Natasha (36 page)

Wagner’s and Warner Brothers’ joint influences on Natalie were startlingly obvious when she arrived in New York that summer to test with supporting actors for
Marjorie Morningstar
. Natalie was pictured in the
Tribune
in a glamorous off-the-shoulder white gown, quoted as criticizing the New York “method” actors she earlier had worshipped, saying, “They don’t like movies so, I say, why don’t they leave Hollywood and go back to the stage. Or better still they shouldn’t go to Hollywood in the first place. I for one am tired of hearing them complain about Hollywood. I resent kids who say movies are terrible, non-creative and all that. That’s just talk.”

The star-driven, “Maria” aspect of Natalie’s personality had assumed center stage via her budding romance with Robert Wagner, to the delight of her studio. By early August, rumors that Natalie would marry Wagner—who called her “Bug”—began to pop up in the trades. When Natalie, increasingly afraid to fly, took the train to the East Coast in mid-August to start filming
Marjorie Morningstar
, Wagner tagged along, staying at the same Adirondacks resort hotel on Schroon Lake as Natalie, Maria and Lana. The fan magazines, and Warner Brothers, embraced the couple, putting them on covers in dreamy, romantic poses—Wagner tenderly kissing Natalie on the forehead, or the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes—with headlines such as, “Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner: It’s the Romance of the Year!” or “Natalie’s Love Search Has Ended!” Louella Parsons bubbled that they would marry, writing that Wagner had become accustomed to being called “Mr. Wood.”

By the end of summer, Natalie’s disenchantment with
Marjorie Morningstar
was summed up by her private comments about the director, Irving Rapper, to a friend: “I’d rather spend my life in a crapper than do another picture with Irving Rapper!” Actress Ruta Lee, who had a small part in the film as a rival of Marjorie Morningstar’s, remembers Natalie being “not too crazy” about their “old guard, somewhat dogmatic” director, and vocalizing it.

The Lithuanian, outgoing Ruta Lee bonded with Natalie over their ethnic backgrounds and shared rituals. “She was very real, very down-to-earth… and she had a wonderful, dirty giggle. Loved a bawdy story. Was very earthy and very wonderful… and yet there was something about her that, even though I was very, very young, wanted me to reach out and kind of make a haven for her, and
protect
her in some sort of way.”

Wagner celebrated his and Natalie’s joint return to Hollywood in September by buying a new forty-two-foot powerboat, which he planned to name
The Natalie
, but changed to
My Other Lady
. The two spent increasing amounts of time on Wagner’s boat, out at sea, one of the few places where Natalie found it possible both to drop the “Natalie Wood” mask and to relax, something she found difficult with her driven, intense nature. She confessed to
Seventeen
magazine she hadn’t had a day off in two and a half years, since
Rebel
.

Natalie kept up the pace, beginning in November the film for which Sinatra had pursued her,
Kings Go Forth
. It was a war drama set in the
Mediterranean, with Natalie playing a French-speaking mulatta driven to a suicide attempt by a playboy soldier (Tony Curtis), rescued by Sinatra’s character. She spent her time between scenes listening to Sinatra records (“He’s from greatsville!” she told a reporter from
Bride
magazine, sounding like Wagner), or knitting an afghan to use on the boat as a surprise for R.J.

On December 6, the anniversary of their first date aboard
My Lady
, Wagner arrived at the Gurdins’ to take Natalie to Romanoff’s, carrying a bottle of Dom Perignon and two crystal glasses. When he filled Natalie’s glass with champagne, she discovered a pearl-and-diamond ring on the bottom, engraved with the words “Marry me?” At Romanoff’s, Wagner discreetly dropped a pair of diamond earrings in Natalie’s glass, the way Cary Grant, his role model, might have done on screen.

Their first call was to Hollywood reporter Louella Parsons, who wrote breathlessly about R.J. and Natalie’s movie-scripted engagement in her column the next day. In keeping with the Hollywood theme, Natalie hired her movie costume designer, Howard Shoup, to create a wedding gown for her, with Shoup sketching a beautiful short white lace dress and romantic lace coverlet for her head.

When Wagner showed up on the set of
Kings Go Forth
to see Natalie, Sinatra, who had a special relationship with Natalie that Faye Nuell, Janet Leigh and others perceived as romantic then, pulled him aside, giving Wagner “the Hoboken guide of, ‘Don’t you do anything to hurt her,’ ” recalls Nuell, who happened to be visiting Natalie. “He said, ‘If you ever hurt her, you’ll have to answer to me.’”

That week, Natalie had lunch with her oldest and dearest friend, Mary Ann, rhapsodizing about R.J. and their engagement, telling Mary Ann how “perfect” he was, how “perfect” their marriage would be, reminding Mary Ann how she once had seen Wagner on the Fox lot and fantasized marrying him, how this was her fairy tale come true. Mary Ann had a deep concern for her friend, related to Mud’s original suspicions about Robert Wagner as one of Henry Willson’s stable of handsome young actors reputed to be homosexual or bisexual. Wagner, recalls Rad Fulton, another Willson client, was the topic of “a lot of stories” in Hollywood concerning “the same thing they were saying about Henry.”

Mary Ann broached the subject with Natalie, expressing her concern. Natalie told Mary Ann she had discussed the topic with R.J., who
denied the rumors he was bisexual. “She said, ‘Oh Mary Ann, all these people are just jealous of us.’ ” Mary Ann was still uneasy. “R.J. presented such a grandiose thing. She was in love with love. And he was extremely handsome, surfacely [sic] extremely charming, and she was being pushed by all sides—studio, Mama,
everybody
. And it seemed almost… you know how when things seem to be
too
perfect? I told her, ‘Nothing’s
that perfect.’
”

Mary Ann’s caveat about Robert Wagner caused a rift between the two friends. “She believed everything he said. But sometimes you’ve got to
listen
. She was hearing what she wanted to hear. And the studios were pushing, and Mom. She was into this, both hands, both feet, everything—all systems go.”

Natalie had a similar experience with her friend Jackie. “I hadn’t seen her in a long time, because she was making all these movies. And she called me one day and she said, ‘What are you doing? I want to take you to Romanoff’s for lunch, I have something to tell you.’ ” Jackie expected to see Natalie in her T-Bird, “but she had a black Cadillac, and the whole persona of Natalie had suddenly changed to this very sophisticated—she had a black turban on, and a black jersey sheath, and a cigarette holder, and the leather gloves. So we march into Romanoff’s, and we’re talking, and she pulled off the glove, and there is the diamond on her finger. She said, ‘I’m marrying Robert Wagner.’ ” Like Mary Ann, Jackie had heard rumors about Wagner’s bisexuality and mentioned it to Natalie, who again denied it.

Within three weeks of finding a pearl-and-diamond ring in the bottom of her champagne glass, Natalie was on a train to Arizona with Robert Wagner to get married—on such short notice, even her sister Olga was unable to attend. Olga believed that Natalie married so young “to get away, maybe… although I think she was in love with R.J. They were fun to watch together. I remember they came to San Francisco and we went out to dinner. And they always would make a production—if she was going to the bathroom, they’d have all these farewells! They had this little act together.”

Her mother, remembers Olga, was “not always” happy about Natalie’s decision to marry Wagner, partly because, “for Mother, it was a big blow when Natalie decided to be on her own, and Mother wasn’t to interfere. That was a blow.”

Jeanne Hyatt was a witness to her close friend Maria’s devastation at losing her star-child, the outcome that Mud had schemed to prevent since Natalie was a little girl, frightening her with grotesque lies about sex and pregnancy. Maria’s motivation to keep Natalie at home was to some degree financial, as “a lot of her meal ticket would go away when Natalie married somebody.” But the more primal reason for Mud’s hysteria over losing her daughter was survival, for as Maria’s friend Jeanne points out, “She lived and breathed through Natalie.”

Maria had a foreboding about Natalie marrying Robert Wagner, afraid that her earlier suspicions about him were correct. She told Natalie, “No good will come of this.”

Though her older sister had insufficient notice to attend Natalie’s wedding to Wagner, a fan magazine reporter and photographer were present every second, even on the train to Scottsdale, where R.J.’s parents had a home. Barbara Gould was Natalie’s maid of honor, just as she would have been if Natalie had married Scott Marlowe the year before. The only other guests at the Wood-Wagner wedding were Mary Anita Loos and Richard Sale (whom Natalie had met on
Driftwood)
, Nick Adams, Faye Nuell, the Gurdins, the Wagners, and a few other family or friends.

But the photographs, and all the details, were available to anyone who bought the March 1958 issues of
Photoplay, Modern Screen
, or
Motion Picture
.

IRONICALLY
,
BOATS
—
AND BOAT MISHAPS
—would be a recurring theme in the joined lives of Natalie and Robert Wagner.

Their first honeymoon began with a misadventure at sea. Because Natalie was afraid to fly, the Wagners and their sixteen pieces of luggage took the
Silver Streak
to Miami, where they had booked passage on a chartered boat for a month-long cruise, an opportunity for Natalie to relax—with no telephones—after the grueling schedule of filming
Marjorie Morningstar
and
Kings Go Forth
almost back-to-back.

“So what happens?” Wagner queried Louella Parsons after the honeymoon. “The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! They called it a storm—ha! It was really a typhoon.” Natalie and
R.J.’s honeymoon cruise became a nightmare, as their boat lurched its way back to port. “It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing… all the furniture that wasn’t nailed down was sliding from wall to wall. It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her.”

The newlyweds shifted their honeymoon to New York, where they checked into the Waldorf Towers, accompanied, rather bizarrely, by Nick Adams, Natalie’s perpetual sidekick. (Actor Robert Conrad, Adams’ best friend then, did not consider the arrangement strange. “Nick was a very entertaining guy, and they were pals. He was with them all the time, always hanging out. He was referred to by his friends as ‘Emperor Adams’—he was charming, he was funny, he was outrageous, and you had a sense that he really cared about you.”)

The next few weeks were a public spectacle, with photographers chronicling the Wagners’ comings and goings to Manhattan restaurants and Broadway plays, including
West Side Story
, Natalie’s eventual film classic. They left New York mid-January, buying a new Corvette to drive home, another way for Natalie to avoid airplanes. Natalie and R.J.’s motor trip back to California was a surreal exercise in movie star fame: each time they drove to a different city, a local radio station announced their arrival and fans would mob the car.

When they returned to Hollywood from their honeymoon, the Wagners had barely spent a waking hour alone. They holed up aboard
My Other Lady
, moored off Catalina Island, the glamorous little hideaway two hours by sea from the port south of Los Angeles. “The best part was the last week,” Natalie would say a year later, of her honeymoon. “We spent it on R.J.’s boat, off the coast of Catalina, in a dense fog for four days.” The experience would forever hold a glow for both Natalie and R.J., who romanticized Catalina, and their boat, as the perfect expression of their love.

Natalie spent her first days as Mrs. Robert Wagner writing one thousand personal thank-you letters on pastel blue note cards monogrammed “NWW,” acknowledging wedding gifts she and R.J. had received, with thoughtful greetings to every person she addressed. It was typically Natalie, her sister Lana would observe. “The same as she took acting very seriously, she took being a wife very seriously. And
gave it her all… she did everything meticulously, and very thoroughly and completely.”

Outwardly, the newly wed Wagners appeared to have achieved romantic nirvana; however, the movie star façade that was “Natalie Wood” concealed the person inside, gasping for breath. “It was a mystery to me. I loved my husband, we were healthy, we were desirable according to the press, but all I felt was torment. I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life, and now I was expected to function as an adult woman.”

After nineteen years of possessing a human shadow, Natalie was experiencing the same separation anxiety from her mother as Maria—her alter ego—was from her. She included Mud in all her movie contracts for the rest of her life, paid by the studio to autograph fan photos, with Maria signing as “Natalie Wood,” their shared identity.

Natalie and R.J. kept up the illusion of movie magazine bliss, with Natalie ensconcing herself in her husband’s cozy bachelor quarters, a two-bedroom duplex apartment on Durant, in Beverly Hills, with barely enough space for their star wardrobes.

Mud’s protective antennae went up the first time she visited Wagner’s tiny apartment, when the door was opened by a much older, “swishy” man with an English accent, identifying himself as R.J.’s butler. Mud made it her mission to rid Wagner of his live-in houseman before he married Natalie. “Her mother thought it was suspicious,” relates Maria’s friend Jeanne Hyatt, “and being that type of a person, she didn’t want Natalie to have anything to do with Wagner.”

According to Bobby Hyatt, Natalie was also “questioning why Wagner had that guy. She was trying to get him to get rid of him. And the joke became that after they got married, not only did R.J.
not
get rid of the guy, but
moved
the guy into their apartment.” A fan magazine even reported on the oddity after the Wagners divorced:

Jeanne Hyatt recalls, “I used to go over there with Marie Gurdin and the butler would answer the door and one time she said to me, ‘He is the
faggot!’
” From then on, Maria complained to Jeanne Hyatt incessantly. “She mainly said, ‘I don’t know why Natalie would marry R.J. in the first place. I told her that’s a faggot around him all the time.’ And she just went on and on about that ‘faggot’: ‘Now that faggot’s gonna open the door for us.’ And she’d say it right in front of Natalie—she said she didn’t care whether he heard her or not. She was very outspoken, Marie was. Not to hurt you, but that was just the way she was.”

Natalie wanted desperately to live the fairy tale she imagined for herself as a child, with the handsome prince she fantasized about at eleven. When her costar of so many movies, Ann Doran, ran into her in the Fox commissary, she was “ecstatic over her new husband. This was ‘it!’”

Natalie made a romantic pact with R.J. never to be separated, and they vowed not to exploit their relationship by appearing in a film together. As a symbol of her love, Natalie balked at making a six-city tour to promote
Marjorie Morningstar
, since R.J. would be filming a movie called
The Hunters
and they would be apart.

When the studio prevailed, bowing to her preference to travel by train, Natalie got a viral infection at the station before she even left Los Angeles, and was sick throughout the tour. Her insistence that her husband be with her at all times was probably as much a symptom of her emotional dependency and fear of solitude as a romantic gesture.

Natalie was in a tug-of-war with Warner Brothers from the time she returned from her honeymoon in January through summer, refusing to accept the pictures they were offering —
The Miracle
and
A Summer Place
—as a bargaining tool to renegotiate her contract. Natalie had no idea what to do with herself, or her time, away from a movie set, admitting sadly she was “more at home on a soundstage than in my own home.” She joined R.J. on
his
set, appearing so often she was given a canvas chair with the title “Associate Producer” while he filmed
In Love and War
that June. Natalie followed the cast to the Monterey Peninsula, near the Stanford campus, where yet another
movie magazine,
Screen Album
, took pictures of her and R.J., posing like lovebirds in the picturesque setting.

By July, studio executives were losing patience with Natalie. The star whom the
Los Angeles Examiner
described as the “queen of the Warner Brothers lot” hadn’t worked for six months. That summer, she was offered a huge salary as the female lead in a prestige film. Natalie turned it down, saying she couldn’t be separated from R.J., resulting in publicity that made her appear either capricious or unreasonably demanding. The underlying reason, which Natalie did not disclose, was that one of the figures associated with the project was the famous, powerful actor she said had raped her.

The tension with Warner Brothers reached a climax on July 14, when Natalie failed to show up for a meeting to discuss
The Philadelphian
, a courtroom drama costarring Paul Newman (later changed to
The Young Philadelphians)
. She made the cover of
Variety
the next day for the wrong reasons: to report that Warner Brothers had placed Natalie Wood on unpaid suspension for refusing to appear in
The Philadelphian
.

Natalie offered several principled explanations for her suspension in later years: that she refused to do “silly press,” she wanted the right to make pictures for other studios, and she wanted a voice in the roles offered to her by Warner Brothers. She was also unhappy with her salary, which was less than she was making as a child, at Fox.

Natalie turned twenty a few days after she was suspended, celebrating her birthday by picking up the $27,050 in bonds that had accrued in her name since she became a child actress, money the Wagners needed without her salary. That same month, Natalie’s parents moved into a new house in Van Nuys, a few blocks from the Hyatts, offering the Laurel Canyon home to R.J. and Natalie.

She spent the rest of the year out of work, a circumstance utterly alien to Natalie, who had acted for so much of her childhood she “didn’t know how to play.” She idled away some of her restlessness on the boat, with R.J. Occasionally they would sail to Catalina with their business manager, Andrew Maree III, and his wife, Prudence, who were in their wedding party. Prudence Maree recalls she and Natalie “kind of
learned
to like it, because the boat was a great love of R.J.’s.” Natalie also considered it “a place to get away from everything—ringing phones and
fans and all the rest of it.” According to both the Marees, they would moor at Catalina and stay on the boat all weekend, playing cards and cooking on a hibachi. “Natalie was an excellent gin player,” recalls Andrew Maree. Neither wife set foot in the water.

Natalie and R.J. discussed their boat with columnist Hedda Hopper then, in what would become an eerie interview in light of Natalie’s eventual drowning from their last boat, the
Splendour
. Wagner told Hopper, “I had my first boat before we were married, and Nat didn’t know anything about it. So she started reading books to learn how to run it, so if I fell overboard, she could come back and pick me up.” Natalie confessed to Hopper, in the same interview, that she would never set foot in the ocean. “It looks so dark down there, and I’m scared of fish. I sort of thought when the boat went along, the fish would swim away from it.”

Faye Nuell, still a close friend, always found it odd that Natalie and R.J. had a boat, since Natalie was so terrified of dark seawater. Natalie addressed that question in a joint interview with R.J. for a magazine, after he teased her that he felt ignored when she took naps on the boat. Her comments are haunting, in view of how she died: “Don’t you realize that here I am, out in the middle of the ocean?” she asked him. “The boat could sink, a storm could come up, anything might happen. But am I afraid? No. So I lie in the sun and fall asleep—a little. Why? Because with you I feel safe, secure, but most of all happy. That’s a compliment.”

R.J. taught Natalie to play gin rummy and poker, a game she enjoyed with wicked delight, beating her husband, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin on regular poker nights. The Wagners became fringe members of Sinatra’s “Clan,” taking the train to Vegas to play blackjack with Dino, Frank, or Peter Lawford, and to catch a show by Eddie Fisher.

Steffi (Skolsky) Sidney, Natalie’s
Rebel
costar, was writing for a fan magazine called
Datebook
that November, and interviewed Natalie and R.J. for an “at home” profile on America’s sweethearts. While Sidney sat in their living room, R.J. rehearsed a dance number for his next movie,
Say One for Me
, as Natalie appeared, wearing a leopard-skin robe and slippers, accompanied by her poodles, Chi Chi and Chou Chou. She sat on the sofa beside Sidney, surrounded by her stuffed tigers, talking about how stars
are
different, how she wanted to bring glamour into peoples’ lives.

Sidney found them both charming and adorable, but she left the Wagners’ home with a disturbing feeling that the marriage was doomed. She thought Natalie was too young, “and there was something about it that wasn’t real.” When Sidney tried to include her opinions in the article, the Wagners’ publicist struck her lines.

By the end of the year, around the time of her first wedding anniversary, Natalie’s problems with the studio began to lift, triggered by Jack Warner’s return to work after a serious car accident, and Natalie’s discovery of
Splendor in the Grass
, which Elia Kazan, her movie god, had begun to develop at Warner Brothers.