Natasha (35 page)

Natalie returned from her star-making Warners tour the first few days of September, joining Marlowe for a “hideaway at the beach, to get away from her mother.” They rented a cottage in a Malibu hotel for a few days, resuming their discussions about getting married, a possibility that created panic in Maria and alarm in Warner Brothers executives, who were desperate to sever the maverick Marlowe from Natalie’s life.

While they were in Malibu, Nick Adams
“appeared
at our hotel,” Marlowe would recall, bringing his newest famous friend, Elvis Presley, to meet Natalie. Adams had encountered Presley, then twenty-one, a little over a week before on the set of Presley’s first movie,
Love Me Tender
. Presley, who deeply admired James Dean’s acting, knew every line in
Rebel Without a Cause
, and wanted to meet Natalie Wood because she had worked with Dean.

Presley, Natalie and Adams instantly became “almost a threesome—having a lot of fun together,” Natalie said then. They were spotted that week at a cinema in Hollywood called the Iris, seeing
Hot Rod Girls
and
Girls in Prison
, the day before Presley flew to New York for his historic first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, turning him into a cultural phenomenon.

With the world’s most famous singer expressing an interest in Natalie, Maria exerted the full measure of her power over her daughter to end her romance with Scott Marlowe, abetted by equally potent pressure from Warner Brothers. Natalie Wood, the movie star, relented. “I don’t know if you can imagine those days,” Marlowe later would reflect. “Everything was geared to publicity. Studios got together and made people’s lives, and had clauses in their contracts: what time they could go out, what time they had to be home, what they had to wear, what their hair was, what their photographs were like. They dictated how they lived or
not
lived. They said, ‘You do this and you’ll be okay; you
don’t
do this and things will be bad for you.’ And they meant it.”

The effect of Natalie’s enforced breakup with Marlowe was as devastating, in its way, as her broken engagement to Jimmy Williams, her earlier opportunity for a “real” life. “The mother just fucked it—just screwed it all up,” remarks Marlowe. “I was kind of a fort for Natalie. I just was there for her all the time.”

After the breakup with Marlowe, Natalie took her first trip to New York without her mother or a chaperone, to appear on
The Perry Como Show
. The experience was so disconcerting, she decided not to move out of her parents’ home until she got married. A friend she made that fall, actress Judi Meredith, noticed that Natalie needed to have “someone around her all the time.” “And when they are not,” Meredith said at the time, “she keeps in touch by phone. That’s why she calls her mother practically every hour, why she calls me at three and four in
the morning, why she constantly talks to her agent, to the studio, a dozen different people. Even at home she can’t be alone for a moment.”

Natalie wanted to escape from Mud and her dysfunctional family, but the very neuroses Mud had instilled—primarily the fear of being alone—bound Natalie to her mother, as if Maria were a snake coiled around her neck.

With Marlowe exorcised from her life, Natalie spent more time with Elvis Presley and his companions from Tennessee, who had taken over part of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as their stomping grounds. Lamar Fike, a Presley pal with a rollicking Southern sense of humor, adored “the raving ingénue,” as he later described Natalie. “We used to call her the Mad Nat. Elvis and I thought it up. Natalie used to get so dramatic! I came in one day to his room at the Beverly Wilshire and she got up on the windowsill and opened the window up. And I said, ‘Elvis, Jesus Christ, she’s going to jump!’ And he said, ‘No, no,’ and then he said, ‘Nat, come and sit down and quit being so dramatic.’ And he was right. So we called her the Mad Nat.”

Her mother “pushed” the relationship with Presley, according to Hyatt. Maria visited Presley on his movie set with Natalie and struck up conversations with his mother, Gladys. Even Fahd liked Presley, according to Maria, who would remember her husband buying Elvis Presley records that fall. “Natalie was crazy about Elvis,” she claimed in later years. Natalie bought matching velvet shirts for herself and Presley, sneaking into movies with him throughout the late fall, finding him “complex and lonely,” not unlike herself. “Natalie was attracted to dark personalities,” Marlowe observed.

Her school friend Jackie, who was still friendly with Natalie, remembers Natalie telling her “what a polite, wonderful human being” Presley was, but “he was not what she wanted romantically.” Later in life, Natalie gave an interview to Presley biographer Albert Goldman, discussing her relationship with the singer:

At the height of her friendship with Presley, in October, Natalie was sent to New York to appear in a live television drama called
Carnival
on NBC’s Kaiser Aluminum Hour, costarring Dennis Hopper, directed by George Roy Hill. Natalie played the daughter of a drunken carny worker who takes a job as a “cooch dancer” in a desperate bid to save her father’s job, then lies to cover for him. She would later refer to it as her best work as an actress, perhaps because she related to her character, who was supporting her alcoholic father.

Ironically, Scott Marlowe was NBC’s first choice to play Hopper’s role as the carnival barker in a tender romance with Natalie’s character. “I was doing a television show, and I couldn’t do it. My heart was wrenched.” Marlowe, who was still in contact with Natalie through “secret” phone calls she made to him through friends, watched her perform that night. “She was brilliant. The camera came in close and she had this big, big scene, she had to burst into tears—and she did it and she was brilliant. She burst right into tears. God, she was magnificent.”
Daily Variety
agreed with Marlowe, calling Natalie “touching and effective.”

She returned to Hollywood from her television triumph to begin dating an intense young actor she met before she left town, when she saw him perform onstage in
End as a Man
. Her companion that night was Ben Cooper, who recalls their reaction to actor Robert Vaughn, when they met him after the play at a small party: “Bob played a real rat, just a despicable bastard. And I told him, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you later; right now I still hate you.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘Thank you very much.’ He was just magnetic. You would hardly remember any of the other actors who were in the play. So when he and Natalie met, there was a lot of electricity.” Vaughn would say, “Being a reasonably sensitive fellow, it was apparent from the git-go that the girl and yours truly would see each other again—she had that look.”

By the time Natalie returned from New York, Vaughn had been signed to a two-picture-a-year deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and moved from a one-room apartment shared with his mother “into a
magnificent three-story, ten-room penthouse on Orchid Avenue overlooking the lights of my newly discovered Hollywood.” Natalie introduced him to Hollywood’s haunts, as she earlier had Hopper. “My first Hollywood premiere was with Nat, who as a result of
Rebel
, was now the toast of
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
, etcetera.” Vaughn simultaneously went out with Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith, “[and] since neither Judi or Natalie seemed to be concerned about the other’s role in my life—that life was good.”

Natalie was juggling Vaughn with Elvis Presley, who invited her to Graceland, his Memphis home, over Halloween. According to Marlowe, “She did a weekend, to make me
jealous
, with Elvis. That’s
all
it was about. She wanted to get back with me and so she took off with him.”

Natalie left town abruptly, without telling the studio or her new agency, William Morris, missing a publicity event and flying under an assumed name. Her “secret” visit to Graceland was captured by photographers moments after Nick Adams picked her up at the airport in Memphis, where she and Presley were stalked by fans everywhere they went: riding on his motorcycle, tooling around town in his Lincoln Continental, stopping at the Fairgrounds or for ice cream. Presley’s later friend Jerry Schilling remembers, “I was fourteen years old, playing touch football, and who should drive up but Elvis on a motorcycle, and who’s sitting behind him but Natalie Wood! All I could do was just stand there and stare.”

Presley allowed his fans to do almost anything, even look through his windows. He explained why to a bewildered Natalie, who recalled, “I hadn’t been around anyone who was religious. He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people, otherwise, God would take it all away.”

Both Lana and Maria would later say that Natalie phoned home toward the end of her visit, asking Mud “in code” to call her back on the ruse that Warner Brothers needed her in Los Angeles. Presley’s friend Fike, who was in Memphis, claims that was “a lie,” that “Natalie really cared for Elvis,” though he acknowledges “it just didn’t work out” between them. “She just didn’t like the whole set-up, didn’t like the guys around, which most girls didn’t.” Faye Nuell, Natalie’s friend from
Rebel
, still a confidante, felt Natalie, who preferred “worldly” men, had always considered Presley more a friend than a boyfriend.

Natalie flew back to Hollywood from Memphis in tight toreador pants, clutching her stuffed tigers, greeted at the airport by Robert Vaughn and by photographers, eager to snap Elvis’ “new girlfriend.” Pictures of Natalie Wood, smiling ebulliently, waving to her fans, appeared in newspapers across the world the next day. Michael Zimring, her new William Morris agent, saw Natalie privately, “and when she came back she looked like a rat that died. I don’t think she’d been to sleep for a week.” Zimring took Natalie to task for leaving town without informing him or the studio, though he felt sorry for her. “I tell you, she had a tough family thing. She was a good kid. She was a little wild, but basically she really was a good kid. I really was fond of her. She took care of her family: I mean let’s face it, she supported them. Her father was a mess.”

Marlowe recalls, “She appeared at my door the following weekend,” still hoping to marry him. “She wanted to be married badly-to
somebody
—I know. I think she just wanted out—of that mother, and that relationship. And out of feeling suicidal so much.” Natalie and Marlowe gave it a last go, but it was “not meant to be,” they would both say. “Barbara Gould tried to get us back together, but we split up.”

In the end, Scott Marlowe, like Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s true loves, represented a too extreme break from her codependent relationship with Maria, and their shared Hollywood fantasy, movie star “Natalie Wood.”

Robert Vaughn briefly filled the void in Natalie’s life through November. He remembers her then as “a full blooming late teenager, with all the passion, humor, vulnerability and craziness that time suggests. She could also drink a Volga boatman under the table. She introduced me to the ‘way of the world’ in Hollywood’s last glamorous days, and I shall treasure our fleeting time upon that ‘wicked stage’ all of my days.” At the same time, Vaughn had a strange premonition about Natalie, a disturbing feeling that something was wrong. “Even then, I had some concern, based on her zest for life, that she might not realize her full ‘Biblical’ four score and ten, and said so to my friends.”

When Vaughn escorted Natalie to a party given by Elvis Presley that December at the Santa Monica Pier, which Presley had “bought out” for his friends for the evening, “Natalie, with profound sadness, stared at the black waters, and told me how deeply afraid she was of drowning.”

NATALIE FINISHED THE HEADY
,
TUMULTUOUS
, high-pressure year of 1956 in a burst of fame, winning a Golden Globe as Outstanding Newcomer (shared with Carroll Baker and Jayne Mansfield), after being named “Most Popular New Star of 1956” by
Modern Screen
in a ceremony hosted by Louella Parsons on Sunday, December 3, broadcast live from CBS in Hollywood to
The Ed Sullivan Show
.

At one event, the movie star whom Natalie told her close friends had raped her sat near her during a ceremony, flashing his charismatic grin as if nothing had ever happened. Natalie Wood, the always-beautiful, always-happy star, beamed radiantly throughout the event, pretending to adore the famous actor beside her whom she despised.

Dennis Hopper would later observe that Natalie did her best acting “playing” Natalie Wood. Natalie worried about the fact that
she
was lost inside her screen persona, telling her sister Lana she felt that “very few people liked her just for
her
. They liked her because she was ‘Natalie Wood.’ Including guys. That was always foremost on her mind.”

At a party after the
Modern Screen
ceremony, Natalie bumped into Robert Wagner, whom she hadn’t seen since their unexciting publicity date five months earlier. He was worried about how much weight she had lost—“neuroses” kept her thin, Natalie told a magazine—and invited her to meet him at his studio commissary for lunch the next day. Natalie’s indifference, and Wagner’s easy-going nature, are suggested by the fact that she arrived three hours late, to a patiently waiting Wagner, still in good humor.

Natalie found Wagner’s mellow manner a soothing balm for her increasingly frazzled nerves, accepting a date on his new sailboat,
My Lady
, moored at Newport, south of L.A.
My Lady
was Wagner’s first of many boats, paid for with his “movie money,” and he was intoxicated
with her, and with the ocean. Natalie discovered that sailing off to sea, where she could not be reached, was a relaxing panacea from the stresses of the studio and the demands on her. “At night, when the sky is full of stars and the sea is still you get the wonderful sensation that you are floating in space,” she said. “You don’t even
think
words, yet you get the glorious feeling that you are tuned in on the universe.” She spent that night—December 6—aboard
My Lady
, which she and Wagner would celebrate in future years as their most sentimental anniversary, commemorating their first date and the first time they were intimate.

Natalie’s fear of dark water—seawater—was still with her, but she somehow separated it from being on a boat. “I don’t think it occurred to her that she would go in the water, or go off the boat,” her then close friend, Judi Meredith, noticed. “R.J. always had a boat, and it started out with a smaller one, and then it just grew. And she was going with R.J., and I don’t think it would have occurred to her to say, ‘No, this is not for me.’ ‘Cause Nat was gung-ho for life.”

Wagner said later he “fell head over heels in love” with Natalie “the way they write about in songs,” describing their relationship as “intense,” but in fact they saw each other only sporadically the next few months. Natalie was seeing several other suitors, including hotel heir Nicky Hilton, Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband, whom she met a few weeks later as part of a “star junket” to promote the opening of a new Hilton hotel in Mexico City. Natalie “liked the idea” of dating the dark and dashing Hilton, according to her friend Meredith, and was eager to emulate Elizabeth Taylor, in the opinions of Robert Blake and Marlowe. She juggled three boyfriends on her trip to Mexico City: Bob Neal, a wealthy businessman in Hollywood circles, took her to the airport, Hilton was with her in Mexico City, and Wagner picked her up by limousine when she flew home.

Respected character actor Karl Malden, who was playing Natalie’s father in a Warners potboiler they shot that winter eventually called
Bombers B-52
, remembers beaus “swarming” around Natalie on the set, “There must have been five or six boys around all the time—and you know, it was funny, they’d come together. Two or three of them’d come in, and hang around… She was always a serious actress, that was her profession, she really cherished it, she worked on it, so she was always
conscientious there, but as a person—boy, she had a good time at eighteen.” Malden glimpsed the loneliness underneath Natalie’s surface gaiety when he discovered she had never been on a family picnic, and arranged to take her on one. She told him, afterward, that it was one of the happiest days of her life, which Malden found desperately sad.

Natalie paid for the Gurdins’ new house that December—perversely, on Laurel Canyon, the street she feared—fashioning her bedroom into a separate “wing” so that she could pretend she was in her own apartment, something she was still too terrified to do. She surrendered her schoolgirl pink canopy bed for modern bedroom furniture, all in black, and acquired a private phone line so she could “talk all night” with Nick Adams or Barbara Gould or Judi Meredith, the friends who kept her company through the long nights that frightened her, “sometimes falling asleep on the phone.”

The “ambition of her life” was to play the part intended for Elizabeth Taylor in
Marjorie Morningstar
, a role she was certain would catapult her to true movie stardom, which consumed her thoughts more than any of the boyfriends who phoned with “love talk” night and day, according to the neighbor who shared her party line. “For fun, I work,” Natalie told
Cosmopolitan
in 1957, which described her “demonic ambition.” She tested for the part of Marjorie in January with a drove of actresses amid great publicity over who would play the coveted role. Natalie anguished into spring, as the tests continued.

“Warner Brothers tortured her over
Marjorie
,” recalls Marlowe, who still had occasional taboo contact with Natalie by phone. Her agent at the time, Mike Zimring, was aware of what the studio was doing. “I
knew
Natalie was going to play the part, but I had to play this game. The studio wanted to test all these other girls for publicity—because it was a big deal, who would be Marjorie Morningstar. I always felt so damn guilty about that.” Natalie even adopted a Brooklyn accent with her friends, pretending to be Jewish, desperate to play Marjorie not only as her ticket to stardom, but a chance to prove herself again as a serious actress, disgusted by the pictures she was being forced to make for Warner Brothers.

She exhibited some of her old “rebel” behavior, engaging in swearing contests for sport with her friend Meredith and their “core monster group” of Hopper and Adams and occasionally actor Robert Conrad.
“We were so full of B.S., running around and terrorizing theaters and things, putting our feet in the back of people’s seats so they’d move, and dressing in black leather. Oh God, we were like Peck’s bad boys, but it was just to make ourselves laugh. We didn’t care what anybody else thought.”

Natalie added a new swain to her assortment of men that spring, the young and wealthy Lance Reventlow, who took her to the Academy Awards. In April, she was seen with Frank Sinatra, her mentor in the ways of Hollywood at fifteen. Sinatra was courting her for his next movie,
Kings Go Forth
, as well as personally, according to Natalie’s chum Nuell, who recalls how Sinatra “adored” her. Natalie told a movie magazine it was not uncommon for her to have three dates on the same night—Hilton, Wagner, Reventlow, Robert Vaughn, Bob Neal, Nick Adams, Dennis Hopper, and the list went on.

By late spring, Natalie was pilloried in the press. Hedda Hopper warned her, in print, she was going to “burn out”; columnist Sheilah Graham wrote, “Tomorrow won’t come for Natalie Wood if she doesn’t slow down”;
Look
published a profile of Natalie, querying, “Is she riding for a fall?”
Movieland
criticized her for dating Sinatra, calling him “her most incongruous escort,” writing that he was “old enough to be her dad.” Even
Variety
took a shot, tittering, “Natalie Wood’s either got a great press agent or she’s boy crazy.”

Judi Meredith, Natalie’s close friend, considered the attacks unjustified. Meredith, who had her own apartment, acted as a “beard” for Natalie when she spent the night with Hilton, because Natalie’s father disapproved of him, an arrangement Maria—impressed by Hilton’s name—encouraged. “Her mom told her dad that she was staying overnight with me, but she wasn’t. Natalie got pretty much whatever she wanted.” Meredith largely discounted the negative gossip about Natalie’s male harem, saying they were
“purely
platonic” for the most part. “Nick [Adams] was just sort of the kid next door. So was Dennis [Hopper]. Dennis the Menace, for God’s sake. He was just inventive.”

Natalie’s school friend Jackie, who was still around her quite a bit, felt “Natalie couldn’t be faithful to one boy then.” Several years later, Natalie admitted that she fell in love much too easily, observing poignantly, “It’s not really love, though; I guess you call it fascination.” “She could have had anyone,” observed Jackie. “She was looking for happiness.” Natalie told a magazine she was looking for a man who was
“intense about
something
.” With Scott Marlowe evicted from her life, she seemed to spiral downward. A female friend who remained unnamed described Natalie during this period to
Coronet
magazine, later, as reminding her “of an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine. She was burning herself up. I was frightened and I waited for something to happen.”

There was evidence. Amanda Duff, who met Natalie years earlier during
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
, written by Duff’s husband Philip Dunne, recalls seeing Natalie at a party, smoking heavily, noticing that “her hands were shaking.” At another party in this period, Natalie encountered actress Anna Lee, who had a small part in
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
as George Sanders’ screen wife. Natalie, who was only eight when she made the movie, was curious about her screen mother, the beautiful Gene Tierney, who had suffered a nervous breakdown in the interim. “She wanted to know what my scenes with Gene Tierney were like.”

Natalie’s childhood hypochondria returned with a vengeance. She missed several days shooting
Bombers B-52
because she thought she had a “nervous heart,” driven by car from the set by Hilton. “Every time she reads a book about a disease or hears a person discuss a sickness,” her friend Meredith wrote at the time, “she’s promptly convinced that she has it, too. During the past six months, she was convinced she had hardening of the arteries, TB, rheumatism, sclerosis of the liver, leukemia, and half a dozen other diseases I never even heard about… luckily, just as quickly as she identifies these ‘symptoms,’ she gets over them.”

Photoplay
, then the most influential movie magazine, published a two-part cover series on Natalie, describing her as “controversial,” frighteningly ambitious, “flashy,” criticizing her for having so many boyfriends, reporting there was “talk she won’t make it in her personal life.”
Movie TV
, another popular magazine, wrote that Warner Brothers had been warned there would be no more fan magazine covers for Natalie if she “doesn’t slow down on men,” prompting the studio to exert pressure on Natalie to rehabilitate her image. Natalie would complain, later, that the fan magazines “tried to make me look like a femme fatale.”

She narrowed the field of suitors to Hilton and Wagner by May, just after Warners announced she would play Marjorie Morningstar, the same week Wagner left for Japan to shoot a movie with Joan Collins.
Troy Donahue, who was seeing Judi Meredith and double-dated with Natalie, recalls her “trying to make up her mind—I remember—between R.J. and Nicky.” According to Olga, Hilton invited Natalie and their mother to the family mansion to meet his father, Conrad Hilton, to discuss terms for a marriage, with Conrad Hilton attempting to “bribe” Maria, who thought at the time that Natalie would choose Hilton over Wagner. “That was very serious,” recalls Lana of the Natalie-Nicky Hilton romance. “He was like part of the family or something.”

Wagner inundated Natalie with phone calls from Tokyo, sometimes every three minutes; by the time he returned to Hollywood on July 2, she was cooling the romance with the violent-tempered Hilton in favor of R.J., telling friends how gentlemanly and attentive R.J. was, traits she valued after her confessed rape. “She was crazy in love with Nicky,” recalls Troy Donahue, “but knew it wouldn’t be the best thing.” Friends noticed that Natalie was also drawn to men who were handsome, like her father. Wagner took her out on his boat for her nineteenth birthday on July 20, surprising Natalie with a Black Mist mink stole, the perfect symbol of the glamorous life they would have together.

The studio was ecstatic with Natalie’s romance with Wagner, who worshipped at the altar of Hollywood and posed endlessly with Natalie for fan magazines, flashing his dazzling movie-star smile as they quickly became the era’s favorite new celebrity couple, joining the ranks of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Natalie acquired a “personal” couturier, Howard Shoup, the costume designer from
Bombers B-52
, who “taught her how to dress” and created special costumes for her with “boob uplifts” to create the illusion of the larger breasts she had coveted since
Pride of the Family
.