Natasha (28 page)

While Natalie hero-worshipped Ray, she was in awe of Dean. A few months later she said reverently, “Great directors Elia Kazan and George Stevens said that Jimmy was the finest of young actors, and I knew how right they were when I had only worked in one or two sequences with him.” Sal Mineo observed, “He was all she could talk about. Every night for weeks in a row, she went to see
East of Eden
—she must have seen it over fifty times. She even taught me to play the theme song from the picture on the piano.” According to Natalie’s tutor, “She would hang around him as much as possible… she was very flirtatious with him.”

By nearly everyone’s accounts, Dean at times treated the adoring Natalie perversely. “He would
do
things to her off-camera. He would taunt her… Natalie would be in a close-up, and he’d get on a ladder behind Nick Ray and the camera, and Jimmy would say,
‘Woo-woo-woo-woo’
and imitate a train.” Dean’s disciples considered it a form of “Method” acting: that Dean was staying in the character of Jim Stark, the alienated outsider, between scenes. “Natalie was schooled that
when the scene is over, you drop it and you go away and become ‘Natalie Wood’ again. But Jimmy was Jim Stark all the time. It was a different kind of atmosphere for her.”

She said later, “I kept hearing about the Method, and just about everybody on the set was carrying a copy of Chekhov’s book,
To an Actor
, and using phrases like sense memory, and emotion memory.” They were techniques invented by Stanislavsky, taught at the Actors Studio in New York. Natalie idealized Studio devotees—Kazan, Brando—as gods of drama, embarrassed by her child star past. “Natalie and I took acting as a job,” observes Margaret O’Brien. “We went in to do our best, we had responsibilities. When I left the job, I didn’t think about it anymore, and neither did Natalie.” O’Brien considered the Method “a lot of hooey,” and believed it destroyed actors’ lives by instructing them to become their characters. Natalie was “fascinated” by the Actors Studio methodology, concedes O’Brien. “She loved the Brandos and the Deans. These were people that were like from another planet, you know?”

Dean, a costar observed, would “toy” with Natalie in the guise of Method acting, occasionally crossing the line to cruelty. She would defend his behavior passionately, saying that it was part of Jimmy’s “brilliance,” though later, Natalie privately expressed disappointment about a few of Dean’s taunts. She yearned to measure up to his standards, to emulate the mysteries of his genius. “I think she was a little scared of him, too,” assesses Bev Long. “Or more like, ‘wow.’ He was extraordinary as an actor, but he was very weird as a person. He was very moody and all that stuff.” Long’s heart went out to Natalie during her scenes with Dean. “She was so vulnerable. She was really ‘right there,’ all the time—really working, and really trying to do something. Working with Jimmy was quite a feat, because he would behave so badly sometimes… and it was hard, I think, with her, to get close to him.”

Natalie’s access to a deeper part of herself in her scenes with Dean was evident. Reynolds, who might have played Judy, noticed “a lot of depth and soul” when she saw Natalie’s performance. “She was not just a little cute thing… she had a lot of courage, and she fully fulfilled the role and brought to it color and unexpected moments, which is what makes a star.” Natalie’s feelings of inadequacy were unfounded, assesses Robert Blake. “She didn’t need the Method—she was instinctual.” Hopper, who was there, concurs. “She did it without a lot of baggage, without having to go through a lot of great metamorphosis to become Judy.”

Natalie lacked that confidence or insight. She felt inferior to anyone with Studio training and embarrassed by her ignorance of Stanislavsky. Her insecurity manifested itself in a jealous fixation on actress Susan Strasberg, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio, who represented everything Natalie felt
she
was not. On set, Ray would whisper encouragement to Natalie before a scene, or pull her aside to suggest how to do it differently. He used his sexuality to bring out the young actors. “He would come up to Jimmy or Sal or Natalie, and he put his arm around their shoulders and walked them away from the crowd, and then he would say, ‘Well, what I want to see…’ and be very vague and strange and moody and mysterious… very sensual. That’s how he made the connection.”

However, it was Dean—not Nick Ray—who was the dominant presence. According to Corey Allen, “Nick told me that he made an agreement with Jim not to rush Jim. And so sometimes we would wait thirty or forty minutes for Jim to come out of his trailer.” Dean wanted to “prepare” until he felt ready to shoot a scene.

Marsha Hunt, the actress signed to play Dean’s mother, left the picture the day Ray was to shoot the opening sequence at the police station (“I was already committed to a play… and I finally had to make a choice”). The no-nonsense character actress Ann Doran got a call at five in the morning from her agent, telling her to drive to Warners to replace Hunt in a Nick Ray picture. “I thought ‘Nick Ray? Who the hell was Nick Ray?’ I didn’t even know what I was going to be doing.” Ray had cast comedian Jim Backus against type as Dean’s tortured father, which meant that Doran and Backus would be portraying husband and wife, as they had three years earlier in
The Rose Bowl Story
.

Backus stuck his head inside Doran’s dressing room door. “I hadn’t seen Nick Ray yet. I hadn’t even been on the
set
yet. And Jim [Backus] came in and said, ‘Good to see you,’ and all that kind of stuff. And then he said, ‘Natalie’s on the picture, too.’ I said, ‘But I haven’t met this boy who’s playing my son,’ and Jim said, ‘Whoo! Wait’ll you meet him!’”

The old-school actors decided to get a closer look at James Dean. “So we crept up to the set, and sat way, way behind the camera to watch him in a scene.” Once the camera was in place, Doran and Backus waited for Ray to call for action. “All of a sudden everything got quiet and [Dean] got down in this fetal position. We waited and
waited.
Finally
he stood up, and they said, ‘Action!’ Jim [Backus] and I practically fell on the floor laughing. We had never seen such a bunch of crap in our lives. We snuck out, because we broke up the scene by our laughing.”

Doran considered Ray “a wimp” as a director for giving his star such license. By the end of filming, Doran’s opinion of the youth-oriented Ray had not changed. “He said, ‘Turn ’em over,’ ‘Action,’ and ‘Cut,’ and that’s about all he did. Jimmy [Dean] just took over the picture,” an opinion seconded by Hopper, Rosenman and Steffi Skolsky, who was cast as a gang member. Doran came to admire Dean, once she figured out what he was doing. “Jimmy and I kind of squared off. He was not too sure of me. The first scene we did together was at the police station, where he was rattled—rattled as a person, rattled as a character. So he was fighting back at anybody… that’s just the way he worked. And I tried to play it to him, to give it to him, to be a little too sweet… it gave
him
something to bump off of. And as I watched him work, and worked with him, it was wonderful, because there was this wonderful giving
to
you, and giving it back.”

Doran could tell Natalie was in distress the first day. “When we worked before, she had been fourteen, and now she was gonna play a grown-up, and it scared her to work with Jim, this weird thing! Very difficult for her to get
into
that mood.” Doran, who had been in five pictures with Natalie by then and admired her acting “tremendously,” recognized that Natalie had a completely different approach to acting than Dean. She observed of Natalie, as Orson Welles had when she was six, “Whatever she did, she did it from the heart. From the heart first, and from the mind second.”

Natalie had a panic attack just before the emotional scene when Judy bursts into tears at the police station. Long found her in the bathroom. “She was saying, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t, I just can’t… I can’t
cry
,” and then she started crying. I said, ‘Natalie, yes you can. Look—you’re crying now. Just stay in that moment, that feeling, whatever it is.’”

“It” was Natalie’s past: the pressure, at six, to cry on cue; envisioning her dog killed; seeing Mud tear apart a live butterfly
.

“I told her, ‘Let’s go back to the set, quick, while you’re crying.’”

Natalie felt she couldn’t do it. When Long left the bathroom, she was alone with her secret. “She had a little ring made, with a cup on it, and
she put Vicks in there. And when she had to do a crying scene, she’d rub the Vicks into her eye. That’s how she cried in the scene in
Rebel
.”

Doran noticed Natalie was fixated on Dean, who could be “rude, nasty.” (Doran once slapped him for taking
her
on a wild motorcycle ride.) “If he would have said, ‘Get down and crawl over there,’ she would have gotten right down and crawled.”

Natalie’s friend Jackie, who cut class to be on set, believed Natalie was serious about wanting to marry Dean, whom Jackie felt was contemptuous of Natalie for being too “Hollywood”—the Maria component of the “Natalie Wood” composite personality. “Jimmy liked the innocence of Pier. He had this image of Natalie that she wanted to be with him just because of his fame, which was not true.” According to Jackie, Natalie tried to hide her affair with Ray so Dean wouldn’t think less of her.

She was embarrassed that she still had to have a welfare worker on set, irritated that she had to study with a tutor, and indignant that the studio was required to use a double for her when shooting after midnight. Ray tried to hire Jackie to be Natalie’s welfare worker, until Warner Brothers realized that Jackie was in the eleventh grade. Ray finessed it so that Tom Hennessy, a tutor for the studio, served as both Natalie’s teacher
and
welfare worker, and got a “special dispensation” from Maria authorizing Hennessy to stand in for her as Natalie’s guardian on the set.

Hennessy, a handsome former football player who sometimes worked as a stunt man, was as straight an arrow as Ray was “a free spirit,” in Hennessy’s words. He recalls Natalie “could be moody. She resented the fact that the other ‘kids’ were out there doing their thing… when she had to be restricted to the schoolroom or trailer, but basically she was cooperative.” Natalie later told
Look
that she and Mineo, Hennessy’s other charge, “would tell him that we had arranged interviews for [him for] an acting job… we made up the interviews to get rid of him.” Skolsky remembers, “She just wanted to grow up. She wanted to be eighteen so she could be out of her mother’s reach. And she was always trying to sneak a smoke.”

Hennessy took it as his responsibility to shield Natalie from the
Rebel
gang. “He had a big meeting and he told the producers and Nick Ray that we were smoking and swearing around Natalie, and that we were a bad influence. We just howled, because she smoked more than we did—and swore!”

There was an absurd, Fellini quality to the illusion of Natalie being under the protection of a studio welfare worker, when she was sexually involved off-set with the forty-three-year-old director. Faye Nuell, a pretty dancer with a passing resemblance to Natalie, whom Ray hired as her double, became Natalie’s friend and used to go to Ray’s bungalow with her at all hours. Nuell was aware that Natalie was involved with Ray, but “she didn’t really talk about that stuff very much. I mean she adored him—that was very clear… I think it was hero-worship on her part.” Nuell considered Ray’s involvement with Natalie “ego” driven: “She was an adorable, sexy young girl.
We
, of course, thought he was an old man—a sexy old man.”

According to Nuell, Ray’s affair with Natalie was taboo on the set. “If it was thought about, it was whispered and nobody wanted to talk about it. She was underage. To my knowledge, people didn’t really know at the time. It was years later that Natalie was a little more open about it.” Others described it as a quiet buzz. “We all knew,” Doran said in 1999. “Jim [Backus] and I talked about it.” Backus told Doran, “Well, I hope she doesn’t get pregnant.”

Hopper, who had been persecuted by Ray since filming began, came to the conclusion Ray was using him as a smokescreen for his illegal affair with Natalie. “The day of the chickie run scene, Natalie’s parents had arrived on the set, and Nick suddenly started yelling at me and sent me to my trailer, in front of her parents. Which is when I realized that the reason I was getting into this kind of a problem with Nick was because of Nick Ray’s relationship with Natalie and
my
relationship with Natalie.” Hopper figured that the studio or her parents had complained that Natalie was having an affair, and Ray told them it was with
Hopper
. “I realized that I could be expendable in Nick Ray’s world. And he could blame
me
and get off. And I wasn’t gonna let it happen.”

That night, before the chicken run scene, Hopper took Ray aside. “I said, ‘Nick, I
know
that you’ve been fucking Natalie. You’re now using that against
me
. I know that you’ve now told the studio that I’m having an affair with her. This has gotta
stop…
[or] I’m gonna beat the shit out of you right now.’ And I took some sort of boxing pose.” Hopper would never forget Ray’s response. “He said, ‘See, that’s your problem. You have to use your fists. You can’t use your brain. Someday you’re gonna have to start using your brains.’ And he turned and walked away.”

Whether the studio
did
know about Ray’s affair with Natalie is unclear. Hennessy, who was working for Warners as Natalie’s chaperon/tutor and on-set guardian, “was suspicious” because of her frequent night and weekend rehearsals at the director’s bungalow, “but she gave me the impression that there wasn’t much that I could do about it.” Since Hennessy wasn’t legally required to be at Ray’s bungalow, he felt “it was up to her mother and her parents to be in charge.” Natalie’s increasing control over her mother was apparent by the fact that Maria delegated her guardianship of Natalie on the set to Hennessy, who recalls, “Her mother wasn’t around all that much.”