Natalie. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
All the Fine Young Cannibals didn’t break my streak of losers, but as far as the public was concerned, Natalie and I were living the movie star life and loving it. In October 1959, Frank Sinatra threw a major bash at Romanoff’s to celebrate Natalie’s twenty-first birthday as well as her fifteenth anniversary in the movies. There was an orchestra, Frank and I both toasted her, and Spencer Tracy hugged her. Then Frank, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and I formed a quartet and sang “Happy Birthday” to her. I admit I was the weak link in that particular vocal chain.
At Fox, I could feel the temperature falling. Buddy Adler had died, and the studio was now being run by Spyros Skouras, whose background was as an exhibitor. It was a field that had served Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner well in that it gave them an education in exactly what put people’s asses in seats. But Skouras was a walking, talking disaster, and he had just begun production on Cleopatra, the biggest runaway production of all time. Cleopatra would bring the studio right to the edge of the precipice, so he certainly had more important things to worry about than me.
When I would go in to complain, the studio minions would say something on the order of, “What the hell are you beefing about? You’re making thousands a week, and there are hundreds of kids out there earning nothing. We’ve done all right by you so far. We know what we’re doing.”
Actually, Darryl Zanuck had known what he was doing, but nobody else at the studio had his touch. The studio was making a mistake by keeping me a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed juvenile and not letting me play an adult, and I suppose I had been at least somewhat complicit in this as well.
That was one reason Dick Powell and I began developing a picture called Solo, about a jazz musician, somewhat in the mold of Young Man with a Horn. But it was increasingly clear to me that the studio was much more interested in catering to a new group of leading men: Brad Dillman, Richard Beymer, Tony Franciosa. They may have been comparatively untried, but they hadn’t been touched by failure either.
If my career was sputtering, my marriage was still solid. We were having a great deal of fun, and we continued to learn together. When Jack Warner bought Gypsy for Natalie, we went to New York to see the show. It was clear that it was a perfect vehicle for her and that she’d be sensational in it. Warner and Natalie gave a press conference announcing their plans for the picture, and afterward we were sitting in Jack’s office, at 550 Fifth Avenue. Natalie went down the hall to pose for some stills, leaving me sitting there with Jack Warner.
“Would you like a drink?” Jack asked, and I said yes. He poured us both a Jack Daniel’s. So there I was, sitting on Fifth Avenue having a drink with Jack Warner. I distinctly remember thinking, Life is good.
“Great, great property for Natalie,” he says. “It will be a wonderful picture.”
“She’ll be wonderful in it, Jack.”
“Who do you think should play the mother?”
“Well, Jack, in my estimation there’s only one person in the world who can play the part.”
“Who’s that?”
“Judy Garland.”
And suddenly all the good feelings vanished as Jack Warner began screaming. “That fucking cunt will never work in my studio again! Fuck her! She’s a pain in the ass, a no-talent cunt.” And that was just for starters. It was a stunning transition, because Jack Warner was a man who always effected the air of a jovial comedian. Jack Warner wanted to be liked, but he was acting like he was going to pick me up and throw me out the window, Jack Daniel’s still clutched in my hand.
As he continued ranting, it became clear why he was so angry. Right after the premiere of A Star Is Born, he had gone to a party at Judy’s house on Mapleton Drive. When he walked in, he had a vague feeling of déjà vu. Instead of dissipating, it got stronger, and then he realized what it was. Judy and Sid Luft had taken the furniture that had been used for the sets of A Star Is Born and moved it into their house. Judy Garland had stolen furniture from Jack Warner! He’d been brooding about it for years, and his anger had been building, and all it took was the mention of her name to set him off. His attitude was, “She fucked me and I’m going to fuck her!”
Warner’s outburst was a window into the ferocity of that generation of movie moguls. This had happened six years before, but as far as Jack was concerned, it was the day before yesterday. There was no sense of letting bygones be bygones, and there wasn’t even a sense of respect for Judy’s talent and the fact that she would have been far superior as Mama Rose than Rosalind Russell, who got the part. These men were so competitive! Most obviously with each other, but it went deeper than that. They didn’t want anybody getting ahead of them, on any level. Not another producer, and certainly not an actor, no matter how talented, no matter how much they needed that talent.
I have learned that in a long life we all eventually play the part of the betrayed, and we all eventually play the part of the betrayer, and neither is pleasant because both roles involve pain—inflicting it or absorbing it.
By the spring of 1960, I began to feel pressure building on our marriage. With the exception of Gypsy, Natalie felt that she had been put on the back burner by Jack Warner, and she was right: Fred Zinnemann hired Audrey Hepburn for The Nun’s Story, and Josh Logan hired Leslie Caron for Fanny. Finally, Natalie caught a break when Elia Kazan asked her to be the leading lady of Splendor in the Grass.
It didn’t start out that way. Kazan’s first choice was Diane Varsi, but she quit the business. Then he thought about Jane Fonda, but it was William Inge, who wrote the original script for Splendor, who suggested he look at Natalie. Jack Warner wasn’t happy about it and actually tried to talk Kazan out of using her; Natalie had defied him when she went on suspension after Marjorie Morningstar, and God knows, Jack could hold a grudge.
For Natalie, this was her ship coming in. Kazan was unquestionably the best actor’s director alive, and he’d made A Streetcar Named Desire, which contained Natalie’s favorite female performance. A lot of people thought Kazan was nuts to hire her; one reporter told him that she’d been good in only two movies. “Then I say she’s got it,” Gadge said. “Two pictures is a hell of a lot of pictures.” While the script was by William Inge, not Tennessee Williams, it had both authority and emotional authenticity.
Natalie was so hungry for the part that she even agreed to test for it. She told Kazan that she wanted a new career, and Gadge recognized her power as an actress and her willpower as a person; she got the part. What was unsaid but clearly indicated by the fact of that screen test was that she was willing to put herself completely in his hands—one of those things that every director wants to hear.
Fox had postponed Solo, so I was able to accompany Natalie to New York, where all of Splendor in the Grass was shot, beginning in the spring of 1960. We rented an apartment on Sutton Place that Bill Inge found for us—he lived in the same building. The exteriors were shot on Staten Island and in upstate New York, which stood in for Kansas, and the interiors were shot at the Filmways studio.
Elia Kazan, who became a good friend of mine, said in his memoirs that Natalie and Warren Beatty began an affair on Splendor in the Grass, that I was on the set, and that my humiliation was a terrible thing to see. I was indeed on the set when they were on location, but I honestly didn’t see any evidence of an affair.
There’s another scenario: Beatty had nothing to do with our breakup, and Natalie didn’t begin to see him until after we split. I choose to believe the latter. Now, it’s within the realm of possibility that the affair began earlier, but I don’t think that’s what happened for one simple reason: she would have told me.
Here’s what all the speculation about this period of our lives fails to take into account: both of us were serious about the marriage, and we were always straight with each other.
Let me put it another way: I never knew Natalie to tell me a lie. Affairs were not part of our equation. I had been faithful to her, and she had been faithful to me. If she had been sleeping with Beatty, she would have told me. Mart Crowley, who was with Natalie throughout Splendor, also thought nothing happened until much later. As a matter of fact, she initially disliked Beatty because she thought he didn’t bathe enough—scruffiness supposedly equaled authenticity, at least according to the Actors Studio.
I do know that Splendor in the Grass constituted a critical time for Natalie. The material was emotional and sensual, she worshiped Kazan, who properly set a very high bar for her performance, and Warren Beatty was…attractive. A good actor, a great sense of humor. He even played the piano.
Perhaps the core problem was in something Kazan said years later: “So many actresses, you feel they have a private life, a husband and kids, and acting has a place. But, with Natalie, acting was her whole life.” At this point in her career, I think Kazan was right—Natalie’s success or failure as an actress was more important to her than anything else. Including me.
Whether or not Beatty made the crucial difference in our marriage breaking up, I do not know. I do know that with Natalie, I always had a fear of a third party coming between us. Anytime you are involved with a beautiful woman, you can see that other men respond to her the same way you do. You have to have a lot of self-confidence to cope with the ultimate questions: Would she like him better than me? Would he please her more than I can?
Because of Natalie’s innate radiance, she couldn’t help attracting every man around her, so there was always a certain unease on my part. And when Splendor in the Grass came around, there was an added sense of fear. When such a fear is combined with the feeling that you’re not being responded to in the way you expect, things can get very edgy, very fast.
After she finished Splendor in the Grass on August 16, she had exactly two days off before beginning rehearsals with Jerome Robbins for West Side Story. The Mirisch brothers, who were producing the picture, offered her one of two deals: a flat salary of $250,000, or $200,000 plus 5 percent of the profits. I advised her to take the percentage instead of the extra $50,000, but Abe Lastfogel pointed out that musicals had been in a downward spiral for years and there was no guarantee that West Side Story would do any better than Les Girls or any of the other musicals that had been laying eggs. The only successful musical in the recent past had been Gigi.
“Take the $50,000,” Abe said, and she did. West Side Story is still playing, still earning money. She spent the rest of her life regretting the deal, but that’s the business—even the brightest agents and managers make mistakes. In the future, whenever she was offered a percentage instead of flat salary, she took the percentage, with very good results.
It was around this time that Natalie began to put together the support system that was with her for the rest of her life. Mart Crowley was a go-fer on Splendor in the Grass, and he would go on to write The Boys in the Band as well as be a mainstay for me on Hart to Hart. She met Howard Jeffrey when he worked on West Side Story. The triumvirate was completed by the actress Norma Crane. Unlike many stars’ friends, Mart, Howard, and Norma weren’t competitive with each other at all, perhaps because they were all different kinds of people. Although they were Natalie’s friends before they were mine, I grew to love them as well.
All these people benefited from being close to Natalie, because one of her greatest gifts was kindness. Natalie paid for Mart’s first six months of analysis. When Tom Mankiewicz, who also became part of our circle, bought his first house, she used her decorator’s license to get dealers to sell him stuff cheap. Then she threw a housewarming party and invited big shots whom Tom didn’t even know, but who she knew would bring him presents that he really needed.
As she began work on West Side Story, Natalie was under so much pressure; her career was approaching white heat, and mine was no more than lukewarm. What made things even worse was that making West Side Story was miles of bad road. Jerome Robbins was incredibly demanding and difficult, so much so that he threw the shooting an entire month behind schedule. The producers waited until October to fire him because it was imperative that the musical numbers be superlatively shot, and Robbins did almost all of those. The book scenes were less important, and those were finished by codirector Robert Wise.
Natalie was furious about Robbins’s firing and threatened to quit the picture unless he was reinstated. Both Abe Lastfogel and Robbins told her that was foolish, and she went back to work. Then she got furious all over again when the producers overdubbed her singing with Marni Nixon’s. All this turmoil couldn’t help but be reflected in our married life, and things continued to deteriorate, even after the movie was finally finished.
None of the arguments were about anything that could be objectively regarded as important, but Natalie’s intensity and my fears magnified every trivial disagreement into a critical blowout. In February 1961, Mart Crowley moved into an apartment we had over the garage. He thought our marriage was hanging by a thread, and not a sturdy one. As for me, Abe Lastfogel had arranged a three-picture deal at Columbia. The first one up was a comedy called Sail a Crooked Ship, written and directed by Irving Brecher, from a novel by Nathaniel Benchley. Irv had written for the Marx Brothers and was one of Groucho’s best friends. Irv was and is a delightful man, very attuned to comedy, and he surrounded me with funny people—Ernie Kovacs, Frank Gorshin, and Frankie Avalon among them. But he was a much better writer than he was a director, and the movie itself, while not bad, simply wasn’t strong enough to lift me out of the trough I had fallen into, and I knew it.
My insecurities were mounting, as were our disagreements. We argued. We made up. We argued again. I would give Natalie gifts to apologize for the argument, and then we would argue again. And the pressure mounted. It had gotten to the point where we were almost never alone. There was always an agent on the phone, or the studio, or a publicist. Everybody was fluttering around trying to keep her together; she was very nervous, and all of this was taking place away from me.
I can see now that I was not that sympathetic or understanding about Natalie’s needs. She told me that she wanted to go into analysis; she was overpowered by the pressure of her work, going from one movie to another, and the movies were getting bigger and bigger. She felt that therapy would help her. After all those years of Jack Warner giving her films from the back of the cupboard, she was suddenly getting major movies; it became a case of “Be careful what you wish for.”
And I was standing there saying, “What about us? They’re just parts in a movie.” What I really meant, of course, was “What about me?”
I was excluded from almost everything that was happening to her, and I was jealous. I wanted us to spend more time together, and she wanted to stay on the merry-go-round, even if it was going faster and faster. And I felt that her going into analysis implied a failure on my part.
In June 1961, we got into a terrible, terrible argument. There was a lot of yelling that ascended to screaming. The argument culminated in Natalie running to her parents, which was a measure of her desperation, because her parents had spent her life running to her.
That same week we announced that we were going through a trial separation but had no plans for a divorce. We had been married for three and a half years. From the coverage in the papers, you’d have thought we’d killed the Lindbergh baby.
In our own minds, we had always been an ideal couple, and the media had picked up on that and spread it around the world. We were about to endure the sort of coverage that was being thrown at Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Eddie Fisher, which was no help at all.
Looking back, I can see that some of the attitudes of Robert Wagner Sr. were coming out in his son—it was “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-a-man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do.” Utterly stupid, not to mention counterproductive, but that’s the way I felt.
It wasn’t really professional jealousy I was feeling. I’ve always known that the movie business is completely cyclical—roll a seven and the waves part; roll snake-eyes and the waves close over your head. I was never one to sit there and whine, “How come I’m not working for Kazan?” It was the fact that Natalie was less and less of a presence in our life, and I didn’t handle it well. Had I had more maturity, or taken some steps back, the divorce might not have happened.
The irony is that I was threatened by the idea of analysis. I told her, “Try to do it on your own,” but she couldn’t. Nobody could. We were both paralyzed by our individual insecurities. We still loved each other—I don’t think we ever stopped loving each other—but we could no longer communicate with each other. Our emotional vocabulary had deteriorated.
Warren Beatty really came into the picture after she left the house. That summer, when I read about the two of them as the hot young couple around town, I wanted to kill that son of a bitch. The one thing I did not want to have happen was have him move into my life and break up my marriage. That was the absolute bottom. I felt as if the ground I had been standing on was being systematically cut from beneath me. I was also totally humiliated, in a way I’d never felt before and, thank God, have never felt since. Life magazine was calling Beatty “the most exciting American male in movies,” and my last four or five pictures had been flops. How would you feel?
At one point, after their affair made the papers, just after Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “The way Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty are carrying on…it’s a wonder they have time to eat,” I was hanging around outside his house with a gun, hoping he would walk out. I not only wanted to kill him, I was prepared to kill him. I was living out of a suitcase, staying with Mart Crowley some nights, John Foreman and his wife other nights. At the same time, I was opening up our house on Beverly Drive and walking around at night, sleeping in our bed, smelling Natalie on the sheets. I was, in short, a mess—on the verge of a complete emotional meltdown.
Maintaining a troubled marriage with two people is difficult but possible; maintaining a troubled marriage with three people can’t be done. I was desperate, ripped wide open, and going slowly downhill. I drank a lot in this period, although I didn’t tip over into alcoholism. I don’t have the compulsive personality that alcoholics have; if they’re not drinking, they’re gambling or snorting or eating, and I’ve always been able to control my appetites. I poured my sorrows into bottles, not cases.
One night I went by the house to get some things. The house was empty, and a mood of desolation washed over me that was just overwhelming. I thought everything was coming to an end—my marriage, my career, the life I had painstakingly built up for the last dozen years, all of it leaking away. I remember thinking that if I couldn’t kill Beatty, maybe I should kill myself.
There was a knock at the front door. I didn’t answer it. Then there was a knock at the side door. Persistent. Finally, I opened the door. It was our old friend John Foreman. He came in and said, “What’s going on?”
“I just don’t think I can make it,” I said. And John held me and stayed there with me and helped me. It was John who got me into analysis, which slowly enabled me to put the pieces of my life back together.
After John talked me into going to see somebody, I thought of trying the LSD therapy that Cary Grant swore by, and I went to see the same doctor. He scared the living hell out of me. While I was talking to him in his office, I could hear moans coming from a back room, and I noticed there were suspicious stains on his rugs. While we were talking, he was spinning a record around on a turntable and trying to play it with his fingernail. Finally, he said, “I don’t know if you’re capable of this therapy,” which was precisely the decision I had come to on my own. On the other hand, he helped a lot of people besides Cary. Eventually, my second wife, Marion, went through that LSD therapy, and it did her some good.
Throughout this perilous, ragged time, John and Linda Foreman held me together. I was at their house every afternoon, drinking and crying. Sometimes I crashed at Mart Crowley’s place, some nights I spent on Guy McElwaine’s couch. Other times, I would just sit in a near-catatonic trance. Bob Conrad was very helpful at this point, but it was really a man named Gerald Aronson who made the difference. He was my therapist, he made himself available to me at any time, and he helped get me through some of the longest nights of my life.
Throughout this time, I remained crazy in love with Natalie. I did not want a divorce, but she was very involved with Warren and felt that she had to give things some space—in other words, spend more time with Warren. Friends did what friends always do in this situation—you get variations of the “there’s lots of fish in the sea” speech, and they introduce you to lovely single women.
I couldn’t have cared less. I was only interested in a reconciliation with Natalie, and I had no interest in starting something else that could possibly derail a reconciliation down the road.
Solo, the movie Dick Powell and I had developed, was supposed to be a serious picture about a jazz musician. Dick had gotten André Previn to compose the jazz score, and the picture was shaping up as something special. But Fox had reshaped it into a project that could have been made by Sam Katzman; now there were supposed to be a lot of currently hot rock-and-roll stars doing numbers, and they wanted me to work opposite Jayne Mansfield. In other words, it was supposed to be a follow-up to The Girl Can’t Help It, which neither Dick Powell nor I wanted to get anywhere near. I went on suspension.
The last thing Fox offered me was a western with Elvis Presley called Flaming Star. If I’d done that, it would have taken the “jaws of life” to free up my career, because nobody ever paid attention to any other man in an Elvis Presley picture—Colonel Tom Parker made sure of that.
Between my career and my marriage, it was game, set, match. It was at this point that I decided to leave it, all of it, and go to Europe and start over. I had loved living and working there when Spencer Tracy and I made The Mountain, and going back gradually became a goal in my mind. The most charitable view of my situation would be that I was standing still; a more realistic view was that I was losing ground, and fast. I had to move, had to do something to alter the chemistry of my life and career. It was either flip out or flip the page. I chose the latter.
What was happening all around me made it that much easier. Hollywood was falling apart, and Fox wasn’t doing well either. The mood on the lot was different because the people who had been there in 1949 weren’t around much anymore. There had always been a family feeling at Fox—the same wardrobe people, the same technical crews. If a grip worked at Fox, he had fifty-two weeks of work a year, or close to it. Likewise, it seemed like my dear old friend Joe MacDonald was always the cameraman. It wasn’t so unionized that a carpenter couldn’t put an electric plug in a wall or a lighting man couldn’t lift a piece of lumber. There was a certain esprit de corps; everybody worked together to make the film. We worked a full day on Saturday, and if a picture was supposed to be shot in thirty-five days, you better believe that it was finished on that thirty-fifth day, no more, no less. Overtime? Forget about it.
But by the late 1950s, business was down, the crews were being let go, and people were hired by the picture. All the crews and costumers, who were devoted to their jobs and to the studio and to the picture, had to start freelancing, and I think the quality of the movies was subtly affected. It was the beginning of a crucial transition in the business—from several generations of people whose concern was what was happening on the studio floor to several generations of people who were more interested in the programming and the marketing.
Darryl was still in Europe and had no intention of coming back anytime soon. I had been making movies for twelve years and was no longer the fair-haired boy, to say the least. I believed that if I went to Europe, where the most interesting movies were being made, I could get the kind of work I wanted to do and perhaps start my life over again. As for Natalie, I was still holding out some hope that we might be able to reconcile somewhere down the road.
Abe Lastfogel was my agent, and I told him I wanted out of Fox. Abe agreed that it sounded like a plan, so we went to see Spyros Skouras. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with the company,” Skouras began. He seemed to be honestly distressed about the way things were going, even though he was one of the primary reasons behind the deteriorating situation. But at this point, that wasn’t my problem. I told him I wanted to leave the studio; I had had it.
Skouras said that he wanted to keep me at Fox and wanted to renegotiate and keep me on—maybe at the same salary. Abe started talking about a raise. While they were talking, I flashed back to a conversation I’d had with Spencer Tracy. “Get out,” he said. “The quicker the better. Leaving MGM was the smartest, not to mention the most lucrative, decision I ever made.”
It was at that point that Skouras revisited the Elvis picture, and I said that wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. I held firm; Abe and I told Skouras that I wanted out. Skouras said he didn’t understand any of this; hadn’t the studio taken me from nothing, from a $75 a week contract actor to someone whose face was known around the world?
“Spyros,” said Abe, “I think we need to move on.”
“The bottom line,” said Skouras, “is that we want him here.”
“That’s not our bottom line,” Abe said.
And then Skouras uttered the magic phrase: “If he doesn’t stay here, I will see that he doesn’t work anywhere.” Well, Abe didn’t scream, but he got extremely angry, as angry as I ever saw him. “How can you speak about him like that?” From pretending to be fatherly, Skouras had slipped right into pretending to be a gangster, and he didn’t have the personality for either part. We left that office with my release from Fox.
I’ve always retained a sense of surprise about that meeting. Perhaps I was naive, but I had thought the meeting would be consummated with more grace. I would have been perfectly happy to let them have an option for a picture or two in exchange for my release—there is always room for negotiation in a negotiation—but Skouras poured gasoline on what was actually a modest flame.
It was always about power with those guys. Skouras wanted his way, not because there was a good reason for it, but simply because it was his way. Fox wasn’t going to do anything for me that it hadn’t already done, and we both knew it. The difference was that he couldn’t admit it.
I began to sell everything I had that could be sold. What I couldn’t sell or put into storage I gave away; I even gave away Conroy, the wonderful Lab that Bing Crosby gave me. Natalie and I divided everything down the middle. The house we had bought for $90,000 and dropped nearly $100,000 into sold for around $185,000—we managed to avoid a bloodbath, the only bloodbath I had been able to avoid for a long time.
On my last day in Los Angeles, Abe and Frances Lastfogel drove me to the airport. Abe was very paternal and supportive during the ride, which, God knows, I needed. As for my father, he was consistent—he stayed in La Jolla that day. He wasn’t crazy about me relocating to Europe, but then he hadn’t been crazy about me becoming an actor either.
It was a quiet departure. I just got on the plane and left. About all I took with me were my clothes and a few belongings. I had no intention of coming back anytime soon, but then I had no real sense of what was actually happening: the great movie studios were in their death throes. Nobody really believed that the studio system, the way Hollywood had run and defined itself ever since Cecil B. DeMille opened up a little studio on the corner of Vine and Selma in 1913, was self-destructing. Sure, TV was tough competition, but hadn’t it produced more jobs for more actors?
I had no sense of the old order dying; rather, I was focused on the wonderful pictures that were being made in England, France, and Italy. I meant to get into some of them. No, that isn’t correct. I had to get into some of them. This wasn’t about want, this was about need; it was a question of survival.
On the trip to the airport, on the plane to London, I tried hard to cling to my residual optimism, as I have all my life. I believed that the future had to be better than the recent past. All I had to do was be there. All I had to do was strike a match.
A heartbroken actor in Rome, on the terrace of his new apartment, 1962. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ARALDO DI CROLLALANZA)