Natasha (32 page)

Toward the end of filming, Warner Brothers got word their seventeen-year-old starlet was dating the corpulent, thirty-eight-year-old villain of their stalker movie. “Everything gets upstairs,” Anderson would say. “Whatever happens on the set—they have their watchers.” The studio pressured Natalie to stop dating Burr, considering the relationship destructive to her image and their film.

Natalie ended the year 1955 as she began it, embroiled in a complicated, scandalous, futile relationship with a middle-aged man.

IN HER NEW YEAR’S DAY COLUMN, HEDDA
Hopper predicted Natalie Wood as one of her “top picks for stardom” in 1956, a harbinger of what would be the most glamorous, clamorous year of Natalie’s life.

Warner Brothers launched a dizzying campaign to get Natalie nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in
Rebel Without a Cause
, capitalizing on her emerging popularity as a teen idol. They scheduled five separate magazine layouts in the Gurdins’ backyard at intervals, with an ecstatic-looking Natalie dressed in a variety of bikinis and bold bracelets to cover her left wrist, pretending to dive into the tiny kidney-shaped pool she avoided, in real life, like a death trap.

“We’d all get her in the pool and she’d do a little dog paddle,” one of the Hopper clique recalls. “I’d say, ‘Come on, you gotta learn to swim, I can teach you and we’ll take it slow,’ but the water was terrifying to her. We’d make fun of her when she would paddle around like a little dog, and we’d laugh, and call her all sorts of dumb names.”

Natalie demonstrated an obsessive dedication to Warners’ publicity department, helping to create an artificial version of her life for fan magazines to foster the studio’s image of Natalie Wood. She was still the people-pleasing Natasha she was at four—curtsying for grown-ups, singing songs with hand gestures, desperate that people like her.

The publicity was effective; a few months into 1956, Natalie was receiving more fan mail than any other star on the Warners lot. But the line separating Natalie from “Natalie Wood” blurred with each publicity layout she did. “They were very strange,” she said later. “It was like reading about somebody else. I didn’t feel synthetic, but lots of the stories were simply made up… there was so much invention.” Years later, in 1980, she would compare her experience to Brooke Shields’ teen fame:

As she posed for fan layouts, Natalie was simultaneously completing the grueling abduction scenes in
A Cry in the Night
, performing with such intensity she dropped to ninety-one pounds and gashed her thigh on a rusty nail, prompting the studio physician to recommend time off, a warning Natalie ignored.

She continued her forbidden romance with Burr, which she told one close friend had become physical. Natalie was so engrossed with her career and with Burr—who sent her flowers every other day—her head was barely turned at a Thalians party at Ciro’s in January, when she chanced to encounter Robert Wagner, the Fox heartthrob she had been maneuvering to marry since she was eleven. They shared a dance and flirted enough to be mentioned in a gossip column the next day as “in a spin… and loving the spin they were in,” but nothing more came of it.

That winter, Warner Brothers capitalized on Natalie’s popularity, putting her in the first of two low-budget movies with Tab Hunter, the blond teen idol, who was also under contract to Warners. To promote them as romantic costars, the publicity department created the impression that Natalie and Hunter were dating
offscreen
, sending them to glamorous events photographed as a couple, planting suggestive items in columns (“Natalie Wood was seen coming out of Noel’s candy store with a red heart, on Tab Hunter’s arm”). “They were pushing us, so they really built us up,” recalls Hunter.

Natalie’s true personal life—puffing from dramatic cigarette holders, sipping champagne at supper clubs with her beau, thirty-eight-year-old screen heavy Ray Burr—was causing problems between her and Warner Brothers. She and Burr were pictured together at the Coconut Grove over cocktails, listening to Peggy Lee: Burr is in a tuxedo; seventeen-year-old Natalie wears an ultrasophisticated one-shouldered gown, her mink beside her to keep her heart warm, as Lee performs “When the World Was Young,” Natalie’s poignant trademark song. That month, Natalie’s Revlon-red smile radiated from the cover of
People and Places
, quoting her wanting to play a “femme fatale.”

Warners waged war over Natalie’s romance with Burr, and her glamorous nightlife, forbidding both. The end of January, Hollywood writer Joan Curtis ran into her at a party for forty “up-and-coming” young actors:

The party—at a restaurant called the Oyster House—ironically was hosted by Robert Wagner. “My husband and I wondered why Natalie and Bob hadn’t discovered each other romantically,” Curtis commented for a magazine after the party. “Bob’s blond handsomeness seemed to compliment [sic] Natalie’s dark beauty to perfection.” Natalie, according to Curtis, thought only of her taboo boyfriend, Ray Burr. “Nick Adams confided to me that he was particularly distressed over the deep depression she was in.”

The same week, Jack Warner—the head of Warner Brothers—“chaperoned” Tab Hunter and Natalie to an industry banquet, sending an emphatic message about the image the studio wanted to promote. Hunter recalls: “Natalie and I used to kid, we used to say, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me they’re gonna try to make us into William Powell and Myrna Loy!’ Then we’d laugh like crazy about this.”

On February 10, the new Warner Brothers duo started filming
The Burning Hills
, a Louis L’Amour western in which Natalie wore a cascade of black hair and deep tan makeup to play a Mexican spitfire tending to Hunter’s cowboy wounds, a picture so camp, “she used to make jokes about it… and do all those terrible Spanish lines.” (Hunter, who later became a rancher, would remark, “The best thing in it was my horse.”) After living her part in
Rebel
, and as Burr’s near-rape victim, Natalie’s only comment to friends about
The Burning Hills
was, ‘Oh, hell, I’ve got to be up at five…’ She was more worried about wardrobe—to make sure that she had a bosom lift.”

Natalie’s pique at Warners for pressuring her to stop seeing Burr, and forcing her into a “Carmen Miranda accent” in a picture she found absurd, revealed itself when she began staging sick-outs on the set, behavior she had learned from Mud. Stuart Heisler—the same director who had forced her to dive from Sterling Hayden’s boat during
The Star
—telephoned a Warner Brothers executive one evening to complain, saying:

Natalie was frustrated, telling a writer her goal was to be the “greatest actress” she could be, to play “character parts with realistic emotions,” using the model of Jo Van Fleet or Vivien Leigh, hoping she would “still be creaking on the stage at eighty.” During the first days of shooting the embarrassing
Burning Hills
, she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her performance in
Rebel Without a Cause
, an exceptional accomplishment at seventeen. Natalie got a standing ovation on the set—validating her consuming passion to play Judy.

While she was struggling through
The Burning Hills
, Natalie found out that Warner Brothers had acquired the film rights to Herman Wouk’s popular novel
Marjorie Morningstar
, forming a similar obsession with its title character, a sheltered Jewish ingénue inspired to be a great actress, whose heart is broken by a middle-aged composer-director. “She read the book and she just threw the book down and she said, ‘This is my next movie. I’m gonna do this. I love this character—it’s just me!’ ”
Variety
announced in March that Warners had Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in mind, but Natalie was possessed to play Marjorie, another character with whom she identified, telling
Seventeen
magazine later, “Almost every girl falls in love with the wrong man, I suppose it’s part of growing up,” a reference to her affairs with Nick Ray and Raymond Burr.

Her verboten relationship with Burr took a more serious turn in early spring. He took Natalie to the Philharmonic, continuing his real-life role as Henry Higgins to her eager Eliza Doolittle. They went out several times a week, arranging to costar as Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII in a production of
Anne of 1000 Days
at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Burr regularly appeared onstage. The two made plans to go to Korea on a USO tour Burr was organizing that spring.

“He was just so good to her and for her,” thought Tab Hunter, whom the studio
wanted
Natalie to date. “She was like a colt, finding its legs—experimenting with things, learning about herself, trying to find herself as an actress. Raymond Burr was like a father figure, in many ways.”

Natalie told columnist Sheilah Graham that she and Burr had “an understanding for the future,” with Graham reporting, “It’s beginning to look like a marriage for young Natalie Wood and Raymond Burr.” When Louella Parsons put an item in her March 15 column denying any romance between Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter, stating, “Her real heart is Ray Burr, who’ll escort her to the Oscars,” Warners took drastic action. Within a week,
Variety
reported that
Hunter
would be Natalie’s date to the Academy Awards on March 21, with Natalie retracting her comments about Burr to Graham, saying, “He just helps me with my acting.”

Burr, who was cast within months as
Perry Mason
, said later, “I was very attracted to her and she was to me. Maybe I was too old for her, but there was so much pressure upon us from the outside and the studio, it got awkward for us to go around together.” According to Robert Benevides, Burr’s companion in the last thirty years of his life, “He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess.”

Natalie, trained by Maria to defer her own needs to the studio’s-whether it meant being terrified by water in a scene, keeping secret a broken wrist from a faulty stunt, or in this instance, losing someone she loved—accepted Burr’s immediate exile in exchange for Warner Brothers’ star-making buildup of Natalie Wood.

She attended the Academy Awards on the arm of Tab Hunter, chopping off her hair as her sole expression of rebellion. (Hunter had
popped into her dressing room that afternoon as the studio hairdresser was styling it, and teased Natalie to “just cut it all off.” When he returned a few minutes later in his dinner jacket, Natalie said, “Surprise!” and twirled around, revealing a pixie cut she later called “plumas locas.” “She started a whole new trend that went all over—she made publicity all over the world with that.”)

Going to her first Oscars ceremony without Burr was not the only disappointment Natalie faced that night. She failed to win an Academy Award for
Rebel Without a Cause
, though the consolation was that she lost to Jo Van Fleet for her performance in
East of Eden
, which Natalie knew by heart. As ever, Natalie had her fur to keep her heart warm: a silver stole, identified in Warners’ publicity as a gift from her parents—paid for, by Mud, with Natalie’s money.

Within a few days, Warner Brothers announced its second picture to pair Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter, beginning in May.
The Girl He Left Behind
(or
The Girl with the Left Behind
, as Natalie later would deride it) was another “schlocky” production, so low-budget the studio would decide to shoot the picture in black and white. “Warner Brothers made me do [it],” she later conceded, a condition of the studio’s pact to make Natalie into a movie star in the old Hollywood tradition.

She returned to her submissive, dutiful self, “dating” up a storm with Tab Hunter, photographed in movie magazines dancing with him at a UCLA fraternity party where she served as Queen of the Dublin Ball, the model of a wholesome fifties teenager. While she was at UCLA, she ran into a few of her classmates from Van Nuys High, including one of Jimmy Williams’ former teammates, who found Natalie “totally unaffected and totally sweet,” despite her burst of fame, though it was clear, to all of them, she could no longer even pretend to fit into their world. “She honored us with her presence,” as the student chairman of the Dublin Ball would put it.