Natasha (10 page)

Natasha, who was learning to read, signed the picture herself, copying her sister Olga’s perfect penmanship. “To dear Edwin, My best
friend,” she wrote neatly, “love Natalie Wood,” adding, in parentheses, “(Natasha).”

It was a psychologically complex correspondence, foreshadowing, among other things, the interweaving of Maria’s persona with Natasha’s; Natasha’s identity complex; and Mud’s total domination of her movie star daughter. “God
made
her,” she would say years later, “but
I
invented her.”

BEFORE FILMING WAS COMPLETED ON HER
first movie, a fan magazine called
Motion Picture
had already interviewed “Natalie Wood” for a profile called “Six-Year-Old Siren.” Pichel made immediate arrangements to borrow her from International for his new movie at Paramount,
The Bride Wore Boots
, to start in July, putting Natasha back to work within three weeks, over what would have been her summer holiday.

Mud’s paranoid behavior blossomed into hysteria now that “Natalie” was on the cusp of fame. She never let Natasha out of her sight and would not allow her to play at other children’s homes because she was afraid Natasha might be kidnapped, instilling a disturbing new element to her growing fear of being alone, “this feeling that it was somehow
dangerous
.” Natasha put off bedtime until as late as possible, “babbling” for hours, populating her bedroom with storybook dolls—believing that Bo-Peep, Cinderella, and twenty-eight other doll characters kept her from being alone. “I talked to my dolls and toys and I thought they came alive at night,” she told a writer when she was an adult. “Sometimes I stayed up all night to see what they would do.”

Mud’s restrictions, and the absence of school, isolated Natasha. Her sole companion, apart from Olga and a cat named Voska, was a three-year-old boy who lived next door. Natasha called him “Father,” for reasons she didn’t tell. She lived in her imagination, inventing stories, identifying with the dark Russian fairy tales in Fahd’s books, envisioning when she would travel to the Russia of Mud’s romantic description, cloaked in ermine, riding through snowdrifts on the trans-Siberian express. Her reality was a childhood so lonely she named “Mr. Pichel” as her best friend when asked by a reporter from
Motion Picture
, referring wistfully to Edwin, her “boyfriend” in Santa Rosa.

Natasha’s first day on Pichel’s new movie was July 20, her seventh birthday. Mud and Fahd gave her a party, inviting all the neighborhood
children with whom she was forbidden to play. They wore colorful hats and ate cake, bringing presents and singing “Happy Birthday.” Natasha, who had never been to a child’s party, was so overcome she cried. She told Mud afterward when she grew up she wanted to be a mother and have a hundred and fifty kids, “and they’re all going to have to give me presents on my birthday.”

Natasha’s kiddie party was a brief diversion from her real life, acting in movies. The war ended a few weeks after she turned seven, and Pichel’s new picture reflected the changing times.
The Bride Wore Boots
was a daffy comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as an equestrienne married to a citified writer comically inept around horses (Robert Cummings). Natalie Wood and a cherubic six-year-old named Gregory Muradian played their children, given little more to do in the film than provide background scenery and play appealingly with a goat. Off camera, Gregory was “quite enamored of” his movie sibling, Natasha, whose Aryan blond braids as Margaret Ludwig had been replaced by a halo of golden brown curls. Most of the children’s scenes were shot on location at a horse ranch, where Natasha and Gregory romped. After her demanding bilingual performance opposite Welles, Natasha essentially had to show up and look adorable. Her enduring memory was of Stanwyck’s perfume.
The Bride Wore Boots
also introduced Natasha to horses, a passion of Stanwyck’s. The film itself was a pallid imitation of Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn screwball comedies, though it was pleasant and Natasha was beguiling. Pichel, borrowing from Hitchcock, appeared briefly in a scene.

Natasha finished shooting her part in September and returned to school, where she continued to be shadowed. Olga walked her to class every day, under instruction from Maria, who was still convinced that kidnappers lurked around every corner.

Tomorrow Is Forever
would not be out until after Christmas, but “Natalie Wood” was already getting attention. Her profile in
Motion Picture
hit the newsstands, predicting she would be a candidate for a child Oscar and proclaiming her a prodigy. Maria controlled every aspect of her daughter’s emerging persona and Natasha followed orders like a good little soldier. “I want to be a movie star,” she “bubbled” to
Motion Picture
, repeating the mantra Mud chanted to her since birth.

In November,
Life
magazine sent a reporter and a photographer to the Gurdins’ cottage in West Hollywood to prepare a story on the seven-year-old actress who had Orson Welles at her feet. They took pictures of
Natasha, tanned and topless, on the backyard swing; lying on the grass stroking her cat. Mud, hoping to glamorize Natalie’s image, lied to the reporter, telling him her husband, Nick, was an “engineer,” constructing an intricate tissue of falsehoods about how “Natalie Wood” got into the movies. She told the reporter that
Pichel
stumbled onto Natasha shooting
Happy Land
and
sent
for her to star in
Tomorrow Is Forever
. Then she fabricated an elaborate story that Natasha’s father disapproved, so she “tricked” him by pretending to visit a friend in Los Angeles and “sneaking” Natasha to a screen test. Natasha begged to do the movie, said Maria, so she returned to Santa Rosa, convinced her husband, and sold the house.

When the
Life
pictorial came out at Thanksgiving, Maria Gurdin’s outlandish lies were printed as fact, creating a Hollywood myth concerning the discovery of Natalie Wood that would crystallize, with time, into legend. Even Lana, who was born after the
Life
article, believed her mother’s propaganda that Pichel sent for her sister from Santa Rosa to star in
Tomorrow Is Forever
, repeating it over the years as “the story that I have been told my entire life.” The image of a movie star is
illusion
, a concept Mud, the ultimate fantasist, instinctively grasped. “Marie Gurdin was a highly imaginative genius,” an industry friend once observed. “She managed to form, to invent, to chisel this image of Natalie Wood.” In an irony,
Life
pronounced Natalie “stiff competition” for Margaret O’Brien, whose look Mud had brazenly copied.
Life
also reported that three studios were trying to buy Natalie’s contract from International. Whether this was true, or more of Maria’s hyperbole, is unsubstantiated.

Mud would do anything to get a foot in the door for Natasha. She read and re-read the trades, enrolling Natasha in ballet and classical dance with Tamara Lepke, hiring a piano instructor so she would be prepared to play any role. “They put a
lot
into her—piano lessons, dancing lessons—always to further her.” Olga, who sang in Hollywood High operettas, had her voice lessons suddenly discontinued by Maria, who was insensitively oblivious to her elder daughter’s talent. “I just decided to work and pay for my own lessons,” relates Olga. To earn money, she babysat after school, “and I would work at department stores on Hollywood Boulevard.” The Gurdin household was like a miniature studio dedicated to the training of just one star: Natalie Wood. Recalled Natalie: ” My mother used to tell me, ‘No matter what
they ask you—“Can you sing, dance, swim, ride?”—always say yes. You can learn later.’”

For all her gurgling to magazines about wanting to be a movie star, Natasha didn’t seem excited about being in movies, her sister remembers. What compelled Natasha to act was not the desire to perform; it was a compulsion to
please
. She defined “acting,” at six, as “doing things for people.” Natasha, by nature, took pleasure in bringing joy to others. When Maria was in her seventies, she told this story about Natalie:

It was this innate sensitivity to other people’s feelings that made Natasha such an affecting child actress, and explained how she remained unspoiled. Singer Lena Horne’s daughter Gail attended grammar school with Natasha that year as fame struck, and she remembers her fondly as “tiny, pretty Natalie, our resident movie star.” Olga, who had every reason to resent her, considered it a treat to take Natasha to the movies.

Maria’s driving ambition and Natasha’s urgency to please were a dangerous cocktail. “I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt,” she said later. Olga would observe her sister at ballet recitals “concentrating so hard she put her tongue out the left side, biting her cheek.” At seven, Natasha was playing Chopin. She studied Olga’s movie scrapbook like a textbook, memorizing details of the ninety-four stars’ lives, repeating
them in interviews. When she watched movies, Natasha got so emotionally involved, once at a cinema with Olga, “she was watching the movie and I guess had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know it, so she must have been letting it out very slowly… and I was just so proper, I took her home right away. But she wet her pants!” When she wasn’t in a movie, taking ballet or piano to prepare for a movie, or going to the movies, Natasha played “making movies.”

Nick, according to a brother, was proud of the fact that his daughter was acting. If it bothered him, as Natalie and Maria later maintained, he was too passive within the marriage to exert any authority, or to buffer Natasha from Mud. The fact that his wife had gotten him a job through his six-year-old daughter’s connections underscored his impotence; the word in the Gurdins’ Russian circle in San Francisco was that Natalie was the breadwinner in the family. Nick was “miserably unhappy,” according to his younger daughter, Lana, who was conceived that June, between Natasha’s films for Pichel.

Maria consequently dominated Natasha, inflicting strange paranoias to sculpt her into stardom. She refused to let Natasha go “on toe” too soon in ballet class, concerned that her calves would look too large on the screen. “After each exercise, I rubbed her with oil—the whole body I rubbed, not just the legs, so she wouldn’t get the bulging muscles ballerinas usually get.” When Natasha told her mother she wanted to be a ballerina
and
a movie star, Maria “said no. Ballerinas don’t live very long, and it’s bad for the heart.” Mud repeatedly told Natasha she was frail. Both parents refused to let her run or play outside, for if she got hurt, she wouldn’t be able to work. “I was so overprotected, I used to think I was as delicate as people said I was.” Natasha began to imagine she had various illnesses, acquiring new fears—fast cars and earthquakes—to supplement her existing ones, dark water and being alone. “Natalie had a lot of fear
in
her,” states a childhood friend, “all
misplaced
fear.” Natasha’s refuge was animals. Besides her cat, she had three turtles. Mud and Fahd bought her a German shepherd that year, to replace the puppy she saw killed. Natasha called him Rusty.

She needed a haven. Her sister Olga remembers walking into the house that winter to find Nick, drunk, holding a knife to Maria’s pregnant belly. Olga created a diversion so her stepfather would come after her, deciding it would be better if he stabbed
her
than her pregnant mother. Though no one was hurt, it was a harrowing incident; a signal,
to Olga, she should leave Nick’s house. She stayed, but warily, forming the opinion that her mother was partially responsible because she could provoke Nick. It was a strange, complex marriage. Maria was still in romantic contact with the sea captain from San Francisco’s Russian colony, where the gossip was that she was pregnant by a Hollywood producer. She told Olga the reason she didn’t leave Nick was that “she was always
afraid
of him.”

Whether Natasha was present when her Fahd held the knife to Mud’s stomach that winter is unclear, though she certainly experienced violence. “She had a very tough, troubled life,” reveals Robert Blake, a confidant from their years as child actors. “The things that she told me about her childhood, which are nobody’s business, but they were tough. In today’s world, Natalie would have been in child abuse groups… the courage and the strength that it took for her every day to get out of bed and pursue her life—she spent her life rowing upstream.” Lana, who was born late that winter, described her father as “a mean drunk. He wasn’t actually an alcoholic. He didn’t drink all day long. He would get drunk probably once a week. He was just a really unhappy man.”

Because Mud was nearly eight months pregnant with Lana, she sent Nick with Natasha to New York for the January premiere of
Tomorrow Is Forever
, possibly the only occasion when Lana would come before Natalie for Maria. It was a medical necessity, or Mud would never have missed the public unveiling of her creation, Natalie Wood. It was the first time she and Natasha had been apart. Mud must have been histrionic, sending her star-child on an airplane, across the country, without her. One of Natalie’s crippling fears, later in life, was flying on planes, a fear that probably originated with this trip. The stress of the separation from Mud was evident in Natasha in other ways. While she was in New York, the studio sent her to children’s hospitals and F.A.O. Schwarz, the famous toy store, for publicity shots for
Tomorrow Is Forever
. A mob of people clamored around International’s new child star, tugging at her pigtails, which Fahd did not know how to braid correctly. “Fans pulled the ribbons off my pigtails,” she would remember. “I was terrified.” Pictures from the event reveal Natasha clutching her “mama doll,” Gabriella, like a life preserver, masking her terror with an overanimated smile, prattling manically about wanting to be a movie
star when she grew up. “My goodness!” she exclaimed, between flashbulb pops. “That time I didn’t blink!” As an adult, Natalie would seldom make a negative remark in public about her child acting experiences, not wanting people to think she didn’t enjoy it, saying that it was “a bore to complain”—still the consummate trouper. She revealed her true feelings indirectly, telling interviewers she would not want
her
child to act, as she had.