Natasha (29 page)

The tutor was on “friendly relations” with Maria, who considered it in her best interests to be polite to anyone affiliated with the studio. To the
Rebel
gang who had minor roles, she was “such a bitch. She used to throw us out of the dressing room if she wanted to take a nap. I remember being very intimidated by her.” In her middle age, Maria had cut her bush of hair into a severe Dutch bob she dyed until it was the color of indigo ink; the contrast against her Russian-pale skin, and the intensity she projected, gave her the appearance of a prison matron in a film noir. “She seemed very stern, with the black hair, and the way she looked.”

Maria’s lack of outward affection was a mirror of what Natalie was experiencing playing Judy, whose father slaps her when she tries to kiss him on the cheek. One of the gang recalls, “I never saw Natalie hug her mother and chat with her mother, and her mother certainly never associated with any of us.”

Natalie had powerfully deep and conflicting emotions about Mud. As Faye Nuell would observe, “She kept trying to keep a distance, she very much wanted to be her own person,” but “there was an incredible bond there.” Nuell, who was privy to Natalie’s feelings about Maria, perceived their mother-daughter symbiosis as a uniquely Russian, “strange, mystical connection.” Natalie told Nuell many times about the gypsy’s warning, “Beware of dark water,” as if
she
and the prophecy were somehow entwined, even though it was said to her mother. She revealed to Nuell the secret she and Mud shared: that it was Natalie’s destiny, as Maria’s second-born child, to be known throughout the world as a great beauty. Nuell found it all mystic and fascinating, “but Maria wasn’t
my
mother.”

Fahd, who got a job as a carpenter on miniature sets at Warners through Natalie’s connections and Mud’s finagling, “somehow seemed
to know that he wasn’t important” by comparison to the gothic drama of Maria and Natalie. Nuell could tell that Natalie loved her Fahd “and he loved Natalie tremendously… but I don’t think she respected him then.”

Natalie embraced Nuell as part of the magic circle of Nick Ray, as she did Hopper, Adams and actor Perry Lopez, who were disciples of Dean and whom Natalie viewed as extensions of Dean. She told biographer Albert Goldman years later, “They were the gods. I just wanted to be exactly like them.” They frequented foreign films, Hopper recalls, “trying to find another way of, like, working… we were very ambitious to change things.” The Dean acolytes adopted angst as an artistic affectation, and Natalie cheerfully suffered with them: “What we used to talk about was how unhappy we were. Whoever was the unhappiest, whoever came closest to suicide the night before, he was the winner.”

She hinted at their other exploits, saying that Nick Ray had taught her about books, while Hopper and Adams offered a fast course in cigarettes, drinking and cussing—their imitation of “wild, crazed Hollywood icons,” reveals Hopper.

“All three of them—Natalie, Dennis, and Nick Adams—had a leaning to the wild side,” remembers Natalie’s tutor. Adams later told a magazine, “Natalie thought that being grown up meant being free of the rules… for a few months, she spent most of her time rebelling against everything and everybody.” Nuell believed that Natalie’s fast life with Adams and Hopper was an attempt to exorcise the superstitions and gypsy magic Mud had brainwashed her into believing.

As its only female member, Natalie became the golden goddess of the cult to Dean. Adams loved her as if under a spell. Hopper said later of his friendship with Natalie, “It’s one of the best relationships I’ve ever had in my life.” What Hopper admired most about Natalie was her honesty, audacity, “and her
balls
. I mean she really had balls.” Lopez remembered Natalie as “up for anything.” She filled a room with her tinkling laugh, sparkling with creative energy.

Natalie also gave her complete attention when she listened, fixing her expressive velvet eyes on whoever was talking, mirroring that person’s emotions. “Hopper and Perry Lopez… these guys were all running in the fast lanes, and getting themselves messed up. And bless her heart, for
hours and hours and hours
she would sit and just be consoling.
She always had time for them.” In his old age, Lopez, a handsome bit player in
Rebel
, would cry at the mention of Natalie’s name, saying, “Meeting her was the best day of my life. I still think of her twice a day.”

Some questioned whether the ambitious Adams and Hopper had additional reasons for getting close to Natalie. “I remember being in Dennis’ dressing room with Nick [Adams] and Natalie,” states actor Jack Grinnage, one of the gang members in
Rebel
. “I don’t know which one of them said this—it was Nick or Dennis—but he said, ‘We’re gonna hang on to her bra straps.’ Meaning up the career ladder.” Natalie’s tutor, who knew Hopper and Adams off set, said, “Both of those two guys were all over her… because they could see that this movie was going to be a big thing for Natalie… they were game for anything in order to be noticed and to get ahead in the business.”

Opinions were passionate, and divided, about the two actors. Ann Doran considered Hopper “an opportunist” but liked Adams (“he was a nice kid, very straightforward that he wanted to be an actor”). Skolsky and Long championed Hopper, calling Adams “an asshole” whose “motives were never pure.” Natalie openheartedly adopted them both; the comical Adams became a best friend. “Natalie was very naïve in many ways,” observes Steffi (Skolsky) Sidney, “and she didn’t realize he was such an operator.”

As part of their desire to make their marks in the history of cinema, the triumvirate of Hopper, Natalie, and Adams fancied becoming their era’s romantic icons, patterning themselves after notorious screen legends from the past. “We were always envious of the generations
before
us,” reveals Hopper. “People think that
we
were wild, but man, we had a lot to come up to, in our opinion, from the generation that had just, like, disappeared—the John Garfields and the Lana Turners, Ava Gardners. In a strange way, we were trying to emulate some sort of past glory.”

One night, possibly after
Rebel
, they decided to have an “orgy,” because they read that Garfield had them. Natalie’s Hollywood-glamour idea of an orgy was to bathe in champagne. As Hopper recalls, “I think she had heard that Jean Harlow or somebody had had a champagne bath.” Hopper and Adams eagerly rushed out to buy several cases of champagne, pouring the contents of the bottles into a hot bath at Adams’ cabin in La Cañada. Natalie put a dainty foot into the tub and
smiled, imagining herself as Harlow. When she sat down in the champagne bath, she let out a scream and jumped out, her vagina burned from the alcohol. “That stopped
everything
,” Hopper would remark.

Natalie laughed about the “orgy” afterward with Nuell. “Natalie was adventurous about sex and life. She was going to explore it all. She thought it sounded so glamorous—they bathe in champagne—and her whole vagina was burned by the alcohol!”

Nuell considered Natalie’s sexual adventurism a form of rebellion. “I saw the fights with her mother in the house a lot. It was, ‘You have to be home by such and such time.’ ‘No, you can’t wear this.’ ‘You are wearing too much makeup.’ If Maria could have kept her a baby forever, she would have been very happy.” The mixed message to Natalie from her mother—that it was acceptable to have sex with middle—aged, married men with power in Hollywood, but not with boys her age-created moral confusion in Natalie.

Nuell observed, “I think there was an
amorality
with Natalie. There was a big thing about breaking the rules: she wanted to break the rules. She followed whatever her feelings were and it wasn’t about making judgments. That’s not always the healthiest thing to do, or the smartest. That was her modus operandi. That was her appetite, too. She would become fascinated with somebody and the sexual part of it was just the natural part of wanting to get to know them.”

Hopper felt that Natalie was living out “the goddess syndrome, and the outrageous behavior of the female stars during the forties and so on.” She had been trained for this idolatry since she was two, pasting pictures of Hedy Lamarr, Veronica Lake and other forties’ glamour girls into the family scrapbook of stars.

In the case of her behavior with Hopper and Adams, Natalie was also fueled by the desire to belong to the kingdom of James Dean. “She went along with things, thinking she was being the ‘in’ person—naïvely, with these guys, who were on the make for
everything
. She was very enamored of that whole—the legitimacy that title gave: you know, ‘method acting.’ ” Hopper contends, “It was almost that we were naïve to the point, ‘If people did drugs and alcohol and were nymphomaniacs, then that must be the way to creativity, and creativity’s where we wanna be. We wanna be the
best.’
She always wanted to be the best.”

There was a schizophrenic quality to Natalie’s life. In reality, she was having an illicit affair with a director her father’s age, participating in wild escapades with Hopper and Adams; for fan magazines, her publicist would send a young, wholesome actor to her house, accompanied by a photographer, and the trio would travel to a restaurant, where Natalie and her arranged escort would be photographed on a “typical date.”

Actor Ben Cooper, who got the assignment more than once, kept photos from one choreographed evening. In the first photograph, Cooper, a boyish twenty-two, stands in front of the Gurdins’ open front door, as a smiling Maria—in a mink-trimmed dress—kisses a pony-tailed Natalie goodbye. In the second photo, Natalie, wearing an evening gown, and Cooper, in a three-piece suit, feed each other cherries off the top of a hot fudge sundae.
That
was the image of Natalie Wood press agents created for the public.

Not surprisingly, “Marie was an expert at the set-up date,” observes Robert Hyatt, who witnessed her in action when he and Natalie were at Republic. Mud, who took credit for inventing Natasha’s star persona, considered
herself
to be “Natalie Wood,” as much as her daughter. If Natalie got dressed to go to a premiere, Mud put on a formal gown as if
she
were going. Mary Ann recalls, “Natalie and I used to laugh about it all the time. Natalie would say, ‘Well I think I’ll wear this… unless
Mom’s
gonna wear it!’”

Cooper, Natalie’s staged date that spring, became friendly with her, howling over the fan magazine’s “screamingly funny” demand they share an ice cream sundae. Once the photographer was gone, “we went out and had a bite to eat, and talked.” Cooper, who had starred on Broadway as a child and worked with Nick Ray the year before in
Johnny Guitar
, had a similar enough background that he and Natalie related, though Cooper was a conservative, “kind of mature for my age.”

Cooper found Natalie to be “just a terrifically nice, sweet person” who was being consumed by insecurity and drive, “to do
more
, to be the
best
,” which she equated with Dean and the Method. Cooper got the impression Dean and his followers had her under a Svengali-like spell, “that they were manipulating and controlling her, and that she would do just about anything, at anytime,” which distressed him. “Here she was, a fabulous actress—just incredibly good, from the time she was a child, devastatingly good, and well-known—and it seemed that she needed
more
, and was allowing herself to be used by this group of guys,
as if that was her acceptance. I felt that she felt she
had
to go along with whatever they wanted.”

Cooper drove Natalie home, “trying to see if I could get her to kind of pull away from Jimmy Dean and that group. Not for
me
, I just felt she was caught in a quagmire, and I really liked her very much.”

The second time Cooper was set up with Natalie, he spent a few minutes with her mother, giving him a glimpse into the reason behind Natalie’s secretly sybaritic lifestyle. “Her mother was firm, Russian: ‘You
vill
do this, you
vill
do that.’ ” Cooper found it revealing that Natalie “didn’t tell me
anything
unhappy about being a child actor. She shied away from talking about her mother. It was almost as if, ‘No, I’d rather not.’ ” Cooper analyzed that Natalie participated in Dean’s cult as the only way available to rebel, “because in film, the work is so structured you can’t be too rebellious
there
, or they’re not going to use you. So where else
could
she?”

Natalie’s sometime beau, Rad Fulton, was dismayed by the change. “It was like looking at a pretty little girl on one page, turn it over, you see an adult. She became a nasty little girl, as far as morals. Sometimes she spoke like a truck driver. Kind of hard to fathom, that happening that fast.” Actress Debbie Reynolds, who was twenty-two then, remembers seeing sixteen-year-old Natalie at parties, often with Nick Adams. Reynolds thought of her as “a woman with a young girl’s face.”

Jackie, who was with Natalie almost daily, began to worry that her behavior “sometimes felt destructive.” She noticed that Natalie needed to be the center of attention, in the midst of clamor, at all times. “If she was at home and the phone wasn’t ringing, she was unhappy—but it was always ringing—and if we were out someplace, she’d call her mother a hundred times to see if anybody had called. Like she wanted to fill her life with people so she didn’t have to think about anything.”