Chapter 13
Natasha on the set of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, 1997.
One morning in the spring of 1990, Courtney and I headed off together in my black Jeep Wrangler, making our way out of our protected cocoon on the west side and onto the tangled freeways of the 405 and 101. For the first time since our mother died, we were going to visit the storage unit in Glendale where all her belongings were kept. My dad had decided he was ready to revisit the items that had been put in storage and he thought that Courtney and I might also want to take a look and see if there was anything we wanted to keep now that we were older.
Liz had organized the day. Since my mom’s death, Liz had kept working as my dad’s assistant. I remember feeling a nervous thrill when she called to ask if I wanted to go with her and Courtney to the storage unit. I was excited that my dad thought we were old enough to take care of our mom’s possessions. What treasures might we find?
On the drive over I was filled with anticipation, but as soon as we walked into the storage facility I felt the back of my neck stiffen. It was a sort of gripping tension, a burning. There was Liz waiting for Courtney and me. Everything about Liz felt safe to me, her English-accented “Hello, lovey,” her complete confidence in organizing our lives. I trusted her. Why does my body feel like this?
I followed closely behind Liz as we walked toward the back of the building and entered the storage unit. Long tables had been set up along the walls, covered with what seemed like hundreds of objects. All my mom’s possessions, waiting to be rediscovered by Courtney and me. To be held, touched, looked at, and listened to. The flotsam and jetsam of a well-lived life. These artifacts from the past had been loved by my parents and they were waiting to be loved by us. Maybe if we loved them hard enough, if we made space for them in our own lives, they could tell our mom’s story.
There were the silver goblets that Spencer Tracy had given my mom and dad for their first wedding. “Bob and Nat, all my love, Spence.” I remember they had sat in our wooden bookshelves in the living room. When Jessica and I played “ladies” in that room, often we would pretend the goblets were tall wineglasses. We would take ladylike sips and try to imitate our mothers’ voices. “Now, Natooshie, tonight will not work for a sleepover with Jessie.…”
In the middle of one of the long tables was a cluster of Limoges boxes that had rested on my mom’s night table. There was an oblong box with the words “You are witty and pretty,” a reference to the lyrics from a West Side Story song, with pale blue forget-me-nots circling the top and bottom. A box in the shape of a heart had been given to my mother for her birthday by Howard Jeffrey the July before she died. Pink and green flowers wound tightly together in friendship.
Then there was the sloppy rabbit I made out of clay for her in fourth grade. Painted dark mauve and molded with immature hands. She loved that rabbit and kept it next to her on her bedside table.
Novels that had once been piled on the floor next to her bed were now piled on the tables in the storage unit. I remember one called High Anxiety. Was that what I was feeling now?
Liz was the lightness in the room that day.
“Natooshie, look at Mommie’s little shoes! Your grandma had them bronzed. Do you remember these sat on the mantel in their bedroom? And here are your little ballet slippers and Courtney’s sweet little shoes. Look, Mummy did the same thing to your shoes. Take them with you today, lovey. They are beautiful!”
Courtney and I, discovering and rediscovering, what? Our childhood, our mom, our younger selves when life was safe and sweet?
A silver box with my parents’ wedding invitation engraved on top, “the second time around.”
Another plain rectangular silver box. I opened it and it read, “For Lady Wood, with continuing affection, Redford.”
“Look, Toosh,” Courtney called to me. “Remember Mommie’s music box? I wonder if it still works?”
The box was large and square, made of dark, inlaid wood. Courtney opened up the lid, turning the old crank handle. Suddenly the bells started ringing, playing their familiar tune. Inside, there was a little drum and butterflies and flowers that hit the brass bells, chiming and chirping. The sound of our mother filled the room. I ended up taking the box home with me, to the magical delight of any small child that happens upon it.
That morning I lost track of time. I don’t know how many hours went by before I remembered I had an appointment with my therapist, Mrs. Malin. I was still seeing her once a week. It was time to go, but where were my keys?
The three of us looked on every table and around every object, to no avail. What had I done with them? I felt foolish and insecure. This was a grown-up thing, to be invited to the storage unit. Now I was back to being an irresponsible child. I had lost my keys and I would miss my therapy session, dammit.
I can’t remember who found my keys or how but they were finally retrieved after we turned that room upside down. I had missed my appointment.
When I finally made it to my therapy session the following week, Mrs. Malin asked what I had been doing when I lost my keys. I casually mentioned that Courtney and I had gone to the storage unit. Then I kept talking about some inconsequential argument I’d had with Josh.
Mrs. Malin stopped me. “Natasha, was that the first time you had seen the contents of Canon Drive since you moved out?”
I remember her gaze so clearly. Steady and deeply focused on me.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well, no wonder you lost your keys. That must have been an incredibly emotional experience. Let’s talk about it.”
I shifted in her noisy leather chair.
“Why?” I asked. “It’s all fine now. I picked out things I wanted and I found my keys.”
I did not want to talk about it.
Mrs. Malin looked at me again, her eyes filled with kindness.
“Okay,” she said. “Maybe another time.”
Not long after the visit to the storage unit, my mom’s datebooks arrived at my home in narrow black boxes. Looking back, I can’t precisely remember how they ended up there. Maybe I had asked Liz to send them to me? What I do remember is staring at them in the entry hall of my apartment. Each box had a year printed on top: the first year was 1964 and the last was 1981, when the boxes ended. I found the box that said 1970 and took it into my bedroom. I sat down on my bed and I opened up the box. Inside were twelve tiny, black, spiral-bound notebooks. One for each month. I remembered these datebooks. My mother kept them within reach on her table, her desk, her bed, usually opened to the current day of the week, so she could easily jot something down: a reminder, an appointment, a number, an address, a moment she didn’t want to forget.
I picked out the book for September 1970, the month of my birth. My mom’s loopy, happy, Natalie Wood handwriting was on every page, slanting upward and to the right. Sometimes she used black ink, sometimes blue, sometimes pencil. Sometimes she wrote in block letters, sometimes script. In the front of the book were the names and numbers of all her doctors, emergency numbers, numbers of her friends and her family and all her favorite restaurants. Some of them were the numbers I had memorized by heart as a child. I flipped through the pages to find September 29, 1970, the day of my birth. At the top of the page, in pencil, she had written, “cleaning crew.” Then “1:45 Bentley’s chop house Lana—Wilshire.” After that the words: “At 2:30 hospital.” Then, at the bottom of the page in big purple letters, she wrote: “Natasha born 9:11 p.m. 6lb. 8 ounces.” My mom drew the N of my name exactly the way she drew the N of her name. Tall and proud but ladylike. A brick dollhouse.
Sitting in my room that day, I read the words over and over: “Natasha born.” I am born. I am here. If I am born, then how could it be that she is gone now? These were the confusing strands of thought tangling in my mind. I know my mom wanted me so, so, so much. I know she was over the moon to become a mother. I remember how much she loved and adored and cherished Courtney and me. How much fun she’d had planning our parties, buying us velvet holiday dresses, curling our hair with her big hot rollers.
I pulled out the book for 1971. August. On the first page of the beginning of the month, my mom had written in turquoise cursive, “Sat 7:45 Dinner Langes.” Beneath that in large, black, cursive letters, “End of Marriage,” with a black line down the page. Okay, so this is the day my parents’ marriage ended. I knew a couple of weeks later my mom, my aunt Olga, Mart, and I boarded the SS Raffaello for Europe. A disastrous trip but a journey that my mom somehow needed to take.
On the back of the datebook she had made a list: “Richard did not want me to continue breastfeeding after three months.” “Wanted me to go back to work when Natasha was just a baby.” “Did not understand why I needed to call home and check on her when we were out to dinner.” “When she became of age wanted to send her to an English boarding school.” So here are my mom’s reasons for leaving my dad right in front of me? If she were still alive and I asked her, “Why did you and my Daddy Gregson break up?” these would be her answers? Or would they?
Discovering this vulnerable time during her breakup from my father was too much for me. Sitting there with the datebooks, I realized I had been without my mother for nearly nine years. Her love no longer felt sturdy or solid. It felt far away, like cotton candy clouds in a dream that I could reach for but that disappeared in my hands. I was supposed to be a grown-up or very near a grown-up, but I still felt so much like a little girl. I might live by myself, have a boyfriend, drive my own car, and work as an actor, but I felt as if a big gust of wind might blow me away. I was looking for guidance in the datebooks. I needed to lean on my mother’s trusty strength. If she had periods when she felt scared and insecure, then that meant I would have periods when I felt scared and insecure—and what would the outcome be for me?
I closed up the datebooks and sent them back to storage. Around this same time, Mart told me about my mom’s suicide attempt. The year was 1964. She was divorced from R.J., filming The Great Race with Tony Curtis, and feeling particularly lost and alone. One night, Mart heard a banging on his door, and when he opened it, Natalie fell into his arms. She told him she had taken too many pills. Mart immediately called her doctor, who came to the house and said she needed to go to the hospital. My mother stayed in the hospital for the weekend, getting her stomach pumped, and was back to work on Monday, always the professional.
I heard what Mart was telling me, but I barely processed his words. I was nowhere near strong enough to come into contact with my mother’s fragility. I didn’t want to read her datebooks. I wasn’t ready to revisit her intimate possessions from Canon Drive. I could only feel the anxiety gripping the back of my neck, mislay my keys, and cry in the shower when nobody could hear me.
While I was studying acting as a sophomore at USC, Josh was working with the producer Nick Wechsler. Nick invited me to audition for Fathers & Sons, an indie drama starring Jeff Goldblum and one of my teenage idols, Rosanna Arquette. I got the part of Lisa, a lost waif of a girl searching for love.
By now Daddy Gregson had started speaking to me again. One day, out of the blue, he called me up, and we were back to our old relationship. I think he realized I was serious about my acting career and he had better go along with it. He warned me that I would never be able to focus on acting and finish college. “You need to pick one,” he said. The choice was obvious. I wanted to be an actor. Instead of going back to college for my junior year, I headed to Belmar, New Jersey, to start shooting my first movie. I had never acted professionally before, and I had no idea what I was doing. But I felt lucky to be among such an exceptional ensemble cast: Jeff and Rosanna, as well as Joie Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Ellen Greene, and Famke Janssen. And I wasn’t the only newcomer. The director, Paul Mones, had hired Rory Cochrane, also a first-time actor on a film set.
I had been on many sets as a child and I quickly felt at ease. The camaraderie was familiar to me. After all, most of my mother’s dearest friendships had been forged on movie sets. I bonded with many of my castmates, the director, makeup artists, hairstylists, the first assistant director. I was especially drawn to people who could teach me, guide me, mother me. I was still looking for that kind of connection. The freshly printed scripts, collated and clean, reminded me of my parents and their scripts. When the paper changed colors from blue to yellow to pink, I knew what that meant. Rewrites!
What was not familiar to me were the inevitable discomforts of filming: the 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls, being so cold all the time, the way they called the next meal “lunch” even though it was clearly dinnertime. Night shoots… My very first day I had a love scene on the beach in New Jersey with Rory. It was January but we had to pretend it was summer, which meant we were freezing and sandy and all-around uncomfortable. Even so, I found I could easily relate to Lisa’s search for love and connection.
I remember calling Gadge to give him an update on my career. He, of course, wanted to know all about the director and if I liked the way he talked to me about the character. I did.
Next I landed a small part in the film of the moment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One day on the Buffy set, I was waiting inside my trailer, only a little bigger than a bathroom on an airplane. I had my vampire teeth poking out of my mouth when I noticed another brunette actress wandering the parking lot with her own vampire teeth poking out of her mouth, waiting to be called to set. Despite the fangs, I recognized her from Bar One, the nightclub we both frequented. She reminded me her name was Amanda and we had met on the dance floor a couple weeks earlier. I invited her to share my space. Amanda’s dad was the singer Paul Anka. Her mother was English like my dad. She had four sisters to my five (including those from my dads’ other marriages). We had both traveled a lot as kids and were both trying to be actors. That day in my tiny trailer we began a lifelong friendship.
After that I landed roles in TV series and some other smaller films, including the indie thriller The Phony Perfector, later known as Dead Beat. In the film, I played Kristen Biedermeir, and I treasured the part. Kristen was a spoiled, neglected rich kid who took up with Kit, an Elvis impersonator turned murderer in a desolate valley in New Mexico. I wore a polka-dot bikini for many scenes and bleached my hair blond. We hunkered down in Tucson, Arizona, for the shoot. The cast included Balthazar Getty, Meredith Salenger, and Sara Gilbert. The movie was loosely based on a true story. The dialogue was snappy, the director, Adam Dubov, was playful—like a grown-up kid—the costumes were fabulous. I found it easy to understand the ride-or-die love connection that Kristen and Kit shared.
I was immersing myself in the actor’s lifestyle. My mother’s lifestyle. I grew accustomed to the rigmarole of auditioning. Rejection was painful, and of course I questioned my talent, especially when I really wanted a role. But as rejection is more common than acceptance in the acting business, all the actors I knew, including my dad, supported me through the experience—they all knew what it felt like.
When I did win a part, I was jubilant. Each film or TV project, it was as if I had joined another patchwork. I was also getting to discover different aspects of myself by experiencing the varying emotions of a character. Playing Kristen in Dead Beat was a revelation in this respect. In real life I was too circumspect to live my life with the kind of wild abandon that Kristen did. She had a temper and I was only too ready to let Kit have it in the movie. Was this what my mom loved about acting? When she screamed at the actress playing her mother, Audrey Christie, in Splendor, was she feeling the same release? I found it hard to let go of a beloved character when a shoot was over. Did my mom have the same struggle? In her performances, she is so completely immersed in her characters. If I missed Kristen after Dead Beat wrapped, did that mean my mom missed Deanie Loomis or Gypsy Rose Lee? I couldn’t ask her. The more energy I spent following a trail of gingerbread crumbs to my mother, the more acutely I felt her loss.
As much as I was looking for her, I did not watch my mother’s films during this time. I knew that if I studied her performances too closely I wouldn’t be able to find my own identity as an actor. When people brought her up, I shrank. I did my best to make sure most people did not know I had famous parents. I wanted to live or die by my own strengths and weaknesses. But it was inevitable that I would be held up to my mother’s mirror. One of my teachers told me that my mom “held her emotion in her throat” and that I did the same thing. What he meant by that was she wasn’t speaking from the deepest place in her body, that her voice got caught in her throat; therefore in a very emotional scene there was still a part of her that she was holding back. “My mom held her emotion in her throat?” I remember saying it back to myself over and over. I wouldn’t have dared look at my mother’s performances with anything but admiration and awe. She was famous for her vulnerability, the tremor in her voice, her velvet brown eyes that told the audience everything we needed to know. She had been nominated for three Oscars and this teacher just picked apart her talent? I felt very confused. Were her flaws my flaws? Maybe I had only inherited her shortcomings as an actor and none of her talent? Her image loomed large, and I worked overtime trying to diminish our connection. I wanted this time to be about my teachers, my directors, about me.
My agent suggested I take weekly scene study classes with Larry Moss, the great actor, director, and acting coach. Amanda was going to be taking the class as well so we decided to work on a scene together. We chose In the Boom Boom Room by David Rabe, about two go-go dancers. I played Chrissy, a young, inexperienced dancer with a past history of abuse and dreams of making it big on the stage in Philadelphia. Amanda played Susan, the more mature of the two dancers.
I borrowed a Playboy Bunny costume from a friend and Amanda put together her interpretation of a stripper’s outfit. Larry sat in his director’s chair in a corner of the theater, watching us intently. He was tall and gangly, a real string bean, with glasses and a baseball hat. I was in awe of him and desperately wanted his approval.
The scene went from bad to worse—neither of us was up to the task.
Larry was kind but he made it clear there was a lot to learn. He gently told me the unvarnished truth about myself: that I was a little girl who needed to grow up.
“You need to work on strengthening your voice and breathing from your diaphragm,” he advised.
Even at the age of twenty, my voice sounded like a child’s voice. It had no power or resonance and it could sound nasal and whiny. After that assessment, I didn’t go back to Larry’s classes for a very long time.
While I focused on my acting, my sister was on a very different trajectory. Two years after I moved into the condo on Doheny Drive, Courtney bought a place in the same building. We fell easily back into the pattern of living close together. We each had our own space, but we knew the other was just a floor away. Courtney’s love affair with drinking and partying was intensifying. Often, she couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. Katie and I were constantly getting reports from Courtney’s friends, telling us about her wild nights.
“You guys better do something about Courtney,” they said. “We’re worried about her. She needs to go to rehab or she will wind up dead.”
Sometimes I would organize for Courtney to stay with me. We would talk about our mom, the pain we were both struggling with, our dreams for our future. I would remind Courtney of her strength, her courage, her talent as an artist, her beauty. Though Courtney had seen a therapist after our mother died, this relationship did not yield the same kind of emotional stability that I had gotten from Mrs. Malin. The family conferred. Doctors and specialists were contacted. What could we do to help her? Could we find Courtney another therapist, insist that she go to rehab, take her to Wales to live with Daddy Gregson and Julia for a time? Courtney would listen to us, aware that she had a problem, in agreement that she needed help. And then before we knew it, she’d be out on the town, drinking and partying with no plans to stop or slow down.
Worry and fear for Courtney’s life soon dominated my days. My family and I took turns staying with her, watching out for her, praying for her. I knew that losing her would be more than my family could bear. My mother had died from an alcohol-related accident. I couldn’t save my mom, but I was determined to save my sister. I clocked her moves, I called her and her friends incessantly, I stayed up at night wondering where she might be and what time she would be home.
Finally, Courtney hit rock bottom and, a couple of days later, checked herself into the Sierra Tucson treatment facility in Arizona.
My sister had been at the rehab center for a month when my dad, Jill, Kilky, Katie, and I arrived for family week.
The facility was a low adobe building in the middle of the stark Arizona desert, surrounded by cactus and tumbleweeds. We rose early, separating into different groups. For the rest of the day we worked with specialists alongside other families that had been through loss and addiction. At the hospital, they called Courtney the “identified patient,” meaning she was the one our family was always focused on. We were told that we were enabling Courtney by trying to ameliorate her problems. They suggested that Courtney was using her addiction as a way to stay young, to continue to be a child because she felt that she had not gotten enough of a childhood.
My sister had once said to me, “You miss Mommie. I miss having a mom.” Courtney had scarcely had a chance to get to know her own mother before losing her. Because I was three and a half years older, I had had more time with our mother before she died. I felt guilty about this: guilty that I knew our mom better than Courtney did; guilty that I had a stable second family in Wales that I spent summers with, and she did not. Courtney was often left with Kilky while I was in Wales, Katie traveled the world, and my dad lived his life with Jill. She did not have a therapist who was as wise and brilliant as Mrs. Malin. Thank goodness for Kilky, who mothered Courtney consistently, with every bit of her love and devotion.
We each had our time in a chair speaking our truth to Courtney. I told Courtney that she was the closest person to me next to my mother. I told her I loved her as my little sister but also as my best friend. I told her how much I needed her. I apologized for my judgment of her, the times when we fought and I was furious at her. I admitted I was afraid of losing her. Maybe if I pushed her away first, the pain of losing her wouldn’t be so great.
On that trip to Arizona, Courtney and I talked openly about what happened after our mother died. Because our dad was traveling and working so much, we had felt left behind, longing for him and his attention. He always told us how much he loved us, how much we meant to him, and yet he was not able to be there for us physically. He would call us and buy us presents, but he was not able to tolerate our pain, to sit still, to just stay home. Courtney and I didn’t want to travel to Europe and stay in the nicest hotels or go to fancy dinners; we didn’t care what beautiful gifts he gave us. We just wanted him, his basic, unadorned self, at home, doing normal, unremarkable things, like making dinner, playing board games, watching a movie, taking a walk.
That week, I watched my brave dad sit in a chair across from one of the therapists and talk about his relationship with his own father. The heartbreak he carried with him of not having a father who supported him in his life. How much he wished they could have had the opportunity to talk like this. My dad apologized to Courtney and me for working so much, for not knowing how to support us in our grief.
Jill also became more open with us. We learned that she simply did not know how to be a stepmom to us. She explained that our dad had asked her not to try to take our mom’s place and that was why she didn’t engage with us as much as we wished she would. It was not rejection. Jill acknowledged she didn’t know how to be our friend.
After Arizona, Courtney did well for a while. Her sobriety went on just long enough for it to be all the more heartbreaking when she relapsed. A small thing, and before we knew it, she was drinking too much again and we had to face the hard truth that this wasn’t over yet. My mother’s loss was like an earthquake, continuing to send ripples of shock through our lives, leaving cracks beneath our feet where there should have been solid ground.