Natasha (5 page)

According to Natalie’s mother, her parents changed everyone’s names because they were afraid Communists would find them, exacting a promise from each child never to reveal the family’s true identity—a reaction a Russian émigré friend considered extreme to the point of “demented.” “Stepan Zudilov” is identified as Kalia’s father on her 1905 birth certificate,
before
the alleged name change, and “Maria Kuleva” is the name documented as that of Marusia’s mother on family possessions prior to the revolution. These are also the names Natalie’s mother would use to identify her parents on legal records once in the U.S., leaving little room for doubt that Natalie’s grandparents were born Stepan Zudilov and Maria Kuleva; though Olga, Natalie’s older sister, still expresses uncertainty those are their true names, “or if they changed them when they ran.” Olga and Natalie’s mother remained haunted all her life by the fear that Communists would come after her and “kill me like killed my brother.”

Once in Manchuria, little Marusia and her family stayed at a hotel in Qiqihar, where Natalie’s mother had the first of several alleged mystical experiences. As Maria later told the story, she “recognized” a house near their hotel as one she had lived in, remembering an outdoor playhouse and the ceiling of her bedroom, with “angels” on it. Her parents took her to the house, afraid she would have another seizure if they refused. Upstairs was a room with cherubim painted on the ceiling; in the backyard, concealed by spiders’ webs, Marusia found a decaying playhouse. Natalie’s mother believed in reincarnation ever after, despite the opposite position of the Russian Orthodox religion in which she was baptized, and to which she and her parents adhered. (“How can you explain that?” she would ask. “There was my angels!”)

Natalie’s grandparents settled in nearby Harbin, China, where so many Russians had fled, neighborhoods appeared to have been lifted
out of Siberia. The family lived in such an enclave, in a “good” part of town. Stepan, Natalie’s grandfather, is presumed to have managed a soap factory. Natalie’s mother, Marusia, attended an all-Russian girls’ school, though Marusia’s eye was on “pretty young boys.” She went to church so she could “look at the boys, and look at what the girls are wearing—is my dress better than theirs?” Marusia had thick, naturally curly, crow-black hair and was preternaturally tiny—just five feet—“But she carried herself as if she were seven foot tall,” said an acquaintance from Maria’s senior years. “She liked to talk about how she had been a great dancer, and how she had been a great beauty.” Natalie’s studio press releases would later describe her mother as a “professional ballerina” in China. “That was made up,” admits daughter Olga. Teenage Marusia took
one
ballet class in Harbin. “For grace,” she put it later, claiming her parents withdrew her, believing dancers and performers fell into a category with “prostitutes.”

Marusia and her sisters placed absolute faith in Russian superstitions and “did gypsy stuff” using Romany magic, such as “looking in the mirror on a certain night between two candles and you can see the person you’re supposed to marry.” One day, the sisters had their fortunes read by a Harbin gypsy. The fortuneteller warned Marusia to “beware of dark water,” for she was going to drown. The gypsy also predicted her second child “would be a great beauty, known throughout the world.” Natalie Wood’s life, and death, would be dictated by the gypsy’s twin prophecies.

The fortuneteller’s predictions held an immediate power over Natalie’s mother. She refused to go near water, “especially if it’s dark waters.”

Marusia eloped in her teens, defying her parents by choosing a Russian-Armenian, the brawnily handsome Alexei Tatulov, originally “Tatulian,” the son of an Armenian Cossack who, legend has it, led a regiment against the Turks astride a white horse. Marusia was fleeing a father too strict for her ambition; her choice of a “ladies’ man” her girlfriends coveted revealed her vanity, and a competitive streak. (She told Olga, their daughter, she married Alexei “because he said he would kill himself if she didn’t.”) Natalie’s mother was not a true beauty, as she imagined, but her vivid personality was a magnet.

She became pregnant in 1928; claiming, later, that she weighed only seventy-five pounds and doctors ordered her to abort. She would tell Natalie she had several abortions before this, because she was too tiny. By Maria’s later account, her mother took her to a French doctor experienced with “narrow” Chinese women, who agreed to deliver her baby. Alexei brought a priest, she would recall, “because he thought I definitely was gonna die.” Marusia gave birth to her first daughter, Olga, on October 28, 1928. She alleged that it was without anesthetic, that her labor lasted five days, and “it felt like my bones were cracking, they were stretching, it was horrible.” “My mother,” Olga would later sigh, “told so many stories.”

Olga was originally called Ovsanna, christened in the Armenian Orthodox church. One morning, Stepan Zudilov took his infant granddaughter “for a walk,” secretly bringing Ovsanna to a Russian Orthodox priest, who baptized her in the Zudilovs’ religion, renaming her “Olga,” a Russian name. Olga/Ovsanna had her part-Armenian father’s dark eyes and gentle disposition.

When Olga was a little over a year old, Alexei and Marusia Tatulov made the bold decision to leave Harbin for America, Alexei’s dream, according to Marusia, who saw America as “just this amazing land, and the Communists will never get there.” Alexei boarded a ship called the
Taito Maru
in Kobe, Japan, on January 12, 1930. He arrived at the port of San Francisco, California, fifteen days later, identified in the ship’s logs as an “auto mechanic.” He had no job, no prospects, and fifty dollars in his pocket.

Marusia was rejected for the voyage, ostensibly underweight. She spent the next ten months in Harbin drinking a concoction of beer and milk to gain weight, a recipe she would one day give to actor Jack Lemmon, when Natalie starred in
The Great Race
. A Japanese nurse tended Olga while Marusia passed the time studying bookkeeping. She and Olga were issued their visas in November 1930, embarking on a grueling, month-long journey to the United States.

Dispossessed of her child’s nurse, Marusia had no maternal instincts. She continued to breast-feed Olga, who was now two, and the little girl cried without ceasing as they traveled by train from China into Korea, then Tokyo, where they boarded a ship, the
Asama Maru
, sailing first to Hawaii, finally to San Francisco, sleeping on bamboo mats. Natalie Wood’s mother’s life of privilege, if it existed, existed no more.

MARUSIA AND OLGA’S SHIP, THE
ASAMA MARU
, arrived at San Francisco’s Port of Angels on the eleventh of December 1930. Alexei met them at the pier, informing his wife he had a mistress. He still loved her, he told Marusia, but Armenians were “passionate” men who could not survive a year without a woman.

Marusia’s next shock was her home, one room in a bungalow co-occupied by a crowd of Russian immigrants who worked with Alexei at the nearby shipyards. “I thought, ‘What we gonna do?’ ” She had no money, a toddler, and spoke broken English. Marusia accepted the arrangement, consoled by the fact that she was further from Communists, about whom she was possessed by a terror bordering on the hallucinogenic.

Natalie’s mother’s escape from her demons, and her poverty, was the movies. She was “movie crazy,” relates daughter Olga, who remembers how her father would give her mother money for food “and we’d go to the Temple Theater instead.” Flights of fantasy transcended Marusia from the reality of having seen a brother hanged, or the squalor of her life in America. They infused her with the cheerfulness of the deranged. “She would say, ‘Believe in the best, expect something good to happen, and it will.’”

Ballet was Marusia’s secondary passion. She befriended Nadia Ermolova, a model who taught ballet to children, enrolling Olga in her class. Marusia danced alongside the little girls, “doing it more than
we
would.” Marusia left her toddler to her own devices. When she got a job as a church seamstress, lying that she knew how to sew, Marusia left Olga, then four, in the park while she went to work.

She was remembered as a “social climber” in the Russian community of San Francisco, which socialized at a Russian Center off Divisadero, where an Invalids Ball was held each year. Marusia was twice Queen and twice Princess, chosen on the basis of having collected the most money for Russian veterans. “Here we all were,” recalls a neighbor, “not two pennies to rub together, and Marusia is standing around on the corners gathering money for the Invalidzi.” A 1936 photo of Natalie’s mother as Queen shows her sitting in a ballgown wearing her crown, a satin banner draped across her chest, trophy in one hand, a spray of flowers in the other, looking as if she had assumed
her rightful place on the Russian throne. The gossip where Alex worked as a janitor was that he “took” the dress from the emporium where he worked and returned it after the ball. Olga remembers her mother hiring a dressmaker a different year she was Queen, “using
all
her money for this one dress.”

Marusia began acting in plays at the Russian Center, then at the Kolobok, a Russian club, where she danced onstage, dragging Olga, who would “fall asleep on pool tables.” Marusia wanted to be an actress, in the opinion of her closest friend, Josephine Paulson, whose daughter Lois was Olga’s playmate, giving Olga the lifelong nickname “Teddi,” for Tatulov. Marusia read palms and threw tarot cards, “always into something.” She looked at apartments full-time, moving the family at whim.

Though her husband continued to have affairs, Marusia became pregnant in 1932. She collapsed on the street and was rushed to Mt. Zion Hospital, where her second reputed mystical episode occurred. She hemorrhaged during a blood transfusion, lost the baby, and was pronounced dead, regaining consciousness as a nurse prepared her to be embalmed. Marusia lay on the hospital bed, unable to speak or move to indicate she was alive. Alex arrived to accompany her body to the morgue, carrying dried flowers from a religious icon, sent by Marusia’s mother. As he placed the flowers on Marusia’s neck, she felt warmth. “I open my eyes and I start to scream. The nurse fainted, then she run out and said,
‘She’s alive!’
” Marusia’s friend Josephine, Josephine’s daughter, and Olga all confirm the incident, which Natalie’s mother would consider a miracle, reinforcing both her religion and her belief in the mystic.

Marusia was still living with her husband, Alex, when she began dating a Russian sea captain, George Cetalopv, the “great passion” of her life. “My father had other interests,” as Olga explained, “and she had this interest.” One night Alex brought home for dinner a coworker from the sugar boats, a Russian immigrant named Nikolai Zakharenko. He was twenty-three; short, but well-built; with black hair, black eyes, and the refined face of a matinee idol. “God, he was so handsome,” Maria would swoon in her later years of the man who would become Natalie’s father. She continued to dally with her sea captain, but acquired Nick Zakharenko like a trophy. “All my girlfriends want him, and I thought, ‘If they want him, I have to get him!’”

Nick and Musia, his pet name for Maria, made a dazzling couple on the dance floor, where they won prizes dancing together. He impressed
Maria with his gentlemanly manners, for Nick had a poet’s soul which expressed itself when he played the balalaika, a Russian string instrument. He was also possessed by a dark force that could explode after too much vodka. “Nick would get very moody and would hurt somebody,” recalled Olga, who was seven when they met. “He would fight.”

The underlying cause of Natalie’s father’s rage was not fully understood. His brother Dmitri believed it came from deep-seated hatred of Communists. The Zakharenko brothers—Nikolai, Dmitri and Vladimir—spent their childhoods in the eastern Siberian port of Vladivostok, where their father, Stepan, worked at a candy factory and their mother, the former Eudoxie Sauchenko, was known for her beauty. During the revolution, Stepan Zakharenko fought against the Bolsheviks. Nikolai, the eldest, was not quite ten when Communists killed his father. Eudoxie received financial aid from a brother who immigrated to California, enabling her to escape Vladivostok for Shanghai with her three handsome young sons. She remarried in China. Her new husband, a Russian naval engineer named Constantine Zavarin, determined to move the family to the U.S., far from Bolshevik forces. Their first stop was Vancouver, the end of 1927, when Nikolai was fifteen. By 1932 the family made their way south to Seattle, settling eventually in San Francisco. Dmitri and Vladimir Zakharenko survived their upbringing relatively unscathed; Nikolai emerged with psychic wounds even Dmitri considered an enigma. “He kept in touch with Russians that were in exile, and he read the Russian books—oh, and he was so proud of the Tsar’s family. I didn’t even
think
of them.”

Nick struck out on his own when he was twenty, mining for gold in the Rockies. Dmitri, who briefly joined him, described a tortured artist playing balalaika part-time with an orchestra, railing against Communists during drunken binges on vodka. “He worried about and hated the Communists so much… it kills
you
instead of the other guy.” Nick’s anger came out in fistfights, when “he’d just lose his temper and threaten some guy. He’d never back down.”

Alex Tatulov saved Nick’s life in such a brawl before he brought him home to dinner. Natalie’s mother, who thrilled to strong and handsome men, and to drama, may have found Nick Zakharenko’s furies exciting at the start. They also shared a fanatical attachment to the royal family and a frenzied paranoia about Communists. Maria ended her “arrangement” with Alex and set up housekeeping with Nick, taking
Olga. She filed for divorce in October 1935, identifying herself as Maria and as “Marie,” a name she began to use arbitrarily. The new setup with Nick did nothing to deter Maria from carrying on her flirtation with George Cetalopv, the captain she considered her true love.

Maria became pregnant with Natalie in October 1937, six months after her divorce from Olga’s father. She and Olga, who was nine, lived in a cubbyhole apartment in an alley with Nick, who was working as a janitor at Standard Oil. The conception was noteworthy, for Nick thought he could not have children, according to Maria, who was still romantically involved with George Cetalopv. The baby, from all accounts, was Nick’s. He and Maria were married on February 8, 1938, in a small Russian Orthodox cathedral in the neighborhood, witnessed by Nick’s artist brother, Vladimir. Why she waited until she was four months pregnant with Natalie to get married is one of Maria’s mysteries. “George went on a trip because he was captain of the ship,” recalls Olga. “When he came back, she was married to Nick.” Olga wondered, then and later, why her mother married Nick and not George Cetalopv, the love of her life. “I asked her that once. She said she liked George
too
much, that she’d always be jealous of him. But who
knows
her story? Nick was
very
attractive… much more attractive than George.”

Maria may have delayed marrying Nick because of his alcohol problem, which concerned her. “He drank a lot,” she said later, “even when I married him. He was wonderful man—when he was not drinking.”

Her choice of Nick Zakharenko over George Cetalopv would prove prophetic to Maria, despite its disturbing consequences. She was glad she married Nick, she said at the end of her life, because he gave her Natalie.