Chapter 3
Natasha with her grandmother Baba (center) and Natalie on Christmas Day, 1974.
My maternal grandparents, Baba and Deda, were fixtures of my childhood. When I watch old home movies from that time, they are almost always there, either in the background or part of the action itself. I loved being around them. They spoke with funny accents, and they were always kissing and hugging me and talking to me in their make-believe-sounding language: “Natashinka, moya princessa, lyu blu.”
My grandmother had raven-black hair cut in bangs and dark blue eyes, like a grown-up Snow White. She always wore long ornate gowns of crushed velvet in shades of deep emerald or purple often embellished with shimmering metallic appliqués or gold brocade. When I visited my grandparents at their home, my grandmother would be chattering away, standing over the stove making strange brews. My grandpa was much quieter, more docile, and altogether less dramatic than my grandmother. He had dark hair and an impish smile, eyes that looked straight into the depths of yours. He played with me, carrying me on his shoulders, pushing me in my swing, letting me bury him under my stuffed animals. He played an instrument that looked like a guitar but had a silly name—balalaika—and sang to me in Russian. According to my parents, Deda wanted to go back to Russia, his homeland, but felt it was no longer his, and so he drank too much.
To visit my grandparents was to follow the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole. Wherever we lived, whether it was in Palm Springs or Los Angeles, they always had a house close by. Any and all childlike possibilities existed at their place. My grandma let me have sugary treats whenever my heart desired, something that was closely monitored in my mother’s house. Their home smelled of sautéed onions and garlic, and the warm, lumpy stew that Baba brought to me in small bowls always tasted delicious. Whenever I visited, there was a new toy for me, a little handmade doll or a stuffed animal. The dolls were so different from the ones you could buy from the toy store. They wore makeup and jewelry and had colorful ribbons tied in their hair. Even when Baba gave me a store-bought doll, she made sure to enhance her by adding fancy clothes, rhinestones, and a tiara or crown. An ordinary doll wouldn’t have been special enough.
Like the dolls she made for me, Baba was always bejeweled. For special occasions, she wore real jewelry of gold and precious or semiprecious stones. On an average day at home, she adorned herself with costume necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. She loved to wear her birthstone, amethyst—purple, the color of royalty. If we were going out for dinner, Baba made up her face, and when she did, her lipstick and eyeliner were usually painted a little askew, as if she had applied them in a bathroom by candlelight. When I snuggled in my grandmother’s arms, I remember the heavy fabrics she wore emitting a musty odor, mingling with the powdery notes of her White Shoulders perfume. After she sat on the sofa in our home, the pillows smelled like her for days. Baba’s birthday was February 8 (the same day as James Dean’s). I remember my parents buying her birthday jewelry sparkling with little purple amethysts and taking her to dinner at a restaurant she loved, the Hawaiian-themed Luau in Beverly Hills, where she was treated to her favorite dessert, lychee nuts on ice.
But the thing that defined Baba most of all was the intensity of her love for me and my mom. Her passionate affection for us was fierce, unwavering, even overwhelming. When I was with her, she didn’t leave my side, just as she had never left my mom’s side when she was a little girl. Baba hovered, she exclaimed excitedly at my every word, she was my biggest and most adoring fan.
When I was about six, my hair was light golden brown, much lighter than my mom’s, and was cut in a feathered pageboy. I remember one afternoon, Baba coming to visit. She had been to the beauty salon, where she had instructed the hairdresser to lighten, cut, and style her hair exactly like mine.
“Look, Natashinka,” she said, grinning broadly, “we have the same hair now!”
Baba had gone from having black hair like Snow White to having light brown hair like mine. As a child, I didn’t think Baba’s new hairdo seemed strange. I considered Baba my grown-up child friend, and so in some way, her matching haircut just made sense. Looking back, however, it seems quite bizarre that an adult woman would want to look like a little girl. But that was Baba. For her, love meant fusing with the object of your adoration so completely that you even looked exactly the same.
Deeply religious, my grandmother filled each of her apartments with golden, glimmering icons, placed reverently in the corners of each room. Almost every time Baba came to our house, she brought a tiny bag of Russian holy flowers and a vial of holy water. I knew the drill. After hugging me, Baba opened the golden oval-shaped locket with a cross on it that I always wore around my neck. My mother had given the locket to me when I was a baby. Inside were the dried flowers Baba had put in there last time. She would switch them out for new ones, before flicking holy water on my face and saying a prayer over my head. The flowers and the water were meant to ward off evil spirits. As long as I had the locket with holy flowers around my neck, Baba told me, nothing bad could happen to me.
My mom grew especially exasperated with my grandmother when she performed her rituals on me. “Mud,” she’d say—or “Mother,” if she was really annoyed—“please don’t fill Natasha’s head with Russian nonsense.”
Baba knew my parents didn’t approve of her superstitions, but instead of stopping, she chanted her prayers in a low whisper. When my parents weren’t watching, she and I hid in the linen closet, switched off the lights, and sat down on the floor cross-legged. Then Baba sang a Russian prayer and flicked more holy water in my face. Of course, Baba approached these secret ceremonies like a child would—a little too loudly, a little too brazenly—and my parents usually found out what we had been up to and got irritated with her.
It was from Baba that I learned to worry about the world. Whenever we were together, she warned me of things I should be fearful of. People I should watch out for. Doorways I should avoid. Rituals to keep me safe.
She had all kinds of superstitions. She knocked on wood, spit over her shoulder three times, and threw salt here and there. Every time my parents left on a trip, Baba wouldn’t let anyone put away anything they had used before they left—a bottle of juice left out of the fridge, a plate on the counter—until my mother called to say that they had arrived at their destination. If you even put so much as a knife or fork away, that was considered bad luck. Once Baba knew my parents were there safely, she’d spend the next hour or so frantically tidying up the house.
Baba never got mad at me, but she was often in a bad mood with other people. If she was mad at someone—her daughter Lana, my grandfather, Daddy Gregson, someone who didn’t smile at her when she smiled at them—she sewed a voodoo doll out of fabric, stuffing it with cotton balls, using sequins for eyes, and drawing red lips on with a marker. Then she’d stick needles in it or submerge it in water or put it in a dark closet. The little dolls fascinated me and confused me at the same time, but I was never worried Baba would make a doll of me—I knew she loved me too much for that. Other times if someone made her angry, she wrote the person’s name on a piece of paper and put it in cold water in a coffee cup in the freezer. I could tell if she was mad at someone because when she walked by the fridge, she made a face. At the time, I think I knew her behavior was unusual, but I loved her completely and so accepted her quirks.
When I was very little, I remember being in the backyard with Baba and pointing to a spider a few feet away.
“Look at the spider!” I said innocently.
Baba leaped to my rescue. She positioned her body between me and the dangerous insect.
“Oh! Did it bite you, Natashinka?”
She knelt down in front of me, examining my arms and legs for any signs of attack. “Are you all right?”
The spider was minding its own business and had come nowhere near me. I was fine. Her reaction frightened me more than any insect.
Baba was also extremely wary of people she didn’t know, especially men. Throughout my childhood, she was convinced that intruders were about to enter our house to take me away. Once, when I was woozy with jet lag after a trip to England with my mom and Daddy Wagner, my grandma accused my parents of drugging me. My parents were furious. But she couldn’t help it. She saw danger everywhere.
My parents were in a near-constant state of exasperation about Baba. Whenever she came to visit, I could see Daddy Wagner barely concealing his sighs and frowns. He tried to be nice, but I knew he felt resentful of my grandparents. He felt they tried to control their daughter. It annoyed him that my mother continued to support them financially, as she had done since she became a star at six years old. My mom still felt responsible for her parents, she loved them and was loyal to them, but they were exhausting. My mom joined my dad in forming a silent, invisible barrier between my grandmother and me. Baba was always close by, but as I got older, my mother tried to keep her at arm’s length—inviting her for holidays and festivities but no longer asking her to babysit when they went out or away on a trip.
The problem was, I was drawn to Baba. I found her magical. Make-believe was her comfort zone, and for a child, that was intoxicating. My grandmother took me on her lap and fed me her fairy stories, which were just as delicious as her bowls of beef stroganoff or broth with dumplings.
“Natashinka,” she cooed, “we are special. There is nobody like us. We come from a long line of Russian princesses. I am a princess, your mamatchka is a princess, and you are a princess too.”
She made me think we were fragile, delicate, unique, like Fabergé eggs. The fact that Baba, Mommie, and I were physically small seemed to prove that we were to be treated with extra care, in case we might break.
In my grandmother’s version of her life story, she was born a princess, related to the Romanovs, Russia’s last doomed royal family. Years later I found out that in fact she was born Maria Stepanovna Zudilov, the youngest daughter of Stepan Zudilov, a well-to-do businessman who had made his money in soap and candle factories. Zudilov was considered landed gentry, not royalty. Her mother, Maria Kuleva, may or may not have had distant Romanov connections—no one knows for certain—but in some ways, it doesn’t matter. Baba believed her story with such fierce commitment that it became her truth. When Baba made her claims about us being princesses, my mother would shrug her shoulders, saying, “Maybe we are!” Meanwhile, I drank in every word of it. Why would I doubt my grandmother? In her burgundy and purple embellished gowns, she looked like royalty to me.
What I do know is that my grandmother was born in 1912 and spent her early childhood in Siberia during the final years of the reign of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia. She had two half brothers and two half sisters from her father’s first marriage, and a sister and two more brothers from his second marriage to her mother. According to Baba, her parents were White Russians, wealthy beyond measure, with glittering jewels they kept in a vault in the family’s vast estate in the countryside surrounding the southern Siberian city of Barnaul. Growing up, my grandmother was waited on by servants and cooks. She was taught at home by a governess and spent little time with her own mother, from whom she yearned for maternal affection. Despite the lavish setting of her upbringing, the adults around her were cold and forbidding. “When I was bad,” she told me, “my governess would punish me by making me kneel in the corner with uncooked peas beneath my knees.” As a child, my grandmother promised herself that when she grew up and had her own children, she would shower them with the love and attention she herself had never received.
When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, little Maria was five years old. Her father supported the czar, and as a landowner, he was considered an enemy of the Bolsheviks. After the czar and his family were executed by the Red Guards in July 1918, Maria and her family prepared to flee their home. They gathered their money and jewelry, concealing it in the peasant clothes they wore as a disguise, and ran to a prepared hiding place on their estate.
Maria’s older half brother Mikhail happened to be out of the house that day. As the rest of the family hid on the estate, they had no way of warning him that the Red Guard soldiers were close by. After the soldiers left, the family emerged from hiding to see something hanging from a tree. As they came closer, they realized it was Mikhail. Little Maria was so traumatized by the sight of her murdered brother she broke down in convulsions. The memory of that moment must have haunted her for the rest of her life, but my grandmother never told me about her brother or his murder. I only learned about Mikhail many years later from talking to my aunt Olga and her family and, later, from reading Gavin Lambert’s biography of my mother, one of the most reliable sources of information about my family ancestry.
Instead, Baba told me about her family treasures. The family knew the soldiers were likely to return, so they wrapped their jewels in silk scarves, burying them deep in the ground, so they could come back and find them someday. She explained that the jewels belonged to us, but they were trapped in Russia and one day she would go back and claim them. Anytime she saw a photograph of some particularly dazzling piece of Russian jewelry, she showed it to me and explained that it was ours. Anything sparkling and gorgeous had been part of those untold riches that had been left behind but belonged to us.
Six-year-old Maria and her family boarded a train in deepest winter, escaping for their lives. After traveling almost three thousand miles, a journey that took many weeks in freezing conditions, they arrived in Harbin, China, a city with a large exiled Russian community. Maria and her parents were now just another immigrant family, one of hundreds of thousands. They were able to bring enough money with them to survive, but my grandmother was no longer being taught at home by governesses. Baba once shared a memory with me about her mother giving her a baked potato before she walked to school in the mornings, and how she would put it in her pocket. “I held on to it as I walked through the snow to keep my hands warm, then when I reached school I would eat the potato,” she said. It wasn’t an uncommon sight in Harbin to see formerly wealthy Russian families begging for change just to survive. No wonder little Maria learned to be superstitious, to see catastrophe around every corner.
Despite the fact that my grandmother spent her teenage years in relative poverty, she never forgot the vanished opulence of her childhood. Whenever she told her story, she was always a princess with many admirers. Sometimes it felt to me as if Baba were the movie star, not my mother. In her version of events, everyone loved her and never stopped talking about her stunning looks, and all the handsome young Russian military captains in Harbin wanted to marry her.
It was in China that she met a gypsy fortune-teller who predicted that one day Baba would have a daughter who would be a great beauty. The woman also warned my grandmother that her daughter would die by “dark water.” As a result of this prediction, my mom didn’t like to be out of her depth, where the water was very dark or deep, even though she loved to swim in our pool and spend time on our boat.
When my grandmother was about eighteen, she met a Russian-Armenian officer who was stationed in one of Harbin’s military units. His name was Alex Tatulov, and he was dark-haired with dark eyes just like my grandmother. Alex had dreams of finding his fortune in America and my grandmother was irresistibly attracted to him. She married him in secret, because she knew her father wouldn’t approve. In 1929, Alex left for the US, to seek his fortune in San Francisco, promising to send for Maria as soon as he got himself settled. By now my grandmother was pregnant and unable to hide her secret union from her parents. When the baby was born, she named her Olga.
In November 1930, Maria learned that she had been granted an American visa and said goodbye to her family. The voyage across the Pacific Ocean took many weeks and she traveled alone with her baby daughter, a testament to my grandmother’s courage and her ability to dream of a future for herself independent of anyone else’s expectations.
Alex met her quayside in San Francisco. While they had been separated, he had met another woman. What’s more, although he was working at a shipyard, he was a long way from finding his fortune, having arrived on American shores right as the Great Depression began.
Maria had no choice but to stay with Alex in the rooming house where he lived with other workers from the shipyard; from there the couple moved from apartment to apartment, trying to find a foothold. Alex continued to see his lover, often leaving my grandmother alone with a baby to take care of, in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language and in the midst of the greatest economic slump in American history. But Baba soon discovered a way to help her forget her troubles: she started going to the movies. The talkies had just arrived, and the screens were filled with singing and dancing in glorious black and white. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced cheek to cheek, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sang their hearts out, and Shirley Temple tapped and curtsied her way to child stardom. Baba and little Olga went to see romantic dramas, comedies, and musicals, the images on-screen feeding my grandmother’s hopes and daydreams.
Down at the docks, Alex befriended another Russian exile named Nikolai Stephanovich Zakharenko, who had shortened his name to Nick Gurdin. This was my grandfather. Nick was dark-haired, strong, and good-looking. Maria loved when he played his balalaika and sang soulful Russian folk songs. Before long, my grandmother left Alex, moving into Nick’s apartment with Olga. Not long after, she finalized her divorce, and in October 1937, Nick asked Maria to marry him.
Like my grandmother, my grandfather was a child refugee who had fled Russia during the war. He was born and grew up near the port of Vladivostok, in Far Eastern Siberia, one of three sons. His father was a worker at a chocolate factory, but he supported the czar and quickly joined the White Army in their fight. Before he left for the front he told his son, “When I come home, Nikolai, I will bring you a kaska.” In Russian kaska means helmet. But little Nikolai thought he meant skazka, which is Russian for fairy tale. He waited for months for his father to return with a special story for him, but his father was killed in the fighting and never came home. After that his mother fled by train with her family to Shanghai. Somehow, she managed to get herself aboard a boat bound for Vancouver. Nikolai was eight and spent the rest of his childhood in Canada. At the age of eighteen, he started working, slowly making his way down the West Coast by taking manual jobs, finally landing in San Francisco, where he met my grandmother, two Siberian exiles by way of China. They were married in 1938.
By then Baba was already pregnant again. When my mother was born, on July 20, 1938, my grandparents named her Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, but everyone called her Natasha. “Was most beautiful baby in the whole world,” Baba wrote in Natasha’s pale pink baby book. “Everyone stopped me in the street and admire her. My princess!” Baba’s baby had a special spark, with her big brown eyes and button nose. From the moment she was born, all Baba’s hopes for recovering the prosperity and happiness she had lost as a child revolved around tiny Natasha.
“You are a princess, Natasha!” I can just hear Baba whispering that to my mother in her cradle. In Natasha, Maria had found someone to shape into the kind of screen idol she worshipped, a partner to play with in her world of make-believe. My mother was literally nursed on movies. Baba would bring her newborn baby to matinees, breastfeeding her and rocking her to sleep right there in the darkened theater. As a preschool-age child, my mother’s favorite game was called “Movie Star.” Each morning, she checked into the “studio” (the garage) as Vivien Leigh or Bette Davis, pretending to act in their movies, then checked out again for lunch. My grandmother helped prepare my mother for fame by teaching her to sing and dance, and to always smile, talk to people, tell them stories, and sing songs.
Little Natasha cried often when she was a baby and a doctor had told the family it was because the San Francisco dampness made her joints ache. And so, by the time America entered World War II in 1941, the Gurdins had moved to Santa Rosa, a little town sixty miles north of San Francisco, and bought a small starter home. (My grandfather’s dream had been to buy a farm in Oregon and bring his children up there, but my grandmother wasn’t interested in a farmer’s life.) In Santa Rosa, Deda worked in construction as a day laborer. Theirs was not the happiest marriage. Deda liked to drink, he was constantly shifting between jobs, and the couple often fought.
What they were able to give to their daughters was an appreciation for the imaginary. With her father reading her stories like The Little Mermaid, Bambi, Snow White, and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, my mother grew up believing in magic, elves, fairies, saints, and angels. Baba used to take my mom for walks in Santa Rosa, and as they walked along, my mother would often find coins and even toys on the sidewalk.
“Look, Mama,” she’d say to Baba. “Is this magic?”
“Yes,” Baba replied. “There is magic even on the street. But you must look for it. And if you want your heart’s desire, you must work hard. And you must always do as you are told.”
Eventually, my mother figured out that it was Baba—and not magic—scattering the coins and toys on the sidewalk for her daughter to find there. It was the first of many times my mother would become aware of my grandmother’s propensity for illusion.
Baba continued to follow the movies. In 1943, a Santa Rosa schoolgirl named Edna May Wonacott appeared on-screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock had discovered the nine-year-old while she was waiting at a bus stop. Now she had a Hollywood contract. My grandmother took note. When the director Irving Pichel came to town to shoot a movie, my grandmother seized her chance. Pichel was looking for a young girl to play a bit part in his movie Happy Land. It was early July, just a few weeks before my mother’s fifth birthday. My grandmother dressed my mother in her best pinafore, rolled her straight, brown hair into Shirley Temple curls, and pushed through the crowd of hopefuls toward Mr. Pichel.
Baba whispered to Natasha, “Smile at that man.” And my mother did.
Mr. Pichel asked little Natasha to sit on his lap. She put her arms around him and sang a little song.
“Would you like to act?” he asked her.
My mother looked at Baba and then nodded.
Mr. Pichel told this little girl to walk down the street with an ice-cream cone, then to drop it and burst into tears.
After my mother was given the cone, she told the grown-ups, “I don’t want to drop it, it tastes good.”
Mr. Pichel looked at Baba. Baba looked at Natasha. Natasha dropped the cone.
The director told my mother to cry; she told him she didn’t feel like crying.
So Baba told her daughter a story about a butterfly who burned its wings. My mother loved butterflies, but even this wasn’t enough to make her cry. Then Baba reminded her about her beloved puppy who had been killed in a car accident. After that the tears came and my mother couldn’t stop crying. When she was interviewed about it she always said that was the beginning of her career: “I dropped an ice-cream cone and Hollywood taught me to cry.”
Pichel saw potential in her and promised her a bigger role in his next production. Before long, he invited my mother to go to Hollywood to audition for a new part. My grandfather was against the whole idea. He wanted his daughter to have a normal childhood. He fought furiously with my grandmother about going. My grandmother remained calm. She pointed out the audition would probably come to nothing and that his daughter would never forgive him if he didn’t give her this chance. “Don’t do it for me, do it for Natasha,” she reasoned.
Natasha won the part in the film. It was Tomorrow Is Forever, a World War II drama starring Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert. She played an orphan, a part that required her to learn some German, speak with a German accent, and cry on demand. Welles himself later described her performance as “almost terrifyingly professional.” The film was released in February 1946 and was my mother’s major motion-picture debut. She was seven. The Gurdins never did return to Santa Rosa.
By then the powerful men of Hollywood had decided my mother’s name sounded too Russian—this was Cold War–era America, and anything seemingly related to Russia or Communism carried a stigma—so they changed it to Natalie. The producer William Goetz informed my mother that her last name was going to be Wood, in honor of his friend the director Sam Wood. “Couldn’t it at least be Woods with an s?” my mother asked. “Don’t worry,” Mr. Goetz said, “Wood will look good on a marquee.” My mom really didn’t like “Wood,” but she made her peace with it because it made her think of the forest and all the magical creatures that lived in it. She always missed her first name—this was why she eventually named me Natasha.
My mother had a new life now. She no longer went to school. Instead she had a revolving set of private teachers and chaperones who taught her on set. When she wasn’t acting or studying, she took ballet and piano lessons. There was no time to play imaginary games in her make-believe “studio” anymore. She was too busy working for a real studio. Her big sister, Olga, would help her learn her lines and pronounce words correctly.
The biographies of my mother will tell you that my grandmother pushed my mom into the movies at a very young age and exploited her talent. In the simplified version of my mother’s life, Baba is usually cast as the wicked queen, abusive and controlling. But I have a hard time seeing her that way. She was an immigrant who spoke very little English and a refugee of war. She came to America and somehow managed to steer my mother’s career in Hollywood, a notoriously tough business. And my mother was no passive victim. She had a talent for acting that couldn’t be forced and that my grandmother nurtured. Young Natalie’s brown eyes were not just beautiful, they radiated an intelligence that was uncommon for child actresses. She was able to make you fall in love with her and want to take care of her, while letting you know not to mess with her as she was probably smarter than you. She may have missed having a “normal” childhood, but she loved acting in the movies. She soaked up the attention, thrived on being around movie stars, and was a born performer. I often wonder if my mother’s childhood career gave her a sanctuary, a movie set of make-believe to turn to when her home life failed her.
After Tomorrow Is Forever, my mother’s next role was as Barbara Stanwyck’s daughter in the comedy The Bride Wore Boots, also directed by Pichel and released in 1946. My mom often worked with actors who were much older than she was, many of them Hollywood legends. By all accounts, they adored her. When she played alongside Stanwyck, who was in her late thirties by then, my mother took a liking to Barbara’s gardenia perfume. After the production wrapped, Stanwyck sent her a bottle of it, which made a lasting impression. As soon as she was old enough to wear it, my mom adopted the scent—Jungle Gardenia—as her signature perfume.
Natalie kept working. In her third film, released in 1947, she played the daughter of Gene Tierney in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Next she appeared in Miracle on 34th Street, playing Susan Walker, the daughter of Maureen O’Hara. At home Natalie was encouraged by Baba to keep her head in the clouds of fairy-tale fantasy, but that didn’t stop her from throwing herself into the role of Walker, the little girl who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. In the movie, she’s a sharp and analytical kid, a skeptic with her feet firmly planted in reality. The film was released in July 1947, and it was such a success that Maria was able to negotiate a two-picture contract with Fox, including jobs for my grandfather as a studio carpenter and for herself as the person managing Natalie’s fan mail.
The movies were quickly becoming the Gurdin family’s lifeblood and, increasingly, their main source of income. Maria managed every aspect of my mother’s career, down to the smallest detail. After my mother’s sister Svetlana was born in 1946, Baba was determined this new daughter would have a career in Hollywood as well and so she gave her a Russian name that could be conveniently shortened to match the first name of her favorite screen star, Lana Turner. As soon as Lana Gurdin was old enough, she began auditioning for roles, and in 1956, when she was ten years old, she would make her screen debut playing Natalie’s childhood self in the movie The Searchers, directed by John Ford. Like Natalie, Lana changed her last name to Wood.
When my mother was twelve, my grandpa suffered the first of several heart attacks and couldn’t work. My mom became the sole provider for her family while also attending junior high school. Suddenly, winning acting roles became a source of great worry. Every time a casting director told her no, she felt rejected personally and heartbroken—she knew her family’s financial stability was at risk.
My mother continued to work consistently into her teens, but as she grew into a young woman, she found herself increasingly stifled by my grandmother’s grip. Everywhere she turned, there was Baba: at home, at work, even chaperoning when my mom was old enough to date. Baba and Deda believed they could control not only my mom’s career but her entire life. She began to rebel. When her parents wanted her to stay home, she went out. If they wanted her to dress a certain way, she dressed the way she wanted to dress. She was tired of always being told what to do and where to go.
My grandparents forbade my sixteen-year-old mom to even audition for Rebel Without a Cause because they did not like the way the parents were portrayed in the film as old-fashioned and insensitive, but she insisted on going up for it anyway. The movie was directed by Nicholas Ray and it told the story of three suburban teenagers rebelling against their families. My mother was determined to win the part of Judy, the heroine who bonds with her boyfriend, Jim Stark (played by James Dean), over their shared loneliness and frustration. Until this time, my mother had gone for parts because she had to, or to win her parents’ approval. The part of Judy was different. She wanted it because it was meaningful to her. She auditioned three times and won the role.
My mom had first met Dean in 1954, at a rehearsal for a televised adaptation of Sherwood Anderson’s story “I’m a Fool.” He arrived on his motorcycle, hair in the wind and a safety pin keeping his pants up. During the filming of Rebel Without a Cause, they became close friends, my mom often riding behind him on his Triumph motorcycle. Dean had trained as a Method actor with the legendary teacher Lee Strasberg. Although my mother worked with a voice coach on Rebel Without a Cause, she had never taken an acting class. This was the first time she ever improvised on set, the first time she was asked for her opinion, to think about acting as a craft. She often said that it was the beginning of her ambition to become a serious actress.
James Dean died in a car accident only a few weeks before Rebel Without a Cause was released. His death was the first big tragedy of my mother’s life, the first time someone close to her had died. She never forgot it. She always spoke of her friend with such fondness: about his kindness and vulnerability, as if he needed protection in the world.
The following year, at the age of seventeen, my mother was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Judy. The more successful Natalie Wood became, the harder Maria tried to control her life. Professionally, my grandmother still negotiated the deals with the studios. At home she would sneak into her daughter’s bedroom and rifle through her belongings while Nick barged in, looking for photos of friends he didn’t approve of and ripping them to shreds. Natalie’s name and face began to appear all over the gossip columns and fan magazines, romantically linked to all kinds of young men, even (briefly) Elvis Presley. Some of these dates were arranged by the studio for publicity purposes, but nevertheless, they sent Baba into a frenzy of suspicion. When my mother returned home from evenings out, my grandmother held her dress up to the light to see if there were wrinkles or creases in unfamiliar places. My grandparents had devoted their lives to Natalie. It seems what they wanted in return was complete domination. But now that she was older, my mother knew more about the business than they did and started making her own decisions. No longer totally in control, Baba became more willful, neurotic, upset. It was an exhausting tug-of-war.
In the end, Natalie held the position of power in the Gurdin household and everyone knew it. My dad, Robert Wagner, remembers that when the family lived on Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks in the mid-1950s, my mother occupied the master bedroom and bathroom suite, Lana had the smaller bedroom, and Maria and Nick slept on a roll-away bed in the living room. By now Olga had left home and was married, but my teenage mom supported every other member of her family financially. If she wanted to stay out late or date a man they didn’t approve of, Maria could forbid it, Nick could put his foot down and threaten punishment, but ultimately, what could they do? Natalie was in charge.
One of the reasons my mother married my dad at nineteen was to escape her controlling parents. For a time, Maria shifted her attention to Lana, hoping her younger daughter could fill the gap Natalie had left behind her. But Lana seemed to be the kind of actress who directors and studio heads could imagine only in supporting roles. My grandmother would become furious with my mother for not doing more to help Lana’s career. But it wasn’t her fault. Lana was a good enough actress but she simply didn’t become a star.
In my grandparents’ Brentwood apartment, my grandmother had a painting hanging on the wall in the living room right next to the sofa. The painting was of my mother in her twenties, posed with her arms crossed, wearing a black dress with thin black straps over her bare shoulders, her neck and arms elongated, her eyes wider than in real life. The painting was by Margaret Keane, wife of Walter Keane, who later became famous as the authentic artist behind her husband’s signature portraits of children and women, their eyes dramatically large.
The Keane painting of my mother is from 1961, the same year that West Side Story came out. After it was completed, Baba claimed the painting. Although my grandmother coveted the portrait because it was of her beloved daughter, she wasn’t completely satisfied with it. Keane hadn’t included the bracelet my mother always wore on her left wrist. Baba considered herself to be the expert on all things Natalie Wood and so she decided to paint a bracelet herself, using oil paints to add on a golden cuff. My grandmother was very proud of this addition, even though she had essentially desecrated a renowned artist’s work without anyone’s consent.
No wonder that as a grown woman my mother tried to establish some boundaries. It didn’t always work. Once, when I was very young, my parents took a trip, and while they were away, Baba decided to change the locks on their house without telling them. When my parents returned home from the airport, they couldn’t get inside their own home. “I didn’t want strangers getting near Natashinka!” Baba explained. My parents were furious. Another rift followed. Eventually, my mom softened up and let Baba back into our lives. This push-and-pull pattern with Mud and Fahd would continue for the rest of my mother’s life.
My mother didn’t want Baba controlling me the way Baba had tried to control her. She had spent years on the therapist’s couch trying to untangle fantasy from reality. That’s why, as I grew older, she began limiting my time with Baba, in an attempt to save me from a similar fate. But it was too late. I was already adopting Baba’s rituals and beliefs as my own.
As a child, I used the locket around my neck filled with holy flowers like a talisman. When panicky feelings would creep in and I became terrified that something bad was going to happen to my mother—my whole world—I closed my eyes, touched the locket, and said a silent prayer that everything would be okay.