Natasha (49 page)

When Natalie talked about having become a mother, it was clear she saw Natasha as a resurrection of her lost self, and that the void in her life had been filled:

Natalie exhibited a glow that winter and into the next summer that had not been in evidence since before her trauma with R.J., posing
proudly with Natasha in magazines with headlines such as “How I Was Saved.” The new Natalie, as she was being called, described her lifestyle as a homebody, telling
Pageant
in the July 1971 issue, “For the first time I feel an inner emotional security. There is reality and dependability. My life revolves around Richard and the baby… independence is fine, but not for me.”

While the magazine was still on newsstands, Natalie stumbled upon Gregson in an affair with her youngish female secretary, “which was doubly painful for her,” recalls Olga, “because Natalie
chose
her out of college.” Olga’s impression was that Natalie overheard Gregson and her secretary in an indiscreet phone conversation. “That was quite a story, though I like the man,” Maria later told Sue Russell, the author of
Star Mothers
. Maria’s version was more graphic than what Olga understood. “Natalie caught Gregson in bed with the secretary,” she told Russell, “so that was the end of that.” For Mud, the affair validated her gypsy prediction of May weddings bringing tears.

Bob Jiras, Natalie’s longtime confidant, heard the same account about Gregson from Natalie as Maria did, confirming Jiras’ dim view of him. “In their —
her
house! Is there anything dumber than that?”

“It was just a very stupid move on his part,” concurs Olga, who did not consider the secretary a threat to Natalie. “I met her when Natalie and Gregson had a place in Tahoe. Natalie brought her there once, and she was bathing in the nude in one of the verandas… she wasn’t anything that would knock you over.”

Bricusse, Gregson’s great friend, was in total shock. “It just happened suddenly and explosively… knowing Richard, I was absolutely amazed. But of course one didn’t know how the marriage was going. The
visible
marriage was just fine.”

Natalie’s sisters, even Mud, who were fond of Gregson, hoped she could get past his indiscretion, but for Natalie it was a painful reminder of the unexpected, shattering way she had been betrayed by R.J. She took extreme measures, demanding that Gregson leave the house immediately. Natalie gathered all his clothes, wrapped them in a sheet, and threw them on the driveway, calling her attorney that night to instruct him to file for divorce. She refused to take Gregson’s calls and got a restraining order to keep him away from her and Natasha. “Natalie was really angry,” remembers Lana. “She had people posted outside the house. Seriously, he could not drive onto the driveway.” As Jiras observed, “He blew a
lot
.”

Gregson was beside himself. “He called
me
to see if I could help patch them up,” recalls Olga. “And I can’t change Natalie’s mind when she decides that she’s not gonna go back to him. And he never spoke to me after that! It was like pffft!”

NATALIE
’
S SUDDEN DIVORCE WAS THE TALK
of Hollywood. Rumors of Gregson’s affair with her secretary whispered across town the first week in August, even showing up in gossip columns, where Natalie tersely responded, “No comment,” saying that her divorce action “speaks for itself.”

She isolated herself in the house on Bentley, bereft over the failure of her marriage and the fact that Natasha would grow up as a child of divorce. Natalie took tranquilizers to calm her nerves, unable to eat, humiliated and angry and miserable, questioning whether she ever wanted to be married again. She decided to disappear from Hollywood for a while, asking Olga to go with her on a cruise around Sardinia, accompanied by Natasha and by Mart Crowley, her buffer from being alone.

While Natalie was at this low point, she received an unexpected call from R.J., who was living in London for the summer to film an ABC movie called
Madame Sin
, costarring Bette Davis. By a turn of fate, his marriage had ended since his emotional encounter with Natalie the summer before, and he was now engaged to Frank Sinatra’s twenty-three-year-old actress daughter, Tina, who reportedly had a crush on R.J. as a child.

R.J. had flown into L.A. for a few days early in August for a deposition in a thorny lawsuit with Universal over residuals and his right to star in outside projects, when he happened to read about Natalie’s divorce.

“He called and said he was sorry and that he understood what an unhappy time it was for me,” she later recounted. “He asked if there was anything he could do.” Wagner said later, “I just called to see if she needed anything or if I could be of help.” He left a few days later to return to London. “R.J. never knew how touched I was by that telephone call,” Natalie would remember. “I was actually crying when we talked that day, but he never knew it.”

Natalie departed for her sad cruise around Sardinia in September, with Olga to hold her hand, and help her with Natasha, who was only a year old. Olga recalls, “It was important to
me
, because Natalie had never asked me to do anything for her before… so I told my boss I needed to take a month or so off to go with my sister.”

Olga was heartbroken when she saw Natalie. “She was very depressed. She had lost so much weight, she looked like Audrey Hepburn—anorexic. Her bones stuck out. She had been in the business for God knows how long, since four years old. She had really decided to get married, to have children, and she was a good mother. She
really
wanted Natasha, and she nursed her, she took care of her, she worried about her. She was ready to have a
life
. It was a real letdown for her.”

Natalie spent the cruise fantasizing about a reunion with R.J., hoping to make things in her life right again. “She was
thinking
about R.J., even in Sardinia,” recalls Olga. During the holiday, Natalie kept analyzing whether his call to her was consoling, or something more. As she said later, “He’s very thoughtful and it was the kind of thing he would do, without romantic motives.” Olga recalls her sister as worried about R.J.’s engagement to Tina Sinatra, which he implied was “cooling.” Natalie mused whether it could ever work out for her and R.J. a second time. “She was asking me, ‘How can I… ?’ or ‘What do
you
think?’ She was sort of thinking about it.”

Natalie went through a period of “desperate” unhappiness after she and Natasha came home from Sardinia in early October, when R.J.’s divorce came through and Hank Grant of the
Hollywood Reporter
wrote, “The question is not when he’ll marry Tina Sinatra, but where.” R.J. and Tina Sinatra were in the south of France, staying with her father, Frank, at David Niven’s villa, where Natalie holidayed with Gregson in summers before.

Actor Steve McQueen, who was recently separated from his wife, Neile Adams, invited Natalie to dinner the middle of October, giving the former costars an opportunity to act on their attraction from
Love with the Proper Stranger
. Natalie “thought the world of Steve,” calling him “one of the smartest cookies you’ll ever come up against.” They went to a few high-profile restaurants together and bought $800 solid-gold sunglasses, but “it was not a serious thing,” observed Adams, who
was still friendly with her estranged husband. “I think they went together for about ten days, something like that. It was no big deal. Natalie was a child of Hollywood, and she really represented everything that Steve didn’t even like about Hollywood. When he first began, everything was new—the premieres, the parties and all that—but by the time he and I divorced, that was old. But Natalie still loved doing that. She always loved doing that.”

In November, Natalie had a few highly publicized dates with California governor Jerry Brown, but she was not a content woman. “I’d been thinking of R.J. almost constantly since my divorce,” she said later. When he returned from Europe, R.J. began calling Natalie, but he was still seeing Tina Sinatra.

When she met Richard Smedley, Lana’s third husband, over Thanksgiving, Smedley noticed that Natalie was under a strain. Even Natasha, who was less than two, sensed her mother was vulnerable, saying later, “Subconsciously I have a lot of memories of sort of being with her all the time and wanting to sort of protect her, take care of her and stuff.” Natalie considered Natasha her “perfect love.” She was at her happiest singing nursery rhymes with her, tape-recording their songs as forget-me-nots.

She did a favor for an old friend in December, during the depths of her depression, flying to Oakland to appear in a cameo as herself in Redford’s second foray as a producer,
The Candidate
. According to Redford, Natalie accepted “without a thought, without a question… she just came and did it. There was no calling the agent, no deals. She said, ‘I’m just gonna do it.’ That kind of stuff I’m a pretty old-fashioned guy about, that kind of loyalty and commitment. That meant a lot. And we had great fun, doing it.”

Natalie arrived on set in jeans and a mink coat, a perfect metaphor for the dichotomy between Natalie the person and The Badge, charming the crew with reminiscences about
Splendor in the Grass
, making the poignant remark that she had been playing the last scene too often in her real life. She would not see Redford again, though he would consider Natalie a fond friend evermore.

Actress Edie Adams, who had a large circle of friends, remembers a plaintive call she got from Natalie in this period. “It was very late at night, and she sounded like she was crying and very sad, and she said,
‘Edie, I’m so out of things, are you giving any parties, what’s happening?’ She just sounded awful, and
so sad
. And I tried to include her in things, or say, ‘Why don’t you go ask Natalie out?’”

Natalie spent a forlorn Christmas at a party at the house of Dean Martin’s ex-wife Jeanne, while R.J. announced plans to take Tina Sinatra to producer Irwin Allen’s house for New Year’s Eve. Somewhere in between, he stopped by Natalie’s house with Christmas gifts for her and Natasha, “And when he left,” Natalie recalled, “there was kind of a feeling we would see more of one another.”

A few weeks later, on January 19, 1972,
The Hollywood Reporter
broke the news that Natalie and R.J. were “dating again,” ending his engagement to Tina Sinatra. (“They were going separate directions,” observed his assistant.)

R.J. would later say that he was feeling sentimental that Christmas, and took out a box with some old newspaper and magazine clippings. “I was suddenly overwhelmed by the number of stories about Nat and me that had been published over the years,” he said, inspiring him to telephone her for a date. The fact that Natalie looked upon R.J. as the symbol of a dream she hoped to recapture was obvious by her reaction to his call. “I thought my heart would stop… it was like I was eleven years old again.” The same age she was when she first saw Robert Wagner on the Fox lot.

R.J. invited Natalie to his home in Palm Springs the weekend of January 26, a date they would celebrate in the coming years with the same nostalgia as December 6, their first time together on R.J.’s original boat,
My Lady
, in 1956. As soon as Natalie got off the plane, R.J. said then, “It was instant reaction.” From that point on, he and Natalie had an understanding they would remarry. “We started going out again… mostly out in Palm Springs, before anybody knew it. We fell in love all over again.”

This time, there was a better balance in Natalie and R.J.’s professional lives. During their first marriage, he accepted self-effacingly the role of “Mr. Wood,” the handsome face married to a full-blown movie star. Since then, R.J. had capitalized on his enormous personal charm, and the style he copied from Cary Grant, to transform himself into a popular television idol by playing a character—Alexander Mundy in
It Takes a Thief—patterned
after Grant in
To Catch a Thief
.

Natalie was still a “movie star” with all the prestige that connoted when she and R.J. remet in early 1972, but she had acted in only one
picture,
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
, in six years, and her three previous films
(Inside Daisy Clover, This Property Is Condemned
, and
Penelope)
were disappointments. Financially, she had amassed a fortune, which she shared with the cash-poor R.J. “Frankly, she bailed me out. I was a financial disaster at the time, what with the divorce and back taxes and committing money to an unproduced movie. But off we started again. It was the most highly emotional and most marvelous time of my life.”

Lana, who knew how devastated Natalie was when she told Mud she found R.J. with another man the night she left him in 1961, had concerns that winter when they arrived at a dinner party at Natalie’s house, and she surprised them with R.J., implying they would remarry.

Natalie later told Lana, “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.” Lana explains, “Here was a person whose problems she
knew
, and could cope with, rather than having to deal with the unknown… she knew there were problems with R.J., but she’d say, ‘These things will not hurt me; I can deal with these.’ She was very good at preserving an image, at holding things in, at living up to the public perception of her.” According to Hyatt, Natalie believed R.J. would be different because he had been through analysis in Europe.

Natalie entered her new relationship with R.J. with eyes wide open, desperately in need of what he offered her: adoration, stability, and the illusion, at least, of the fairy tale she sought. “I think she got precisely what she wanted,” declared Lana. “She told me she never stopped loving R.J., that she would always love him.” While she was adrift in her single years, Natalie often mused to Sugar Bates, “R.J. was so nice, if I couldn’t get along with him, who could I get along with?”

Mud was still opposed to Natalie’s involvement with R.J., grumbling about it to the Hyatts, but at nearly thirty-three, with a lonely life as her possible alternative, Natalie chose to ignore her dominating mother, placing Maria further on the sidelines, although the Gurdins moved into a townhouse in Palm Springs within footsteps of Natalie, who happily left her Bentley house when R.J. swept back into her life.

As Natasha, who was a toddler then, would touchingly say of R.J., “He was like this
Romeo
that came and just
saved
us, and took us away, and was so fabulous.”

To Natalie and to Natasha, he was Prince Valiant.

On April 10, Natalie and R.J. were invited to be joint presenters at the Academy Awards, as they had been fourteen years earlier, in March of 1958, shortly after their honeymoon off Catalina. The Oscar ceremony in 1972 was R.J. and Natalie’s first public event together since reuniting, and they arrived on the red carpet radiating an old-fashioned glamour that was electric, looking as movie star gorgeous at forty-two and thirty-three as they had at twenty-eight and nineteen. The public was so captivated by their storybook renewed romance, they needed bodyguards to walk through the crowd. A friend of the Wagners used the word
“Zeitensprung
,” a German musical term for an intermission between dances, to describe Natalie and R.J.’s interrupted romance, a poetic concept they, and the public, romantically embraced.