Natasha (34 page)

Through Marlowe, Natalie met an Actors Studio graduate that summer named Norma Crane, a blond actress nearly ten years older, who would become her closest friend around 1959 and until Crane’s premature death in 1973 from cancer, when Natalie quietly would pay all her medical bills and arrange for her funeral.

About the same time as she met Crane, Natalie acquired another new girlfriend, named Barbara Gould, a Fox bit player near her age, with whom she was close for the next year or two.

By June, Natalie was living part-time with Scott Marlowe, alarming Mud into the surveillance activities she had used on Jimmy Williams,
Natalie’s first love. “Her mother would open my mail! Just dumb things, like a phone bill, anything, a personal letter.” She induced Nick Adams to follow Marlowe when he was with Natalie. “The mother had him actually spying on us and reporting back. I don’t know if he was being paid or not.” Mud
did
pay a struggling actor named Nicky Blair, who had a tiny role in Natalie’s new film, “and he had nothing to say, really, except that I used bad language. I had a vile, filthy mouth. I used to say ‘fuck’ a lot when I was a kid—I was just trying to be older—and he went to the mother and said that I had this filthy mouth.”

A few weeks prior to her eighteenth birthday, after an argument with Mud, Natalie proposed to Marlowe, in a manner reminiscent of Jimmy. “We were walking on the beach. She said, ‘Let’s get married.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ and she said, “Yeah, I want to get away from her. I want to get away from orders. And I feel that you’re my harbor and my shelter.’ ”Marlowe demonstrated Jimmy’s strength of character. “ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can do
that
, but
you
certainly can get away from these
people.’

“She wanted to marry me. I didn’t particularly want to get married. But I knew that, probably, was the only way we would ever stay together, is if we got married, so I agreed. It was mostly her… she wanted to get away from that whole family and background stuff, away from that awful childhood.”

Though Natalie told movie magazines she felt sorry for her sister Olga because Olga missed a glamorous career to start a family, Natalie, in her heart, still desired what she sought with Jimmy at fifteen. “She wanted to have a normal life, and have a husband and kids,” she revealed to Marlowe. “Kids were very, very important to her.” How much of that was fantasy, or seeking “time lost” from her own childhood, Marlowe could not be sure.

Louella Parsons announced Natalie’s engagement to Scott Marlowe in a banner headline on July 2, quoting Natalie saying, “I’ve never loved any other man.” When Parsons suggested they might marry on Natalie’s eighteenth birthday—July 20—because she would no longer need her parents’ consent, Mud reacted like a Fury, setting out to sabotage Marlowe. “Her mother got frantic—frantic—and she gave out this story that I would never go to premieres.”

Mud warned publicists at Warner Brothers that Marlowe could ruin Natalie’s image because he disliked publicity and drove a “junk heap.”
When he took Natalie to the opening of
Moby Dick
in his 1940 Cadillac on a rainy night, accidentally stepping on a woman’s train, “I was just taken to task in the press, saying that I was not good for her.” Maria escalated the anti-Marlowe campaign, enlisting Nick Adams, who gave interviews to fan magazines accusing Marlowe of using Natalie to further his career.

Warners took seriously Maria’s propaganda to break up the relationship with Marlowe, who had never played by studio rules. “When I came to this town, I was so inaccessible to those gossip people that they were out to destroy me. I’m not overreacting, either: they were out to destroy me. I was a threat to Warner Brothers and to Natalie. They just wanted to end it. And get on with
her
.”

Natalie was caught in a tug-of-war between her respect for Marlowe’s disdain of cheap publicity, versus her mother’s powerful influence and her now ingrained obsession with image and the pursuit of stardom. As she admitted a decade later, “I [even] used to worry about the
fan
mags!”

Mud’s scheme to discredit Marlowe extended to Warners’ publicity department, which issued “erroneous” press releases in mid-July stating that Natalie was demanding they cast Marlowe in her next picture or sign him to a contract. “It was a nightmare for me. Warner Brothers just tried to keep her
away
from me.”

The day she turned eighteen, July 20, Natalie had her first date with Robert Wagner, to attend a press screening of his new Paramount picture,
The Mountain
, followed by a dessert party with forty-eight other film stars and the press.

Over time, the Natalie Wood legend has been that Wagner telephoned Natalie to invite her to the premiere after photographers posed them together at an industry event, a publicity story that began to circulate after they married. Natalie and Wagner gave conflicting versions of the industry event—Wagner said it was a charity luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire, Natalie wrote that it was a nighttime “Hollywood party-fashion show.” They also offered differing accounts of
when
he phoned her for the date: Wagner said he was “captivated” and called right away, Natalie wrote that it was “a few weeks later.” Suspiciously, there is no record in the press of an event matching either description.

According to Bobby Hyatt, whose mother and he were still in close contact with the Gurdins, Wagner took Natalie to the July 20 press
screening of
The Mountain
as an
arranged
date to fulfill agent Henry Willson’s earlier promise to Natalie that she could go out with Wagner when she turned eighteen.

Maria and others would also recall it as a studio “set-up” date, as would Marlowe, who was still engaged to Natalie and begged off going to the
Mountain
premiere, preferring to spend the evening at a friend’s place at the Chateau Marmont, where Natalie began the evening. “I remember she got dressed at the Chateau, and went on the date.”

Natalie chose a sea-blue chiffon dress and a tiny diamond tiara for her night with her childhood Prince Charming, though it was not the romantic fantasy she had envisioned at eleven. Robert John Wagner (“R.J.” to friends), who was twenty-six to Natalie’s eighteen, worshipped the older, conservative bastions of Hollywood, copying the style and mannerisms of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, to whom he had ingratiated himself as a teenager while caddying at the Bel Air Country Club, next door to his wealthy parents’ home. His perfect manners, polished prep school charm, and penchant for fifties slang like “the gonest” and “the coolest,” were the antithesis of the intellectual-poet-rebels who fascinated Natalie.

“She was sort of all into that whole Actors Group, and I was sort of a Happy Jack Squirrel kid, you know, with nothing on my mind, much, but my hair,” was the amusing, self-deprecating way Wagner would remember it in the late seventies, when he and Natalie were married to each other a second time. He admitted, “I really
liked
Natalie a lot, and I really wanted to strike up a little conversation… and she sort of resisted me a bit, actually, at the beginning, because I was so different than all the rest of them.”

Ironically, it was Wagner, not Natalie, who was star-struck in their first extended encounter after Natalie’s schoolgirl crush on the Fox lot in braces and braids. (“She was so beautiful—those eyes!”) Wagner, a high school graduate more interested in mimicking Hollywood stars than in his studies, found Natalie “a great intellect—she read like crazy.” Wagner’s career, from Fox bit player to
Prince Valiant
, had primarily been as a pin-up boy for teenage girls. He was awestruck by Natalie’s “wonderful talent… that driving ambition to be somebody.” His recognition of his limitations, and Natalie’s superior gifts, was honest almost to the point of poignancy. “She was much more accomplished an actor than I will ever be,” he said in midlife.

Their first evening together underlined the differences. Natalie would recall Wagner doing “perfect imitations of movie stars,” while
he
remembered, “She was so honest. She was real and very vulnerable.”

Maria, who had been worried about Natalie’s girlish infatuation with Wagner because of his representation by the homosexual Willson, dismissed him completely that night. “He came in and I thought, ‘Well, at least the studio sent one with good manners.’ That was my first impression of R.J.”

In her studio publicity, after she married Wagner, Natalie would help create the illusion she waited by the phone for Wagner to call from the time he brought her home from the premiere. Marlowe recalls, “She came back and we met at the Chateau later that night… and she said, ‘I had the
most
boring evening. He’s very sweet—and so boring.
So
boring.
Please
don’t let me do that again.’ And I said, ‘I can’t go to them. I can’t. I can’t sit through those Warner Brothers things.”

The next day, Wagner, the perfect gentleman, sent Natalie flowers to thank her for the date. She put them in a vase and went to the backyard to burn an effigy of her studio welfare worker, in ritualistic celebration of the fact that she was eighteen, and the law no longer required a guardian for her on the set.

Years later, Wagner seemed defensive about the impression he made on Natalie. “I was a different type than she was used to… she was running around with Jimmy Dean and those guys—you know, part of the rebel movement. Me, I was around the elite of Hollywood. Power, Webb, Stanwyck… Bogie, Betty, Coop—these were the people I was going around with, and it was a whole new world to her.” After sending the flowers, Wagner made no attempt to contact Natalie. It was just another date, he told columnist Sidney Skolsky the next year.

Natalie spent the next few days making plans for an imminent wedding to Marlowe, “And she made the mistake of telling her mother,” he recalls. “I think Barbara was gonna be the maid of honor, Barbara Gould. Natalie wanted Nick [Adams], and I just said, ‘No.’ ” Their plans were to have a simple ceremony, with just a few guests.

That week, Marlowe was called to New York to do a play, putting the wedding in limbo. Natalie aligned herself with her anti-establishment fiancé. He recalls, “She told Warners she wouldn’t go to
any premieres again, or do publicity, and they got
really
insane. They got really crazy.”

Natalie’s second bold move was to fire Henry Willson, who had served his original purpose: setting her up on a date with Wagner. Willson was “screwing her career,” in Marlowe’s opinion, because he was too attentive to “his boys, the Rock Hudsons and so forth.” Natalie’s chief complaint was that Willson had not been aggressive enough.

Jackie Eastes was at Natalie’s house when Willson phoned for the last time. “She wanted
Marjorie Morningstar
, and he wouldn’t go to bat for her. He said, ‘You’re not right for the part.’ And she said, ‘If you don’t get me this part, you’re fired.’ I’d never seen her so forceful.” Years later, Natalie would ridicule Willson to the
London Times
, saying, “There was a Hollywood agent who made up names for his actors—Race Gentry, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter. He knew what he’s doing, I guess, but Tab’s the name of a soft drink. Low calorie.”

A desperate Maria implored Nick Adams to persuade Natalie to delay marrying Marlowe. Adams further assisted by “planting” a story in Army Archerd’s August fifteenth column in
Daily Variety
, stating that
he
and Natalie “might elope,” to Las Vegas, a “set-up” about which Natalie later bitterly complained.

She succumbed to mounting pressure from Warner Brothers and Mud, demonstrating the part of her personality that craved stardom, by participating in a month-long publicity tour to New York, Chicago and St. Louis with Tab Hunter to promote the release of
The Burning Hills
and
The Girl He Left Behind
, arriving at the Los Angeles airport on August 21 in a plunging neckline, carrying her good-luck toy tigers to make it through the flight.

Natalie and Hunter were mobbed at the New York premiere of
The Burning Hills
, with fans swarming them like bees at each city Warners arranged for them to visit. “The tours we went on were phenomenal,” as Hunter recalls. “That kind of exposure when the studio gets behind you, it’s incredible… they wanted to make stars out of the both of us. We were the last of that sort of era.”

While Natalie was in New York, she had lunch at the society restaurant Twenty-One, with author Herman Wouk, hoping to convince him to cast her as the title character of his novel, the demure Marjorie Morningstar. She dressed for the luncheon with the same display of
allure she had when she met Nick Ray to campaign to play Judy—mistakenly believing that glamour, rather than authenticity, would sell her, an influence of Maria’s that would stay with Natalie her life long. Wouk would write:

Natalie’s seriously artistic side revealed itself in New York, as she sat in on classes at the Actors Studio, which Marlowe had arranged for her. Later, she would compare Stanislavsky’s teachings to “the way I’d been working all along. ‘Emotion memory’ is recalling something sad when you have a sad scene to do, and very early on I used to get myself in the right mood by thinking of a pet dog that died.”