Natasha (17 page)

Natalie’s personality flowered under Mary Ann’s gregarious influence. They both attended Friday-night sock hops at the junior high, where the girls who weren’t too jealous to talk to Natalie found her “very down to earth. I don’t think any of us would ever say that she acted like a star. She was very sweet.” Natalie never mentioned the movies she was in unless “you asked her about it,” observes a classmate. “She wanted to be part of the clique.”

Natalie (“Nat” to her classmates) savored her first taste of freedom. She went to the beach with Mary Ann without mentioning her fear of the water, though as Mary Ann recalls, “We both got reactions to the sun, and sun lotion, and blew up like balloons, so we never went again.” They created code names. Natalie called herself “Mac,” and Mary Ann was “Boo Boo,” for reasons no longer clear to Mary Ann. The friendship liberated Natalie for brief intervals from the tyranny of Mud, and Hollywood. “It was a little relief of pressure being with me. There was no having to be ‘on.’ We could just sit in jeans and talk. And I think we all need that, and especially in the situation she was in, because she really didn’t have a chance to
have
girlfriends, or a lot of friends, so the time we had together was really very special.”

The only slumber parties Natalie attended were in her living room, with girls who met her mother’s casting requirements. Maria still wouldn’t let her go to anyone else’s house, for fear of kidnappers. Natalie had not been alone in the daytime since she became a child star at six. “I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone,” she once told a friend. “My mother and a social worker always went with me.” In bed at night, the only time she was by herself, Natalie was terrified someone would kidnap her, or that she would have another drowning nightmare. Her bedroom was a shrine to her paranoia, with storybook dolls atop the furniture, crowded onto the bed, spilling over to the floor, squeezed amid toy animals and her caged parakeet, Gregory Peckwood, helping her to pretend she was not alone. “All this stuff! Jesus Christ, nobody else could sit in there!” recalls Mary Ann. “She had all kinds of stuffed animals, and those
dolls
… it was just spooky.” Natalie had names for every doll and still talked to them, at twelve, as if they were real. “They always had to be in order,” remembers Mary Ann, “like they were taken care of. I thought about that every once in a while… because then it wasn’t the thing to do, and we were really kind of beyond that. But it was
important
to her… they had to
be
there. They were her friends.” Mary Ann was astute enough, even at thirteen, to understand the underlying cause of Natalie’s neuroses. “That stupid mother of hers did that—goddamn her.”

Mud’s disturbing dominance over Natalie became apparent to Mary Ann as she gained further entrée to the Gurdins’ inner sanctum. Mud (“Mother Superior”) kept Natalie physically and emotionally cloistered.
Athletic activities were off-limits because “she might break a fingernail or something.” The obsession with Natalie’s health, appearance, and acting was “all Mama. Natalie didn’t care. She wanted to make babies and walk off into the sunset like all young girls do.” The dangerous element, in Mary Ann’s view, was Natalie’s pleasing nature. “That was the mother’s feeding ground. Natalie would never raise her voice to her mother or say no
ever
.” Natalie, according to her friend, was unaware of what Mud was doing, or the damaging effect it was having on her. “She really didn’t have the time to sit or think about it, because her head was going in so many directions—if it wasn’t school, it was scripts. Her mother had that all manipulated to keep this kid’s head really cranking, and it worked.”

Natalie auditioned for casting directors and producers throughout the fall, winter and spring of seventh grade, doing everything she could to make herself appealing. Robert Banas, her former ballet partner, has a vague recollection of Nick working as a studio guard, but it was Natalie’s acting that kept the family solvent during Fahd’s convalescence. The rumor at Fulton Junior High—sadly true—was that
she
bought the family’s house in Northridge. Natalie got good notices for
Never a Dull Moment
when it came out that winter, but the picture “wasn’t a great success,” admits costar Ann Doran.
The Jackpot
also under-performed, and Natalie got mixed reviews. When
Dear Brat
came out that spring, her bit performance wasn’t even mentioned. The pressure on Natalie to find work was almost unbearable.

Gigi Perreau, who was several years younger than Natalie but kept encountering her at auditions, describes the tension between them while vying for the same child’s parts as unnervingly intense, “Her mother was ruthless.” If being a child performer had ever been fun for Natalie, it wasn’t anymore. “I didn’t like it all so much,” she admitted later. Acting, which had come naturally for her as a little girl, seemed “very difficult” now that she was almost thirteen. “I suddenly became self-conscious. I felt awkward.” Worse, she was imprisoned in her movie childhood, a captive of the braids the public associated with “Natalie Wood.” “The point was that the studio wanted me to stay looking young. That was the image.” Whatever the studio wanted, Mud made sure Natalie provided. When she started junior high, Natalie “looked exactly like she looked in
Miracle on 34th Street
,” a classmate recalls, “except she was bigger. Same face, same pigtails.” A
producer from this period convinced an executive from one of the studios not to sign Natalie to another long-term contract “because he thought I was going to turn out very homely.”

Her ungainly self-image was exacerbated by the fact that Natalie was being raised by a mother who worshipped glamour and the illusion of perfection as photographed in movie magazines. Maria had transferred her fascination with the Romanovs to
Hollywood
royalty. Making a star of Natalie became an alternative way for Maria to position herself as a member of aristocracy. Beauty was the key to this kingdom. “Looks were
everything
,” asserts Mary Ann. When Mud saw an unattractive child, she would tell her daughters, “If that was my kid, I’d drown it.” “My mom had to have a special child,” declares Lana, “she really wouldn’t accept anything else.” The pressure to look beautiful
at all times
imbedded itself in Natalie, who wouldn’t leave the house unless she was stylish enough for a magazine layout.

“Natalie was very concerned at how people would perceive her,” remembers Lana, who had her own problems as a child dealing with their mother’s perfectionism. “I was a mud fence. I didn’t have that ‘special’ thing, I really didn’t. I was incredibly introspective, very quiet and overly sensitive and I kept to myself.” Gigi Perreau felt sorry for Lana during the filming of
Never a Dull Moment
, when Natalie and Gigi costarred as sisters. “Little Lana was dragged along and kind of given things to do by the studio teacher. She was kind of like this little waif that wandered around while Natalie was getting all the attention.”
Natalie
was the star of the family,
Natalie
could do no wrong, was Maria’s mantra to the press. If she talked about Lana, it was pejorative.
Lana
felt overshadowed by her sister,
Lana
was high-strung,
Lana
was shy. Mud even told one reporter Lana “has a tendency to stoop—we are trying to correct that.” According to Mary Ann, Lana was cute, an opinion borne out by photos of her at five, revealing a spindly but appealing little girl. “It was sad,” comments Mary Ann. “She was not even the
also-
ran. Natalie’s mother structured her whole life around Natalie. It was almost like when anybody came into the house, she would put Lana in the back room—really, physically.”

To Natalie, Lana was still a “twerp” sister she teased by locking her in the closet and other “stupid and fun things,” though she was becoming aware that Lana “had a hard time of it because… our mother’s attention was focused on me, because I was the one working.” There
was an unexpected blessing to Lana’s neglect, one Lana would discover, much later, through years in therapy. “We’re all shaped to a certain extent by our parents, and I’m sure a lot of that carried over for Natalie. It didn’t for me, because I wasn’t really raised by anybody. I wasn’t around our parents as much, and my personality being the way it is, I don’t think I really listened. Because I was left to my own devices I learned to rely upon myself, and what
I
believed was correct, and not what I was being told. Natalie was so coddled and watched over, that my mother had a much greater impact on her. Much greater.”

Mud influenced Natalie in a newly harmful way that spring as she prepared to turn thirteen, for she had discovered boys. The object of her adolescent fantasies was a dairy farmer’s son from her art class named Jimmy Williams, the archetypal rebel in a leather jacket. As Jackie Eastes, one of the lovestruck, recalls, “He was kind of dangerous, in a way that he was very—he was like a bad boy, but not really… Jimmy just had a charisma. He worked at a farm around the corner from me, and I used to go and sit there, hours, just to be with him.” Natalie was erotically charged by the wiry Jimmy’s aura of power. “There was a group of us, about eight or ten of us, that ran the school,” Williams states matter-of-factly. “Not that we were better than anybody, it’s just that we were the ‘in’ crowd.” Williams, an eighth-grader, “wasn’t really overly impressed” with seventh-grade Natalie. “She was just another kid. So what, she’s in the movies.” Jimmy’s casual disinterest made him more provocative to Natalie, who “wanted what she couldn’t have,” according to a friend who met her then.

Mud took immediate action, forbidding Natalie to date anyone in junior high. She warned her that if she even sat in a boy’s lap she would get pregnant, misinformation that alarmed Natalie, who was already terrified to have a baby, thinking she would die, Mud’s earlier admonition. Maria’s “sex education” of Natalie was partly ignorance (“She was all messed up,” relates Lana), for she offered the same advice about a boy’s lap to Olga, who “had to learn the facts of life going to city college and reading the physiology class book with my husband.” In the case of Natalie, Mud was deliberately instilling fears about boys so her star-child would remain under her black wing. “Her mother didn’t want to lose control,” asserts a witness to the manipulation, Natalie’s friend Mary Ann.

Mary Ann got a closer view of Maria’s hypnotic power over Natalie that April when Natalie got a part in a Jane Wyman film, her first acting job since Mary Ann became her friend. Wyman had won the Academy Award two years earlier for
Johnny Belinda
, and would be nominated again for this picture. The movie was called
The Blue Veil
, an adaptation of a sentimental French film about a self-sacrificing spinster (Wyman) hired to take care of other people’s children via an agency known by its blue-veiled uniforms. Natalie was featured in the third vignette as the sort of wistfully appealing girl she played so convincingly; in this case, the sweet young daughter of a blowsy showgirl (Joan Blondell) too self-absorbed to pay attention to her. Desperate for love, Natalie’s character forms a deep attachment to her nanny (Wyman).

The film, and her sympathetic role, were superior to the bit parts she had been playing, but it was an onerous blessing for Natalie, who had fallen under the sexual spell of eighth-grade rogue Jimmy Williams and was cast as a little girl in braids. “It seemed as though I’d spent my whole life in pigtails,” she later sighed. At the time, no one involved had any idea Natalie, nearly thirteen, was humiliated by the way she looked in the movie, a virtual re-creation of the seven-year-old she played in
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
, dressed in old-fashioned English schoolgirl frocks with braids coiled to her head. Mary Ann, who visited the set, was amazed at her pal’s professionalism at twelve. “Of course I’m sitting back and watching the whole scenario… she was like the old
pro
—not in years, but in experience. Usually when actors are working with a younger person, they’re kind of ‘Oh-oh,’ but with
her
it was wonderful. She was very sensitive and aware of others. If somebody didn’t feel well or somebody messed up their lines or something, she was just always there to be encouraging, so everybody just loved her.” Natalie’s genuine tenderness came through in her portrayal of the forlorn young girl. The
Los Angeles Times
would praise her performance for its “remarkable sincerity.”

What impressed Mary Ann was her friend’s intellect, which she became aware of as Natalie prepared for the part. “This girl had a
brain
in her head. She could sit and
memorize
a script. I’d help her and she would just start verbatim and she knew everybody’s part, not just hers. She’d even prompt other people with their lines!” On set, Mary Ann was surprised to observe, the atmosphere was more technical than creative. “They would say, ‘Here, you do this. You do that. You walk here
and you walk there and you smile.’ It was very structured. And she was a pretty young girl who could walk in a straight line, who could do this, do that. Very structured, very disciplined. And she was extremely good at this, and she would always do
whatever
to please the director, to fill the need.”

The extent to which Natalie had been driven to this by Mud was revealing itself to Mary Ann: “Her mom wanted her to be a movie star from
conception
. And that was gonna happen, come hell or high water, at whatever cost.” Fahd’s ineffectualness had also become apparent:

The dark, tragic triangle that had been created between Natalie and her parents laid itself bare to her first close friend. Mary Ann had great affection for Natalie’s father, who drove them around and whom she considered quiet and gentle, “the strong, silent type” who “catered to her mother, like most men do.” She had observed Maria “run over” Nick time and again while he shrugged it off, too weak and tormented to resist. During
The Blue Veil
, the family secret was exposed. “Every once in a while her father would get loaded and then he’d had it, and her mother would open her mouth and oh Christ, then it really hit the fan. It was horrible. When you sit there and take that kind of stuff for how long—when you blow, you blow.” When Mary Ann observed their brawls, it was usually over Maria forcing Natalie to do something, such as get up at four
A.M
. to go to the studio. “That’s why the father got into it with her all the time, and why he got so ugly and awful.” Natalie tried to ignore her parents’ fights, concealing how much it disturbed her. “That’s why she had a lot of the problems she had. She kept it all quiet and close because she didn’t want to show weakness… she would just brace herself and go on. Natalie was very good about that.”