I was immersing myself in the actor’s lifestyle. My mother’s lifestyle. I grew accustomed to the rigmarole of auditioning. Rejection was painful, and of course I questioned my talent, especially when I really wanted a role. But as rejection is more common than acceptance in the acting business, all the actors I knew, including my dad, supported me through the experience—they all knew what it felt like.
When I did win a part, I was jubilant. Each film or TV project, it was as if I had joined another patchwork. I was also getting to discover different aspects of myself by experiencing the varying emotions of a character. Playing Kristen in Dead Beat was a revelation in this respect. In real life I was too circumspect to live my life with the kind of wild abandon that Kristen did. She had a temper and I was only too ready to let Kit have it in the movie. Was this what my mom loved about acting? When she screamed at the actress playing her mother, Audrey Christie, in Splendor, was she feeling the same release? I found it hard to let go of a beloved character when a shoot was over. Did my mom have the same struggle? In her performances, she is so completely immersed in her characters. If I missed Kristen after Dead Beat wrapped, did that mean my mom missed Deanie Loomis or Gypsy Rose Lee? I couldn’t ask her. The more energy I spent following a trail of gingerbread crumbs to my mother, the more acutely I felt her loss.
As much as I was looking for her, I did not watch my mother’s films during this time. I knew that if I studied her performances too closely I wouldn’t be able to find my own identity as an actor. When people brought her up, I shrank. I did my best to make sure most people did not know I had famous parents. I wanted to live or die by my own strengths and weaknesses. But it was inevitable that I would be held up to my mother’s mirror. One of my teachers told me that my mom “held her emotion in her throat” and that I did the same thing. What he meant by that was she wasn’t speaking from the deepest place in her body, that her voice got caught in her throat; therefore in a very emotional scene there was still a part of her that she was holding back. “My mom held her emotion in her throat?” I remember saying it back to myself over and over. I wouldn’t have dared look at my mother’s performances with anything but admiration and awe. She was famous for her vulnerability, the tremor in her voice, her velvet brown eyes that told the audience everything we needed to know. She had been nominated for three Oscars and this teacher just picked apart her talent? I felt very confused. Were her flaws my flaws? Maybe I had only inherited her shortcomings as an actor and none of her talent? Her image loomed large, and I worked overtime trying to diminish our connection. I wanted this time to be about my teachers, my directors, about me.
My agent suggested I take weekly scene study classes with Larry Moss, the great actor, director, and acting coach. Amanda was going to be taking the class as well so we decided to work on a scene together. We chose In the Boom Boom Room by David Rabe, about two go-go dancers. I played Chrissy, a young, inexperienced dancer with a past history of abuse and dreams of making it big on the stage in Philadelphia. Amanda played Susan, the more mature of the two dancers.
I borrowed a Playboy Bunny costume from a friend and Amanda put together her interpretation of a stripper’s outfit. Larry sat in his director’s chair in a corner of the theater, watching us intently. He was tall and gangly, a real string bean, with glasses and a baseball hat. I was in awe of him and desperately wanted his approval.
The scene went from bad to worse—neither of us was up to the task.
Larry was kind but he made it clear there was a lot to learn. He gently told me the unvarnished truth about myself: that I was a little girl who needed to grow up.
“You need to work on strengthening your voice and breathing from your diaphragm,” he advised.
Even at the age of twenty, my voice sounded like a child’s voice. It had no power or resonance and it could sound nasal and whiny. After that assessment, I didn’t go back to Larry’s classes for a very long time.
* * *
While I focused on my acting, my sister was on a very different trajectory. Two years after I moved into the condo on Doheny Drive, Courtney bought a place in the same building. We fell easily back into the pattern of living close together. We each had our own space, but we knew the other was just a floor away. Courtney’s love affair with drinking and partying was intensifying. Often, she couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. Katie and I were constantly getting reports from Courtney’s friends, telling us about her wild nights.
“You guys better do something about Courtney,” they said. “We’re worried about her. She needs to go to rehab or she will wind up dead.”
Sometimes I would organize for Courtney to stay with me. We would talk about our mom, the pain we were both struggling with, our dreams for our future. I would remind Courtney of her strength, her courage, her talent as an artist, her beauty. Though Courtney had seen a therapist after our mother died, this relationship did not yield the same kind of emotional stability that I had gotten from Mrs. Malin. The family conferred. Doctors and specialists were contacted. What could we do to help her? Could we find Courtney another therapist, insist that she go to rehab, take her to Wales to live with Daddy Gregson and Julia for a time? Courtney would listen to us, aware that she had a problem, in agreement that she needed help. And then before we knew it, she’d be out on the town, drinking and partying with no plans to stop or slow down.
Worry and fear for Courtney’s life soon dominated my days. My family and I took turns staying with her, watching out for her, praying for her. I knew that losing her would be more than my family could bear. My mother had died from an alcohol-related accident. I couldn’t save my mom, but I was determined to save my sister. I clocked her moves, I called her and her friends incessantly, I stayed up at night wondering where she might be and what time she would be home.
Finally, Courtney hit rock bottom and, a couple of days later, checked herself into the Sierra Tucson treatment facility in Arizona.
My sister had been at the rehab center for a month when my dad, Jill, Kilky, Katie, and I arrived for family week.
The facility was a low adobe building in the middle of the stark Arizona desert, surrounded by cactus and tumbleweeds. We rose early, separating into different groups. For the rest of the day we worked with specialists alongside other families that had been through loss and addiction. At the hospital, they called Courtney the “identified patient,” meaning she was the one our family was always focused on. We were told that we were enabling Courtney by trying to ameliorate her problems. They suggested that Courtney was using her addiction as a way to stay young, to continue to be a child because she felt that she had not gotten enough of a childhood.
My sister had once said to me, “You miss Mommie. I miss having a mom.” Courtney had scarcely had a chance to get to know her own mother before losing her. Because I was three and a half years older, I had had more time with our mother before she died. I felt guilty about this: guilty that I knew our mom better than Courtney did; guilty that I had a stable second family in Wales that I spent summers with, and she did not. Courtney was often left with Kilky while I was in Wales, Katie traveled the world, and my dad lived his life with Jill. She did not have a therapist who was as wise and brilliant as Mrs. Malin. Thank goodness for Kilky, who mothered Courtney consistently, with every bit of her love and devotion.
We each had our time in a chair speaking our truth to Courtney. I told Courtney that she was the closest person to me next to my mother. I told her I loved her as my little sister but also as my best friend. I told her how much I needed her. I apologized for my judgment of her, the times when we fought and I was furious at her. I admitted I was afraid of losing her. Maybe if I pushed her away first, the pain of losing her wouldn’t be so great.
On that trip to Arizona, Courtney and I talked openly about what happened after our mother died. Because our dad was traveling and working so much, we had felt left behind, longing for him and his attention. He always told us how much he loved u
s, how much we meant to him, and yet he was not able to be there for us physically. He would call us and buy us presents, but he was not able to tolerate our pain, to sit still, to just stay home. Courtney and I didn’t want to travel to Europe and stay in the nicest hotels or go to fancy dinners; we didn’t care what beautiful gifts he gave us. We just wanted him, his basic, unadorned self, at home, doing normal, unremarkable things, like making dinner, playing board games, watching a movie, taking a walk.
That week, I watched my brave dad sit in a chair across from one of the therapists and talk about his relationship with his own father. The heartbreak he carried with him of not having a father who supported him in his life. How much he wished they could have had the opportunity to talk like this. My dad apologized to Courtney and me for working so much, for not knowing how to support us in our grief.
Jill also became more open with us. We learned that she simply did not know how to be a stepmom to us. She explained that our dad had asked her not to try to take our mom’s place and that was why she didn’t engage with us as much as we wished she would. It was not rejection. Jill acknowledged she didn’t know how to be our friend.
After Arizona, Courtney did well for a while. Her sobriety went on just long enough for it to be all the more heartbreaking when she relapsed. A small thing, and before we knew it, she was drinking too much again and we had to face the hard truth that this wasn’t over yet. My mother’s loss was like an earthquake, continuing to send ripples of shock through our lives, leaving cracks beneath our feet where there should have been solid ground.
Chapter 14
Natasha on location with Jesse Peretz (far left) and author Ian McEwan in Houma, Louisiana, for First Love, Last Rites, 1997.
Courtney’s breakdowns were dramatic. Obvious. On the outside I was the “good” daughter, capable, working, getting on with my life. But that was only the facade. My breakdowns were more secretive. Reserved for my boyfriends, my closest friends, or Mrs. Malin. I allowed Courtney to be the messy one so I could be the tidy one. I did not want people to worry about me, to pity me, to feel sorry for me—but I was living a total lie. My anxiety would sit itself in my stomach, knotting up my insides. “How do you stay so skinny?” my friends would ask me. “You eat like a horse.” And I did. I ate anything I wanted. I think my adrenaline was running overtime ever since my mother died.
When I was alone with my journals I could describe my struggles, my fears, my insecurities about not having any talent, not being as beautiful as my mom. Then there was my fear of separation, which had been with me since the earliest days of my childhood. Sometimes I could barely catch my breath when Josh left for a weekend, so terrified was I to be apart from him. I learned to go home to my apartment on Doheny to cry into my pillow exactly the way I did as a child when my mom died, take a bath, and call a friend or one of my sisters, and then I would be okay. It was just the initial trauma of separating that was so painful. I hated to be alone, and airports left my palms sweaty, my heart beating like a hummingbird’s. Even if I could talk myself through it, saying, Josh is not my mom, he is not going to abandon me, I could not stop the physical sensations that overtook me.
Josh was opinionated. Instead of arguing with him or standing my ground when he implored me to adopt his vegetarian lifestyle, I assured him that I had stopped eating meat—around him, that was. When he wasn’t there, I devoured a cheeseburger with the best of them. We fell into the roles of teacher (Josh) and willing student (me), and I quickly grew dependent on his nurturing and his advice. The more intertwined Josh and I became, the more terrified and out of control I would feel. Sometimes I acted out with other guys, blatantly flirting with them in front of Josh or mutual friends who would tell him. It was as if I was testing him, pushing the boundaries to see how far his love for me would stretch. When he would confront me, I’d become enraged, petty, and jealous. I would scream and cry and fall apart. During these emotional outbursts, Josh would always tell me, “You need to call Miss Malin.” It became an inside joke with Jessica and me, the fact that he called her “Miss.” But Josh didn’t seem to care if he got her name right. He was emotionally mature enough to know that I needed to process these unwieldy feelings with a professional, not a twentysomething.
One night I stayed out late. When I came home to Josh’s apartment at 3 a.m. he had accidentally locked me out. I was outraged, humiliated. When he finally came sleepy-eyed to the door, I let him have it. A punch would have been cleaner. Instead I raged at him from the darkest places inside of me. He sat there, he listened, he jumped up and ducked when I threw things. It was too late for me to call “Miss Malin,” so he didn’t mention it. A couple of hours later I was beset with shame and sadness. How could I have treated the one I loved so deeply, so terribly? I cried, I apologized, I curled into a ball. Josh was that rare person who was able to withstand my craziness. He was a few months younger than me and yet he had an emotional fortitude that I lacked. He was patient and strong and kind. But I knew something had to change.
* * *
After that, Mrs. Malin and I doubled down on our therapy sessions. She’d sit there in her brown leather chair, a long necklace of pearls or a gold chain around her neck, her gaze focused on me. Together, we began to see a pattern. I had gone from dating Ricky to Paul to Josh, instantly fusing myself with these boys in the same way I fused with my mom. Courtney found drugs to ease her suffering; I found relationships. Neither ultimately could take our pain away. I wanted to be with my boyfriends all the time. When we were together, I could be my stable, fun-loving self. When it was time to separate for a day, a weekend, or longer, I disintegrated into a puddle of need. Sometimes my neediness was like a little girl’s; other times I became angry, lashing out at the men in my life.
I could not make sense of my thunderbolt emotions. Where were they coming from? Especially my rage. I had had such a happy childhood. I had been adored by all three of my parents, coddled, nurtured, protected. But in therapy, Mrs. Malin helped me uncover the parts of my childhood before my mom died that were not as perfect as I remembered them to be. It was a slow and delicate process. In the beginning, I did not want to believe that my beautiful, loving parents were anything but perfect. Just like they looked in pictures. They radiated warmth and safety.
Mrs. Malin encouraged me to accept that sometimes my mother wanted to be away from me and that was okay. When I was very young, after my mom and Daddy Wagner reconnected, she would leave me for a handful of days with Baba to be just with him. Later, she was constantly out for dinners and events with my dad or traveling for work. Mrs. Malin explained that the comings and goings were on her terms, not mine, and this was why when a boyfriend left me for a trip or even for an evening, I collapsed into rage and grief.
I grew to realize that one of the reasons I had such a hard time being alone—why I would be so sad when a weekend at Daddy Gregson’s or a long holiday ended—was because when I was a child my parents had surrounded themselves with so many friends. There were always people at our house visiting, staying with us, having drinks or dinner. The message to me was that being alone was wrong—it was lonely.
We also talked about my parents’ drinking. As a child I would clock my parents’ voices when they were drinking, often waking up in the middle of the night to make sure they were safely asleep in their beds. No cigarettes smoldering in their ashtrays, no candles still lit. Was the front door locked? I carried this vigilance into my relationships.
I needed to accept the fact that my parents were not perfect. That my mother had her own bouts of sadness and anxiety. That she drank too much sometimes. This was devastating for me. To me, she was flawless and all-powerful. I was scared to view her as weak in any way. Mrs. Malin helped me to see that it was going to be impossible for me to flourish in my life without accepting some of these darker, messier truths about my mother.
Slowly, I began to accept that my parents were fallible human beings, children whose own hearts had broken at various times in their
lives. I forgave my dad for his physical and emotional absence after my mom died. I began to forgive my mom for abandoning me. She did not mean to die. She drank too much; she argued with her husband, whom she adored; she felt overwhelmed. I believe she was at an artistic crossroads in her life. I know with my whole heart that had she not slipped, hit her head, and fallen into the water, she would have retied that annoying dinghy to the other side of the boat and gone back to sleep. She would have woken up the next morning and had coffee with my dad and Christopher Walken. She would have pulled herself together and come home to her children and her life. If my parents were struggling in their marriage, they would have reached out for help. My mother was a self-preservationist. She was a fighter, stronger than them all, as my godfather Mart always tells me. She would have figured it out, and my parents would have figured it out. It was a terrible, terrible accident and the only thing to blame was too much alcohol that night. My parents were not perfect like I thought they were and that was okay.
At some point, Mrs. Malin suggested I meet with a psychopharmacologist. She felt that the trauma I had experienced with my mother’s death and my subsequent emotional highs and lows could be ameliorated with medication. I was prescribed 20 milligrams of a relatively new drug called Prozac, also known as fluoxetine. About a week later, I felt so much more secure in myself. I did not wake up with anxiety every morning, my heart pounding, my stomach somersaulting. I felt like the layer of skin that had been removed when my mother died was growing back—not as strong and elastic as it had once been, but at least it was there.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 19