Natasha (31 page)

Dean’s fatal accident in a speeding Porsche along Route 466 on his way to the races in Salinas, California, would have similarly eerie reverberations throughout the country, and on
Rebel Without a Cause
, which came out at the time of his funeral. “The way the world reacted
to Jimmy’s death was what I had heard, but was not old enough to remember, about Valentino’s death,” observed one of the
Rebel
gang. Actor Corey Allen, whose character drives off a cliff while racing against Dean’s character (seen through much of the movie in a red jacket), remembers, after the movie opened, “young men running around in red windbreakers, and talking with their lips barely moving, and thinking that they would somehow become Jimmy.”

Theaters showing
Rebel Without a Cause
offered grieving fans a temple to worship Jimmy Dean as an actor, to mourn his passing, and to wonder what might have been, turning Nick Ray’s personal statement into “an epic,” and Natalie Wood into a star. “It’s a gruesome thought that she owes her stardom to James Dean’s bad driving, but it’s certainly true that his death helped establish him as an icon and that her association with him benefited her,” film critic Stanley Kauffman observed years later. “What might have happened otherwise, who knows?”

Natalie called it “a lucky picture” for her, “because that part had such dimension to it—more than the normal ingénue role for a fifteen-year-old girl, so I think that helped me get into more mature roles.”

While it was a lurid coincidence that car accidents contributed to Natalie’s fame from
Rebel Without a Cause
in three ways—Hopper’s head-on collision on Laurel Canyon helped her get the part, a tragic crash was the climax of the “chickie run” scene, and Dean’s fatal smash-up in his Porsche ignited the movie’s cult success—her poignant performance was memorable on its own.
The Hollywood Reporter
called Natalie “splendid,” with Ray proclaiming her “the greatest young actress since Helen Hayes.” She had the same vulnerability on-screen as an ingénue as she had playing an Austrian waif-child at six, clinging to Orson Welles. “She had an endearing quality,” as her actor pal Ben Cooper observed, “and I don’t think people can
fake
that.”

Natalie found out about Dean’s death during the taping of
Heidi
, reacting hysterically. She broke down in tears at the press premiere of
Rebel
, and kept a miniature bust of Dean as a shrine, recalls Lana. For days, reporters would call Natalie for stories about him, designating her the keeper of Dean’s flame. “I was embarrassed,” she told Hollywood correspondent Vernon Scott months later, “because it made me look as if I were capitalizing on his fame.” At the same time, she loyally defended her friend Nick Adams to Steffi Skolsky when she heard that Skolsky was
“badmouthing” Adams for selling Dean trivia, a rumor Nuell and others confirm was true, though Natalie was too faithful a friend to believe it.

Her role as James Dean’s girlfriend in
Rebel Without a Cause
not only established Natalie as a mature actress, she suddenly became her generation’s idealized teenage girl. Her brown eyes sparkled from the cover of every movie magazine, featuring articles with headlines such as: “Natalie Wood Speaks Out,” “Teenage Siren,” “Natalie’s Teenage World,” “Going Steady with Stardom,” “The Dance She Couldn’t Miss,” “It’s a Wonderful Whirl,” “Togs for A Teen,” “It’s a Date!”

Natalie’s personality buried itself further as “Natalie Wood” became more famous. She felt pressure, in public, to become the air-brushed fantasy figure smiling from the pages of fan magazines, to
please
everyone, to be
perfect
, the way Mud trained her, to look beautiful at all times, to be a
star
. “She was very concerned about how her fans felt about her,” her sister Lana observed. “It was sometimes a burden for her, because she felt so indebted to everyone, felt that she had to appear a certain way, had to
be
a certain way.”

“I have to be
‘Natalie Wood,’
” she would tell her friend Robert Hyatt.

Hopper recalls, “People would come to the table—we’d be sitting eating, in the commissary, or a restaurant or whatever—and Natalie would turn on this
smile
. This smile, you know? And the
second
the person left, the smile would drop and she would just go right back. She’d turn it on, and turn it off—it was incredible. I used to say, ‘I don’t know how you can do that, Natalie. How do you do that?’ She said, ‘Practice.’”

Every moment in Natalie’s day was dedicated to the pursuit of stardom. Even the court hearing for approval of her new contract at Warner Brothers—required by law because she was a minor—became a photo opportunity for Natalie Wood, her star alter ego—and her mother’s. She and Mud went to court together, with Natalie dressed to the nines, carrying her toy white poodle, Fifi. As they left the judge’s chambers, Natalie held up Fifi for UPI photographers, mugging adorably with her poodle, a picture that made newspapers across the country the next day, with captions such as “Pats of Joy,” reporting Natalie Wood’s new seven-year movie contract.

She opened her first checking account, depositing part of her Warners salary at the discretion of Maria, who controlled the rest as family income.
Natalie had no concept how to function outside the artificial world Mud had created for her. “My first official act was to overdraw $400,” she said to a Hollywood editor. “I’m not very bright about money. I’m not domestic either. If I don’t learn how to cook, maybe I won’t have to.”

She cooperated fully with Maria’s star-driven regime, even though her own dream was to be a serious actress like Jo Van Fleet and other protégés of Kazan, creating an internal conflict that contributed to Natalie’s confusion about her identity. Her struggle to reconcile these two competing goals is evident from this interview she gave then:

That fall, Natalie heard about a picture in development at Alan and Sue Ladd’s production company on the Warners lot. The script was by novelist David Dortort, an Emmy nominee for adapting
The Oxbow Incident
, featuring character actor Raymond Burr. Dortort recommended the dark, heavy-set Burr, then thirty-eight, as the villain in the small-budgeted noir drama he was writing for the Ladds’ company, called
A Cry in the Night
. Burr was playing a sexual stalker who kidnaps a beautiful girl after he spies her necking in a car with her boyfriend. The stalker knocks out the boyfriend and drags the girl to a secret lair, where he intends to rape and possibly kill her before her boyfriend and her father, a police captain, can discover where he’s taken her.

Natalie “staged a campaign” to play the intended rape victim, which not only challenged her as an actress, but had obvious parallels to her
violent encounter with the star she said held her sexual hostage. “It was so absolutely unbelievable,” recalls Dortort, who was unaware of Natalie’s experience. “She would come up, and practically break down the door, and say, ‘I want to play that girl!’… she
really
had some deep
feelings
, and an emotional response, to the character for some reason.”

Dortort had conversations with Natalie about the character, which he had written with a plot twist. “At first she’s terrified, but… she slowly but surely begins to
dominate
the man that kidnaps her and was going to rape and kill her.” Dortort asked Natalie to read a few scenes. “Watching her—and watching the animated face, and the eyes, she had wonderful eyes—she convinced me that she not only
could
do this part, but she almost
needed
to do this part.” For days, Natalie lobbied the producers. “She’d meet the Ladds on one of the studio streets and implore them, beg them, ‘I can do it. I was born to do this part.’ ” As with Judy, in
Rebel
, Natalie
related
to the character, and felt a passion to
become
her on-screen.

Natalie got what she wanted, again—approaching
A Cry in the Night
as if it were Chekhov, not a B movie, and she was Helen Hayes. “She always did the best job she could,” observed Hopper. “If she was doing something that was not important at all, she gave it the same energy as something that was going to be great. She really loved her work. That was her
life
.”

Her first day of shooting, early November, Natalie invited Richard Anderson, a reserved, contemplative actor loaned by MGM to play her boyfriend, to meet in her dressing room so they could go over their scenes, a rare gesture in a low-budget contract movie. Anderson, who was a mature twenty-nine to Natalie’s seventeen, remembers her as “very watchful,” “always fighting for better stuff,” a “fully engrossed actress” who was “really
there
.”

Lana, who had to be forced into doing
The Searchers
, was awestruck by her older sister’s absolute dedication to acting. “Every day of her life, she never thought about doing something else. She thought of what she could do to be better. She would analyze her script and write notes in the margins, and she was very, very careful, very meticulous with
all
of her roles. She would get an idea of who that individual was long before she would start the film.”

Natalie merged with her victim character in
A Cry in the Night
, forming a bond with Raymond Burr, her movie stalker. Their costar,
Richard Anderson, noticed they “caught on immediately professionally,” and “had great sympathy for one another’s work, and what they were both trying to do.” Burr, a closeted homosexual or bisexual who seemed “overwhelmingly lonely,” according to screenwriter David Dortort, brought sympathy to the sexual psychopath, playing him as a persecuted mama’s boy with a kind heart beneath his brutish exterior. Burr’s gestures during script readings with Dortort—“bringing his hands around, fluttering a little bit”—suggested the rapist was secretly homosexual, like Burr, “and I put that into the character: that he wanted someone to
talk
to, someone who would appreciate him for what he was, and not criticize him.”

Natalie, whose character responds sensitively to her captor, found herself similarly drawn to the gentle giant Burr, who had infatuated her ever since she saw his deep-set bedroom eyes in
A Place in the Sun
with Mary Ann. Burr, a gourmand, invited her to dinner one night, ordering escargots at an elegant restaurant. Natalie had no idea they would be eating snails, setting the tone for Burr’s “Orson Welles makeover” of her that fall. “Burr was a very classy guy, and he saw her talent, and the potential in her, and he really wanted to cultivate her, the way Orson Welles did with Rita Hayworth,” suggests Mary Ann, “and it was done very lovingly.”

Natalie went out with Burr throughout filming, and afterward. “Natalie was so crazy about Raymond Burr,” Jackie recalls. “That was when she was kind of branching out, and learning more about literature. She said that when she would go over to his house, he could recite poetry. He was a real sensitive human being, and she had a wonderful time with him—fine wines, wonderful cook, extremely intelligent—but at the end of the day, he’d kiss her on the cheek and say, ‘Goodnight, Natalie.’”

According to Jackie, “It was the most devastating thing when she found that Raymond Burr was gay and there was no way they were going to have an affair, because she tried her darndest. She thought with her charm she could make the difference.” Burr’s preference for men stimulated Natalie’s tendency to “want what she couldn’t have.” She continued their relationship, in the hope she could “change” or seduce him, “like Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift.”

After Natalie’s confession she had been raped sadistically by a powerful star, the males in her life were either
pseudo-
boyfriends—Hopper,
Adams, Perry Lopez, Martin Milner—or men of sensitivity, such as Nick Ray and Jimmy Dean, who possessed her Fahd’s tender, artistic nature. Her attraction to the gentle, homosexual or bisexual Burr followed this trend, providing Natalie with what Debbie Reynolds referred to as a “safety net.” Hopper, who performed in an ABC King’s Row Theater production of
The Wedding Gift
with Natalie that December, knew that she was seeing Burr and that Natalie considered it “dating,” not a friendship, speculating, “She may have gone into a period where she was interested in gay men.”

Her next serious boyfriend, Marlowe, believed that Natalie also viewed Burr as representative of a fantasy. “He was a protector of sorts. He would tell her things, worldly things—he thought were worldly and
she
thought were worldly. She
wanted
somewhere… she wanted a world, outside the world that was created for her: the child actress, the Warner Brothers contract; that mother, the dragon. She was living a frightening fairy tale.”

Natalie, moreover, may have found the relationship with Burr a catharsis from her confessed rape, since Burr played her attacker on screen, and her character formed a sympathetic attachment to him, managing to escape sexual assault.

Most of Natalie’s friends assumed that Burr was using the relationship partially as a “beard” to “cover his gayness,” as Hopper put it, a common practice in the repressed fifties. Burr claimed to have been married multiple times, to wives who died or disappeared under untraceable circumstances. “In those days, they were all in the closet,” asserts Dortort, who felt sorry for Burr. “To admit it was suicide. Absolute death.” Others presumed Burr dated Natalie to get his name in the gossip columns. Burr later told Robert Benevides, his longtime male companion, he was in love with Natalie.