Chapter 11
Natasha and Courtney at the house on Old Oak Road, mid-1980s.
During these years, crying felt as natural and automatic as breathing to me. Many mornings, I would arrive at school with the puffiest of eyes. One day my friend Shingo asked me why I looked like a salamander. He wasn’t being mean; he just didn’t understand why my eyes were always so swollen.
Time was passing but my feelings about my mother had only grown stronger, threatening to overwhelm me. Whenever I left the house, I put on a brave face, desperate to blend into the background, to convince everyone I was okay. I could cry alone in the shower or on my pillow, but to the outside world I played the game that I was fine. It was exhausting. I have my act together. I am not sad or upset or lonely or missing my mother. It’s all in the past and I never even think about it. I had too much pride to let people see my ugly feelings, and yet they must have been fairly obvious: they were written all over my face. It was as if the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had spilled from the box and scattered across the floor, but because I wasn’t yet mature enough to figure out where each piece fit, I just jammed them together and hastily bound them with Scotch tape. “It’s all fine” was the message I tried to convey. “Just don’t look too closely.” I kept my crying jags private even from Courtney, who was becoming my closest friend.
To leave the house was to constantly risk exposure to other people, their pointing fingers, the looks of pity on their faces and whispers behind our backs. Before my mother died, our parents’ fans never seemed scary to me. Now they felt different—looming, overly emotional, locking me in with their eyes and their body language. One time I remember Courtney and I went with our dad to a charity benefit. Courtney and I dreaded these events, as it meant we would be surrounded by a lot of strangers. At this particular benefit, I remember my dad was shepherded away from us and we were left alone in a banquet room, where guests were filling their plates with food from a buffet. As soon as people realized who we were, they swooped. Suddenly we were surrounded by older women with made-up faces telling us how much they loved our mom. How sorry they were that she died. How much we looked just like her.
“Oh my God, we’re so sorry for your loss, we loved your mom,” they lamented.
It was like being trapped in a scene from a Fellini or Buñuel film.
“Oh my God, look at you, Natalie’s daughters!” one woman said between bites from the buffet. She was wearing a sequined blouse and had food stuck in her teeth. Then she shouted to her husband across the room, “Natalie Wood’s daughters!” before turning back to us. “Oh my God, what a terrible tragedy! Your mother was so beautiful. Your father is gorgeous. Look, I can see the sadness in their faces!”
I think because my mom had grown up in front of the cameras, people felt they somehow knew us and were entitled to speak to us, ask us questions, invade our personal spaces as if we were objects on display in some Natalie Wood museum. I didn’t want to talk to these people, I didn’t want to be showcased for them to see, I just wanted to get through the day.
After her death, the press maintained a strong interest in my mother, especially around the anniversary of her death. Each November when the tribute articles appeared, I did my best to block them out. They always seemed to say the exact same thing, speculating again about her “tragic death,” how my parents had fought that night, that my dad had somehow been “jealous” of my mom’s closeness with Chris Walken. At a certain point, the tabloids even started implying that my dad had somehow been involved in my mom’s death, that he could have saved her but he didn’t. I knew this couldn’t be true, so I simply shut out the chatter. My mom and dad had loved each other more than love. There was nothing in the world that would have stopped my dad from rescuing my mom if he could have. When the media started talking about foul play, our family was always told by our publicist and lawyer to remain silent. Do not respond. That is what the rumor mill wants. These reporters are baiting you. Do not dignify falsehoods with a response. So we remained silent. As did our close circle of family and friends.
My aunt Lana felt differently. In 1984, less than three years after my mom’s death, she wrote a gossipy book about my mother’s life. My dad was upset but not surprised. I remember my aunt Olga was horrified that Lana had done this so soon after my mom’s passing. My mom was close to many people; she had a large circle of loyal and intimate friends and family members. No one else had sold their story in the way Lana had been prepared to do.
As I entered my mid-teens, I started to have a social life of my own. Going out at night became my escape from the big, empty house on Old Oak Road. Jill and my dad traveled frequently and we were often left home with Kilky and Liz. At fifteen, I began to discover the Los Angeles nightlife with my friends. My big sister Katie knew the doorman at the nightclub at the time, Vertigo, and so he would let my friends and me in too. Before our nights out, I always made sure to raid Katie’s closet, filled as it was with one-of-a-kind designer pieces from her mother Marion’s clothing boutique. I was certain Katie’s beautiful clothes made me look older, although they probably only accentuated my underdeveloped frame. My goal was to look exactly like Rosanna Arquette in Desperately Seeking Susan. Even if I merely carried one of Katie’s Judith Leiber purses or wore her black silk bomber jacket with a sequined Felix the Cat on the back, I felt anointed. My coolest-of-the-cool older sister’s clothes were my armor against the world.
Some of my friends were starting to drink and experiment with cocaine. It was the 1980s and coke was the drug of the moment. When my friends did lines, I did them too, not because I particularly enjoyed being high, but because I wanted to fit in. I didn’t like the way the powder burned my nose or the weird metallic taste in the back of my throat, but I wanted to be like everyone else. So I did the tiniest of lines, or I’d rub some on my gums so I wouldn’t have to snort it. I watched the movies St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club religiously. That’s what I wanted. A group of friends who were as close as family.
Once dressed and equipped with fake IDs, my friends and I had to figure out how to get a ride downtown. Of course, I would lie to Kilky and my dad and say that Jessica’s mom was picking us up. In fact, we would call a taxi and tell the driver to wait a few doors down from my house. The drivers never seemed to mind or notice that we were underage; they were just happy to have a fare. Eventually we met a driver who liked coke. Soon we were bribing him with folds of cocaine we had bought downtown to take us to and from Vertigo. Out on the dance floor, we spun around to Madonna, Prince, and George Michael, the strobe lights blinking in our eyes. I moved through the experience robotically. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. I just went through the motions as if I were in a dream.
I began dating a seventeen-year-old guy named Jack. He was tall and thin with sandy-brown hair cut short and spiky. Handsome, but with an edge. I had met him through neighborhood friends. One night he drove me in his vintage Mercedes convertible to Bonnie Brae, a sketchy street just west of downtown. “I’m taking you out to dinner,” he told me, “and then we’re going to score some coke.” I remember thinking: Wow, I must really have him fooled. He thinks I’m cool enough to score coke with him on the street.
We were cruising along when suddenly his old Mercedes put-put-puttered and stopped dead. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He got out and lifted the hood. “Oh, the gas tank is busted,” he said. “I think we ran out of gas. We’re going to have to walk to a gas station.”
“Okay.” I felt a little nervous because we were in a somewhat deserted area, but I wasn’t frightened. Somehow, my feelings of isolation and sadness gave me a strange kind of courage. I remember secretly hoping that I would get jumped by someone and fatally stabbed or shot, and at the same time, I knew with perfect clarity that this wasn’t going to happen, because I had no such luck.
We hiked to the gas station, got the gasoline, and filled the tank, and Jack drove me home. The streets were quiet that night, no trouble to be found. I don’t even remember if we bought the coke. What I really wanted was to go home and drink warm milk and Ovaltine. I wanted socks on my feet and pajamas on my body. I wanted to watch Mister Rogers and be a little girl again.
A couple of days later, Jack confessed that he had arranged for the car to run out of gas on purpose. “I wanted to see what Natalie Wood’s daughter would do if she had to walk through the streets of downtown LA looking for gas.” He smirked.
That was the end of my relationship with Jack.
After Hart to Hart was canceled in 1984, my dad went straight into another series, Lime Street, about a widower raising his two daughters, a role to which he could clearly relate. My dad had just finished shooting the pilot episode in England and we were at London’s Heathrow Airport together, en route to Switzerland for a vacation, when suddenly my dad was paged on a loudspeaker to take an urgent phone call. This was unusual, and I started feeling panicky. When he came back from the call, the look on his face told me something horrible had happened. His Lime Street costar, a young actress named Samantha Smith, was flying back to the States from finishing her work with my dad. Her plane had crashed and she and her father had been killed instantly. She was thirteen years old. My dad was devastated, stunned, barely able to get the words out. As soon as we arrived in Switzerland, he turned around immediately and flew to Maine to be with Samantha’s mother and attend the memorial service. I stayed on with Jill, Kilky, and Courtney. I was rocked and blindsided. I couldn’t stop thinking about Samantha’s mother. She had just lost her daughter and her husband. What must she be going through? How could one person cope with so much loss?
Three days after that, the phone rang. Jill answered, listened, and then hung up. “Natasha, I’m so sorry, Ruth Gordon died today.” She spoke the words plainly. There was no hand-holding, no hugs. Just the cold hard facts. My darling godmother had passed away from a stroke. Whomp, another punch in the gut. I took it in and pretended I was fine. I don’t remember if I cried. I just knew that I needed to hold on tightly to the people in my life because death was all around us.
I became terrified to travel. Every time I landed in the UK to see my Daddy Gregson, I panicked, becoming convinced that something catastrophic had happened during the long flight. As I walked off the plane, my pulse would race and my lungs would tighten up. I anxiously searched the faces and body language of whoever had come to pick me up for any hints of impending bad news. “Is everyone okay?” I would ask before saying as much as a hello.
For our family, the 1980s was an entire decade of loss. Was death going to be a constant presence in our lives now? With each passing, the grief I felt over my mom was compounded. I became convinced that we were a cursed family and that Daddy Wagner would be next.
I lost my virginity in the summer before my sixteenth birthday. Jessica did it first, so naturally I wanted to do it too. Paul was a year younger than me and went to another school. He was smart and funny and sophisticated, one of those people who made you feel like the most important person in the room when they focused their attention on you.
Before Paul and I had sex for the first time he put on the song “Tonight’s the Night,” even though it was the middle of the afternoon. Losing my virginity hurt, but I did it anyway. It had nothing to do with Paul and everything to do with being like my best friend Jessica.
One night right around my sixteenth birthday, my dad took me out for dinner at Valentino, an elegant Italian restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He told me he thought it would be a good idea if I started taking birth control pills.
“I know you and Paul have been spending a lot of time together lately,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Daddy, Jessica and I already went to Planned Parenthood and got the pill.”
I could see the relief in my dad’s eyes. What my dad was not able to see was how much pain I was still in over losing my mom.
When Paul and I began dating, he called regularly, and we’d chat or make plans to see each other. After we started sleeping together, he’d say he was going to call, but then he wouldn’t—and he wasn’t home when I called. My friends told me they saw him out with other girls. I would wait by the phone, my heart pounding, my palms sweaty, my anxiety mounting with every minute. I knew this feeling. It was the same feeling I had as I waited for my mom to call when I was a little girl.
Unlike me, Jessica had a good and kind boyfriend and they were spending all their time together. I began to feel as if I was losing her. She was my safe person and without her I was not safe. I was also about to start a new school where I knew no one. My relationship with Paul was clearly going nowhere.
My dad was in England working when things reached a breaking point. It was a warm June night. I could smell the sweet jasmine outside my bedroom window. I could see my beloved horse in his stall. I had so much to be thankful for, and yet I still felt so alone and insecure.
Courtney and I loved my mom’s movie The Cracker Factory about a woman going through a nervous breakdown. We watched it a lot on the VCR at home. Whenever we got to the scene where my mom’s character attempts suicide I would think to myself, If it all gets too much, I can do that. I can take the pills and check out. For some reason, the image of her downing the pills comforted me. It helped me to know I had a way out of my suffering if I really needed one.
That night, I found a bottle of Tylenol in my bathroom medicine cabinet. On impulse I reached for it, popped it open, and swallowed a handful of pills. I didn’t want to kill myself. I was somehow emulating my mom’s character in the movie. Jessica was in my bedroom watching TV. Courtney was in her room, and I could hear Kilky through the wall talking on the phone to her best friend Velma. I washed the pills down with a glass of chocolate milk.
Almost immediately after I swallowed them, I panicked. I didn’t want to die but I had done something very serious and I knew it. Now I might be in real danger. Could I rewind the tape, make it all go away? This wasn’t a scene in a movie. This was my life.
I walked into my bedroom and told Jessica. She immediately called Tracey, who put her mom on the phone.
“Natooshie, it’s Janis. Are you okay? What’s going on?” Her voice was like warm milk and honey.
“Did you take some pills?”
“Yes,” I admitted, and started to cry.
“How many did you take?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a handful.”
“Natasha, I’m going to hang up the phone and call the paramedics.”
“Please don’t!” I begged.
I knew I needed Janis to save me, but I also knew I was about to be in very big trouble.
During this conversation, Jessica had raced down the hall and told Kilky what was going on.
Kilky came running into my room.
“Tasha, what did you do?” she screamed.
Kilky grabbed me, steered me to the toilet, and put her finger down my throat. I could feel her long nails scratching the back of my throat. I gagged and threw up but only a little.
“Tasha, what is wrong with you, why would you do something like this?”
By this time Courtney was standing in the bathroom too.
“Courtney, go get Jamie,” Kilky shouted. “We have to get to the hospital right now!”
Jamie worked for our dad helping around the house, and happened to be there that evening. He scooped me up and put me into the car, Kilky by my side.
We went to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The nurses brought me a thick, pasty black charcoal drink and a blue bucket to throw up in. The charcoal tasted bitter and chalky. It was not like The Cracker Factory in here. There was no kindly doctor who took an interest in me and made me feel safe. I did not get to let all my feelings out with an on-the-nose emotional monologue. Instead, the doctor on duty, bearded and stern, told me I was very lucky not to have done irreparable damage to my liver.
“Had you taken any more pills or waited much longer, you would be in a much more serious situation,” he lectured.
Sitting there in my thin blue paper gown, I felt like a thrift-store Thumbelina.
Jamie, Kilky, and I drove home silently that night. By morning both my dads had been notified of what I had done. I braced myself for the fallout. Courtney, Kilky, and I were leaving for the UK in a couple of weeks to visit Daddy Wagner in London, before heading to see Daddy Gregson at Whitebrook Farm for the rest of the summer. When I arrived in London, my two fathers were waiting for me at the hotel. I remember a tense dinner at Langan’s restaurant.
“Things have got to change,” Daddy Gregson told us. He reprimanded my Daddy Wagner for working and traveling too much, and laid down the law: it was time to reprioritize and spend more time at home with Courtney and me. Daddy Gregson also felt he needed to be more present for me. I would spend the summer with him in Wales, and then he would decide if he thought I seemed stable enough to return to Los Angeles. Because he was my legal guardian, the final word about my welfare rested with him.
Of course neither of my dads was really to blame. I hid my suffering from Daddy Wagner, terrified that if he knew I was still so sad it would be too much for him to bear. I hid my pain from Daddy Gregson, worrying that if he knew I was still struggling with the loss of my mother he would make me come live with him and Julia in Wales. The truth is, I was afraid to share my pain with anyone because I felt like I should have bounced back by now. Everyone else seemed to have moved on.
Thank goodness for Daddy Gregson, an unwavering force who righted the ship when it veered off course, so full of certitude and direction, caring and concern. As August came to a close, he and I took one of our long walks in the forest behind his farm. I could feel his attention focused directly on me, searching my face for the slightest shadow, probing for clues about my well-being. He was always like that, laser-focused on making sure I was okay, ready to provide counsel, assistance, support. After a summer together, my dad trusted me enough—or perhaps believed in my fortitude enough—to let me go back to America and find my way.
Back home, I settled into a new school, Crossroads, a private progressive school in Santa Monica. It was a small, caring environment where students and teachers called each other by their first names. I took a newfound interest in my studies, reading Franz Kafka, Langston Hughes, and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. I particularly loved my Film Studies class, guided by Jim Hosney. Jim was famous at Crossroads. Tiny and bespectacled, with his beloved pit bull mix Rona always at his side, he had seen just about every movie there ever was. He delighted in his students’ discoveries. No question was ever too stupid or uninformed for Jim. His classroom was a safe place to open your mind, especially to the great screen classics.
One day Jim took me aside. “Natasha, would it be okay with you if I show the class Splendor in the Grass?” I was touched that he requested my permission to screen one of my mother’s movies. This was the film my mom considered her best work, directed by Elia Kazan, the man I’d grown up calling Gadge. I had never watched the film in its entirety and certainly not in a room full of my peers. I surprised myself by saying yes.
We were studying melodrama at the time and so we watched the film in the context of the class. This took the onus away from me and my mom. I felt I could discover her performance and the film along with my classmates. Jim screened the film over two or three class periods as he always did. I don’t even know if the whole class knew that Deanie was my mom. I watched and I listened and I learned from Jim about that movie just like everyone else. I was just a student. I was not the child of a movie star.
Splendor in the Grass is set in the 1920s. In the movie, my twenty-one-year-old mother plays Deanie Loomis, a small-town girl from Kansas who falls in love with Bud, the son of a wealthy local family, played by Warren Beatty. Deanie’s mother (played by Audrey Christie) warns her to wait until she is married to have sex. Meanwhile, Bud’s father tells him to look elsewhere to satisfy his desires, which he reluctantly does, leaving Deanie heartbroken. After she is almost raped by another man, Deanie attempts suicide, and her parents put her in a mental institution.
One of the most famous scenes in the film is the bathtub scene. Deanie is soaking in a hot tub and her mother comes in to check on her. Her mother asks what’s the matter and if she’s upset about Bud. She tells Deanie she’s going to call that boy and give him a piece of her mind! Deanie erupts into anguished screams—“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare!”—and she threatens to do something desperate if her mom does call. A worried look passes over her mother’s face and she asks if Bud has “spoiled” Deanie—in other words, if they have had sex.
“Did he spoil me?” Deanie asks, laughing wildly, then submerging her entire head face-first into the water before coming up for air. “No, Mom, I’m not spoiled!” she spits sarcastically at her mother. “I’m just as fresh and as virginal as the day I was born!”
Then she gets out of the bath, fully naked, eyes wide and arms outstretched, crying, “I’m a good little girl! A good little, good little girl!”
The scene ends with Deanie running from the bathroom, wild, naked, lost. As I watched the film in Jim’s class, the scene sent a flicker of recognition coursing through me. The character felt so familiar to me; the heightened emotion, the woman-child on the cusp of adulthood. I recognized Deanie in my mother and in myself.
I felt proud to share her with my class that day—her beauty, her artistry, the emotional vulnerability she showed as Deanie. Everyone could see how amazing my mother was. Instead of shrinking under the weight of the comparison, I felt as if I were a reflection of her radiance.
At Crossroads, we had a weekly class called Mysteries. The teacher turned off the lights and lit a candle, which was placed in the center of the room. The students sat cross-legged in a circle. A talking stone was passed around. We took turns sharing our feelings in the dark. I loved Mysteries. I felt safe in this candlelit room. Here, I took the first small steps toward revealing my true self.
When a boy in our school died of a congenital kidney disease, the impact was felt throughout Crossroads. That week in Mysteries, other kids discussed the difficulties of accepting his death. None of the kids, however, had lost anyone close to them, and I remember thinking, These people don’t know anything about grief…but I can teach them something about it. This was my moment. There, in the flickering candlelight, I finally opened up about losing my mom. “Grief rocks you to your core,” I told my classmates. “You feel unsafe. You feel afraid. You feel alone. And it never goes away.”
I surprised myself that afternoon by speaking so openly in class. I think I surprised my classmates too, as I had always given them the impression that everything was fine with me. I was discovering how cathartic, how healing it can be to speak about your pain. Tentatively, I was finding my voice.