Natasha (18 page)

The feisty Mary Ann wasn’t. She was infuriated by Mud’s relentless pushing and the effect it was having on Natalie, who was a hypochondriac, frightened to be alone, talking to dolls, forbidden to go anywhere, miserable playing nine-year-olds, pressured by competing for parts, bored with acting, but “wouldn’t make ‘Mama’ unhappy. It’s hard to understand that, but ‘Mother’ preyed on this. She
knew
what was going on and
knew
how this kid was being torn apart. That, to me, was the sin.” Mary Ann stood up to Maria and encouraged Natalie to do the same. “She was becoming aware of what was going on, of what her mother was doing. She didn’t want to be
pushed
so hard.”

Natalie returned to Fulton for the last few weeks of seventh grade after finishing
The Blue Veil
. One morning while she was in art class, Jimmy Williams, who sat at the desk behind her, reached over the inkwell and “started flipping her pigtail.”

Natalie turned around to face her teenage crush. “Why are you doing that?” she asked.

Jimmy stared back at her and teased, “‘Cause I don’t like pigtails.”

“Well, cut ’em off,” Natalie taunted.

Jimmy took a knife out of his pocket “and I cut that pigtail off.”

It was a revelatory moment. “She wasn’t upset,” he declares. “I can remember that. And I know I didn’t get in trouble, so something happened. I believe that she went out of class and cut the other one off, or got some of the other girls to cut the other one off, and I think she told her mother
she
did it. ‘Cause she didn’t like ’em. And I don’t think she ever, never wore pigtails again. That was the end of it, right there.”

Natalie had defied her mother for the first time, severing the braids that made her famous, choosing
her
needs over “Natalie Wood’s.” The gesture was also rife with sexual symbolism. Appearing on-screen without pigtails was a rite of passage from child actress to young womanhood. The fact that it was Jimmy Williams who performed the rite for Natalie would have its own significance.

CUTTING OFF HER PIGTAILS WAS THE
attention-getting first step in Natalie’s journey to disengage from her mother and discover who
she
was inside “Natalie Wood,” the actress alter ego Maria had created for them both.

The catalyst was Jimmy Williams. “She was
gaga
with him, like ‘Ooh, isn’t he wonderful?’ ” remembers Mary Ann. Jimmy was Natalie’s antithesis, a hot-headed rebel who challenged authority, with a mystique at Fulton as the last one standing in any altercation, despite his slight stature. “Jimmy had a temper, and when he got mad, he got mad and I think he could be pretty volatile,” relates a female admirer. Jimmy considered himself “a risk-taker,” following in the proud tradition of his great-great-great-grandfather, “the only person that fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Texas Revolution,” for which a monument was erected in his honor. “I wasn’t afraid of anybody or anything. I never got in a lot of fights, but I would never back down from a fight. And I got a reputation that they just didn’t want to mess with me.” Jimmy’s punk heroism sexually magnetized and emboldened Natalie, who was drawn to the qualities he embodied as ones that could release her from Mud’s iron grip. “Honestly, she kind of chased me from the time I cut her pigtail off.”

Natalie came home from school without braids, demanding to wear lipstick, desperate to get Jimmy to notice her. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she later told a fan magazine. “I got my parents to sit down and… I told them how funny it felt to be different from the other kids. I tried to get over to them how really important it was to me. They didn’t change their minds right then and there, but I could see their resistance was lowered.” In fact, Natalie battled with Mud and won, appearing in the schoolyard the next day in a short bob with “gobs of makeup on, just horrible, overdone,” recalls Williams. “It was more like
movie makeup, because I think that’s all she knew.” When she paraded past Jimmy and his group, “I made the statement that I thought that girls that wore too much makeup looked like a slut.” Natalie tattled on Jimmy to a classmate’s mother, who “set me down and gave me a lecture that I’ll never forget. I told her, ‘Well I didn’t call her a slut. I said girls that have a lot of makeup on
look
like sluts.’ ” Natalie never wore makeup after that, Jimmy noticed, “just enough to give her some sheen.” He ignored her anyway. “I wasn’t interested. She was younger than I was, and she wasn’t in my grade.”

Natalie’s Max Factor face captured the eye of a college student, who asked her on a date. She accepted, leading to a war between her and Mud that revealed a willfulness beneath Natalie’s gentle demeanor. “Nobody told me whom I should date when I was a teenager,” she told a magazine in middle age. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway because I was very rebellious in those days.” Natalie was determined, according to Mary Ann. “She was just starting to stand up a little bit… between ‘I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I want to stop hurting.’ ” Natalie and her college swain “went down the street for a Coke and he let me drive his car,” she said later. “I think that’s about all it amounted to. I was small and skinny but I wore quite a bit of lipstick and tried to look much older and I don’t think the boy knew how old I really was.” Mud subjected Natalie to painful humiliations when she got home, holding her skirt up to the light to see if it was wrinkled, grilling her to make sure she hadn’t sat in her date’s lap or she’d be pregnant.

“Fortunately, she got above that because of school,” reveals Mary Ann, who helped to reeducate Natalie on the facts of life. She didn’t need the information with her college beau, who merely served as an accessory for Natalie to make Jimmy jealous. Her plot was revealed before school let out for the summer, when Jimmy and a few friends were outside behind Fulton. They noticed a car circle the block, and a pair of college boys got out. A couple of Fulton students raced over to Jimmy with a message. “They said, ‘This guy out here says he’s Natalie’s boyfriend and you’ve been making eyes at her, and he wants to beat you up.’ ” Jimmy figured out Natalie’s plan. “I didn’t care… I just walked right across that field. If he wants a piece of me, he can have it. When I was about halfway across, they drove off, and that’s the last I ever heard or seen of him.”

Natalie’s rebellion announced itself on schedule, for she turned thirteen over the summer holiday. Not only had she declared her dating independence, she was realizing for the first time that she had a
choice
whether to act. Her father’s heart condition improved enough for Nick to get a job at Warner Brothers building sets, easing some of the pressure on Natalie to work. She began to view acting from a different perspective, noticing actors whose work she admired. The turning point was that September, when she and Mary Ann went to see
A Streetcar Named Desire
, starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, directed by Elia Kazan. Natalie was transformed, in awe of Kazan and of Vivien Leigh’s performance. “She wanted that part
s-o-o-o-o
bad. She wanted to be
Blanche
!” recalls Mary Ann. “Oh, God, she wanted to be Blanche du Bois. She, at a young age, knew what she could do and how
good
she could be and that she would be successful.” Vivien Leigh became a role model for Natalie: a tiny, exquisite, dark-haired actress admired for her talent. Now, when Mary Ann teased her about her size, “she said, ‘Well, that’s all right. Because Vivien Leigh is as little as I am!’ ” Natalie was also struck, late that summer, by
A Place in the Sun
, enamored of actor Raymond Burr, and at how Elizabeth Taylor had made the transition from child star to ingénue.

Natalie’s transition to more mature roles began that October, when she was called out of eighth grade to read for a part as Bing Crosby’s daughter, Babs, in a lavish Technicolor musical for Paramount ultimately called
Just for You
. Crosby was playing a widowed Broadway song-and-dance man trying to get closer to his teenage son and daughter while courting his leading lady. Crosby chose Jane Wyman, Natalie’s costar from
The Blue Veil
, to portray the actress. Mud was desperate for Natalie to play Babs, afraid that her career was over without her pigtails. She claimed later that Natalie was competing against Margaret O’Brien for the part, and that when Natalie showed up for the reading, the director “right away fell in love with her, but a producer have to approve it, too, so he gave Natalie a script, several pages, and said, ‘Read this as long as you want to and then read it with me.’ Ten minutes later she said, ‘I’m ready, Mother. I know it by heart.’ Not only her part—his, too! And he was so impressed, the producer, that they signed her up—and Margaret O’Brien lost the part.” O’Brien has
no recollection of being considered for Babs, but the story illustrates the pressure Natalie felt to get the part. Mud’s restrictions on her hair and makeup disappeared “as soon as my mother realized that Natalie could still
work
looking older,” relates Lana.

Natalie’s classmates remember her as proud of playing her first role in lipstick and out of pigtails. Both she and Jane Wyman underwent radical transformations from
The Blue Veil
to
Just for You
, only six months apart. Wyman went from an aging spinster on-screen to a glamorous Broadway star. Natalie metamorphosed from a gawky girl in braids to a young woman. The movies had finally caught up with her real age. Her character, Babs Blake, was a sweet, sophisticated teen desperate to be accepted into an exclusive girls’ school run by a headmistress played by the legendary Ethel Barrymore, then in her seventies.

In the picture, Crosby takes his kids to a lakeside resort, giving Natalie a chance to wear a bathing suit, showing off her budding figure. Bob Arthaud (billed as “Bob Arthur”), who played Natalie’s older brother, recalls her as “a very beautiful little lady. She was ‘a lady.’ She was not in any way cheap or tacky or common.” On location at Lake Arrowhead, where the resort scenes were shot, Natalie stuck “very close to her mother,” according to Arthaud, who found her “a little aloof” with “a demeanor that was reserved.” Arthaud perceived none of the awkwardness Natalie was feeling. She appeared “very controlled and poised” and was extremely feminine. Like everyone who worked with Natalie, he was impressed with her intelligence and professionalism, finding her exceptionally “focused,” qualities she needed during filming, which Arthaud describes as an enjoyable but strict education.

“There was a lot at stake. It was one of Ethel Barrymore’s last films and she was quite ill. And she told the cameraman and the director that she would give everybody one chance to get her scenes right and after that it was too late. So everybody was really on their toes. She did all of her scenes in one take.” Arthaud recalls a moment, off set, when he was in Barrymore’s dressing room with her, listening on the radio to boxer Joe Louis’s last match. “And when he lost the fight, she was propped up in bed with that mane of white hair and she said, ‘Sad when a champion dies.’ And I couldn’t help but think that was her.” Crosby had similarly high standards on the set. “What was really surprising about Bing Crosby to me was that he really was a very, very bright man. He knew everybody’s lines and knew everything about the camera. He always came
across as this relaxed performer, but he was far from relaxed.” Wyman, whom Natalie admired, offered tips on how to look at the camera. “She said to ‘look at the eye nearest the camera, don’t play to both eyes, and don’t dart back and forth between one eye and the other, which is what amateurs do.’ And she also said that the pupil of the eye was the pinpoint of the soul and to ‘look into it, when you look at other actors, you look in their eyes.’ ” Natalie paid attention to it all. Her performance, especially her scenes with Crosby and Wyman, was subtle and tender.

Two things about Natalie, at thirteen, stood out to Arthaud during filming. One was that she
demanded
respect. Even in the company of Barrymore, Crosby and Wyman, “she held everybody at bay.” The other exceptional trait Arthaud noticed was star quality. “Noel Coward made a comment when they asked him what made a star. He said, ‘A star sparkles.’ And Natalie Wood sparkled.”

The Hollywood trade papers agreed with Arthaud, calling Natalie “absolutely adorable” in
Just for You
when it was released the next autumn, adding prophetically: “Her appealing performance show[s] that it is only a matter of time and growing up before she becomes a full-fledged star in her own right.”

Natalie completed her scenes in
Just for You
in December and returned to junior high, making her parents $6500 richer. She was happy to be back in the realm of Jimmy Williams, whose maverick allure exerted a more powerful pull on her thirteen-year-old sensibilities than fame or money. She spent the rest of the school year trying to get him to ask her out. Jimmy was aware of Natalie’s obsession (“I kept getting that word, and Mary Ann might have came to me and said, ‘Jim, what are you doing?’ ”), but he remained irresistibly elusive. “I wasn’t really into girls, if you will. I had other things in mind. We were cowboys back then… and of course I watched Andy Devine forever. I was impressed with
him
, but I wasn’t impressed with Natalie Wood.”

Natalie’s nascent interest in dating made her more self-conscious about her peculiarly misshaped wrist. In
Just for You
, Natalie often kept a glove on her left wrist, one of many tricks she experimented with to disguise her deformity. That spring, she came up with the idea of covering the wrist with a huge cuff bracelet, which she wore in every scene of a movie she made that April with Ann Doran, who couldn’t help but notice. Doran asked her why she always wore the bracelet. Natalie
was too embarrassed to tell her what happened, saying, “Oh, I broke my arm and they didn’t set it right.” Wearing the bracelet was another way for Natalie to conceal the darkness in her life, which she perceived as weakness. Hiding her disfigured wrist was a symptom of her compulsion to appear
perfect
, the flawless Hollywood beauty, relentlessly fostered by Mud. As Lana observed, “She felt that she had to appear a certain way.”