“My mother used to tell me, ‘No matter what they ask you … always say yes. You can learn later.’”
Best known as the beautiful lead in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Splendor in the Grass (1961). The daughter of impoverished Russian immigrants, Natalie Wood was pushed into show business by her famously ambitious mother, Maria “Mud” Gurdin, making her screen debut at age four in Happy Land (1943). She continued to work as a child actor, appearing in Miracle on 34th Street and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (both 1947), before landing her first major role, opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Wood was again nominated for an Academy Award, this time for Best Actress, for Splendor in the Grass. This proved to be the most fertile period of her career, as she appeared in two musicals, West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962), and the romantic comedy Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), for which she received another Oscar nod. After the birth of her first child in 1970, Wood would appear only sporadically on television and in the occasional feature. She drowned off the coast of Santa Catalina Island during a break in the picture Brainstorm.
IF THEY WERE GOING to do this, they needed to do it right. Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams, both cast in Rebel Without a Cause, had just returned from the liquor store with several cases of champagne. Little more than kids, obsessed with emulating their Hollywood idols, they’d decided what they really needed to do this night was have an orgy, because that’s what John Garfield used to do. It would be the two of them and Natalie Wood. (Can you have an orgy with just three people? Isn’t that called something else?) Wood had said she was up for it, under one condition: she’d need to bathe in champagne first—like Jean Harlow.
One of the perks of being a young star, as Natalie Wood had been, is that you get away with things other kids can’t. The flipside, of course, is that you lose your childhood to Hollywood. At fifteen, Wood was sipping wine at Frank Sinatra’s house, her mother, Mud, having thrust the teenager on the thirty-eight-year-old. Soon Wood began to smoke and to drink heavily. At sixteen she was ordering drinks at Villa Capri and Ciro’s, passing out on Zombies at frat parties in the Hollywood Hills. By the time she hooked up with Hopper (he’d already been cast in Rebel, she had yet to be), she was more sophisticated than anyone she knew her age and in many ways more immature. Her friend Margaret O’Brien, similarly a former child star, described Wood’s affectations, her mink stoles and cigarette holders, as nothing more than “a feint, a look, an attitude.” A little girl playing dress-up.
Hopper, just two years older, was a newcomer to the movie industry, but already was displaying the insolent, self-destructive behavior that would make him its enfant terrible by the 1970s. Eager to impress Wood—some said it was genuine affection, others opportunism—he’d taken her out drinking one night in Los Angeles before shooting began on Rebel and wound up flipping his car somewhere in Laurel Canyon. Wood, thrown into the street and knocked out cold, had to be rushed to the hospital. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she kept telling the police to call Nicholas Ray (the director of Rebel and her secret lover) instead of her mother, Mud. Wood’s rebellious spirit, her desire to break away, impressed Ray greatly, who was at her bedside when she awoke. “They called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent,” she told the director, “Now do I get the part?” As for Mud, she would eventually find out about both affairs, but according to Hopper, always looking to advance her daughter’s career, complained to Warner Bros. only about him, not Ray. It would remain quite the circus, Wood sleeping with Ray and Hopper (and maybe Nick Adams), and Ray sleeping with Wood and, given his bisexuality, maybe Sal Mineo. While James Dean was left odd man out.
One of the perks of being a young star, as Natalie Wood had been, is that you get away with things other kids can’t. The flipside, of course, is that you lose your childhood to Hollywood.
Fast forward several months. Rebel was complete, and here were Wood and Hopper and Adams, living out their wildest movie-star fantasies at a cabin in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles. Eager to get the orgy underway, they poured bottle after bottle of champagne into the cabin’s bathtub. Wood dipped her toe in: this was glamour. In went the rest of her—but not for long. Because as soon as her most sensitive areas came in contact with the alcohol, she shrieked in pain. Her vagina, she screamed, was on fire! And thus was the orgy extinguished.
