice that appeared one morning in the mouse cage after the mommy mouse escaped and somehow located a daddy mouse. My mother was a true animal lover. She often favored the ugly ones, like the small black Labrador–Jack Russell mix with rotten teeth and bad breath that she adopted from Dr. Shipp’s Animal Hospital. We called him “Siggy,” but his full name was Sigmund, after Freud himself. “I’m naming him Sigmund Freud,” my mom joked, “because everybody needs a good shrink in the house.”
She had a special way of communing with animals. When one of our cats, Maggie or Louise, would saunter by, I would grab at them, holding them awkwardly. They would inevitably wriggle out of my arms, leaving a small scratch or two as they pulled away from my grasp. My mother seemed to know how to pick them up so they were soothed and still, rocking them like babies and talking to them in her most delicate voice. The cats would relax immediately, folding themselves into her embrace, purring contentedly. “How does she do that?” I asked myself.
One day she was in the playroom holding Courtney’s white cockatiel on her finger. I had friends over and we were sitting quietly on the floor, marveling at how the bird stayed there, perched on her extended finger as if drawn to her magnetically. “Hello, beautiful bird,” she cooed in a voice as light as air, stroking the bird gently as we all watched, enraptured. Out of nowhere, our black-and-white cat, Maggie, swooped into the room, leaped toward my mom’s hand, and ate the cockatiel in one swallow! A few white feathers in the air were all that remained. We were completely stunned. My mom’s expression was a cross between wonder, shock, and respect for Maggie’s feline abilities. “R.J.!” she called. “Maggie the cat just ate Courtney’s bird!” My friends and I sat openmouthed, not knowing whether to cry or laugh.
* * *
My mother was stricter than people might imagine a movie-star parent would be with her daughters. Our home atmosphere was casual, but always within the parameters of certain expectations. We knew we had to be polite at all times, be respectful, be well turned out, and stick to the schedule. At home we were not allowed to eat sugary cereals for breakfast or to play when we had homework to do. Our TV watching was monitored. We were taught to always say “please” and “thank you,” and to send thank-you notes for every gift we received. Back then I thought my mother was overly bossy. There was one recurring verbal exchange we had more than any other.
“How come I always have to do what you tell me?”
“Well, I’m the mommy,” she would say. “When you’re the mommy, you can make the rules, but I’m the mommy now, so I get to make the rules.”
That always put an end to the conversation.
Being well groomed and looking our best was also considered important. On special occasions, Courtney and I would be taken to buy velvet or lace dresses from a children’s boutique in Beverly Hills, and Mommie curled our hair with her hot rollers. I remember standing in her bathroom as she put the big, heavy plastic rollers in our straight, baby-fine hair, expertly securing them with long, silver pins. Once we had five or six rollers in our hair we were free to play for ten or fifteen minutes. Inevitably, one or two would slide out and we’d return to my mom’s bathroom so she could put the roller back on the warming stick and redo the curl.
During these early years of my childhood, my mother worked very little as an actress and
mostly stayed home with us. By the time she became pregnant with me, she was thirty-two years old and had been working steadily as an actress for twenty-six years, paying her dues and making her eligible for her pension. Although she took on a couple of projects after I was born, she made a conscious choice to spend time simply raising her family.
In the hot summer months we splashed in the pool, playing Marco Polo, having swim races, and diving for objects at the bottom, my dad shirtless in his swim trunks, golden chains dangling around his neck, my mom wearing a block-printed Indian dress over her bathing suit, her hair in two pigtails, usually held together with colorful elastic pom-poms. She’d sit on a lounge chair and watch my dad and Katie dive off the diving board or do backflips into the pool. Or she’d be in and out of the shallow end with me and Courtney, water wings firmly wrapped around our skinny arms, guiding and encouraging us through the water. At lunchtime, the kids ate grilled cheese sandwiches or bowls of Campbell’s cream of celery soup sitting on the warm redbrick ground while our parents and their friends lunched nearby under the shady sycamores.
* * *
Soon after Courtney was born, my parents hired a woman named Willie Mae Worthen to cook for us. Mommie and Daddy Wagner were great at many things, but cooking was not one of them. Their idea of food preparation was snacking on shredded wheat or All-Bran cereal with raw sugar and half-and-half on top, making BLT sandwiches, or heating up their favorite canned soups. My dad’s specialty was something called “Salisbury corn skillet,” which was basically beef patties with canned corn on top. Willie Mae was from Atlanta, Georgia, and she made us succotash, chicken potpie, sweet potatoes, and green beans. When my British dad came to visit, he taught her how to make my favorite shepherd’s pie; she made it her own by adding corn and Worcestershire sauce. Willie Mae was tall and lean, with the softest skin and biggest laugh—rivaling even my mom’s. We fell for her so completely that my mom asked her to be our nanny and she soon became a beloved fixture in our family. When my Russian grandmother first met Willie Mae, she unwittingly rechristened her by mispronouncing her name “Vilka Maka” with her thick Russian accent. Katie, who was nine at the time, morphed her Russian pronunciation into “Kilky,” and somehow it stuck. To Courtney, Katie, my parents, and me, Willie Mae was known as Kilky.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 3