Natasha (40 page)

R.J.’s live-in butler, and an occasional daytime maid, completed the picture of the “mad young millionaires,” as Louella Parsons wrote of the Wagners. Bobby Hyatt recalls R.J.’s valet as “creepy. He was an elderly, thin guy with gray hair, and he had a tendency to wear a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he pulled his slacks up as high as he could and cinched the belt so that his testicles would be on display. When he’d swish by to his back room, Nat would whisper to me, ‘I hate him!’ ” Hyatt suggested that Natalie fire the butler, “and she said she couldn’t, that he belonged to R.J. That was a continuing argument—about the only thing they ever argued about.”

Leonard Hirshan, the agent who guided Natalie through
West Side Story
daily, and socialized with the Wagners, remembers them as “terrific, a very nice, compatible, easygoing couple. They were fun to be with.”

Natalie plunged into her new musical on a punishing schedule of twelve-hour rehearsals each day, trying to catch up to the cast of professional singer/dancers, many of whom were in the Broadway show, and who resented and envied Natalie as a “movie star.” Rita Moreno, a Tony-winning Broadway singer-dancer-actress who would win an Oscar playing the fiery Anita in
West Side Story
, recalls “a few groans from a few people” when Natalie arrived on set.

The perfectionist Natalie, still emotionally drained from
Splendor
, felt insecure about her singing voice, her dancing, and her attempt to play a Puerto Rican, throwing herself into one rehearsal with such intensity she fell to the floor and Wise thought she was injured. According to Moreno, “She couldn’t get it right” during the mambo scene in the gymnasium, forcing everyone to repeat the dance many times without apologizing. “I remember at the time being rather dismayed that there seemed to be no acknowledgment of the work the other people were doing in this. Not getting it right was not really her fault, but she didn’t address it.” The other dancers—including Moreno—interpreted Natalie’s insecurity as “indifference… I don’t know that there was resentment, but there were sarcastic remarks.”

“Natalie was miserable,” recalls Lana. “She loved Jerry Robbins and she liked that entire process, but she just didn’t get along too well other than that. She just was unhappy on it… it was very demanding, she
was very concerned about the makeup, about the look, about people accepting her as a Puerto Rican—about everything.”

Natalie asked Moreno to help her with her accent during one of the early rehearsals, “and I went into her room and started to tape record her dialogue, and somewhere along the middle she sort of lost interest. I made a tape for thirty minutes, and that was that.” Natalie’s Puerto Rican accent was “terrible,” in Moreno’s opinion. “Awful. It could have been really so much better.” At the time, Moreno thought Natalie was lazy, “but maybe when you feel you’re not up to the job, you sort of give up on it, you go through the motions, and it’s very possible that’s what she was doing.”

Lana recalls Natalie as on the verge of a nervous collapse, missing work by calling in sick, spending lunch hours in her trailer, on the telephone with her analyst. When Jerome Robbins was fired as codirector in October, “Natalie was left without her guru,” as assistant director Relyea relates. Saul Chaplin recalls, “She was adamant and she threatened not to show up. But of course she not only showed up, she was terrific.”

Natalie’s saving grace was Tony Mordente, one of the “Jets” dancers, whom Robert Wise and Natalie requested to work with her on the remaining musical numbers. Mordente “was hesitant about it,” perceiving Natalie the same way some of the other dancers had. “There were kids in the company who thought that Natalie was kind of a snob—same kind of feeling I got. I thought, ‘Oh, wow, she’s really a snobbish, standoffish, Miss Star, Miss Hollywood.’ But she was quite the opposite, very much the opposite.”

Mordente spent every night, and weekends, going over dance routines with Natalie at her house on Beverly:

As Mordente spent more time with Natalie, he discovered how insecure she was in the part, and how much she wanted people to like her—just as she had at Fulton Junior High, with Mary Ann. “She was very genuinely worried about what the entire cast thought about her. She would always ask me, ‘What do you think? What do you think they’re thinking?’ In a sense, she was shy around the company. I said, ‘What are you worried about? They’re not even in the scene with you, forget about ’em.’ She was worried about other people’s perception of her as a person, and what they thought of her as a performer. She was so concerned that people like her, and she wanted them to think she was good.”

Natalie talked to Mordente, for hours, about her Puerto Rican accent. “I know she worked on it all day long. She used to talk to
me
like that. We’d be out to dinner, and suddenly she’d be breaking into it. She was always concerned about it. She was always concerned that things were going to be exactly the way she wanted them. She wanted them to be perfect all the time.”

If Natalie had a flaw, in Mordente’s opinion, “it would be that she wanted people to like her, and she wanted to be a great actress… she strived to be the perfect actress. There was no question. She wanted to be the best actress in Hollywood, even the world, there was no question about that. The Academy Award was very big to her.”

Mordente saw Natalie virtually every day from the time Robbins was fired in October, until the end of filming
West Side Story
in February. “I became friendly with Natalie, and R.J., and we spent a lot of time together, going to dinner and so forth. R.J. became a very good friend of mine. And he was going through a very tough period at the time, because he had been suspended by Fox… and I think R.J. had his ego, and his ego was being a little bit tossed around because Natalie was peaking, and he was sliding, at that time, in no man’s land, not knowing what he was going to do next.”

Mordente considered the marriage “good,” though he allowed, “They had their problems. And I think their problems stemmed from Natalie really driving to stardom, and the possibility of winning an
Academy Award, and R.J. saying, ‘Where’s my career going next?’ Natalie was a very ambitious lady, I make no bones about that.”

While filming
West Side Story
, Natalie said positive things to Mordente about Warren Beatty as an actor, never mentioning him otherwise. Nor did Mordente see Beatty around Natalie from October 1960 to February 1961. Natalie’s intimate, Bob Jiras, who did her makeup on
West Side Story
, confirms Beatty was never there. In Mordente’s view, “there couldn’t have been” any personal contact between Natalie and Beatty during filming. “Because, I’m not going to exaggerate, Natalie and I spent five nights a week together. Going to dinner, or talking, or laughing, or playing games, or shopping, or going to the movies—and it was always with R.J., and Natalie, and/or Mart. Mart was always there.” Beatty, in fact, had been living with fiancée Joan Collins since shooting
Splendor in the Grass
, and left for Europe in December to shoot a movie,
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
, accompanied by Collins.

Sometime during filming, Natalie was told that singer Marni Nixon was going to dub the high notes in Natalie’s song tracks as Maria. Nixon recalled, “They were telling her she was wonderful, and we on the sidelines were going, ‘Oh my God! How could they let that go on?’ They would turn to me and they would wink.” Natalie was deceived about her voice being used until the end of the film, when Wise and the producers informed her that Nixon would be dubbing all of her songs as Maria. “She wanted so much to do her own singing, but in the final analysis, her voice just wasn’t good enough,” reveals Wise. “She was more than upset,” relates Mordente. “She was pissed. She was steamed.” Mostly, Natalie was heartbroken.

They had gotten their fawn in the forest, nearly destroying her, like Bambi. While millions of moviegoers, for decades to come, would be dazzled by the dancing and singing in
West Side Story
, it is Natalie who would move them, with her heartbreakingly vulnerable performance as Maria.

After she finished
West Side Story
, Natalie was admitted to St. John’s Hospital for a tonsillectomy, which she had delayed for weeks. Mordente recalls her with a “throat problem” toward the end of filming, “and R.J. was saying, ‘Maybe we should get a doctor.’ ” According to Mordente, Natalie’s mother did not want her to see a doctor, an attitude Mordente felt bordered on “witchcraft.”

During her April 7 tonsillectomy, Natalie developed complications and nearly died, hemorrhaging for four hours, according to reports published at the time. R.J. took an adjoining room at the hospital for two nights, holding Natalie’s hand while she recovered. She was released from the hospital in mid-April, missing an appearance as a presenter at the Academy Awards.

Before she was hospitalized, Natalie turned down a picture that Warner Brothers was pressuring her to make called
The Inspector
(or
Lisa
). She spent the next few weeks of spring contemplating other movie offers and resting, as R.J. rehearsed for his first movie under a new nonexclusive contract with Columbia Studios. The picture,
Sail a Crooked Ship
, starring Ernie Kovacs, began filming in Los Angeles on May 1, 1961.

Natalie visited the set of
Sail a Crooked Ship
occasionally in May and June, as she and R.J. coordinated their work schedules to go to Italy together in July, Natalie’s first time abroad. R.J. had arranged to meet with Darryl Zanuck in Rome to discuss appearing in the war drama
The Longest Day
, while Natalie filmed the Warner Brothers romantic drama
Lovers Must Learn
(later changed to
Rome Adventure)
, costarring Troy Donahue, which she accepted the end of May.

The Wagners kept up their glittering social schedule in June, as R.J. completed his film with Ernie Kovacs, sparkling together at a party the first week of the month, given by their friends Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher at Au Petit Jean, radiantly hand-in-hand mid-June at a Warner Brothers Jubilee dinner of stars, where they were a foursome with Warren Beatty and Joan Collins, who had just returned from Europe.

A day or so later, R.J. completed
Sail a Crooked Ship
, with Natalie romantically anticipating their coming trip to Europe. After they went to bed that night, according to what Natalie told friends, she awakened to find R.J. missing. She went to look for him, and found him in a compromising position with another man.

Natalie went into hysteria, screaming and running to the bar, where she picked up a crystal glass, squeezing it in her hand until the glass broke and blood oozed from her skin. She fled to a neighbor’s house in her nightgown and banged on the door, using their phone to call her mother.

Mud got the phone call she had foretold from a shattered Natalie, who blurted out what she had seen. Lana, who was in junior high,
remembers her sister arriving at the house in Van Nuys that night, frantic, her hand bleeding from cut glass, sobbing that her marriage was over. “She was really, really upset.”

Natalie would not tell her sister what occurred that night. “My mom told me a couple of things that Natalie said,” reveals Lana, who “always heard” that Natalie discovered R.J. in a sexual encounter with a man. R.J., through representatives, denies this version of events and any allegation of bisexuality.

Natalie shut herself in one of the bedrooms at her parents’ home that night, swallowing sleeping pills, “and I guess she had taken too many, because Mrs. Gurdin called my house immediately,” relates Jeanne Hyatt. “But I was asleep and Bobby answered the phone.” Robert Hyatt remembers, “It was late at night, and Marie started telling me everything, because she had been telling me for years, ‘I told her not to marry him, no good will come of this, it will be trouble,’ and she was right.” Natalie, he recalls, went into a coma from taking too many sleeping pills.

Lana remembers Natalie’s overdose, which the Hyatts heard all about the next morning, when Maria telephoned Jeanne to tell her that Natalie “had caught Wagner in the act,” muttering “she didn’t know why Natalie ever married him in the first place.” Mud told her neighbor that Natalie was nearly out of her mind witnessing R.J. with another man. “To hear something is one thing, but to see it in
action
is another.” Mud and Fahd, according to Jeanne Hyatt, “took Natalie to the hospital and had her stomach pumped, they weren’t taking any chances. The poor little thing, I think that she was in such shock, that she took the pills to go to sleep, not to commit suicide. Of course in that state, she could have overdosed without even realizing it.”

Natalie told Bobby Hyatt, sometime afterward, she “wasn’t trying to kill herself.”

NATALIE STAYED IN HIDING FOR A WEEK
, dropping ten pounds from stress. One of her first calls was to summon her old friend Mary Ann, whom she hadn’t seen since their difference of opinion over Natalie marrying R.J.

“Oh God, it was awful. If you would have ripped her arms off, it would have been better. Why it didn’t destroy her—it was close, I’ll
tell you.” Natalie, at first, was in denial concerning R.J. “I said, ‘Honey, you have to accept it now… you’ve got to face what we’re talking about here.’
I
reverted to anger, because R.J. knew how
fragile
this was, he knew how much this meant to her.”

In Mary Ann’s view, the end of her fairy tale marriage to R.J. was the end of a fantasy that had sustained Natalie since childhood. “It was the
whole picture
, it wasn’t just him as an individual.” Natalie discovered “there is no golden rainbow. And it was tough to say it’s all going to be better. And her demons were just going wild, because she was bright and she was smart… ‘but it can’t be, but it
is
.’ Ah, Jeez, it was awful.”

Natalie “just lost it,” in the observation of Mary Ann. “Years later, I could see pictures of her and I could see her heartbreak—she
never
got over it.”

Natalie’s lifeline was her analyst, whom she began to see every day from the night she left R.J., struggling to separate from the merged personality Maria had created between them, to overcome the fear of being by herself that her mother had fostered to keep Natalie at home. She would be in daily therapy for the next eight years. “My parents wanted me to come back to live with them, but I felt strongly that I didn’t need my parents,” she told author/actor Dick Moore in 1981. “I needed, in today’s words, to get my head together. I needed psychiatry. I knew I needed to be independent, but I was still terrified of being alone, and I went to stay with friends. I had always been dependent on someone—first on my parents, then on R.J. This feeling that it was somehow dangerous to be alone was deeply instilled.”

Natalie subsequently kept secret what she said had happened the night she left R.J., seemingly worried about the effect on her image if her overdose and its cause were made public. “She even tried to protect R.J.,” recalls Mary Ann. After her initial disclosure, Natalie would never talk about seeing R.J. with a man, keeping it as private as her romance with Jimmy, knowing that at that time it would damage R.J.’s career. “The iron curtain went down,” as Robert Hyatt put it. “It was a big deal to keep it quiet. We were not supposed to tell anybody, and I never would. Natalie told her mother that if she leaked it, she would never speak to her again and would cut her off her salary, which Natalie provided. That kept Marie quiet.”

Although she could not accept his behavior, Natalie “never got over R.J.,” Lana observed. Family friend Jeanne Hyatt, who saw Natalie during her hideout, felt “she was still in love with Bob Wagner, even though she had seen that horrid thing happen… she always carried him in her heart.” Or as Mary Ann analyzed, Natalie cherished the
illusion
of what R.J. represented. “Natalie didn’t want to get a divorce,” Wagner said in 1986, “but people said, ‘Go your separate ways and see how it feels.’”

The Wagners’ then close friend Prudence Maree remembers, “R.J. was destroyed by that first separation. He’d just sit and look in the distance, which is not like R.J. at all, he has great charm, great charisma, and he was stunned. And never talked about it, but just sat in our home and I’d take care of him as best I could.” Years later, Wagner said, “I should have hung in there, and things probably would have been different. We never wanted to break up, and we thought we would get back together, but there were lots of interventions—our careers, other people… but that
feeling
between us was there. The love was there.”

Their ambivalence and affection was evident in a two-paragraph statement issued by the Wagners’ publicist four days after Natalie went underground, announcing a trial separation with “no immediate plans for divorce. Both are hopeful the problems that exist between them can be worked out satisfactorily.”

The news of Natalie and R.J.’s separation hit Hollywood like a bomb, a foreign correspondent would observe.
Variety
commented the Wagners had “fooled everyone”; the
Los Angeles Mirror
reported show business circles as “baffled”; their friend Elizabeth Taylor was reputed to be under sedation, holding Natalie and R.J. as her role models for a happy marriage. No one in Hollywood had any idea why its golden couple had split up. “Natalie, come out of hiding,” implored
The Hollywood Reporter
.

Warner Brothers executives were frantic to find their missing star, needed for wardrobe tests for the ironically titled
Lovers Must Learn
, set to shoot in Rome in a few weeks. Natalie finally checked in with the studio on June 23, asking that her whereabouts be kept secret. She called Louella Parsons a few days later, telling Parsons she hadn’t spoken to anyone because she “had the flu” and had lost weight. Natalie told the columnist that what had occurred between her and R.J. was
“too personal to discuss,” admitting she was “not up” to meeting with anyone at Warners about her new movie.

“Louella Parsons and they were all looking for her,” remembers Jeanne Hyatt, “and she
was
sick. What she
saw
made her sick—and taking those pills.” She was also afraid to be seen looking anything less than the glamorous “Natalie Wood,” Robert Hyatt remembers.

On June 30, Warren Beatty, who had been in New York for several weeks to promote
Splendor
, returned to Hollywood, just as Natalie “really felt I might crack up.” She temporarily moved back into the Beverly house, and as she later told the story, “R.J. came back home one night to pick up some things and we both had our guard up. We said some hurtful things and he left. I started to shake. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and I was ready to let go. In another minute they would have had to carry me out. But I said to myself, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t let it happen.’ And I got through the night.”

From then on, Natalie would need someone to keep her company through the night, and on airplanes, no longer comforted by her toy tigers or storybook dolls. She began to turn to secretary/companions who stayed with her, the first being Mart Crowley, who eventually wrote
The Boys in the Band
in Natalie’s guesthouse. “He, in a significant way, was taking care of Natalie after the breakup,” asserts Bob Jiras, her friend, makeup man, and occasional fill-in for Crowley.

Natalie was emotionally unable to star in
Lovers Must Learn
, or any other picture. On July 3, Warner Brothers sent her a legal letter accepting Natalie’s request for a leave of absence without pay for an undetermined period for “reasons personal to her,” eventually casting Suzanne Pleshette in
Lovers Must Learn
, renamed
Rome Adventure
. (Troy Donahue would be grateful for costarring with Pleshette, whom he married.) Natalie admitted, later, she was almost “over the edge.” She moved out of the white dream home on Beverly (“too many memories”), into a small, hidden house along a curve on Chalon Road in Bel Air Estates behind an imposing brick wall, a metaphor for her private torment.

Mid-July, Natalie and Warren Beatty began bumping into each other at parties. By a coincidence, Beatty’s romance with Joan Collins was coming to an end, an outcome hastened by Natalie’s sudden availability. Collins observes, “It amused me actually, because knowing Warren was the most ambitious person I’d ever met, a sizzling romance
with the hottest film star helped him
enormously
. Don’t forget he dumped Jane Fonda for me and I introduced him to everyone I knew in Hollywood.”

For Natalie, the suddenly unattached, talented, devastatingly handsome Beatty was a godsend for her shattered sense of self-worth. After saying she found R.J. with a man in their own home, “she went through, ‘It’s my fault. What’s wrong with me?’ Fortunately Beatty came along,” comments Mary Ann. “The timing was good and he was what the doctor ordered. And he was a nice guy, and he had a brain in his head.”

On July 27, Beatty took Natalie to an early screening of
West Side Story
, their first public date. Within a few days, her elderly analyst died. Though she would quickly replace him, “it hit me at a crucial point in our marriage, like the death of a father,” Natalie said later, “and shortly after that, the marriage sank like a ship going down for the last time.” Natalie signed a friendly property settlement with R.J. on August 15, evenly dividing their assets, and she and Beatty were together constantly from then on, though Natalie still had not filed for divorce, an indication of her emotional ambivalence about severing the relationship with R.J.

R.J. fled to the comparative anonymity of Europe, undergoing psychoanalysis, taking small roles in pictures by respected Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, hoping to transform himself and his career, saying, “My life went into a tailspin.” Wagner would later credit therapy, which he had feared during his first marriage to Natalie, for “curing” him. “Lots of years of analysis,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1977. “I had to learn a great deal… first I had to learn to like and respect myself, to find security within me, and in that way to achieve a kind of emotional strength I hadn’t known before.” R.J. rented a flat in London, and then took a penthouse apartment off Rome’s Via Po.

By happenstance, Joan Collins was in London shooting
The Road to Hong Kong
—a movie that Natalie, with whom she was friendly, helped her get—when R.J. arrived in the U.K. to begin filming
The Longest Day
. Much was made in gossip columns of the fact that R.J. and Collins were seen in London having dinner while their exes, Natalie and Beatty, were romantically involved in Hollywood. The “dates” between Collins and R.J. were nothing more than old friends and costars spending time together, for Collins was in ardent courtship with
Anthony Newley, soon to be her husband. She scoffs at the gossip that was published then, painting her as a woman scorned. “I never resented Natalie dating Warren… I was madly in love with Anthony Newley, so I couldn’t have cared less!”

The fact that Natalie—still technically a married woman—was conducting a public romance with rising star Beatty, vacationing with him while he was on location in Key West for
All Fall Down
, created a furor of gossip. According to Mary Ann, Natalie was suicidal at the time, “destroyed” by the dissolution of her dream. “She didn’t even think about the outside world, how it looked or anything. She was just trying to survive. I didn’t think she was ever going to pull out of it. And Beatty just happened to fall in, which was good, it helped her.”

With only whispers about what
really
ended the Wagner marriage, Louella Parsons and other columnists at first offered ridiculous theories, mostly centering on “the horrors” of Natalie and R.J.’s “white elephant” mansion, “literally falling down around them.” When Natalie began dating Beatty, the gossips seized upon a new explanation, speculating the two costars must have begun a “secret” affair during
Splendor
, tarring Beatty as the playboy predator who broke up the Wagners’ idyllic marriage, and casting Natalie as the scarlet woman.

Natalie selflessly accepted the false rumor that
she
was the one who had an extramarital affair, thereby protecting R.J. from further speculation. The Natalie-R.J.-Warren triangle would become part of the Natalie Wood Myth, with Natalie’s explanation for the breakup of their marriage known only to an intimate few. Mart Crowley, who was glued to Natalie from
Splendor
on, conceded in 1999, “Their marriage did not end because Warren Beatty came along,” hinting, “There were problems between the two of them that they needed help in working them out… sometimes love is just not enough.”

The illogic of the gossip that Natalie left R.J. because she fell madly in love with Beatty is apparent in all of the articles about Natalie at the time, characterizing her as wounded, sad, and distrustful of marriage, already recognizing with poignancy that the free-spirited Beatty would not be a permanent part of her life. Asked by one reporter if she had found happiness, Natalie looked wistful. “Doesn’t everyone search for happiness? I think most people search for what makes them happy… but I guess I haven’t found it yet.” Natalie equated happiness, at the time, with finding someone to love. “Love is the most
important thing there is. I don’t see how people can exist without love, let alone work without it.”

Despite the fact that she was the fragile victim, Natalie’s image, suddenly, was as a “callous,” heartless glamour girl who discarded her husband, stole Joan Collins’ fiancé, and would stop at nothing for stardom.

When
Splendor in the Grass
and
West Side Story
had gala New York openings nearly simultaneously in mid-October, Natalie and Beatty became the most-photographed celebrity couple in the world. They appeared, arm-in-arm, at the glittering premieres: Russian-dark Natalie, lush in white mink and white satin, her bust pushed to the skies by Hollywood magic, holding on to a sultry, sensual, formally attired Beatty as if he were her life preserver, which he was. They were the breathtaking gods of the movies, almost too beautiful to be real.