Natasha (23 page)

Bobby’s intuition about Sinatra and Natalie was probably correct, affirms her high school friend Mary Ann, who worried about Natalie.
“Thank goodness, he was a nice guy… and you know, he was fun.” Sinatra, who was devastated over his doomed, fiery marriage to Ava Gardner, found tender-hearted Natalie a soothing balm, in Mary Ann’s view. “You know, he had his share of problems. Natalie always had an ear, and she could always listen. And when
she
said, ‘Can I do anything to help?’ she really meant it.” Natalie’s code words and teen giddiness were a distraction for the moody Sinatra. He said later, “She gave me the feeling that she was always glad to be alive. That she was a happy kind of a human being, and she exuded a lot of happiness when she was with you. She giggled a lot. She loved to laugh.”

Natalie and Sinatra formed a fascination with each other from these early encounters that would persist for years, at times romantically, occasionally while they were in relationships with other people. Sinatra would assume the role of Natalie’s “Godfather” protector the rest of his life—even after Natalie drowned, when he would intervene in classic Sinatra style.

Mary Ann and Bobby, the friends who knew of Natalie’s teen liaison with Sinatra, held her mother responsible for setting her up with the married, nearly forty-year-old star. “Mrs. Gurdin was really pushing Natalie and the Sinatra thing,” as Hyatt recalls. Actor Scott Marlowe, who became Natalie’s boyfriend two years later, describes her then as “easily seduced,” suggesting the worldly Sinatra “probably taught her a lot.”

Her mother’s willingness to do anything to advance Natalie’s career finally pushed the volatile Mary Ann to the breaking point the summer of Sinatra, when Mrs. Gurdin took the two high school girls aside, whispering that she could arrange abortions for them. Maria told her friend Jeanne Hyatt she had frightened Natalie into believing she would die if she had a baby, explaining to Jeanne why she did it. “That was Marie’s way of lying to Natalie, because… she wanted her to always be ready to make another picture. I don’t think Marie wanted Natalie to get pregnant no matter
who
Natalie was married to. I’m not saying that she didn’t love her—she did. That’s all Marie thought about, is promoting Natalie.”

From that point on, relates Mary Ann, “her mother and I got into it regularly.” As a classmate recalls, “Mary Ann was like a grown woman in high school… you didn’t want to get into a verbal altercation with her, because she’d just tell you off flat in one second. Natalie was a softer kind of a person.” When Natalie needed to get away from
home, Mary Ann was her hot line. “She would call me and whisper, ‘Please come over and we’ll go back to your house.’ ” Natalie acknowledged the debt in Mary Ann’s yearbook, dedicating a page to “the most beautiful gal I know,” writing, “Sometimes, when I’ve been sort’ve down in the dumps, ‘funny ol’ you’ has always kidded me out of it.” Almost wistfully, she added, “Maybe next semester I will be back at Van Nuys [High] and you and I will see lots more of each other then.” It was signed “Nat.”

The effect of being thrown into the adult world of Frank Sinatra, with her mother offering abortions, manifested itself in a dramatic change in Natalie’s lifestyle. She smoked heavily and acquired a new adult habit, alcohol. Press releases that July from Warner Brothers, where she and Sinatra were filming their respective movies, quoted Natalie “wanting everyone to know she is ready to play sexy parts.” She was frustrated playing the
younger
version of Mayo’s sultry character in
The Silver Chalice
. “I had ambitions to don a frilly gown by Don Loper and a silver blue mink and embrace Cary Grant in my arms before the cameras.” Paul Newman, who was making his film debut as the lead in
The Silver Chalice
after an acclaimed performance on Broadway, would remember the “marvelous sense of mystery” that Natalie projected at fifteen. She was determined to appear as sophisticated as her life had unnaturally become, identifying herself as seventeen in Warners publicity, modeling in a bathing suit at a Gem Show to cultivate a sexier image. What remained of Natalie’s girlhood had vanished in a summer.

She made several new friends, one of them the delicate actress Pier Angeli, who was in
The Silver Chalice
. Another was Margaret O’Brien, the legendary child actress whose look Mud had purloined when the Gurdins arrived in Hollywood. By an irony, Natalie, driven by Mud’s ambition, was now working more steadily than O’Brien, whose amazing popularity had dimmed in adolescence. Although Margaret was seventeen to Natalie’s fifteen, she had lived a sheltered life in the confines of her studio, MGM, and was kept further sequestered by her rigidly conservative mother. “Margaret was sweet and kind and very naïve about life and people,” as a girlfriend of Natalie’s recalls. An actor who spent time with them both then states, “Natalie had pizzazz. Margaret was more withdrawn. Very ladylike. If you were to say ‘pooey,’ it would be a bad word. Natalie was a little more loose and Margaret was—let’s say strung a little tighter.”

What they had in common was a childhood lost to Hollywood, with their mothers controlling them every hour of the day—although they never discussed their child star pasts, according to O’Brien, who had enjoyed that period in her life and believed Natalie did too. Natalie had fully embraced her mother’s dream by the time she met Margaret, and was consumed with becoming a famous movie star. “She was very ambitious with her career and Hollywood, and I guess I had at that time experienced a little bit more stardom, so I wasn’t as gung-ho on it as she was. She was very driven. Even if we were out, or having a good time, if a call came to go on an interview, she’d drop everything and go.” Natalie never mentioned her TV series to Margaret, which was being considered for renewal that summer. “It was like it didn’t exist. She wanted to be a film actress.” Both of the dark-haired former child stars idolized Vivien Leigh. “She’s the only person I ever wanted to meet and get an autograph from,” states O’Brien. “We tried to copy her.” Natalie wore one of Leigh’s dresses from
A Streetcar Named Desire
to a masquerade party, arriving as Blanche du Bois, the role she desperately wanted to play. “I remember she went to the studio and got it,” said a chum, “and she was the exact same measurements as Vivien Leigh.”

On July 13, a week before Natalie turned sixteen, Irving Pichel died under circumstances as murky as his purported attempt to adopt her. There were whispers within his family that the sixty-three-year-old director’s jealous wife, Violette, had procrastinated in getting his heart medication to him. After his death, his widow destroyed all of Pichel’s papers related to his films. Natalie did not attend her mentor’s funeral, which was private, though many years later when she met Pichel’s son Marlowe, “she made it clear she was very devoted to my dad and very grateful for what he’d done for her.” Maria took immediate advantage of Pichel’s demise by further embellishing the myth she had created of how Natalie became a child star. She told a periodical associated with
Parents
magazine that Irving Pichel had simply appeared at their door in Santa Rosa while he was directing
Happy Land
, offering Maria a small part and giving Natasha the nickname “Cinderella,” sending her a telegram two years later begging her to be in
Tomorrow Is Forever
. Natalie implicitly endorsed her mother’s tall tale about her and Pichel, posing for pictures with Lana in the same magazine, further blurring
the hazy line between fantasy and reality in her increasingly make-believe life.

The sense of illusion carried over to her sixteenth birthday, when Natalie was reported to be eighteen in Louella Parsons’ column, which now mentioned the names of whoever she was dating as gossip items. Natalie’s sweet-sixteen present from Mud and Fahd, paid for with her earnings, was a pink Thunderbird convertible. “She couldn’t wait to show that T-Bird to me,” recalls Jackie Eastes, a former student at Van Nuys High who was getting close to Natalie. “She picked me up at my house and we cruised Van Nuys Boulevard, ending up at Bob’s Big Boy, the Valley hangout. We used to go to Bob’s and she had bacon-tomato-avocado-and-lettuce sandwiches.” It was rare for Natalie to make a new friend from high school, where “most of the girls were thrilled when she left school to do another film,” intimidated by her fame. Jackie, a star-struck strawberry blonde, clung to her celebrity classmate like a trail of perfume, “living through her life vicariously.”

To Jackie, Natalie was a goddess inhabiting a glittering world. When she spent a Friday night with Natalie, they would get up late and go out to lunch in Natalie’s T-Bird convertible. After lunch, Natalie would shop. “That was a major production. She’d go to the House of Seven and Nine and she’d spend eight hundred to nine hundred dollars in one afternoon buying clothes. That was a lot of money, when you consider I worked all week as an usher at a movie theater for fourteen dollars a week.” The instant Natalie got her unrestricted license, she became a fixture at every popular restaurant in Hollywood and the Valley, stopping first in her pink Thunderbird to pick up Jackie. “She would take me out, because she knew I couldn’t afford it. We had breakfast, lunch and dinners out.” Unlike Mary Ann, who had a healthy disdain for Hollywood, Jackie at times felt that it was “tough being with someone like Natalie, who was beautiful, famous—and thin, too. Who could eat anything she wanted and never put on a pound. I wore a size twelve, if I was lucky. She was perfectly proportioned, and very tiny—ninety-five pounds.”

Jackie found it impossible to resent Natalie, even though she believed Natalie had it all. “You couldn’t know Natalie and not adore her. She was extremely warm and open. She was friendly, she was funny, she was witty. I’ll never forget her infectious laugh. It was probably the best time in my
life, knowing her.” Natalie’s consuming obsession with her career fostered her new friendship with Jackie, who idolized movie stars and tacitly supported Natalie’s goal: “Achieving stardom was all she lived for.”

The week Natalie turned sixteen, her family moved from Northridge to a cozy house set diagonally on a winding curve at the top of Valley Vista, “which at the time was the best address to have in the Valley.” The Gurdins’ new home was south of Ventura in suburban Sherman Oaks, closer to Van Nuys High, and to Hollywood. Natalie chose wallpaper with tiny pink roses for her bedroom, to match her T-Bird, choosing fabrics in shades of pink chintz. “She was going through her pink phase. The room was decorated in pink, the car was pink, everything was pink.”

She appeared in public steeped in the sort of glamour she and Mud associated with movie stars, driving around town in her convertible T-Bird, secretly smoking Kool menthol cigarettes with Dunhill’s crystal filters, reeking of Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché, her new signature scent, cultivating the image of a Hollywood star. If there was a chance anyone might see her, “she always had to present herself in a certain fashion,” recalls Lana, who watched, fascinated, as her big sister transformed herself into the star, “Natalie Wood”: putting on her makeup, coiffing her hair, covering her imperfect wrist with a bracelet, dripping in borrowed mink and Jungle Gardenia. “I’m sure a great deal of it was perpetuated by my mom,” attests Lana, “who felt you had to look a certain way or you were unacceptable.”

Maria’s fantasies of becoming a movie star had successfully transferred to Natalie. “She loved everything to do with stardom,” relates Margaret O’Brien. “She just loved the life. The glamour and the going to premieres and all that.” Jerry Eastes, Jackie’s handsome older brother, escorted Natalie to a movie premiere that summer. “She wore long white leather gloves and a white mink stole, and her hair was done up in a French roll,” recalls Jackie, who watched out the window, wishing that she could be Natalie, stepping into a limousine sent by Warner Brothers. “She was beautiful in a full-length, strapless ice-blue satin sheath with a peplum that formed a train to the floor.”

Natalie drew Margaret O’Brien out of her shell, coaxing the reserved actress, who had seldom been anywhere without her mother or a chaperone, to go dancing at trendy nightspots like Peter Potter’s,
taking Margaret to jazz clubs to hear Al Hirt. “She kind of got me going out,” credits O’Brien, who remembers Natalie being “all excited to see a movie star.” Natalie had taken on other characteristics of her star-worshipping mother. When she went to a movie with Margaret, “she would go up and say, ‘We’re in the movies and I’m Natalie Wood,’ and she got us in all the movies free.” Her celebrity status provided Natalie an entrée in restaurants to smoke and to drink alcohol, infractions that would have gotten her expelled from Van Nuys High School.

O’Brien’s lasting image of Natalie at sixteen is in a nightclub, a mink stole thrown over her shoulder, smoking from a long cigarette holder, balancing a cocktail in a gloved hand, laughing gaily, the center of attention of every male in the room.

Natalie reminded her school friend Jackie of Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
—“Boys followed her around like puppy dogs.” Natalie’s boyfriends ranged from high school football players like Jackie’s brother Jerry, to fun-loving “All-American young men” such as Sonny Belcher, a sound technician at Fox, or Bob Allen, a college student preparing to go into the Army.

One beau, Rad Fulton, a darkly handsome aspiring actor of nineteen, gave Natalie the nickname “Squirt.” She exuded effervescence and the promise of a good time, like bubbles in a glass of champagne. “All she wanted to do is laugh,” he recalls. “We never talked about careers, we just had fun with each other.”

Natalie generously passed her old boyfriends to Margaret, encouraging her demure friend to break away from her dominating mother. “Mrs. Gurdin didn’t have much control over Natalie. When she wanted to go out, she went out, if she wanted to meet a boyfriend, she met one. Natalie could never understand my mother. She’d say, ‘We could be better friends if your mother wasn’t so strict.’ ” O’Brien eventually became serious about one of Natalie’s hand-me-down beaus, Bob Allen, marrying him in 1959. She acknowledges, “Natalie kind of helped me grow up.”