This was the beginning of a new closeness between us. A mutual understanding that we had both lost our favorite person, our dearest protector. No longer the squabbling sisters we were before November 29, we had become motherless overnight. The cells in our bodies had shifted. Courtney at seven became more tender with me. At eleven I became more protective of her. I don’t know if I would have been okay if it wasn’t for Courtney.
Everyone in the family coped in their own way. Baba responded to the death of her beloved daughter by clinging to her memory with fierce tenacity. Maria Gurdin gave the world Natalie Wood, managed her career, kept her in the spotlight. By sheer force of will, she had parlayed her little girl’s natural gifts into wealth for her family. Even before my mother died, the fact that Natalie Wood had been her daughter was completely fused with Baba’s identity, her self-worth, her reason for living. Afterward, Baba’s focus was mostly on herself and her famous daughter. Now, whenever I saw her, she would tell me about how some group was honoring her for being Natalie Wood’s mother. This validated my grandmother’s existence, but it made me cringe.
Ever since her daughter first got into the movie business, Baba had taken care of her fan mail, and after my mother married my dad, Baba started looking after his mail too. Though my mother was gone, Baba didn’t stop—she kept on sending out photos. She had stacks of eight-by-ten photographs of my mom and dad that she would autograph and mail to fans. I often wondered if anybody knew that it was Baba signing my mother’s ones. She even took the eight-by-tens to my mother’s grave site and sat there, so that when fans came to pay their respects, she could give them a signed photo.
My aunt Olga—my mom’s older half sister—lived in San Francisco and had three sons, and so she stayed in close contact with us via phone, calling regularly, sending us presents for birthdays and Christmas, and visiting when she could. My dad truly appreciated her support. When we saw her, she would share stories about my mom and show us pictures of them when they were young.
Then there was my aunt Lana, my mother’s younger sister. My mom’s relationship with her younger sister was much more complex than the one she shared with Olga. Theirs had been a troubled relationship for many years—with periods of closeness followed by periods of estrangement. Clearly, there was once a lot of love between my mother and Lana, but by the time I was born, their relationship had become strained. Though my aunt was at our house for the holidays, she was never part of my parents’ inner circle.
My parents liked to surround themselves with people they trusted, and as far as they were concerned, Lana was not that person. At their second wedding, Lana’s then husband, Richard, had been allowed to photograph the ceremony on the condition that the photos were private. Later, my parents found out that the photos had been sold to a fan magazine. A lot of the arguments between Lana and my mom revolved around money—I remember walking into my mom’s bedroom and hearing my mother tell Liz that Lana had asked her for money yet again. Liz remembers that Lana would go to boutiques where my mom had house accounts and charge clothing. “Put it on Natalie’s account!” she would say. At the end of the month, Liz would receive the bills for clothes my mother had never purchased. When my mom would ask Lana about the charges Lana would become defensive and another cold front would move in between the two of them. Another story I’ve heard from those times is that Lana asked my parents for seven thousand dollars so her daughter, Evan, could go to private school, but instead used the money for her own plastic surgery, having her nose narrowed to look more like my mother’s.
It can’t have been easy for Lana to grow up with a sister who was a star. Even though she was able to carve out a brief career for herself in Hollywood, she was always overshadowed by her sister’s fame, not to mention her own mother’s obsession with Natalie. Years later, I read an article about Lana where she told the interviewer: “Natalie was the embodiment of what my [mom] longed for in life. She worshipped Nat, I was the forgotten daughter.… After Nat died, it turned out that she was stuck with the daughter she didn’t really care about that much.”
In my mother’s will, it stated that Lana was to have her wardrobe, perhaps because the sisters had always worn similar clothes and traded outfits when they were girls and teenagers. My mother probably never imagined she would die so young and suddenly and that Lana would take the bequest so literally. She had been dead for less than a month when Lana came to take away her clothes. Courtney and I had stayed home from school that day because some kids were teasing us about our mom’s death. Liz looked out the window from my mother’s office, which was in her bedroom, and saw Lana and two friends pull up with a U-Haul. Lana rang the doorbell and told Liz that she had come to get our mom’s clothes. Liz told her that the will had not even gone to probate. Lana replied that she had come to take what was rightfully hers. She told Liz she was worried pieces of the clothing would get lost or misplaced if she didn’t come sooner rather than later. Liz called my dad at the studio and told him what was going on. He said, “Just let her come in and take the clothes.” Courtney and I were both upset and afraid. We were worried about what the closets would look like without any of our mother’s things.
I remember sitting on my mom’s bed and watching as Lana and her two friends pushed rolling racks into the room. They commandeered her closet with the efficiency of a military operation. I watched them go in and out with armfuls of clothes. In and out. Back and forth.
I do not recall any comfort or tenderness from Lana that day. She coolly went about her business. At some point, I went into my mom’s smaller closet, where her nighties and bras were kept. The room was dark and still smelled like her. I wanted some of the pale, puffy bras she always wore. I took a couple and some nighties and then got back into her bed.
I asked Lana why she was taking my mom’s bras, underwear, and nighties. She told me, “Your mom wants me to have them.”
Three hours later, Lana and her friends had emptied my mom’s closets. Every thread of my mom’s beautiful and elaborate wardrobe—her original Edith Head gowns, her striped T-shirts, her soft lavender dresses, her rainbow of silk shirts, the fancy outfits she wore when she went out, her shoes, coats, handbags, even the rest of her nightgowns and undergarments—was gone. Only blank space was left behind.
My dad offered to pay Lana for some important pieces, sending her a check for eleven thousand dollars for a few fur coats that he wanted to keep for Courtney and me. She returned the furs, but she wouldn’t allow him to pay her for anything else. A few weeks later we found out that Lana had sold all my mom’s clothes to a resale store, even though she had promised my dad she wouldn’t. Apparently she didn’t have room in her apartment to keep them all. The resale store hung a sign in the window advertising that the clothes “Belonged to Natalie Wood.” My dad was furious. My mother would have hated that her clothes—right down to her undergarments—were on public display, ending up in the closets of strangers and collectors. None of us were able to forgive Lana for that. After that, my aunt was no longer welcome in our home.
Chapter 10
R.J., Katie, and Natasha, Gstaad, Christmas, 1981.
“I think it would be too painful for us to stay here for Christmas,” my dad said as December wore on.
For my mother, Christmas was the supreme festival of the year. When the holiday approached, she lit Rigaud Cypres candles that smelled of pine needles and cedar. This rich, wintery fragrance meant December was here, and even more merrymaking than usual would consume the house; more friends, more relatives, more presents, more food and singing. My mom loved to sing and knew every word to every Christmas carol. She would sing them all in her sweet high voice, and I would sing right along with her.
Now that she was gone, how could we do anything—caroling, tree decorating, present unwrapping—without accentuating her gaping absence? It was decided that the whole family, along with Kilky; Mart; Delphine and her two kids; Liz and her husband, Adrian; and Katie’s half brother Josh Donen, would spend Christ
mas at a chalet near David Niven’s house in Gstaad, Switzerland. David, known to us as “Niv,” helped my dad immensely during this time. He had lost his first wife, Primmie, in a sudden and tragic accident in 1946, which had left his sons motherless. He knew firsthand what Daddy was going through. We didn’t want any reporters following us, so the trip was kept top secret. Niv waited on the side of the road in the snow for four hours while our flight was delayed by a blizzard. When we finally left Geneva Airport, we all piled into a van and found David’s car by flashing our headlights in a prearranged signal. It was like being in a James Bond movie. Niv led us through the snowbanked roads to our rented chalet.
The Switzerland trip was meant to be an escape, a time to get away from home and all its changes and enjoy ourselves despite everything. Niv was so sensitive to our needs, meeting our sad eyes with such compassion in his own. He was the perfect British gentleman, but with his ribald, freewheeling sense of humor, he was also able to make my dad smile and laugh again. I remember one time during the trip we were driving in the car, and both Niv and my dad had to go to the bathroom so we pulled to the side of the road. Niv told my dad to pee to the right, pee to the left, pee to the front, and pee to the back. “Now you’ve peed in all the great rivers in Europe.” They both laughed like schoolboys.
My primary memory of that trip, however, is the feeling of being petrified if Daddy Wagner moved more than five feet away from me. I didn’t want to let him out of my sight. After Switzerland, we went to see my British dad in Wales for New Year’s. He and Julia had bought an old farmhouse with an enormous stone fireplace. “The fireplace is as big as you,” he told me. I was happy to visit him. But when New Year’s Eve came, the celebration seemed out of step with my feelings. When everyone gathered at midnight to ring in 1982 with a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne”—“should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?”—I may have been forcing a smile on the outside, but inside I was thinking, How can I ever be happy again? After New Year’s, Daddy Wagner had to take Katie, now age seventeen, to Paris to see about enrolling her in the Sorbonne, leaving me in the care of Kilky and Daddy Gregson. I remember the early morning, standing at the window of our bed-and-breakfast, watching my dad and Katie leave, my dad in a dark blue peacoat, his head covered by a wool hat, a waiting van making puffs of smoke in the icy air. He kept coming back in to give me one more hug… one more hug… and one last hug. After they drove away down the winding forest road, I climbed back into his bed, which was still warm and smelled like him. Under the covers, I held myself and cried until I fell asleep again.
When we returned to Canon Drive, the paparazzi pack lingered, and reminders of my mom were everywhere. Her night table was still there next to her bed, with her Limoges boxes on it and the books she had been reading, a funny novel called High Anxiety, by Mel Brooks, and another one, Gorky Park, by Martin Cruz Smith. The silver tray outside her bedroom that held the multitude of her sunglasses. Her vanity and all her makeup, brushes in silver cups, trays with pots of black powder, pink powder, the cut-glass carafes in her bathroom that held mouthwash, bubble bath, fragrance. All of those things sitting safely on their shelves like they were waiting for her to return from a trip. If those things were still here, why couldn’t she be here too? It was as if she had just stepped out for a day or two.
By now my dad had found me a new therapist, Mrs. Malin, the wife of his own therapist. Like my mom, my dad had been in therapy for many years, dating back to the time of their divorce. I didn’t like seeing Mrs. Malin at first. I was aware that my dad was paying for me to have intimate conversations about my feelings with this woman once a week, and when my hour was up I had to leave. Before, I had intimate conversations with my mom for free, whenever I wanted and needed to. Now I had to squeeze my feelings into a therapist’s forty-five-minute schedule.
Mrs. Malin did not work with children, only adults, but she made an exception for me. I remember I hated that I was the only kid going in and out of her office. Why couldn’t my dad have found a shrink who saw children and teenagers? Mrs. Malin had black hair parted in the middle that fell to her shoulders. She wore no makeup, silk shirts, and pleated gray pants. She said I could call her Naomi, but I decided to call her Mrs. Malin because she felt like a teacher to me.
In our early sessions, I was shy and uncomfortable.
“I have nothing to say. I don’t know why I’m here,” I told her.
“If you have nothing to say, just sit quietly then,” was her reply.
I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to be excused to leave just because I didn’t want to talk, so I might as well start communicating. Slowly I began to open up. I told her about a disagreement with Courtney or a funny thing that happened at school, what Jessica and Tracey and I had planned for the weekend.
Mrs. Malin was the perfect combination of intelligent, insightful, and nurturing. “What’s the trigger?” she would ask when I felt sad or anxious or depressed or ashamed. She taught me to observe and analyze my own thoughts and emotions. If my heart started to beat or my armpits pricked with sweat, she taught me to slow down and observe the feeling. Maybe my dad was going out of town in the next couple of days and I had just remembered? The mother-daughter luncheon was coming up at school. Was I worried about that? Could I go with Jessica or Tracey? Or was it best to stay home?
Soon, her home office became my weekly sanctuary. Slowly I learned that the bad feelings came and went. That I could rage, yell, and cry and that Mrs. Malin calmly allowed me to sit with those feelings, waiting for them to pass.
* * *
I think I knew my dad would not be single for long. How could he be? There were women all over the world chasing after him. After my mom died, wild-eyed women penciled their eyes with dark liner in an attempt to look like her. They would hand me their phone numbers to give to him, hopeful tears glistening in their eyes. It was Valentine’s Day 1982 when my dad told me that Tom Mankiewicz was “bringing over a friend.” Courtney and I were in the pool house playing on a new Pac-Man machine when Jill St. John walked in, a svelte, stylish woman in a burgundy cashmere turtleneck sweater. She introduced herself and brought us each a handcrafted folding fan made with purple feathers. Courtney and I exchanged glances. Why is this woman bringing us presents? Later, Daddy, Jill, Tom, and Katie went out to dinner. I was left behind wondering, Why can’t I come? I felt betrayed by Tom. He had been my mom’s close friend, and now he was bringing home a date for my dad. Where was his loyalty?
My dad told me that when they were little girls, my mom and Jill had been in ballet class together with Stefanie Powers. He showed me the black-and-white photo of the three of them clad in leotards, their smooth hair knotted at the backs of their heads. Baba had been friends with Jill’s mom and Stefanie’s mom. Even though there was this connection to my mother, I found it very hard to bond with Jill. She didn’t have children of her own and was not a naturally maternal woman. Jill had bright red hair held in place with hairspray. She wore tight cashmere sweaters and figure-hugging leather pants to show off her incredible body. My mom was an intimate person who would lounge around the house in her nightie or robe, her hair tied in a pony or hanging loose around her face. I loved to touch my mom’s soft hair or snuggle up in her lap. Jill was not that kind of a woman. My mom was a furry kitten, whereas Jill was a smooth-haired cheetah. I was intimidated by her.
My dad was in an impossible position, because he really liked Jill and he needed her to help him through losing our mom. He tried so hard to be sensitive to his kids, always struggling to bridge the gap between Jill and us. “Jill was thinking of you today,” he’d tell me and Courtney, “and bought you a present.” Or, over the phone, he’d say, “Jill’s right here, let me put her on so you can say hello.” We would roll our eyes. Please, let us end the call without you bringing Jill up again, we would think to ourselves.
Soon, Jill was around constantly. She traveled with us every time we took a trip and started spending all the holidays with u
s. It became clear that she was here to stay, so we better get comfortable with this new arrangement. At the time, I resented my dad’s focus shifting to this other person. Later, as Daddy and Jill grew closer and I grew more mature, I became aware of what a difficult and precarious position Jill was in, stepping right into a family that had been leveled by loss.
* * *
We managed to stay in the Canon Drive house for a year after my mom died. After that, we moved to Brentwood. The new house on Old Oak Road was designed by the architect Cliff May and it couldn’t have been more different from our white Cape Cod in Beverly Hills. This property was Western, with carved wood, adobe, Spanish tile, and a wide-open feel, with lots of glass and walls so thick no air-conditioning was needed. There was a pool, horse stables, and a trail that led right up into the Santa Monica Mountains. We didn’t abandon the old house, but made a slow, gentle transition into the new one. A long goodbye and a fresh start.
Delphine, one of my mom’s best friends and our real estate broker, sat with Courtney and me and talked with us about the things we wanted to bring. All my stuffed animals, of course, and my swan night-light. The large brass bed my mom had bought me the year before when she redid my room. My wicker desk. The photo albums.
After we moved to the new house, I turned thirteen. I had begun to develop a connection to horses and riding, taking weekly lessons at a house near Sullivan Canyon. For my birthday my dad gave me a beautiful Arabian horse named Fa-Da-Li, a chestnut gelding. My dad and I shared a love of horseback riding. Neither Katie nor Courtney was into horses, so this was something just for the two of us. When my dad and I rode up into the Santa Monica Mountains together, I followed behind him, falling into the rhythm of my horse and instantly feeling lighter. Once we made it to the top, we could see the ocean. This is where we would stop, the horses grabbing mouthfuls of wild green grass. My dad would inhale the air deeply, pointing out how beautiful this place was and how lucky we were to live here. The sunshine casting its yellow light on the oak and sycamore trees. The lizards on the rocky earth darting to and fro. The clippety-clop of the horses’ hooves on the black asphalt as we made our way down our street and back home. Out riding together, my dad and I didn’t need to talk to communicate how we felt about each other.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 14