Natasha (37 page)

Both Kazan and Warners had Natalie in mind for the picture in its earliest stages. Her name appears in Kazan’s first handwritten casting notes (along with Jane Fonda and a crossed-out Lee Remick), and in his original letter of intent to Warner Brothers in January 1959 (with no other actress mentioned). He told his friend Richard Sylbert, and the
Saturday Evening Post
, that when he saw Natalie in
Rebel
, she stayed in his head.

Warner Brothers was already intimating they would cast Natalie in
Splendor
while she was on suspension: the December 12, 1958,
Hollywood Reporter
reported that the studio had just “bought Inge’s
Splendor
for Natalie Wood.”

As further confirmation, Natalie
herself
said later that Warner Brothers had promised her the lead in
Splendor in the Grass
if she would come back to the studio and first appear in
Cash McCall
, which is how it happened. She agreed to a new contract on February 24, 1959, after a seven-month suspension. By her new terms, she was permitted to make one non-Warner Brothers picture a year, and her salary increased to $1000 a week. In early April, she was gritting her teeth through
Cash McCall
, a vehicle to exploit James Garner’s television popularity as
Maverick
.

The Wagners burst into the second year of their marriage spending money with reckless abandon. They bought each other matching Jaguars, and purchased a snow white showcase house at 714 North Beverly in the heart of Beverly Hills, announcing they wanted to “live like stars.” They hired the art director from
Cash McCall
and a decorator named Dewey Spriegel to turn their mansion into a Greek Revival masterpiece with white marble floors, gold rococo in the master bedroom, a saltwater pool, sunken tub, lanai, “His” and “Hers”
Greek statuary, and a sixteen-foot wardrobe for Natalie’s clothes. R.J.’s butler followed him to the house on Beverly, where the surroundings were more suited to a manservant.

“It was the very end of glamour with a capital ‘G,’ movie star with a capital ‘MS,’ ” Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith remembers.

The mistress of the mansion wandered the halls like a stranger. “I had never thought about furniture or things like that,” Natalie later told the author of a book on child stars. “All I’d thought about is acting, and whether I got the part or not. When the decorator said, ‘What about the coffee table?’ I realized I’d never even noticed what goes on a coffee table. I’d never looked. I didn’t have any opinion about the kind of furniture I wanted. I’d always been so worried about being shy, or what people were going to think of me, or what I was going to say, that I’d never notice
anything
when I entered a room.”

Natalie started to see a psychoanalyst, to learn how to “just
be
,” struggling to reclaim the identity that was lost to her at six, when she became the actress Natalie Wood. “I didn’t know who the hell I was. I was whoever
they
wanted me to be,
they
being agents, producers, directors, or whoever else I was trying to please at the time.” Natalie, in her sister Lana’s later observation, needed analysis as a place where she could “be naked and real.” R.J. was against it. He was threatened by the idea of his wife in analysis, just as Mud had been when Natalie briefly went to Marlowe’s therapist, perceiving it as a reflection on him. “I was afraid of it,” Wagner said later.

Robert Hyatt came back into Natalie’s life in 1959, after a stint in the Army, and saw her fairly often, since he and his mother lived near the Gurdins. He and Natalie talked about her therapist, an elderly doctor on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Natalie told Hyatt she needed therapy because she wanted to have a baby, and she was terrified to get pregnant because of Mud’s horror stories. Scott Marlowe experienced Natalie’s pregnancy fears when they were dating. “Oh my
God
, she was just frightened to death. We had to be very careful. We were very, very careful. Again, it was the mother.”

When Maria tried to force thirteen-year-old “Lana Lisa” into show business—pushing her to interview for a
National Velvet
television series and other acting jobs—Lana called Natalie in desperation. Natalie moved her little sister into her house on Beverly temporarily, even permitting Lana to sleep in the same bed with her and R.J.
“Natalie protected her like she was Lana’s mother,” recalls Natalie’s agent, Zimring. Mud harrumphed to a movie magazine that Natalie “spoiled” Lana, whom she called “lazy.” “Which is why I became so attached to Natalie,” explains Lana. “Because she grew up and away and was married and I could go and stay with her. It was like actually being with somebody who cared about you.”

Natalie’s tenderness toward Lana, shielding her sister from their mother’s ambition, spoke volumes about the way Natalie perceived her own tragic childhood. She developed a fascination, that year, with a popular San Francisco-based artist named Margaret Keane, identifying with Keane’s paintings, which usually depicted a wispy waif-child with enormous, sad eyes. “She was obsessed with them,” recalls Dennis Hopper. “She thought they looked like
her
.”

Natalie commissioned Keane to paint her the way she had looked as a child, and sat for a portrait of herself at nearly twenty-one. Keane would remember Natalie posing for her, hours upon hours, without complaining or moving a muscle; still the little girl who would do anything to please. Keane’s adult portrait of Natalie, childlike in a simple black dress, gazing soulfully with dark, tragic eyes, was on display wherever Natalie lived for years afterward, representing her image of herself as a fragile figure of immense sadness. It was reminiscent of the refrain of her long-ago favorite song:
“Where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?”

Her glamorous life with R.J. showed signs of strain. When Hyatt visited Natalie at the house on Beverly, he noticed enormous bottles of prescription pills in the medicine cabinet, with thousands of Seconals, Dexedrines, Nembutal, and Dexatrim. “Natalie would get up in the morning and take a Dexie, then she would have a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a glass of white wine for breakfast.” Hyatt considered her anorexic, before the term came into vogue. “She was worried about her weight, because she noticed her mother had gotten fatter as she got older, and she was afraid it would happen to her.”

Lana, who stayed for several weeks with her sister and R.J. after “running away,” was aware that her sister still took sleeping pills. A publicist who played poker at the Wagners’ recalls Natalie and R.J. using their colored prescription pills as “chips” in the poker game. Natalie’s diet and sleeping pills were commonplace in their crowd, asserts Faye Nuell. “It was like something people did then. It wasn’t
thought of as drugs in those days. That was the day of the Dr. Feel-Goods—there were all these drugs. I knew Cary Grant when he was doing LSD with his psychiatrist. That was all before the sixties drug culture. Nobody thought about it.”

Natalie’s rebel years of drinking ended with her teens. Once she got married, she would have an occasional glass of champagne or wine (her favorite was Pouilly Fuissé). Hyatt noticed that when he visited the Wagners’ house, R.J. often had a bourbon-and-water in his hand.

Natalie and R.J. blended his Old Guard cronies with her younger contemporaries in their social life. According to actor Robert Conrad, part of a group called “the pack” then, “R.J. and Natalie had ‘pocket friends.’ One night or two nights it would be the young, contract, we’re-all-trying-to-make-it group, and then it would be the Fred Astaire, high-powered, Abe Lastfogel, president and head of William Morris. It was like that. And they entertained every night.”

The strange fascination between Frank Sinatra and Natalie continued after her marriage to R.J. One of the few people who knew about Natalie’s teenage friendship with Sinatra, Bobby Hyatt, recalls that Sinatra was a frequent guest at the Wagners’ when he was there. Natalie would be upstairs giggling with Sinatra, while R.J. played poker downstairs in the den, the only room not under construction.

In July, Sinatra cohosted with R.J. an extravagant surprise twenty-first birthday party for Natalie at Romanoff’s, serenading her in song with Dean Martin. Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith, who met Sinatra at the party and began a months-long romance with him, observed, that night, that Natalie was “smitten” with Sinatra, who “did treat Natalie with deference.” When Meredith started to date Sinatra, “Natalie would talk about Frank a lot, about how he treated her so beautifully.” In August, Sinatra invited the Wagners to New York with him and Meredith. They traveled together by train, spending several days on the East Coast, going to nightclubs like the Blue Angel and Monsignor’s.

Sometime the next year, when they were all four at a dinner party at Romanoff’s, Meredith was startled to have “a rift” with Natalie in the powder room over Sinatra. “I’m not confrontational at all, neither was Nat, but a couple of comments were made by each of us.” Natalie made it clear, in the encounter, she had a crush on Sinatra, “and I didn’t know it… and I think my being the center of attention with him—and at one point, very serious—that threw her, she didn’t expect it.”

The jealous confrontation over Sinatra ended the friendship between Natalie and Meredith, who thought Natalie’s infatuation was “a crush on a megastar. Sinatra was a magic person, an icon I guess. I don’t know if it was like something you think about—everybody fantasizes on what would have been, what could have been, what should have been but doesn’t. There’s a huge line between fantasy and acting out. We all make reality out of dreams.”

Natalie and R.J.’s profligate spending and fast life with such as Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, began to catch up with them by the end of 1959. “It was like we were playing house with play money,” Natalie said later, “and when it ran out—that was it.” To recoup their financial losses, they agreed to break their marital agreement to not make a picture together after MGM offered Natalie $150,000 to cast her with R.J. in a Southern Gothic soap opera ultimately called
All the Fine Young Cannibals
.

Natalie approached it with her usual dedication, moving a dialect coach into the house to teach her and R.J. the proper Texas accents, but the picture would come to be known as the fiasco of her career. Hyatt visited her on the set, where Natalie was worried whether her husband could handle a dramatic role.

Although Natalie joined R.J. earlier that year ridiculing “nose-picking fringe Method actors” in the
New York Times
, she was embarrassed by the bad Hollywood films she had made since accepting her star-making Faustian pact with Warner Brothers, beginning with the Tab Hunter pictures. It rankled her to be forced into
Cash McCall
by the studio, which had caused her to forfeit an opportunity to costar with Laurence Olivier in
The Entertainer
, which she wanted “desperately.”

All of her hopes and dreams for her career seemed to reside with
Splendor in the Grass
, the picture Warners had dangled to get her to return to the studio. She saw
Splendor
, and its director, Kazan, as her last best hope to restore her integrity as an actress. As with
Rebel, A Cry in the Night
, and
Marjorie Morningstar
, her three earlier passion projects, Natalie deeply identified with the character in
Splendor
because of parallels to her own life. Wilma Dean, “Deanie,” the sweet high school girl in
Splendor
, was almost
too
close to Natalie for comfort.

In the script, by William Inge, Deanie has a weak but tender father and an overbearing mother who demonizes sex and tries to keep her from the high school boy she loves, with tragic results, leading Deanie into a mental institution for psychoanalysis. Natalie recognized herself, and Jimmy Williams, in the thwarted teen lovers Deanie and Bud, though in the movie it is Deanie—not Bud—who tries to commit suicide. The role excited her because of the storyline with the controlling mother, Natalie told her friend Bobby. At the same time, “I always had a bit of inner resistance to doing that part,” she said later, “because I felt I would have to open doors and relive a lot of feelings that I had put the lid on. I had a hunch that emotionally it wasn’t going to be good for me… [that it would] open up a lot of wounds.”

The script also called for the character of Deanie to sob in several scenes, to walk on a high ledge, to submerge her head under water in a bathtub, and try to drown herself—some of Natalie’s most deep-seated fears. Natalie ultimately decided she had to play Deanie, despite the emotional risks, because of a greater fear: she told Kazan, when they met, she was afraid her
career
was in danger.

Natalie’s first encounter with the director she idolized since seeing
A Streetcar Named Desire
at thirteen was a dramatic illustration of the Natalie/Maria schism in actress “Natalie Wood.” Her by now best friend Norma Crane, a graduate of the Actors Studio, was with Natalie as she was dressing at the Waldorf in New York to see Kazan about playing Deanie. As Crane would recall, “The girl in
Splendor
is the purest, most virginal girl in the world, and Natalie was putting on mascara, high heels up to here, false eyelashes, bracelets, rings. I said: ‘You’re going to meet Kazan. The part!’ She said: ‘I’m Natalie Wood and that’s how I go out at 7 at night.’”

Kazan’s encounter with Natalie was illuminating for the director. Although she was his original choice to play Deanie, he said later that he had second thoughts while he was developing the project at Warner Brothers, worried about hiring a “has-been child star.” According to Leonard Hirshan, one of Natalie’s agents at Morris, Kazan also “didn’t feel that she looked as virginal as he wanted… he was looking for a quality that he didn’t see in her then.”

Upon meeting Natalie, the shrewd Kazan, who was famous for psychoanalyzing his actors, correctly perceived Natalie as half-child, half-woman, “like a doll dressed up by adults.” He saw a “desperate twinkle”
underneath the makeup and recognized an “unsatisfied hunger” in Natalie to excel. He looked past her mink, and believed Natalie when she told him she was “disgusted with the image” she had acquired.