More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood

by Natasha Gregson Wagner

  I remember dancing legend Fred Astaire was always immaculately dressed in vests, ties, and cashmere blazers. He had a wide, clean face and, usually, a yellow silk scarf around his neck, and he always smelled clean, like a fresh bar of soap. My Daddy Wagner had attended the Black-Foxe Military Academy in Hollywood with Fred’s son. Before my dad had any idea who Fred was, he was being picked up by him at school and staying at the Astaires’ house on the weekends. Later, my dad cast Fred as his father in the TV series It Takes a Thief, which came out in the late 1960s. Fred was always so friendly to me. “What’s your doll’s name?” he asked, or “What are you learning in school?” On party nights at our house, Fred would be at the bar, telling a story, drink in his hand. Sometimes he played our baby grand.

  The director Elia Kazan was another frequent guest. My mom had given one of the greatest performances of her career for him in Splendor in the Grass, earning her second Academy Award nomination for it. She was in awe of his talent as a director. This was the man who had made A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, and East of Eden with James Dean. She always considered Splendor her best film and Kazan one of her greatest champions.

  Everybody called Kazan “Gadge,” a nickname he earned from his love of fiddling with gadgets. Around our house, Gadge wore shorts and could often be found poolside, soaking up the sun on a chaise lounge. To me he looked a little like Elmer Fudd. With rumpled gray hair, he sort of shuffled from side to side when he walked. I figured he must be very funny because my parents were constantly laughing when they were with him.

  My mother had a handful of older women who were important to her. She had spent so much time around adults when she was a child that many of her friends were her senior by many years. There was Rosalind Russell, who had played her mother in Gypsy; the author, activist, and philanthropist Mickey Ziffren; the grand dame of Hollywood Edie Goetz (daughter of Louis B. Mayer); and the actress and writer Ruth Gordon. My mother loved and admired these fancy ladies, and so naturally I loved them too. Once, I remember being sick with a cold, lying drowsily in my mom’s bed on Canon Drive, overhearing Mommie on the phone with Edie Goetz. “Oh, she would love that, Edie. No, I don’t think she has ever seen a nosegay. Oh, how perfect, how divine! You are the best, Edie. Thank you.” This was how I learned Edie was sending me a nosegay.

  My mom was especially close to Ruth Gordon. A look of excitement and glee always passed her face as she prepped for Ruth’s arrival. Ruth was my godmother, a role she had taken on after my first godmother—my mom’s best friend the actress Norma Crane—died of breast cancer when I was three years old. Ruth was a brilliant performer and writer of screenplays with her husband Garson Kanin. She and my mom ran in the same social circles, and my mom was a fan of Ruth’s work. They first became close after my mother handpicked Ruth to play her mother in Inside Daisy Clover in 1965. In the movie, my mom plays a young star growing up in Hollywood with a difficult mother whom she calls “Old Chap.” To say my mother related would be an understatement. A few years later, when Ruth won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Mia Farrow’s nosy neighbor in Rosemary’s Baby, she made the audience roar with laughter by saying, “I can’t tell you how encouraging a thing like this is.” She was seventy-two years old. Not long after that, she played Maude, a seventy-nine-year-old woman with a much younger lover in the cult classic Harold and Maude.

  Ruth always arrived at our house in a chauffeured limousine with her husband Garson, whom she called Gar. My mom still called her “Old Chap,” and sometimes my mom called me “Old Chap” too. Ruth was a miniature person, a Thumbelina with a dramatically deep stage actress’s voice and a splash of a New York accent.

  “Natasha, dahling, how is my beautiful gawd-dawter?” she’d exclaim. “Gahrson and I are so deliiiii-ted to see you.”

  Ruth dressed with drama too, wrapped in swaths of silk, with huge freshwater pearl earrings clinging to her ears and perfectly round pearl necklaces at her throat, all shimmery and white. The pearls bounced light onto the tiny features sitting happily on her tiny face, which was wrinkled, a bit like papier-mâché. She wore a red lip and her brown hair pulled back and tied with a silk scarf—the color of it usually matching her dress. And she always brought presents and hugs with her. One time, she gave me a pair of cabochon ruby stud earrings from Cartier, another time, a beautiful dress from Pierre Deux, a French Provençal-themed boutique that was all the rage in the late seventies and early eighties. Then she would wrap her little hands around my little hands and we’d sit together talking. There was an intimacy between us, perhaps because she was so close to my mother, but maybe also because she had a gift for connection. My mother once wrote, “I think that I’ve never known anyone with a greater capacity for living than Ruth,” and it was true. Ruth offered my mother a very different kind of role model than Baba.

  Then there were those guests who visited infrequently but who were considered very important. One day when I was about six, my mother said to me, “Now, Natasha, tonight a dear friend of ours is coming over for dinner. His name is Sir Laurence Olivier, and he’s the world’s most talented living actor, so you must be very polite to him.” The most talented actor I knew was my Daddy Wagner, so I told my mom: “He can’t be the world’s greatest actor. Daddy is.” My mom laughed her wonderful laugh and later, when “Larry” arrived, I was introduced to him. Larry reminded me of a cozy grandfather and sounded just like my Daddy Gregson with his English accent. I immediately felt at ease around him.

  Since I’d recently discovered knock-knock jokes, I decided to entertain Sir Laurence with a few of my favorites. He was kind enough to humor me by listening attentively, dutifully replying, “Who’s there?” to my every “Knock-knock!” When I started laughing before all the punch lines, he even joined me in my hysterics. After dinner, I left the room and my mother told him the story about what I’d said about my father before he arrived. Before she got to the punch line, Larry interrupted. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “I’ll bet I know what Natasha said: that her daddy is the greatest actor in the world.” I walked back in at the precise moment he spoke the words “… her daddy is the greatest actor in the world.” I smiled triumphantly and said, “See? He agrees with me!”

  * * *

  Most days around five o’clock, my mother picked up the phone to buzz the pool house and the guest house for my godfathers Mart or Howard. “Martino, Aitchey, when are you coming down here? Let’s sit at the bar and have a drink.” Like the nuts and cigarettes in the little silver cups on the bar, alcohol was always present at home. It was part of what made our household so lively and festive.

  Various bottles were stacked deep in the liquor cabinet, and the liquids inside flowed freely. My parents always drank. All their friends drank too. Drinking was an everyday pastime in Hollywood in those days, often continuing late into the night.

  Sometimes the fun took on an edge that bothered me.

  My mom did not drink hard liquor, only wine, her favorite being white-wine spritzers. Around the time I turned eight years old, I’d start to notice if she’d had too many drinks. She seemed less attentive to me, and when this happened, I worried about her. I was used to having a somewhat vigilant, slightly bossy mother. When she had been drinking, if I tugged on her skirt because I needed her, she would no longer react right away. Instead, she’d brush me off with a far-away-sounding voice, as if she was too distracted by whatever conversation she was having with a guest to give me her full attention. Mommie was here, but at the same time, she wasn’t really here. Where’s my regular mother? I used to think.

  Both my parents seemed to drink more when we traveled. In 1978, we rented a house on the beach in Hawaii for three months while my dad shot the miniseries Pearl with Angie Dickinson. Late one night, I was awakened by voices and walked out of the house to find my parents’ good friend Tom Mankiewicz wearing nothing but his bikini briefs. He held a drink in his hand, and my fully clothed parents were drinking too. Mank
was there to discuss writing and directing the pilot of a new series my dad was starring in called Hart to Hart. But this didn’t look like a business meeting to me.

  “Why are you in your underwear?” I blurted out.

  “Well, Beano,” he said, “I’m thinking of taking a dip in the ocean.”

  It was two in the morning. Why wasn’t anyone talking him out of it? At eight years old, I knew that a grown man going swimming in his underwear in the middle of the night wasn’t the best plan.

  “But it’s dark outside.”

  I looked to my mom and my dad, but they gave me no indication that anything abnormal was happening. My dad simply said, “You should be in bed.”

  I went back to my room, thinking, What kinds of craziness do my parents get into when I’m not around? I had the strong feeling that I needed to keep an eye on them.

  The following summer, we went to the Las Brisas resort in Acapulco. My dad had made some commercials for a Mexican clothing company in exchange for a free trip there. The whole gang came along: Mart, Howard, Kilky, Courtney, and Katie. Early every morning, the hotel would put bright red hibiscus flowers in the pool outside our suite, and I remember waking up to see these beautiful flowers floating on the water, almost as if they had fallen from the sky. Guests at Las Brisas had access to pink-and-white-striped Jeeps with low bucket seats, and we rode through the winding hills of Acapulco Bay on old dirt roads, carefully turning corners to avoid getting the Jeep stuck in the deep ditches on the side of the road. It became a running joke; every time we turned a corner, Mart, Howard, and the rest of us would yell in unison, “Watch out for the ditch!”

  One evening, my dad was driving, my mom was in the passenger seat, and Courtney and I were in the back. When we returned to the hotel, my mother was slumped over in her seat. My dad said, “Natalie, get up.” She tried to move and ended up falling down onto the floorboard. “Natalie, you’re scaring the kids,” my dad said. “Get up.” She mumbled, “I can’t get up,” from the floor. She looked like my mom, but she wasn’t acting like my mom. It was scary to me. That was the only time I remember seeing my mom really drunk.

  Was my mother dependent on alcohol? Or just someone who enjoyed a few drinks? Mostly I felt too shy and confused to talk to my parents about their drinking. On the few occasions that I did protest, they would assure me that there was nothing to be concerned about and that I was worrying too much. They were in control; everyone was safe. All was well in my world. Maybe at some point, had she lived, my mom would have realized the drinking was getting out of hand, and she would have turned to my dad and said, “R.J., it’s time to take a break.” She was a professional actress: when she needed to diet for a role, she was extremely disciplined, counting calories and working out to get into shape. Maybe she would have done the same with alcohol. I’ll simply never know.

  Chapter 5

  Sir Laurence Olivier, Natalie, and R.J. in rehearsal for the 1976 British TV production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  Although her family was important to her, my mom was growing restless, less content with being a full-time mother and occasional actress. Nothing could entirely replace performing for the cameras, at least not for someone who had been starring in movies since kindergarten. She had planned and carefully constructed our domestic world, and now that it was up and running, she was ready to return to her career. It was more than a force of habit or an ego trip for her; acting was her lifelong passion.

  In 1978, she began preparing for a role in the big-budget disaster movie Meteor (about which she later joked “the movie was the disaster!”). In it she played a Russian scientist, which meant she had to brush up on her Russian for the role. She found herself a Russian teacher and spent hours listening to the language on a tape recorder, perfecting her accent. I remember sitting next to her and reading my book or drawing as she listened and recited. This was the first time I can recall witnessing my mother’s diligence when it came to preparing for a role.

  After that she played a recovering alcoholic in the made-for-television movie The Cracker Factory, which was filming in LA. Kilky would bring Courtney and me to visit my mother on set. As always, she was thrilled to see us, beaming with pride as she introduced us to the cast and crew. I was just as proud to be her daughter. This person that everyone wants is my person, I thought. Because The Cracker Factory was a serious drama concerning alcoholism, suicide attempts, and mental hospitals, she allowed us to watch her shooting only lightweight, PG scenes. Her favorite moment in The Cracker Factory was when her character gives a defensive, angry monologue to her doctor, in which she refuses to stand up in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and “confess my ninety-proof sins to a bunch of old rummies who just crawled in off of skid row!” I can remember overhearing my mom memorizing that speech at home, and sensing that she loved saying the words as much as I loved listening to them. The speech was punchy, funny—strong.

  The night the movie aired on TV, my mom was out to dinner, but she’d instructed Kilky, “When it comes to the scene where I take the pills, change the channel!” She didn’t want me and Courtney to be traumatized by seeing our mom swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills and falling over. Meanwhile, I had overheard the phone conversation and was prepared. When Kilky switched the channel, I reached over and switched it right back. I wanted to watch that overdose scene! Later, when we got a copy of the movie on videocassette, Courtney and I watched our mother’s monologue over and over again and memorized all the words, which we would repeat for each other at any time of the day or night.

  Once The Cracker Factory was over, she took a part in a TV series based on the 1956 movie about Pearl Harbor, From Here to Eternity, alongside the actor Bill Devane. She played the Deborah Kerr role from the movie, an emotional and sexy role—which meant that we weren’t allowed to watch her filming or to see the finished product once it was on TV. In the lead-up to filming, I remember she was excited, extremely focused, and watching her weight. Whenever she got a big part, my mom went on a diet. She was always petite, but she loved comfort food and usually put on a couple of extra pounds when she wasn’t in front of the cameras, eating whatever she liked: her beloved lamb chops, beef bourguignon, borscht, and cold cuts from the Nate’n Al deli. She and my dad liked to have deli feasts of matzo ball soup and turkey or roast beef sandwiches on rye bread, topping it all off with her favorite Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream. Then, right before a project, she’d do a grapefruit fast, a watermelon fast, or a cantaloupe fast. She ordered plain salads “with the dressing on the side.” And of course her favorite chopped salad at La Scala, as always, “without the garbanzo beans!”

  * * *

  In 1979, Daddy Wagner shot a pilot for a TV series called Hart to Hart, and it really took off. He coproduced and starred as Jonathan Hart, one half of a chic, jet-setting couple who solved mysteries and were passionately in love. Stefanie Powers played his wife, Jennifer. They traveled, they sparkled, they called each other “darling.” My mother had originally been offered the Jennifer role, but my parents decided it wouldn’t be possible for them to raise children and both be working the grueling schedule of an hour-long weekly TV series at the same time.

  I remember going to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank to watch a screening of the ninety-minute pilot. My parents told us there was a surprise in the episode. Halfway through the program my mom appeared in one of the scenes dressed like Scarlett O’Hara. All in pink and carrying a parasol, playing an over-the-top movie star called Natasha Gurdin (her birth name). Yes, I was surprised and excited to see her on-screen, but it was also confounding to me. When did she shoot without me knowing? I considered myself the keeper of my mom’s whereabouts, so the fact that she had fooled me actually bothered me.

  Hart to Hart became a hit pretty quickly. Courtney and I weren’t allowed to stay up late and watch it, but my parents taped every episode so we could watch the next day. Our favorite part was the opening credits. We memorized all Lionel Stander’s lines: “This is my boss, Jonathan
Hart, a self-made millionaire. He’s quite a guy. This is Mrs. H. She’s gorgeous…” Every few episodes, my dad would bring home a chunky VCR tape labeled “GAG REEL,” containing all the blunders and mistakes the actors made on set. Courtney and I watched the gag reels over and over again.

  Suddenly, millions of people were seeing my dad on TV in their living rooms every Thursday night. Strangers had always spotted my parents in public, but now fans were even more eager to ask for autographs, photographers more anxious to aim their cameras in our direction. Almost every time we left the house a trail of admirers would cluster around us. Because my mom and dad were both reared in the old studio system, they treated fans with respect, signing scraps of paper and smiling for pictures. I remember once a friend giving my parents matching T-shirts that said, “I’m not signing autographs, I’m on vacation.” They got a kick out of that. But they rarely complained unless a fan behaved rudely or interrupted our dinner. Only sometimes after a particularly enthusiastic devotee left, my mom would roll her eyes and make a funny sound like “OYYYYYY” and they would both smile and that would be that.

  By now my parents had also revived the production company they had first started together in 1958. The original company was called Rona (an amalgam of Robert and Natalie) and the new company was Rona II. Through Rona II, they contributed to the development of the hit series Charlie’s Angels, so they received a profit from that show as well as from Hart to Hart. Ever since she’d become an adult, my mother made sure to stay in control of her finances. She was every bit the businesswoman, once saying, “You get tough in this business until you get big enough where you can hire someone to get tough for you. Then you can sit back and be a lady.” (There’s a famous picture of my mom wearing a black hat and seated at the head of a boardroom table, the only woman surrounded by ten men who worked for her: her lawyers, agents, business managers, publicists.) Both my parents were savvy about business and money. My dad’s point of view was that “The only positive is the negative,” meaning that owning “the negative”—or a piece of the film—is where you make the real money (not from your fee as an actor). After the success of Hart to Hart and Charlie’s Angels, our family was definitely in the positive.