Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Thomas Thompson, who became a close friend of Natalie’s the year before while writing for
Life
, would compare Natalie to Monroe in this period, using the metaphor of the front end of a roller-coaster going down. “I remember evenings when Natalie would disappear into her bathroom and take her Seconals and then beseech me to sit beside her until they took effect, until her eyes were falling and her words were blurring and she was finally able to achieve a few hours of drugged blackness until an unwelcome dawn. Had the headline writers found the same tragic verbs for her as they had for Marilyn Monroe, it would have saddened but not surprised most of her close friends.”
The only rainbow over the horizon for Natalie was a script called
Love with the Proper Stranger
, for which she rejected
Charade
, typically forming a bond with the character, in this case an endearingly plucky Macy’s salesgirl from a close Italian-American family who falls in love backward, by first getting pregnant and then being courted. The storyline, which featured a near-abortion, was controversial for 1963, but Natalie recognized the intelligence of the script and the dimensions of Angie, the brave, scrappy salesgirl from Little Italy struggling to break away from her overprotective family, unwilling to settle for anything less than romance that was real.
“She loved it,” recalls Lana. “She loved the character, she liked everything about it. Natalie felt that it was one of the chances she got to show people that she could act. That she wasn’t just a little cookie, that she was an actress.”
It appealed to Natalie that Angie was an ordinary girl, that she was “real,” saying later that she drew on “the healthier parts” of herself to play her, meeting with the screenwriter, Arnold Schulman, so that he could use aspects of
her
in Angie, proud of the fact that Angie was her
“least neurotic role.” The film was even shot in naturalistic black-and-white, part of the French New Wave, then in vogue.
Natalie and Beatty had already broken up several times before she arrived in New York in March of 1963 to start
Love with the Proper Stranger
. Their romance was in its last gasp during filming, as Beatty flew back and forth between New York, Hollywood and London, preparing to star in
Lilith
. Natalie’s costars in the new picture were Edie Adams, stage actor Tom Bosley (later the father on
Happy Days)
, and a sexy Steve McQueen, playing Angie’s hipster musician boyfriend who is averse to marriage.
“She was able to use, obviously, her relationship with Beatty in some of the scenes with McQueen, there’s no question about it,” recalls Bosley, who was aware of the tenuousness of Natalie’s romance with Beatty, as was Edie Adams. “She was vulnerable to anything at that point,” in Adams’ view. “She was more fragile than people thought. We all took care to take care.”
Natalie would remember
Love with the Proper Stranger
as “the most rewarding experience I had in films, all the way around… my personal life was quite meager then, and the picture was ‘it.’ We were like a family.” In fact, Natalie met two of the people she would request on future pictures: costume designer Edith Head, and a hairdresser named Maryce Bates (known also as “Sugar,” “Ginger,” and currently as Ginger Blymer.).
McQueen’s petite brunette wife, Neile Adams, who was on set constantly, felt Natalie was “a little crazed” and “was making a play” for Steve. She mentioned it to her husband. “During the movie, she’d do things like—you know, she’d always bump into him, or she’d see him on the street and she’d say, ‘Hi, Steven,’ and position herself for that. She was there—much like Steve used to do when he and I were going together in New York, where I would look around and he would be there.”
Bill Claxton, a photographer who took movie stills of the actors and became close to Natalie and especially McQueen, believed Natalie “fell in love with Steve,” a suggestion Lana, who was at the location in New York with Maria, questions. Natalie said later she thought she and McQueen “were good together,” referring to their on-screen dynamics.
Neile Adams did not consider Natalie’s flirting a “big, serious thing,” and found her “darling,” “warm,” and “kind.” Adams was confident
“nothing ever happened” between Natalie and her husband during filming, an opinion Lana shares. “Natalie didn’t do that. She really didn’t do things like that.” Lana, who was seventeen with a divorce in her past by then, was surprised at her older sister’s “very old-fashioned moral code.” Natalie told Lana that when she went to bed with a man, it was “a commitment.”
Natalie’s chemistry with McQueen, her affinity for Angie, and her camaraderie with her costars contributed to one of her best, most natural performances, leading to a third Academy Award nomination the following winter.
Edie Adams, who was a friend of Marilyn Monroe’s, noticed a similar quality in Natalie as an actress to Monroe. “She had this way of communicating her innermost thoughts and feelings as if it was just for
you
, and the camera was the person watching. Everybody in the movie theater thought, ‘My God, she’s doing that just for me.’ ” Adams also noticed that Natalie, like Monroe, “didn’t really realize how good she was. She would take you through every thought she had, without saying words, as Marilyn did.”
Natalie and the rest of the cast completed their New York location work on
Love with the Proper Stranger
the middle of April. Director Robert Mulligan shot the last five days at a studio in Hollywood filming interior scenes, many of them with a slightly nervous Tom Bosley, who joined the cast late and was starring in his first picture.
Natalie returned to the house atop San Ysidro, and the gypsy Beatty flew to L.A. to join her for a few days prior to beginning
Lilith
on the East Coast. Lana later recalled things “coming to a head” one night when Beatty was late for a dinner party, resulting in an explosive argument with Beatty slamming the door. “He was a beast, you know,” Sugar Bates, Natalie’s hairdresser, recalls, only half in jest. “She’d have something for them to do, and he’d never tell her where he was. He always kept her on the edge. I always felt he was really good for a girl to go out with, because boy, she’d appreciate the next person she went with!”
On April 26, Tom Bosley’s last day of filming, Natalie left the set early. Bosley was disappointed he had not gotten to express his appreciation to Natalie “for being so nice during the filming,” since he was leaving for New York that night. While he was in his hotel room packing, he got a call from a woman working for Natalie, “who said, ‘Mr.
Bosley, Miss Wood apologizes for not getting to say goodbye to you. She would like you and your wife to join her for dinner at Chasen’s tonight.’ ” When Bosley explained that he had airline tickets for that night, “she said, ‘That’s already been taken care of. You’re flying back tomorrow.’”
Natalie hadn’t arrived when Bosley and his wife, Jean, walked into Chasen’s at eight, but producer Alan Pakula was waiting for them, with actress Hope Lange, Pakula’s girlfriend and a friend of Natalie’s. Lange ordered a Hobo steak, “and it takes a couple of hours to cook the damn thing, so we talked and no Natalie,” recalls Bosley. “So the evening went on—nine, nine-thirty, and no Natalie. And my wife kept saying, ‘Where’s Miss Wood?’ and I said, ‘Honey, it’s
Natalie
, I’ve worked with her, you can call her Natalie.’ And I could tell from the look in Alan’s face that he kind of knew where she was. And she finally showed up, had to be between ten and ten-thirty.”
When Natalie got to the table, “she was obviously shaken,” remembers Bosley. She apologized for being late, explaining to Pakula, Hope Lange and the Bosleys, “she was at the airport breaking off with Beatty. It was the final kiss-off.” Natalie was charming to Bosley and his wife, but Bosley noticed she kept giving Pakula and Lange “that look, ‘Shit, look what I just went through.’ ” According to Bosley, Natalie “was strong about it, because I understand
she
did the breaking off, not he. He wanted her to come and say goodbye to him at the airport and she decided to say goodbye to
him
.”
The story would eventually circulate—another of the Natalie Wood myths and legends—that Natalie’s romance with Beatty ended at Chasen’s when he excused himself to go to the men’s room and left with a blond hatcheck girl for a week, returning to Natalie’s house to find all his clothes burned to ashes.
Natalie did set fire to Beatty’s clothes when he flew to New York to make
Lilith
, from what she told Joan Collins, but she remained on friendly terms with Beatty after the breakup, contrary to Natalie Wood lore. “Because Natalie was very—she knew what Warren was like,” Lana explains. “I mean, you cannot ever dislike Warren, because he’s completely open and honest and adorable.”
Natalie was at sea without a man in her life, or her movie family, to keep her company. “I remember the last day in
Love with the Proper Stranger
,” she told the
New York Times
two years later. “I was supposed
to cry in my last scene, but I could not cry for the camera. Then, during the wrap party, I could not stop crying.” Mud’s closest friend heard about Natalie’s constant calls to her mother. “There was nobody in her life and she would get very depressed.”
Natalie removed the photograph of Beatty from an eight-by-ten frame next to her bed, “and on the cardboard that was in the frame, she drew a big question mark, like, ‘Who’s gonna be next?’ ” She found a new rental house below Mulholland, a terra-cotta cottage on Coldwater Canyon, and set out to find the man whose picture could replace Beatty’s in her frame.
She encountered him at a party in May. Natalie’s new boyfriend was an old friend named Arthur Loew, Jr., the lanky, middle-aged heir to the Loews’ Theater fortune, who specialized in rescuing high-profile Hollywood beauties in the aftermath of painful breakups, setting them free when a more exciting man came along. His damsels in distress had included Janet Leigh, Joan Collins, Debbie Reynolds, Tyrone Power’s widow, Debbie, and now Natalie. “He was a friend to all of us,” Reynolds explains, “and he loved women and he loved to be your boyfriend without taking you to bed. He really wanted to hold your hand and be the gentleman, take you out and teach you about all the good things in life. Arthur, who was a very, very rich man, was the sweetest.”
Natalie needed a soothing man after the emotional tempests with Beatty, someone to chase away her hobgoblins. “With Arthur Loew, Jr., she used to laugh a lot,” recalls Edd Byrnes, who was married to actress Asa Maynor, one of Natalie’s closest friends. The angular-looking Loew, who bore a slight resemblance to playwright Arthur Miller, was not the Greek god Beatty was, but “Arthur was the funniest man I’ve ever known,” acknowledges Natalie’s makeup man and companion, Jiras. “Nicest, kindest, generous… but what is important is that Arthur was all laughs.”
When R.J. moved back to Hollywood and married Marion Marshall, two days after Natalie’s twenty-fifth birthday, Natalie began to suggest, in the gossip columns, that she might marry Loew, who gave her a $10,000 sable coat that fall.
She tried to fill the emotional void in her life with fame, and by starting a new picture,
Sex and the Single Girl
, the title of a pop bestseller by Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of
Cosmopolitan
. Warner
Brothers bought the film rights for $200,000, essentially buying the title, since the book did not have a plot. The original screenwriter created a romantic comedy with Natalie as Helen Brown, a famous author-psychologist, wooed by a sexy but sleazy journalist, played by Tony Curtis. Director Richard Quine hired Joseph Heller, the author of
Catch-22
, to do a rewrite. Heller recalled, “Natalie Wood owed a picture to Warner Brothers and she wanted to get it out of the way, and Richard Quine needed money to buy a house.”
Natalie’s contractual list of demands to appear in the movie was almost as long as the script, beginning with a salary of $160,000. In the pantheon of female stars, she had achieved a degree of power second only to Elizabeth Taylor, whom she still looked to as a role model. Natalie’s Warner Brothers contract set forth, in minutiae, requirements for a luxurious portable dressing room (down to the color of the phone). She requested white cigarette holders from a shop in London, a special oil of gardenia available in Cairo, and stipulated days off during her menstrual period, when “she would get twisted, really terrible,” recalls assistant director Phil Ball. “The lower part of the skin under her eyes would practically get black, and we just couldn’t photograph her.”
Natalie insisted on Bob Jiras or Eddie Butterworth to do her makeup, Sugar Bates or Sydney Guilaroff to style her hair, Edith Head to design her costumes, and Roselle Gordon as her stand-in. She included the standard clause employing her mother to answer her fan mail, with Maria signing publicity stills “Natalie Wood.” Mart Crowley continued as Natalie’s “best girlfriend,” and she hired a dancer she met on
West Side Story
, Howard Jeffrey, as a fill-in personal secretary/companion. Jeffrey and Crowley “were an item.”
Natalie’s movie star entourage, as it would be viewed, was really an emotional support system; a family, of sorts, to keep her from being alone. She admitted, in a televised documentary, that she would “panic” without them on set. Tony Curtis, her three-time costar, noticed, “Natalie
always
needed
somebody
. Always needed somebody running her life. She always had two or three guys, or somebody.”
She bought an extra ticket every time she had to fly, making sure someone from her trusted circle was beside her on the plane. “She didn’t like to fly, but to fly alone, it was hell for her,” states Jiras. Once in 1964, when Jiras missed a flight, Natalie refused to speak to him for
days, even though her business secretary, Mona Clark, was on the plane next to her. “I was
alone
,” she later told Jiras.
The two invisible members of Natalie’s entourage were her psychoanalyst, Dr. John Lindon; and Maria. She phoned them both, every day, in ritualistic fashion: her mother in the morning, and Dr. Lindon at noon.