I returned to the storage unit with a sense of purpose, treading the concrete floors with a mightier foot. Enough time had passed. I was ready to reconnect with my mother. I truly felt that she wanted me to begin this deep dive, that almost thirty-five years after her death, she was ready to be seen again. I went back to the unit over and over, spending countless hours amid her possessions. I dug through boxes, reached up into every shelf and container, and cracked the spines on old albums that hadn’t been opened in decades. I found scrapbooks put together by Baba. A bound copy of the original script for Miracle on 34th Street. A folder of letters from my fourth-grade class thanking her for taking us on a field trip to Olvera Street, Los Angeles’ historic Mexican district. This was the same year she was our room mother. In my letter, I wrote: “You’re just wonderful as a room mother, person, actress, mother, and everything else. I love you so much. Tell Daddy I love him too. You both are just terrific.”
A friend helped to convert the old home movies and film reels we discovered, and I found myself transported back in time to the 1970s through grainy, sun-bleached Super-8. Us in the pool at Daddy Wagner’s house in Palm Springs. My naked body squirming and splashing while my dad holds me, securely guiding me through my first splashes in the pool. He is suntanned and handsome and can’t stop smiling. My mom, long hair pigtailed, wearing a yellow bikini, mugging for the camera, jumping off the diving board, holding her nose in a mock “I hate the water” pose.
One day I was at the storage unit with my collaborator on the coffee-table book, Manoah Bowman. We had already been here for a couple of hours and I was beginning to feel woozy with information, my eyes glazing over from so much searching. On the floor, we stumbled upon an unremarkable brown box. Manoah opened it and pulled out some ¾-inch tapes. Beneath them was a small leather book, its binding stripped and worn with age. I turned the book over and there in gold lettering was my mom’s name: “NATALIE WOOD WAGNER.”
I opened the book and found a note inscribed on the inside: “to Nat from Nick.” The book was actually a journal, a birthday gift to my mom from Nick Adams, her costar and friend from Rebel Without a Cause. The date was 1958.
“… it is a rare love that you both have for each other, and it is a rare love that I have for you and RJ…” Nick wrote. “Perhaps you can use this book to keep the many memories of your beautiful and wonderful life with RJ.”
In 1958, my mom had just married R.J. for the first time. I flipped through the pages. Inside, my mom had placed love notes to her from my dad. There were dried roses flattened in pages. Many of the journal entries described the love my mom felt for R.J., his kindnesses to her. How he brought her a “single white rose because we were separated for 10 hours.”
Letters and notes were taped on different pages. One fell out, catching my eye because it was written on pale blue airmail paper. Light as air.
The front of the note said “Natalie Wood” but I recognized the writing that said “personal” immediately. That was Daddy Wagner’s unmistakable handwriting, all caps, long, well-formed letters. The letter was dated March 6, 1962.
I started reading the letter out loud to Manoah. R.J. began by telling my mother how proud he was that she had been nominated for an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass. He told her “you’ve got my vote.”
Then he mentioned that his lawyer Andy had spoken with him. Andy had said that my mom was willing to go through with the divorce action. My dad then thanked her for the Christmas gifts that my mother had sent his sister Mary’s children. He also told her that his “Mother and Dad appreciated your thoughtfulness… they think you are a marvelous girl.”
He went on, “you look marvelous as Gypsy, hope all is going well on the film.”
As I reached the end of the letter, my eyes filled with tears.
“My thoughts will be with and for you on Oscar night and believe me Nat, I hope with all my heart that when they open up the envelope that it’s you.”
This letter was from the period of my parents’ divorce. My dad could have been angry, lashing out at my mom. Instead he wished her well, hoped she would win her Oscar, wanted the best for her. So much has been written about my parents and their “tempestuous marriage.” So much has been made of the fact that they divorced when they were young and fought on the night of my mom’s death. But in many ways, the relationship I knew, that I grew up around, was marked by a kind of old-fashioned decorum, a courteousness rooted in kindness and mutual respect.
The letter validated everything I knew about my parents, that they loved each other with a deep and rare love. Yes, they had their disagreements, but above all, they adored and appreciated one another. It was as simple as that. I cried for the elegance that existed between them—even as they separated. These were the people who raised me. This was the love that I had witnessed. This relationship of theirs was what made me. This love was the same love I was sharing with my own husband and passing down to my daughter.
At that storage unit in Glendale, I was able to meet my mother over and over again, in photographs, in albums and home movies, through the objects that she kept and loved, the gifts she had been given. I also began to discover her in her own words. My mom was such a compulsive communicator, always jotting things down in her datebooks, sending letters and notes, drawing little pictures of sweet faces with big smiles and curly hair at the bottom of the letters she wrote to Courtney and me. There were letters that she had written to my dad in her journal, letters to directors that she planned to send, stern letters to Daddy Gregson telling him what would or wouldn’t fly when it came to parenting me. I got the sense that my mother wrote these letters first for herself, to clarify her thoughts on paper. Then she transcribed them onto her stationery once they were ready to send.
I felt I was meeting my mother eye to eye, at her own level, instead of seeing her through the filter of her film roles or other people and their perceptions of her. One day, while looking for photos, I was rifling through yet another brown cardboard carton that looked as if it hadn’t been touched in decades. At the bottom was a plain white notebook. I pulled it out. As I opened it up, I found fifty pages of writing. Some pages were typewritten, some were handwritten; some of the typewritten pages had notes on them in my mother’s handwriting. They were dated 1966, with the title “Public Property / Private Person.”
I did the math. In 1966, she was between her first two marriages. She was twenty-eight years old. She had gotten divorced from R.J. but had yet to marry Richard Gregson. This was before she had me, written while she was making the movie Penelope.
I began reading. The article was a kind of memoir of her life to that date. It seems my mom had been writing an article for Ladies’ Home Journal and these were her drafts and notes.
“Hollywood is where I live,” read the first sentence.
It is the only home I have ever known. I have been making a living here since I was a child I have performed in forty films, and before I reach the age of thirty I will be eligible for a twenty-five-year pension Looking at it from the outside it must appear to be a very pleasant way to make a living (as indeed it is)—hanging on to your childhood, playing at make-believe, being Cinderella, meeting Prince Charming… all the while being paid quite well. But like most things, there is another way of looking at it too—from the inside. This is a tough and hotly competitive business, and it is particularly hard on women. Your ego is constantly on the line when your every mood, pound, and inch is scrutinized by experts every day. Part of the bargain is being exploited, misunderstood, and occasionally misled.
I finished the first paragraph and closed the notebook. I didn’t want to read it all at once and so when I left that afternoon, I took the pages with me. It was a long article, about the length of a novella. In the morning, I sat in my bedroom in Venice after dropping Clover at school and began reading. I didn’t want the article to end so I stretched out the process, reading a few paragraphs at a time, over the course of three or four days. Cross-legged on the wo
oden floor or propped up in my bed with a cup of coffee next to me. If the phone rang, the call went unanswered—I was too busy visiting with my twenty-eight-year-old mother. The drafts included many handwritten notes from my mom with instructions to her editor—“this page out!” There were letters from the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal and her responses. Always her lawyer Paul Ziffren copied on everything.
As I read, I realized that when she wrote these words, my mother had been in the public eye for more than twenty years. In the article, she wanted to remind people that she had a private side, that she was so much more than the painted version of herself they saw on the screen and in the movie magazines. My mother explains in the article:
It’s a strange feeling to see people watching you in a film And it brings with it a barrage of mixed feelings. You remember all the crises associated with a certain scene, or… how good you felt when you were able to make a particular moment work. It may have been months since the film was completed, and by now, you are deeply immersed in another.… It’s always seemed bizarre to me that all those months of work, the crises, the turmoil, the decisions, finally get compacted into one hundred minutes of film.… Sometimes you wish you could say to the audience, “Would you please forget that last scene? I wasn’t feeling well that day.” But you can’t run up and down the aisles, and you can’t try to do it better the next night. Once it flashes on the screen, it is there. It no longer belongs to you. That part of me is public property. But there is a private person behind the image. Her name is Natasha Gurdin.
My mom talked at length about her childhood, growing up on bustling soundstages and sets, completing homework to the sound of a banging hammer. She writes about how, when she was twelve, my grandfather suffered the first of a series of heart attacks and could no longer work.
“This meant my acting was the sole economic support of my family, and therefore getting jobs became a tremendous responsibility,” she recalled. “It felt like heartbreak time whenever I heard a casting director say: ‘She’s too skinny—too short—too tall—in the awkward stage.’ The worst one was ‘Not pretty enough.’ When I lost a job, I always felt Nature had played a dirty trick on me.”
My mother describes how she began driving the family Chevy at twelve because her father was too ill and her mother too anxious. Driving a car and earning the money to keep her family at the age of twelve! She was so petite she could barely have been able to see above the steering wheel.… I felt such a pang for her, a feeling of wanting to reach back through the years to wrap my arms around her and to comfort her.
She didn’t focus only on her childhood; she reckoned with the collapse of her marriage to R.J. too. My mother was someone who always seemed so in control. To read about her remorse about their breakup, her feelings of failure, how palpably she still missed R.J. and hoped to reconcile with him, really shook me. At the core of their problems, she explained, was their inability to push aside illusion and deal with reality. My mom wrote:
We were aware that we had problems but tried to avoid the real conflicts. We maintained a superficially happy relationship and hoped that by pretending there was nothing wrong, the problem would go away. It was extremely difficult for us to really face serious flaws in the relationship when everything looked so ideal on the surface. Looking at it from the outside we must have seemed like the American dream. We were both attractive and successful, so what could possibly be wrong? We not only worked at illusion, we lived in it. How do you separate reality from illusion when you have been steeped in make-believe your whole life? Marriage requires patience and work, as well as the capacity to accept another human being, flaws and all, without cloaking him in a smothering mantle of perfection. It was unfair to heap all my dreams on one man’s shoulders.
And yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, my mom was determined to find her way through, to stop sweeping her childhood problems “under a rug labeled Marriage,” as she put it, and to face the hard truths.
Since the collapse of my marriage in 1961 I have been consciously trying to examine and unravel the real cause and effect of all my behavior I think it takes a long time—years—to realize what it means when your marriage fails; all the promises to love forever, the faith, and the belief in another person and yourself. I started psychoanalysis at this crisis in my life.… I had been on a merry-go-round since I was four, and perhaps it was beginning to need some repairs. Because I felt I had so few inner resources, I was extremely dependent on other people and their reactions towards me. It was as if I were the sum total of all the parts I had played and I had no idea who I really was.… I always did as I was told as a child and on the set. These superficial props were no longer satisfying, dependable, or appropriate to my age. For the first time in my life, I considered, in horror, the possibility that I might join that sad parade of famous movie ladies who wind up desperately lonely, with nothing more substantial to sustain them than their scrapbooks and old photos, and memories of romances and divorces. I could no longer expect a magical Prince Charming or even a good doctor to wave a wand and make the pain go away. Nor would I find the answer in work, travel, or material things. Something was wrong and I wanted desperately to put it right. I knew the answer lay within myself.
Toward the end of the article, my mother writes about her newfound desire to educate herself, not only by spending time on her therapist’s couch, where she had grown so much, but by reading and studying too. At the time, she was taking an English literature class at UCLA.
“The course helped me to realize that my feelings are not as unique as I once supposed; in fact, they are so common they are universal,” she pointed out.
People have always had to fight the feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and estrangement from other human beings. Everyone deals with these feelings in a personal way. I don’t want to forget the painful memories. It is from remembering that pain of failure and trying to overcome it that one can possibly begin to grow.… I was once asked if my goal in life was to be a good actress, and at one time perhaps it was. But now I know that, most of all, my hope is that I will be totally committed to another human being and that that union will bring children and happiness.
When she wrote her piece for Ladies’ Home Journal my mom of course had no idea that she would marry my dad, become a mother to me, remarry R.J., and have Courtney.
It wasn’t hard for me to relate to the young woman I found in the writings, struggling in her relationships, searching for herself, on a quest to find a deeper value and meaning away from the gaze of the public and the camera, someone who was still waiting to find her life partner and to have children. These had been my struggles too, the struggles of so many women. I recognized the seeking, insightful, articulate author of the article, lost in the confusion of her twenties, trying to make sense of the past. I felt protective of her and compassionate toward her. And at the same time, I felt such a deep pride and happiness for the young woman that my beloved mom had been and all that she hoped for herself.
The Ladies’ Home Journal article was never published. We don’t know why. I wonder if my mother finished it and then thought better of her decision to expose herself to the world. Manoah and I decided to publish an excerpt from it in the coffee-table book, alongside beautiful black-and-white photographs of my mother at the age she had been when she’d written the words.
* * *
The year of the auction, my aunt Lana decided to write a letter to Christopher Walken, begging him to “tell what really happened” that night, which she published on Radar Online, the celebrity gossip website. In the age of Internet clickbait journalism, Lana had found an outlet eager to feature her theories about my mom’s death. A year later, my father was on a trip to Palm Springs with Jill and was sitting having dinner when a waiter came to the table with a note from Lana, asking him to speak with her. My dad went out to the lobby, where Lana was waiting for him. My aunt proceeded to plead with him to speak about “what happened” that night. What my dad didn’t
know was that Lana had brought with her a TV crew from Radar Online. In the video—which ended up all over YouTube—my eighty-six-year-old dad looks surprised but does his best to remain calm as Lana barrages him with questions and accusations. It takes him a moment to notice the cameras, to see that he has been ambushed.
Three years later, the most recent media blitz about my mom’s death hit, with Lana at the center. It was the summer of 2018, and I was in the Midwest, at the hundred-year-old cabin Barry and I had just purchased. The house sits on a beautiful calm bay. Serene and cool blue, the lake sparkles and shimmers when the sun dances on its surface. They call it “unsalted and shark free.” I like this saying. It means we can swim in the water safely, see the sand at the bottom, know that nothing is coming to get us. Behind our cabin is a forest. Trees—some bent and broken, leaning on each other for support, others growing tall and proud, reaching for the sun—surround us. Ash and cedar, maple and birch. Evergreens everywhere.
Early one June morning shortly after we arrived, Clover and I took a golf-cart ride through the woods. Out of the corner of our eyes, we both caught a flash of brown. It was a mama deer, her baby fawn just behind her. Together they darted across the road.
“Mama, did you see them?” Clover asked, thrilled at our close brush with wildlife.
“I sure did.”
A few days later we were in the car. Off to the right of the highway, we spotted a dead deer, its body still intact. “Could that be the mama deer we saw in the woods?” Clover wondered. It might have been. As we passed, we noticed five or six vultures feasting on her, tearing out her flesh, her blood. They were hungry and she was their meal.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 26