Chapter 8

Natasha, circa 1981–82.

After Kilky came to get me from Tracey’s house that terrible Sunday morning, after my dad came home and confirmed it was true—that my mother was gone and not coming home ever again—the sensation I most vividly remember is pure terror. Did the one thing I’ve been most scared of my whole life actually just happen? Was I cursed with a sixth sense? Did I foresee it? I was always so afraid of losing my mom—unnaturally afraid. And now I had lost her. Forever. Why did this happen? Why did it happen to me? In my traumatized eleven-year-old mind the answer was obvious: it happened because my mom was so famous and beautiful and everybody knew that we were so close. I had been blessed with this gift of an extra-special mother. So this must be some kind of punishment. The Lord had given, and the Lord was now taking away. Perhaps I was being punished for striving for independence when she died, for not appreciating her as much as I used to. Is that what had caused her death?

I remember the next several days in patchwork flashes; some moments come back with clarity, while others are missing.

My dad went to bed and stayed there. He was incapable of functioning.

Liz told me that Baba fainted when she heard the news. She had only recently lost her husband, and now fate had taken away her dearest Natasha too. It must have been the darkest day of Maria Gurdin’s life. I don’t remember seeing Baba in the days after my mother’s death. I think they tried to keep her away from Courtney and me because she was too hysterical.

I stayed close to my dad. I didn’t want to let him out of my sight. Kilky and Liz were doing their best to mother Courtney and me. My little sister—who was, at age seven, too young to understand what had happened to her mom—reacted by attaching herself even more strongly to Kilky. I chose to latch onto my dad, even though he was practically insensate with grief. He was the next best thing to Mommie. He was the person I most closely associated with her.

I remember spending a lot of time in their bedroom right after she died. I napped in her bed. It was a way to feel close to her, to smell her perfume, to inhabit her space. The room was still filled with her energy. On the little notepad by her vanity, she had scribbled a dinner date:

“Herbert and Nora Ross December 6th 7pm Orlando-Orsini.”

I stared at that note a lot. I couldn’t make sense of it. December 6 was coming up, just a few days after her funeral. She had planned to meet her friends at Orlando-Orsini, but now she wasn’t going to be there. What would happen? Would Herbert and Nora Ross scratch that date from their calendar? Would they show up at the restaurant? She must have made all kinds of plans for the future that were never going to happen. How could life just continue without her?

That first week was the strangest of my life. Nobody went to school. Nobody went to work. There was no structure—no bedtimes, no mealtimes, no rules. Calendars, schedules, and clocks became meaningless. It was like being on a long plane flight; it gets dark and you don’t know what land you’re over or what time zone you’re in. Nothing happening down on earth seems to matter.

The house was full of people. The first person who showed up was Daddy Gregson. He arrived from England, picked me up as if I were a baby, and carried me into my room. There he held me in his arms for what might have been an hour or longer—it just felt like forever. He told me that he loved me very much, that he had loved my mother, and that I would be okay. My dignified British father seemed so overcome with emotion, unable to find words. This was completely out of character for him and therefore a little awkward for me. The person I usually went to for intimacy and comfort was my mom, not my dad. Yet on that awful black Sunday, he knew that I needed to feel a tight connection to my birth father, my only living biological parent. And I did. After he comforted me, he went in to talk to Daddy Wagner. I later found out that he offered to take me back to England, but R.J. wanted Courtney, Katie, and me to stay together. In my mom’s will she asked that if anything ever happened that Courtney and I be raised together. Daddy Gregson agreed. Any further loss or separation would have been detrimental.

My godfather Mart was at the house, as well as Howard, Delphine, and, eventually, every single person my parents ever knew, or so it seemed. Friends, family, acquaintances, church officials, neighbors, celebrities, well-wishers, mourners, deliverymen appeared on Canon Drive at all hours of the day and night. I remember thinking, Don’t these people ever sleep? They filed into the living rooms, the den, and the kitchen, hugging me and Courtney and Katie, crying, and saying how sorry they were. Adults I barely knew were so nice to me. I remember Kate Jackson from Charlie’s Angels handing me a scrap of paper, saying, “This is my phone number. This phone is right by my bed. You call me if you need me.” Paul Simon, who was one of my mom’s favorite musicians, came by with his wife at the time, Carrie Fisher. There were the drinks, the nuts in silver bowls on the bar. It was like the biggest party we ever had, but this was not a celebration.

My girlfriends came with their parents. There was an Atari system in Kilky’s room, and I played Pong and Hangman there with my friends. I remember one time when my friend Caprice was starting to win at Hangman, I quickly pushed a button to prematurely end the game. I can do this, I thought, because my mom just died. Caprice looked at me like she was about to tell me off, and then stopped herself. It was like I was testing everyone around me to see how real this was. If Caprice gets mad at me, maybe my mom didn’t really die. But my friend didn’t get mad. She let me win the game. It was real.

The parade of people at home continued. My dad remained upstairs in his bed. In the coming days, I witnessed all of these adults, many of whom I’d grown up around and trusted completely, falling apart at the seams like the Velveteen Rabbit. I could see their buttons and threads fraying and unraveling. People consumed glass after glass of alcohol and broke down wailing or laughing hysterically, sometimes both at the same time. I was used to my parents and their friends getting tipsy, but I had never seen grown-ups lose total control like this before. I often felt like the sanest, soberest person in the room, able to observe everything. Once, I went downstairs and saw Mart standing with a small crowd in the dining room. He was clutching a silver ice bucket that had belonged to my mom, holding it close to his chest and sobbing, “I’m taking this! I’m taking it!”

On the lawn just outside our front gates, hordes of press perched day and night with their Kodaks, their microphones, and their video cameras on tripods, swarming on anyone who entered or exited the house. I had never seen so many photographers before. They made us prisoners in our own home. The police were there too, trying to suppress the crowds and traffic outside. Cars were parked all up and down our street. News coverage of my mom’s death was on the radio and television constantly. I didn’t want to see it on TV. I didn’t want to hear about it on the radio. If the news—or any mention of my mother—appeared on a television set, I changed the channel.

After my mom died, Kilky wheeled a TV set into my bedroom on a portable table. When my mother was alive, she never allowed me to have a TV in my room. But now I was breaking that rule. I like watching TV in my room, I thought, but Mommie would not be happy about this. I suddenly had the freedom to do all the things she had prohibited. R.J. was in bed and so no one stopped me from eating junk food, staying up late, or playing video games… but the victory left me feeling guilty and confused. Not only was my mother gone; all the rules and routines she had so carefully established were gone too. Were the rules she made not valid anymore? Or was I allowed to break them because everyone felt sorry for me?

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I silently bolstered myself: I have to get through this. I can’t go down. And then I realized: I need to see her, that’s what I have to do. I have to see her. Something deep within me knew that it was not acceptable for me to live my entire life without ever seeing my mother’s face again. I had been told there was going to be a closed casket at the funeral service, so that meant I had to get to her before the funeral happened. I told Daddy Gregson, “I need to see Mommie.” He told Daddy Wagner, and they had a therapist come to the house and discuss the pros and cons. Daddy Wagner was afraid I would be traumatized by seeing my mother in a coffin, but it was eventually decided that, though it might be a little scary, it might help me to accept her death and give me the chance to say a belated goodbye. Daddy Wagner knew he wouldn’t be able to take me to the mortuary, that he couldn’t bear it and wouldn’t be able to cope.

“I can’t take Natasha,” I remember him saying. “I can’t go.”

So Daddy Gregson said, “I’ll take her.”

I decided to write a letter to my mom, so I could give it to her the next day at the mortuary. In my bedroom, I sat down at my white wicker desk and opened the drawer that held my stationery. So many times I had written thank-you notes or birthday cards to my parents or other adults from this spot. Only a few weeks ago, I sat here writing love notes to my mom while she was filming in North Carolina. Now she had gone away and she wasn’t coming back. I knew that she would never read this new note, but even so, I needed to write it and she needed to have it. I pulled out a piece of my stationery and sat there at my desk, writing. When tears fell on the paper, I wiped them away with my hands and kept on writing. I think the note went something like this:

Mommie,

You took up a lot of space in our lives. It’s going to be really hard to live without you. I don’t know if Courtney understands, but I do. Daddy Wagner and I are taking it the hardest. But I’m going to be okay, I’m going to help him be okay, and Courtney will be okay too. But I really miss you. I love you.

Natooshie

Then I neatly folded the letter.

My dad’s driver, Stanley Stork, drove Daddy Gregson, Liz, Kilky, Courtney, and me to the mortuary in a limousine. I remember arriving at the cemetery, driving through wide-open gates, past a park laid out with green grass and rows of white headstones. A small brown house came into view at the end of the lot. It looked cozy and comfortable, completely out of place in a graveyard. My dad explained that this was the mortuary. We got out of the car to go inside. I kept my head down, holding on to his hand, letting him lead the way. He was in charge this morning.

Inside, the mortuary smelled like sadness. A mixture of old furniture and the same wood polishing spray we used at our house. We were led into a room. There were chairs against one wall and a casket at the far end. Liz, Kilky, Courtney, Stanley, and Daddy Gregson sat down in the chairs. I slowly walked toward the casket. Behind me I could hear muffled chokes and sobs and so I turned around. Stanley was crying. I had never really seen adults cry until a couple of days ago—now it seemed as if they couldn’t stop. My little sister, Courtney, was dancing around, not really focused on the situation.

“Can I please be alone with her for a few minutes?” I asked.

This was my last chance to talk to my mom. Just the two of us. Everybody left the room.

I walked up to the casket.

I don’t know what I expected my mom’s dead body to look like, but the woman in the coffin did not look like my mother. Her face was harder, her nose pointier, her skin rubbery. It was as if all the warmth and light and coziness had been sucked out of her. Her makeup hadn’t sunk into her face; instead it sat on top of the skin like it didn’t belong there, a translucent mask that didn’t quite cover up a small bruise on her forehead and another one near her cheekbone. Then there was her hair. I thought, That’s not her hair. The color is wrong and it’s falling the wrong way. Her feet looked weird too. Instead of lying straight, they were flopping out to the sides. She was wearing white low-heeled pumps and panty hose. The feet looked like the feet of an old lady, not my mom’s.

I knew I needed to find a way to feel connected to her. That’s all I wanted. A moment to feel close to her again. So I stood there, waiting to get used to her pointy features, the strange hair that didn’t look like hers, the feet splaying out awkwardly to the left and right. At least her hands still looked like her hands—the perfect French-tipped manicure and the gold Cartier wedding ring were in place. Diamond studs in her ears. She had her Elsa Peretti gold cuff on her left wrist, covering up the bump. There was a thin cream-colored blanket folded underneath her shoes. I had never seen this blanket before.

I reached out to touch her hand and jumped back when I felt it. Her skin was not soft and warm. I told myself, Okay, that’s just because she’s dead. She isn’t in her body. I waited a minute and touched her hand again. This is what a dead body feels like. It’s not so scary. She is right here. I am right here. I can do this. I lifted my mom’s heavy, cold hand and placed the folded letter underneath it. I wanted to say something to her. I started to talk to her in a soothing voice, mimicking the soothing way she used to speak to me. A blend of a whisper and a song. I told her that I loved her so much and I missed her. “I don’t really know where you are now,” I said, “but I’m going to stay in touch with you. I’m going to figure out a way to stay connected to you.” And that was it. I was done.

I told the grown-ups I had finished. Now Courtney wanted to see our mom and give her something too and so Stanley took off the scarf he had around his neck and handed it to her. When Courtney stepped up to the coffin, I think she got scared. She sort of haphazardly threw the scarf in and ran off. I was not happy when I saw the scarf had landed right over my mom’s face. I asked Liz to fix it. “It can’t be on her face,” I said adamantly. “You need to move the scarf.”

“I will, lovey,” Liz said in her kind way.

Then I asked Liz about the blanket. She told me the plan was to pull it up to my mom’s shoulders before they closed the top of the casket. I asked to speak to the man in charge. I told him calmly and clearly that I needed to be the one to pull the blanket up over my mother. Together the three of us went back into the room. He and Liz helped me pull the soft, cream-colored blanket from under her feet. Then they left me alone. I gently pulled the blanket up to her shoulders. I smoothed it over her chest. I patted it down gently on the side of her body that I could reach. I tucked her in the way she had tucked me in. “Good night, Mommie. I love you,” I said. Then I walked out of the room.

Later, I learned that my mother’s friends had gone to great lengths to make her look as much like herself as possible. They asked her hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, to fix her hair—which had become hopelessly matted after being in the water. Somehow, Sidney managed to shampoo her hair, blow-drying it and combing it over a dark brown hairpiece or fall that had been worn by Ava Gardner. Eddie Butterworth, her longtime makeup artist, had done her makeup. Liz told me that he kept having to stop because his tears would drop onto her face and smudge his handiwork. Of course, the first thing I said to Mart after viewing the body was, “That wasn’t her hair.” He looked crestfallen. “Are you kidding me right now, that wasn’t her hair?” he said. “We worked so hard, and the first thing you say is, ‘That wasn’t her hair’!” But I was right, it wasn’t her hair, and it wasn’t even her hairpiece. Poor Mart. Everyone wanted to contribute their services, but they were in a state of shock.

After the viewing, we went back home to get dressed for the funeral.

First I had to take a bath. I remember easing myself into the bathtub, the heat of the water spreading through my body, hotter than I can ever remember it being before. This was the same bathroom I had taken baths in for eight years, my own bathroom with the pink carpet and the Vitabath bubbles. But nothing was the same.

I could hear Kilky calling to me from the other side of the door.

“Tasha, you wanna wear the dress that Ruth gave you? The one from Pierre Deux?”

“Okay,” I said, looking at my limbs under the water. They appeared blurry.

The Pierre Deux dress was my special dress for special occasions. This is a special occasion, I remember thinking. Mommie has been dead only a few days and now we are burying her. Why is everything happening so quickly? Why do people have funerals so soon?

Looking around the bathroom, everything was familiar; everything was different. What’s going to happen to me? There had been a dull ache and pale ringing in my head constantly since Mommie died. Who am I? Do I even exist? Is this a dream? Now that I couldn’t define myself by her moves, her love, her attention, I felt raw and alone, so small.

I washed my hair, remembering to add No More Tangles because the smell reminded me of her. Mommie never wants me to have tangles in my hair. If I do, she will cut it off. But now she is in a coffin. I have just seen her this morning.

After my bath, I got dressed and put on my shoes. I looked in the mirror. I was wearing the brown-and-yellow-flowered dress that my godmother had given me for my eleventh birthday only two months ago, the same special dress I wore to the Bistro for my birthday dinner with Daddy Wagner. The next time I had planned to wear the dress was on Christmas Eve. Instead, I wore it for my mom’s funeral and never wore it again.

Daddy Wagner somehow managed to get out of bed, take a shower, shave, and put on a suit. I don’t know who helped him get ready but somebody must have because he could barely move or walk or talk. We drove back to the cemetery together.

The service was on a lawn underneath a big tree. All the most important adults in my mom’s life were there. These people who were usually smiling and happy seemed far away, their faces flat with sadness. Crisp white gardenias lay on top of my mother’s closed wooden casket. Gardenias in November, her favorite flower. They were everywhere that day, stitched into the men’s lapels, held dearly in the grasp of all the women’s hands. Someone gave me one to hold.

The speakers were her close friends Tommy Thompson, Hope Lange, and Roddy McDowall. The sky overhead was gray and overcast, but as Hope spoke eloquently about my mom’s heart and her warmth, the sun emerged from behind a cloud.

After the speeches stopped, Daddy Wagner walked to my mother’s coffin and placed a gardenia on it. He kissed the casket. I remember feeling so worried that he would just fall down dead right in front of her, he was so distraught. As she was lowered into the ground, I understood that this was final. I didn’t want to cry in front of all these people, but I could not stop myself. My limit had been reached and I couldn’t hold my tears in any longer.

Many years later, I found a picture of me in my flowered dress that day. I am holding a gardenia and crying. Daddy Gregson is behind me, looking down in my direction, his face filled with concern. Daddy Wagner is kissing me, his hand on my hair; he is touching my head and my hair exactly the way my mom used to.

When the service was over, we left in a limousine. I remember looking out of the car window as paparazzi snapped picture after picture. Even then I knew people were taking my photo so it could be printed on slick paper and neatly wedged between a gossip column and an advertisement, to make money.

After the funeral, everyone descended on our house. Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and who knows how many other movie stars were there. Elizabeth Taylor, heavily made up and fresh from her performance of The Little Foxes at the Ahmanson Theatre. She brought Anthony Geary from General Hospital; I was starstruck. I remember Shirley MacLaine going to see my dad in his room. She was wearing a gauzy, flowing dress and beaded necklaces, reminding me of Agnes Moorehead as the character Endora in Bewitched. I was most impressed with the appearance of Joyce DeWitt, the actress who played Janet on the sitcom Three’s Company. Liz Taylor I didn’t care about, but meeting Joyce DeWitt I thought, Wow, your mom dies and Janet from Three’s Company shows up in your home.

I don’t remember interacting with Baba at the funeral or the wake, but my godfather Mart recalls Baba coming up to him that day. “If you had been on that boat, my daughter would still be alive,” she told him, as if it were all Mart’s fault. Baba may have been lashing out at Mart, but I wonder if she actually intended the remark as a compliment. But who knows what was going through her mind? She and Mart and everyone close to my mom were beside themselves.

Hundreds of cards, letters, and Western Union telegrams were delivered in bundles all day, every day, for weeks. I remember Liz Applegate sitting at my mom’s desk going through all the condolence letters—sorting them, wrapping them with rubber bands, putting certain ones aside for my dad. Heartfelt words of sympathy arrived at our doorstep from people my parents knew—David Niven, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart—and people I didn’t know that my parents had ever met: Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Shriver, John Travolta, Brooke Shields, Anthony Hopkins, Lana Turner, Mickey Rooney, and so many others. Queen Elizabeth and members of the British royal family sent wires from England. Condolences arrived from the US Coast Guard, the Los Angeles District Attorney, the governor of North Carolina, the owners of all my parents’ favorite hotels and restaurants, and the clowns from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which my parents had taken us to every year. The staff at the Beverly Hills Western Union office even sent their own telegram—my mother’s death had certainly kept them busy. So much sincere appreciation of my mom and dad; so much love and empathy and heartbreak—no judgments or criticisms or accusations. That would only start much later.

No one in my world questioned my dad’s love for my mom or his utter despair at her loss. Everyone in our lives wrapped their arms around him. R.J. had loved Natalie “more than love.” When it came time to choose the inscription on her gravestone, my dad made sure to add those three words, the same phrase my parents had always used to describe their love for each other. He asked if Courtney and I wanted it to say anything else. We told him we liked it just the way it was.

Mart later told me that in the days and weeks after my mom died, R.J. tried over and over again to make sense of what happened that terrible night, to figure out exactly how she got into the water. He kept asking if there was anything he could have done differently. They had all been drinking. At a certain point, my mom had simply gone off to bed. After that, what had happened? He had been right there on the boat that night, but he’d had no idea my mom had left to go down to the dinghy. Did she go down to the deck to move the dinghy? Did she somehow fall into the water at that point? Or had she gone out to the deck because the sound of the dinghy knocking against the boat was bothering her and she wanted to tie it up more securely? Did she slip and fall as she bent down to tie up the boat? Finally, the only thing he could come up with was that my mother must have tried to secure the dinghy to starboard.

In the week after the funeral, he barely left his room. One evening, I remember he came downstairs to take a phone call. I was in the next room, and I heard him talking in the den, then hanging up the receiver. He came out and announced, “I just got off the phone with the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. He called to give his condolences for your mom.” I couldn’t tell by my dad’s voice if he was impressed or bewildered. I remember thinking, Is a call from President Reagan supposed to make me feel better? Could that make my pain go away? No. A friend of my mother’s would show up with presents. Could that make my pain go away? No. Liz wanted to take me to get ice cream. Could that make my pain go away? No, that didn’t do it either. I couldn’t even use my happy memories of my mother to make me feel better because the good times were too painful to relive. So I shut out the past and began eking out a life that hinged on merely surviving from day to day.

Some of our favorite moments as a family had been spent on the boat at Catalina. My dad donated the Splendour to the Sea Scouts and none of us has ever been back to Catalina Island.