Even though we had Kilky to help take care of us, my mother was the one who drove me to my new preschool, the Sunshine Nursery School, in Brentwood. I was almost four by then, but once again, I hated being away from my mom; I missed her so acutely, with such a sharp pang, that I could barely make it through a minute before the tears would well up and I’d start crying. My mother consulted her therapist, who told her to give me something of hers so I could hold on to it while she was away. She decided to give me her Cartier Panthère watch, if you can believe it. When it was time for her to leave, she put the beautiful watch in my hand, looked me straight in the eye, and told me, “Natasha, I promise I will be back to pick you up when the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the twelve.” Her voice was strong and direct and let me know that we were in this thing together. I held on to her watch for a week or so before I was ready to spend those few hours at preschool without her.
Another time, she made a deal with me. “If you can stay at school the whole day without crying once, I’ll buy you a present.”
She asked what I wanted.
“I want a blue talking dog,” was my response. She couldn’t quite make this happen, but she came awfully close, buying me a stuffed dog that talked when I pulled its string to reward my next tear-free school day.
Once, I fell off the jungle gym at preschool and cut a gash just above my eyelid. I remember hitting the ground—boom—my mouth full of dirt, then warm liquid trailing down my face that tasted like metal. When I saw the adults around me looking nervous, I started to cry. The school called my parents, who rushed me to a doctor. My next memory is of both my parents standing over me in a doctor’s office, each holding one arm. I see my dad looking at me and then looking at my mom. His gaze is steady and his eyes are telling her, “Stay calm, Natalie, Natasha needs you to keep it together, Natasha is going to be fine, keep it together, Nat.” She keeps it together while the doctor takes the gleaming needle out and sews up the skin above my eyelid, pulling the thread through and through. I am awake but sort of lulled; my mom is awake but not at all calm. If she cries, I cry, if she panics, I panic. I remember receiving a clear message: my happiness is her happiness. If I’m sad, she’s sad. The world is dangerous, especially if Mommie isn’t there. If she’s here, I’m safe.
At age five, I started kindergarten at the Curtis School. Both my mom and I were worried about how this separation would go. Luckily I locked eyes with another skinny little five-year-old named Tracey, and we soon became inseparable. She was my surrogate safety blanket when my mom left. Just a glimpse of her blond curls and grin let me know I was going to be okay.
Meanwhile, my sister Courtney was quickly growing from a swaddled baby into a small blond bulldozer. When she was three, she wore a T-shirt with “Here Comes Trouble” printed across the chest. I felt this was an accurate description. Later we became incredibly close, but in those days, she seemed hell-bent on destroying everything that was mine. If I were quietly playing with Barbie dolls in my bedroom, she barged in without knocking, breaking all the furniture in Barbie’s DreamHouse before rolling out again. Though she was more than three years younger than me, she was the bully and I was her victim. I lived in fear of her. Her favorite means of domination was hair pulling. Her fingers were like the jaws of a pit bull. “Oooow! Mommie! Kilky! Courtney’s pulling my hair!”
At the sound of my cries, Kilky came running. She was physically stronger than my mom, so it was usually her job to pry Courtney’s hand open. In my sister’s palm would be a clump of my hair. “Courtney,” Kilky would say in a serious tone of voice, “you leave Tasha alone.” Sometimes my mom would gently intervene. “Courtney, sweet pea, come with me. I want to show you something in my bedroom.…”
It got to the point where, whenever I saw my sister coming, I’d yell, “Get out of my room! Get out now or I’m going to tell!” Before Mommie or Kilky could get there, Courtney had already bitten the nose off my beloved stuffed snoopy, Jennifer, or kicked my wooden dollhouse to the floor.
My stepsister Katie posed a different kind of problem. With her strawberry-blond hair cut into a shag and freckles across her fair skin, Katie seemed exotic, untouchable to me. She was older and lived with her mom and two brothers in an apartment and dressed like a boy in rock T-shirts and bell-bottoms, while I was always in dresses. To her, I was a mama’s girl, a Goody Two-shoes, something of a Beverly Hills princess. As with Courtney, I would later grow to love her completely. But back then, I think I saw Katie as more Courtney’s sister than mine. They shared the same father by birth, whereas Katie and I were not technically blood relatives. While I stuck close to my mom, Katie stuck close to her father and Courtney. She took it upon herself to act as Courtney’s protector, always siding with her in arguments and making me feel outnumbered. My mother took her role as stepmother to Katie very seriously. She went with Katie to her very first appointment with the gynecologist, they shopped together to pick out furniture for her room at our house, she let Katie drive her little Mercedes when Katie first got her driver’s license. Despite our different biological mothers and fathers, my mother made sure her three daughters knew that we were a family.
* * *
My parents had this saying, “I love you more than love.” To me it meant they loved each other more than any other parents loved each other. But I think what they meant by it was that the way they felt about each other was bigger than any word they could come up with. They had started saying it when they first started seeing each other, and they continued to say it for the rest of their time together. They engraved the words on silver frames, gold jewelry, just about anything they gave to each other.
When my dad wasn’t calling her “darling,” he called my mom “Nat” or sometimes “Nathan.” He loved to make her laugh with his impressions of Cary Grant, James Cagney, and other classic movie stars. My mom also made him laugh—sometimes with her sharp wit, sometimes because she had her not-so-sharp moments. We used to have this crazy dog named Winnie who once chewed up all the grass in one section of our yard. My dad called the landscaping company and hired them to lay down new grass, then we all went out of town for the weekend, but not before he had sequestered Winnie so he couldn’t get near it. When we got home, we went in the backyard and saw that Winnie had been on the rampage again.
“That goddamn dog,” my dad shouted. “He broke loose and tore up the new grass!”
“But, R.J., this is a really smart dog,” my mom said, a note of wonder in her voice. “Look. He chewed the grass in perfect squares.”
“No, Natalie,” Daddy pointed out. “The gardeners laid the grass in squares!”
Whenever he had to patiently explain an obvious fact to her, he called her “Natalie.”
If I wanted a favor from my mom, I had a unique method that usually worked. I would take a whole grapefruit (her favorite) and stick a toothpick in it with a piece of paper attached that would read something like, “Can my friend Jessica spend the night, please? You are beautiful.” Or “You are the best actress in the world.” I would wait upstairs for her to come into the entryway, then I would roll the grapefruit down the stairs, where it would land with a thud at her feet.
“What’s this?”
Jessica and I would watch from the top of the stairs as she picked up the grapefruit and read the message aloud. Then she and my dad, consummate actors that they were, would pretend to deliberate.
“Can Jessica spend the night? Well, I don’t know. R.J., what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” my dad would muse. “Jessica, do you really want to spend the night?”
“Yes, I do!” Jessica would say earnestly.
Finally, my mom would give in. “Okay. Let me talk to Jessica’s mom.”
One year, our nanny Kilky gave Courtney and me two fuzzy little ducklings as an Easter present and our parents let us keep them. Once the baby ducks started growing, one of them became a very mean drake we had inappropriately named Sunshine. Sunshine was quarantin
ed off to the side of our garden, where an abandoned wooden playhouse stood next to a small pond. Meanwhile, the other duck started flying around our neighborhood, making the rounds like it owned the place. My mom would get phone calls from surrounding houses. “Um, Mrs. Wagner, your duck is in our pool.” She’d hang up the phone and shout, “R.J., the duck is in the neighbor’s pool again! What are we going to do?” Then she and my dad would crack up laughing. They thought it was hilarious that there was this duck flapping around in fancy people’s yards and pooping in their pools, all those Beverly Hills housewives opening their drapes in the morning and screaming, “There’s the Wagners’ duck again!”
Finally, my mom called a family meeting.
“Girls, we’re going to have to get rid of the ducks.”
Courtney and I screamed, “Nooooo!”
“Well, they can’t just fly into other people’s pools!”
My dad piped up with, “Well, why can’t they?”
My mom pondered this for a moment, and then echoed my dad. “Well, why can’t they?”
So we kept the ducks for a little longer until they wore out their welcome for good. One morning, Courtney and I decided to revisit our old playhouse by the duck pond. But this was Sunshine’s turf now, and he did not welcome our visit. He cornered Courtney, hissing at her in a loud, scary screech. Courtney let out a series of bloodcurdling screams as I ran to get help. My mom, who had been applying a facial mask in her bathroom, heard the kerfuffle and raced down the stairs like a flash of lightning, her face slathered with bright blue clay. I shot into the house toward my mom so fast that we collided with each other like Laurel and Hardy. My mother, Kilky, and I stumbled over one another to get to the playhouse, slipping in the mud from a recent rainfall. Kilky and my mom rescued Courtney from Sunshine, getting covered with brown muck in the process. It was sheer mayhem. “That is it!” my mom decided with finality. “We are getting rid of these ducks!” Sunshine and his sister were swiftly donated to the Malibu wetlands that same afternoon.
* * *
After we moved to Canon Drive, Daddy Gregson, who had been living in England, rented an apartment in Malibu where he would stay when he was in town. I loved when he came over to visit or to take me out, greeting me with his posh British accent—“Hello, dahling, it’s so good to see you!”—and grinning widely, with his silver hair and eyes that crinkled like raisins. He and my mom sat at the bar chatting, trading stories about the business, updating each other on common friends, discussing my progress, my schedule, my life. They respected and liked each other. My American dad and my British dad always seemed genuinely happy to see each other as well. There was an ease to their conversations and a respect for their differences as well as a shared understanding that they had both loved the same woman and they both loved the same child.
Most times, Daddy Gregson took me to Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, where I ordered the number eleven (a bacon cheeseburger) and a strawberry milkshake. Sometimes he took me to backyard barbecues or family parties given by his friends. Other times he bought me a present. There was a toy store a few blocks from our house, but my excitement over his suggestion “Let’s go to the toy shop” was always dampened by his insistence that we walk there. Walk? On foot? “No one walks,” I explained to him with a sigh. “Why can’t we drive?” Being English, he never understood why we couldn’t walk there, and being American, I never understood why we couldn’t go by car.
As a child, I thought the story of how my mom met and married my two dads was perfectly unremarkable. Only later did I realize how extraordinary it was that my mom had met and married my Daddy Wagner, divorced him, then met my Daddy Gregson and had me, and then happily remarried Daddy Wagner.
Robert John Wagner, aka R.J., had been my mother’s childhood movie crush. My mother loved to tell the story of the first time she saw him. It was 1948, and she was ten years old and under contract at 20th Century-Fox. She was walking down a hallway with my grandmother when she saw R.J. walking toward her. He had dark brown hair, bright blue eyes, and golden skin. He was eighteen years old and under contract at Fox as well. As he brushed by her in the studio hallway, he didn’t look back, but my mom did. In that instant, my mother turned to her mother and whispered, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry that man.” For the next seven years, when she saw Robert Wagner, it was only in movies. Then, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-four, they met again at a fashion show at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where a photographer snapped pictures of them together. A few weeks later, R.J. called and asked for a date. On July 20, 1956, my mom’s eighteenth birthday, he took her to a screening of his movie The Mountain with Spencer Tracy. In the morning, he sent my mother yellow roses and a note promising to see her again. She found him handsome and kindhearted, with a great sense of humor. They kept their relationship secret from the press at first, meeting at quiet restaurants, off the beaten track. Their romance was youthful and tender. “R came over with a pair of yellow pajamas as a gift for me because I had been in bed all day sick with the flu,” my mother wrote in her journal from the time, “what a dear heart.”
R.J. was older than my mother, seemingly secure in himself. He’d learned his self-assurance the hard way. R.J.’s father, a Detroit steel executive, disapproved of him becoming an actor, wanting him to follow him into the family business. But R.J. had been determined, carving out a career for himself in Hollywood. He first came to public attention in the 1952 movie With a Song in My Heart, in which he played a shell-shocked soldier, and after that, he began to win leading-man roles. In 1954, he appeared in Prince Valiant, the adventure film that made him a star. Like Natalie, he understood what it meant to live with the glare of flashbulbs wherever you went. When they met, they realized they both felt lonely and isolated in their families—and by life in the spotlight. Now that they were together, the loneliness disappeared. They both wanted the same things in life, to have a family and to give their children the kind of pure, unconditional love that they hadn’t always received from their own families.
In October 1957, my mother went upstate to shoot scenes for her movie Marjorie Morningstar, alongside Gene Kelly. R.J. went with her, staying for the three-week shoot. Both my grandparents adored R.J.; they thought he was kind, handsome, and talented and approved of the relationship.
After my parents returned in December, R.J. took my mother out for a champagne supper. My mother spotted something shining at the bottom of the champagne glass. It was a diamond-and-pearl ring. The inscription on it read: “Marry me.” She said yes. In order to escape the press, my parents ran away to Scottsdale, Arizona, to get married, and invited only their closest friends. The wedding date was December 28, 1957. They traveled by train and checked into their hotel under fake names. The night before the wedding, my dad wrote my mom a note.
“Darling, I miss you. Are you going to be busy around 1 p.m. tomorrow? Love you, Harold.”
My mom wrote back: “I won’t be busy. How about getting married? All my love, Lucille.”
On their wedding day, my mother wore a white cocktail dress with a lace hood instead of a veil and long white gloves, a bouquet of calla lilies in her hands. My dad wore a dark suit, a sprig of lilies of the valley in his lapel. In a home movie of the events, my parents can be seen walking past a building, posing for pictures, and getting on a train to leave for their honeymoon.
My mother was not yet twenty years old. Her new husband was twenty-eight. They agreed to put their plans to start a family on hold for a couple of years, realizing they weren’t old enough for that responsibility just yet. R.J. not only loved my mother but respected her enough to support her career—something not many men did for their wives in the 1950s. Immediately after they married, she refused to take a part in the film The Devil’s Disciple with Burt Lancaster. Under the studio contract system, she simply had to show up for work. It didn’t matter if the part, the director, or the script was to her liking. Her contract stated that she had to do it anyway. But after f
ifteen years in the business, she’d had enough. After she said no to the Lancaster film, Warner Bros., her studio, placed her on suspension. My grandmother pleaded with her to go back to work. But R.J. bolstered my mother’s confidence and encouraged her to stand up for herself. With his support, she remained on strike at Warner Bros. for eighteen months—and it worked. In February 1959, Warner announced a new agreement between the studio and Natalie Wood. Not only had she been given a raise, but she would also be allowed to make one film a year of her own choosing, outside of the studio.
By then my parents had bought their own place, on North Beverly Drive, and my mom set about renovating it. It was going to be opulent, with marble flooring, crystal chandeliers, and a giant marble bathtub upstairs adjacent to their bedroom. While work on the house continued, my parents costarred in their first film together, the drama All the Fine Young Cannibals, in which R.J. played a jazz trumpeter in a tortured relationship with the character played by my mother. But the film was not a critical or box office success, and after the failure, both my parents were looking for a hit.
My mother found it in the form of Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, a powerful 1961 drama in which she starred as Deanie Loomis, a young woman from a middle-class Midwestern family. Warren Beatty played her boyfriend, Bud, in his first leading film role. The part required my mother’s character to undergo an emotional breakdown, culminating in a suicide attempt, with Deanie trying to drown herself in a reservoir. My mom was working on one of the most professionally fulfilling projects of her career. At the same time, R.J.’s career experienced a downslide. Fox decided not to renew his contract, and he was out of work.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 4