The problem was, I was drawn to Baba. I found her magical. Make-believe was her comfort zone, and for a child, that was intoxicating. My grandmother took me on her lap and fed me her fairy stories, which were just as delicious as her bowls of beef stroganoff or broth with dumplings.
“Natashinka,” she cooed, “we are special. There is nobody like us. We come from a long line of Russian princesses. I am a princess, your mamatchka is a princess, and you are a princess too.”
She made me think we were fragile, delicate, unique, like Fabergé eggs. The fact that Baba, Mommie, and I were physically small seemed to prove that we were to be treated with extra care, in case we might break.
In my grandmother’s version of her life story, she was born a princess, related to the Romanovs, Russia’s last doomed royal family. Years later I found out that in fact she was born Maria Stepanovna Zudilov, the youngest daughter of Stepan Zudilov, a well-to-do businessman who had made his money in soap and candle factories. Zudilov was considered landed gentry, not royalty. Her mother, Maria Kuleva, may or may not have had distant Romanov connections—no one knows for certain—but in some ways, it doesn’t matter. Baba believed her story with such fierce commitment that it became her truth. When Baba made her claims about us being princesses, my mother would shrug her shoulders, saying, “Maybe we are!” Meanwhile, I drank in every word of it. Why would I doubt my grandmother? In her burgundy and purple embellished gowns, she looked like royalty to me.
What I do know is that my grandmother was born in 1912 and spent her early childhood in Siberia during the final years of the reign of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia. She had two half brothers and two half sisters from her father’s first marriage, and a sister and two more brothers from his second marriage to her mother. According to Baba, her parents were White Russians, wealthy beyond measure, with glittering jewels they kept in a vault in the family’s vast estate in the countryside surrounding the southern Siberian city of Barnaul. Growing up, my grandmother was waited on by servants and cooks. She was taught at home by a governess and spent little time with her own mother, from whom she yearned for maternal affection. Despite the lavish setting of her upbringing, the adults around her were cold and forbidding. “When I was bad,” she told me, “my governess would punish me by making me kneel in the corner with uncooked peas beneath my knees.” As a child, my grandmother promised herself that when she grew up and had her own children, she would shower them with the love and attention she herself had never received.
When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, little Maria was five years old. Her father supported the czar, and as a landowner, he was considered an enemy of the Bolsheviks. After the czar and his family were executed by the Red Guards in July 1918, Maria and her family prepared to flee their home. They gathered their money and jewelry, concealing it in the peasant clothes they wore as a disguise, and ran to a prepared hiding place on their estate.
Maria’s older half brother Mikhail happened to be out of the house that day. As the rest of the family hid on the estate, they had no way of warning him that the Red Guard soldiers were close by. After the soldiers left, the family emerged from hiding to see something hanging from a tree. As they came closer, they realized it was Mikhail. Little Maria was so traumatized by the sight of her murdered brother she broke down in convulsions. The memory of that moment must have haunted her for the rest of her life, but my grandmother never told me about her brother or his murder. I only learned about Mikhail many years later from talking to my aunt Olga and her family and, later, from reading Gavin Lambert’s biography of my mother, one of the most reliable sources of information about my family ancestry.
Instead, Baba told me about her family treasures. The family knew the soldiers were likely to return, so they wrapped their jewels in silk scarves, burying them deep in the ground, so they could come back and find them someday. She explained that the jewels belonged to us, but they were trapped in Russia and one day she would go back and claim them. Anytime she saw a photograph of some particularly dazzling piece of Russian jewelry, she showed it to me and explained that it was ours. Anything sparkling and gorgeous had been part of those untold riches that had been left behind but belonged to us.
Six-year-old Maria and her family boarded a train in deepest winter, escaping for their lives. After traveling almost three thousand miles, a journey that took many weeks in freezing conditions, they arrived in Harbin, China, a city with a large exiled Russian community. Maria and her parents were now just another immigrant family, one of hundreds of thousands. They were able to bring enough money with them to survive, but my grandmother was no longer being taught at home by governesses. Baba once shared a memory with me about her mother giving her a baked potato before she walked to school in the mornings, and how she would put it in her pocket. “I held on to it as I walked through the snow to keep my hands warm, then when I reached school I would eat the potato,” she said. It wasn’t an uncommon sight in Harbin to see formerly wealthy Russian families begging for change just to survive. No wonder little Maria learned to be superstitious, to see catastrophe around every corner.
Despite the fact that my grandmother spent her teenage years in relative poverty, she never forgot the vanished opulence of her childhood. Whenever she told her story, she was always a princess with many admirers. Sometimes it felt to me as if Baba were the movie star, not my mother. In her version of events, everyone loved her and never stopped talking about her stunning looks, and all the handsome young Russian military captains in Harbin wanted to marry her.
It was in China that she met a gypsy fortune-teller who predicted that one day Baba would have a daughter who would be a great beauty. The woman also warned my grandmother that her daughter would die by “dark water.” As a result of this prediction, my mom didn’t like to be out of her depth, where the water was very dark or deep, even though she loved to swim in our pool and spend time on our boat.
When my grandmother was about eighteen, she met a Russian-Armenian officer who was stationed in one of Harbin’s military units. His name was Alex Tatulov, and he was dark-haired with dark eyes just like my grandmother. Alex had dreams of finding his fortune in America and my grandmother was irresistibly attracted to him. She married him in secret, because she knew her father wouldn’t approve. In 1929, Alex left for the US, to seek his fortune in San Francisco, promising to send for Maria as soon as he got himself settled. By now my grandmother was pregnant and unable to hide her secret union from her parents. When the baby was born, she named her Olga.
In November 1930, Maria learned that she had been granted an American visa and said goodbye to her family. The voyage across the Pacific Ocean took many weeks and she traveled alone with her baby daughter, a testament to my grandmother’s courage and her ability to dream of a future for herself independent of anyone else’s expectations.
Alex met her quayside in San Francisco. While they had been separated, he had met another woman. What’s more, although he was working at a shipyard, he was a long way from finding his fortune, having arrived on American shores right as the Great Depression began.
Maria had no choice but to stay with Alex in the rooming house where he lived with other workers from the shipyard; from there the couple moved from apartment to apartment, trying to find a foothold. Alex continued to see his lover, often leaving my grandmother alone with a baby to take care of, in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language and in the midst of the greatest economic slump in American history. But Baba soon discovered a way to help her forget her troubles: she started going to the movies. The talkies had just arrived, and the screens were filled with singing and dancing in glorious black and white. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced cheek to cheek, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sang their hearts out, and Shirley Temple tapped and curtsied her way to child stardom. Baba and little Olga went to see romantic dramas, comedies, and musicals, the images on-screen feeding my grandmother’s hopes and daydreams.
D
own at the docks, Alex befriended another Russian exile named Nikolai Stephanovich Zakharenko, who had shortened his name to Nick Gurdin. This was my grandfather. Nick was dark-haired, strong, and good-looking. Maria loved when he played his balalaika and sang soulful Russian folk songs. Before long, my grandmother left Alex, moving into Nick’s apartment with Olga. Not long after, she finalized her divorce, and in October 1937, Nick asked Maria to marry him.
Like my grandmother, my grandfather was a child refugee who had fled Russia during the war. He was born and grew up near the port of Vladivostok, in Far Eastern Siberia, one of three sons. His father was a worker at a chocolate factory, but he supported the czar and quickly joined the White Army in their fight. Before he left for the front he told his son, “When I come home, Nikolai, I will bring you a kaska.” In Russian kaska means helmet. But little Nikolai thought he meant skazka, which is Russian for fairy tale. He waited for months for his father to return with a special story for him, but his father was killed in the fighting and never came home. After that his mother fled by train with her family to Shanghai. Somehow, she managed to get herself aboard a boat bound for Vancouver. Nikolai was eight and spent the rest of his childhood in Canada. At the age of eighteen, he started working, slowly making his way down the West Coast by taking manual jobs, finally landing in San Francisco, where he met my grandmother, two Siberian exiles by way of China. They were married in 1938.
By then Baba was already pregnant again. When my mother was born, on July 20, 1938, my grandparents named her Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, but everyone called her Natasha. “Was most beautiful baby in the whole world,” Baba wrote in Natasha’s pale pink baby book. “Everyone stopped me in the street and admire her. My princess!” Baba’s baby had a special spark, with her big brown eyes and button nose. From the moment she was born, all Baba’s hopes for recovering the prosperity and happiness she had lost as a child revolved around tiny Natasha.
“You are a princess, Natasha!” I can just hear Baba whispering that to my mother in her cradle. In Natasha, Maria had found someone to shape into the kind of screen idol she worshipped, a partner to play with in her world of make-believe. My mother was literally nursed on movies. Baba would bring her newborn baby to matinees, breastfeeding her and rocking her to sleep right there in the darkened theater. As a preschool-age child, my mother’s favorite game was called “Movie Star.” Each morning, she checked into the “studio” (the garage) as Vivien Leigh or Bette Davis, pretending to act in their movies, then checked out again for lunch. My grandmother helped prepare my mother for fame by teaching her to sing and dance, and to always smile, talk to people, tell them stories, and sing songs.
Little Natasha cried often when she was a baby and a doctor had told the family it was because the San Francisco dampness made her joints ache. And so, by the time America entered World War II in 1941, the Gurdins had moved to Santa Rosa, a little town sixty miles north of San Francisco, and bought a small starter home. (My grandfather’s dream had been to buy a farm in Oregon and bring his children up there, but my grandmother wasn’t interested in a farmer’s life.) In Santa Rosa, Deda worked in construction as a day laborer. Theirs was not the happiest marriage. Deda liked to drink, he was constantly shifting between jobs, and the couple often fought.
What they were able to give to their daughters was an appreciation for the imaginary. With her father reading her stories like The Little Mermaid, Bambi, Snow White, and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, my mother grew up believing in magic, elves, fairies, saints, and angels. Baba used to take my mom for walks in Santa Rosa, and as they walked along, my mother would often find coins and even toys on the sidewalk.
“Look, Mama,” she’d say to Baba. “Is this magic?”
“Yes,” Baba replied. “There is magic even on the street. But you must look for it. And if you want your heart’s desire, you must work hard. And you must always do as you are told.”
Eventually, my mother figured out that it was Baba—and not magic—scattering the coins and toys on the sidewalk for her daughter to find there. It was the first of many times my mother would become aware of my grandmother’s propensity for illusion.
Baba continued to follow the movies. In 1943, a Santa Rosa schoolgirl named Edna May Wonacott appeared on-screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock had discovered the nine-year-old while she was waiting at a bus stop. Now she had a Hollywood contract. My grandmother took note. When the director Irving Pichel came to town to shoot a movie, my grandmother seized her chance. Pichel was looking for a young girl to play a bit part in his movie Happy Land. It was early July, just a few weeks before my mother’s fifth birthday. My grandmother dressed my mother in her best pinafore, rolled her straight, brown hair into Shirley Temple curls, and pushed through the crowd of hopefuls toward Mr. Pichel.
Baba whispered to Natasha, “Smile at that man.” And my mother did.
Mr. Pichel asked little Natasha to sit on his lap. She put her arms around him and sang a little song.
“Would you like to act?” he asked her.
My mother looked at Baba and then nodded.
Mr. Pichel told this little girl to walk down the street with an ice-cream cone, then to drop it and burst into tears.
After my mother was given the cone, she told the grown-ups, “I don’t want to drop it, it tastes good.”
Mr. Pichel looked at Baba. Baba looked at Natasha. Natasha dropped the cone.
The director told my mother to cry; she told him she didn’t feel like crying.
So Baba told her daughter a story about a butterfly who burned its wings. My mother loved butterflies, but even this wasn’t enough to make her cry. Then Baba reminded her about her beloved puppy who had been killed in a car accident. After that the tears came and my mother couldn’t stop crying. When she was interviewed about it she always said that was the beginning of her career: “I dropped an ice-cream cone and Hollywood taught me to cry.”
Pichel saw potential in her and promised her a bigger role in his next production. Before long, he invited my mother to go to Hollywood to audition for a new part. My grandfather was against the whole idea. He wanted his daughter to have a normal childhood. He fought furiously with my grandmother about going. My grandmother remained calm. She pointed out the audition would probably come to nothing and that his daughter would never forgive him if he didn’t give her this chance. “Don’t do it for me, do it for Natasha,” she reasoned.
Natasha won the part in the film. It was Tomorrow Is Forever, a World War II drama starring Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert. She played an orphan, a part that required her to learn some German, speak with a German accent, and cry on demand. Welles himself later described her performance as “almost terrifyingly professional.” The film was released in February 1946 and was my mother’s major motion-picture debut. She was seven. The Gurdins never did return to Santa Rosa.
By then the powerful men of Hollywood had decided my mother’s name sounded too Russian—this was Cold War–era America, and anything seemingly related to Russia or Communism carried a stigma—so they changed it to Natalie. The producer William Goetz informed my mother that her last name was going to be Wood, in honor of his friend the director Sam Wood. “Couldn’t it at least be Woods with an s?” my mother asked. “Don’t worry,” Mr. Goetz said, “Wood will look good on a marquee.” My mom really didn’t like “Wood,” but she made her peace with it because it made her think of the forest and all the magical creatures that lived in it. She always missed her first name—this was why she eventually named me Natasha.
My mother had a new life now. She no longer went to school. Instead she had a revolving set of private teachers and chaperones who taught her on set. When she wasn’t acting or studying, she took ballet and piano lessons. There was no time to play imaginary games in her make-believe “studio” anymore. She was too busy working for a real studio. Her big sister, Olga, would help her learn her lines and pronounce words correctly.
The biographies of
my mother will tell you that my grandmother pushed my mom into the movies at a very young age and exploited her talent. In the simplified version of my mother’s life, Baba is usually cast as the wicked queen, abusive and controlling. But I have a hard time seeing her that way. She was an immigrant who spoke very little English and a refugee of war. She came to America and somehow managed to steer my mother’s career in Hollywood, a notoriously tough business. And my mother was no passive victim. She had a talent for acting that couldn’t be forced and that my grandmother nurtured. Young Natalie’s brown eyes were not just beautiful, they radiated an intelligence that was uncommon for child actresses. She was able to make you fall in love with her and want to take care of her, while letting you know not to mess with her as she was probably smarter than you. She may have missed having a “normal” childhood, but she loved acting in the movies. She soaked up the attention, thrived on being around movie stars, and was a born performer. I often wonder if my mother’s childhood career gave her a sanctuary, a movie set of make-believe to turn to when her home life failed her.
After Tomorrow Is Forever, my mother’s next role was as Barbara Stanwyck’s daughter in the comedy The Bride Wore Boots, also directed by Pichel and released in 1946. My mom often worked with actors who were much older than she was, many of them Hollywood legends. By all accounts, they adored her. When she played alongside Stanwyck, who was in her late thirties by then, my mother took a liking to Barbara’s gardenia perfume. After the production wrapped, Stanwyck sent her a bottle of it, which made a lasting impression. As soon as she was old enough to wear it, my mom adopted the scent—Jungle Gardenia—as her signature perfume.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 6