1 “NATALIE WOOD” NEVER REALLY EXISTED. The actress with that name was a fictional creation of her mother, a disturbed genius known by various first names, usually Maria. How Natalie was discovered, why she went into show business as a child, her background, were all part of a tapestry of lies woven by Maria that began before Natalie was even born. “God created her, but I invented her,” her mother said once, after Natalie’s body was discovered floating in the dark waters off Catalina Island the Sunday after Thanksgiving of 1981, when she was just forty-three. Natalie Wood, the celebrity, was an entwined alter ego of mother and daughter so powerfully macabre her drowning had been predicted by a gypsy, years before, to happen to Maria, not Natalie. The person inside the illusion of “Natalie Wood” was lost for years, even to herself.
Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko*1, the real name of the actress known as Natalie Wood, was a child of Russia, once removed. Exactly where in Russia we may never know, for her mother, the source of the family history, was an unreliable witness, a feverishly imaginative woman who lived in a world of her own invention, only occasionally punctuated by the truth. Maria’s friends characterized this as colorful; others considered her devious; her youngest child eventually concluded she was a pathological liar. There was intrigue to Maria no biographer could fully unravel. She would have three daughters—Olga, Natalia, and Svetlana—three sisters, as in the Chekhov play. For Maria, there was only and ever Natalia. Her consuming obsession with Natasha, Natalia’s pet name, was the one thing no one questioned about Maria.
The rest of her life was a masquerade, with Maria assuming different disguises.
Natalie Wood’s mother came into the world somewhere in Siberia. It was most likely the town of Barnaul, as her oldest child, Olga, believed and ship’s records document, though she told a different daughter and a biographer that she was born in Tomsk. They are both close to Russia’s border with Mongolia, near the Altai Mountains. Maria’s early years were spent in this nethermost, Russian-Asian region of the more than four and a half million square miles known as Siberia, famous for its bitterly cold winters, romanticized for its forests primeval, and considered the ends of the earth.
Maria claimed, throughout her life, to have grown up in fantastical luxury on a palatial Siberian estate with a Chinese cook, three governesses, and a “nyanka” (nanny) per child. But her most cherished belief, or delusion, was that she was related, through her mother, to the Romanovs, Russia’s royal family. Her stories—whether true or not, and most who heard them questioned their veracity—“kept you spellbound,” according to a young actor who befriended Maria in the 1980s, after Natalie drowned. “She herself was quite the actress. She spoke in a very dramatic whisper, so you had to lean in, and pay close attention. She used her hands as she would describe in great detail her genealogy from Russia. She would whisper, ‘We were descended from royalty…’ and you would just hang on every word.”
What is known of Maria’s family is that her father, Stepan Zudilov, was married twice. He had four children—two boys, Mikhael and Semen, and two girls, Apollinaria (called Lilia) and Kallisfenia (or Kalia)—by his first wife, Anna. Anna died in childbirth with Kalia in 1905 in Barnaul, where the Zudilovs resided. Stepan took a second bride, who would likewise bear him two sons and two daughters in reverse order: a girl, Zoia, born in 1907, followed by Maria, then Boris and Gleb. Stepan Zudilov’s youngest daughter, Maria Stepanovna Zudilova*2, would become the mother of Natalie Wood.
According to Maria, her mother (also named Maria) was “close relations” to the Romanov family. It is believed her maiden name was Kulev. Whether she was an aristocrat is unknown. Kalia, Stepan’s younger daughter by his first wife and the only Zudilov child other than Maria to immigrate to the United States, would later tell her children, “Somebody in the line was a countess.” But as a Russian historian notes sardonically, “Everyone from Russia wants to be related to the Romanovs.”
If Natalie Wood’s grandmother had royal blood, her mother undermined her own credibility by the thousand-and-one variations on her lineage she offered, Scheherazade-style. “One story was that her parents took her to China when she was a little girl and she became a Chinese princess through some mysterious circumstances that were never explained,” recalls a Hollywood friend. Another version that surfaced in studio biographies after Natalie became a child actress identified Maria as “being of French extraction.” According to her eldest daughter, Olga, this was a prank on Maria’s part. “When they would ask her if she’s French, she’d say, ‘Oh, yes…’ She knew how to speak French, because she probably had French nannies.” Even this was based solely on Maria’s word, for Olga never heard her mother actually speak a word of French (nor did Maria’s half-sister Kalia speak it). Maria’s white lie sustained itself all the way to a 1983 television tribute to Natalie Wood, during which Orson Welles, her first costar, refers to Natalie being “not just of Russian but also of French descent.” Maria, in the opinion of her daughter Lana (Americanized from Svetlana), was “frightening” in her ability to bend reality and convince others it was true, “because she did believe everything that came out of her mouth.”
Maria told Lana that she was born to gypsy parents who left her on a hillside, where the Zudilovs found her and raised her as their own. “I heard that story my entire life.” Maria would laugh about it with friends after Natalie became famous, muttering, in her heavy Slavic whisper, “They used to call me ‘The Gypsy’! ” She could easily create that impression as an adult, with her raven hair, magical tales and musical accent. “I could almost see her,” remarked a Hollywood writer who spent hours with Maria, “waylaying me on a street with a bunch of heather, saying, ‘Buy this or you’ll be cursed for life.’ ”
The idea that Maria was the displaced child of gypsies is “hogwash” in the pronouncement of her closest traceable living relation—Kalia’s son Constantine. No one in the family, including Lana, took this tale seriously. It originated, Maria’s daughter Olga believes, as gossip among the family servants, for Maria was born, she told Olga, at the Zudilovs’ “dacha,” a country cottage, in the mountains. “And when my grandmother came back she had my mother, so the servants used to tell her, ‘You were born by gypsies,’ because she wasn’t born right there where they could see her.”
One clue exists to help decipher Maria’s past. It is a photograph of the Zudilov family, retained separately by both Maria and Kalia, taken somewhere in Russia circa March 1919, according to the handwritten description. Maria’s family, judged by their portrait, appears to be of means. They are dressed à la mode, the girls in shirtwaists and sailor dresses, posed regally, projecting a patrician mien. Stepan Zudilov, Natalie Wood’s maternal grandfather, sits on a chair to the far left of the photograph, a stout but stately figure with a sweeping moustache, in a well-tailored three-piece woolen suit. At the center of the portrait, also seated, is his second wife, Maria, the putative Romanov. Maria evokes a gentle womanliness. She is possessed of a round face with soft features, girlishly pretty; her dark hair, contrasted by fair skin, is styled in marcelled waves. What distinguishes her as the grandmother of Natalie Wood are her liquid brown eyes: they hold the camera with their tender, slightly sad gaze.
Stepan and Maria occupy the front row with their four children—Natalie’s mother, Maria, staring brazenly into the camera’s eye; thirteen-year-old Zoia; and the two boys, Boris and Gleb, six and four, seated side-by-side in identical Lord Fauntleroy suits. (Maria would later bizarrely refer to them as “twins.”) Standing behind Stepan’s second family are his four grown children by his first wife, Anna; including Kalia, the corroborating witness to the family history. Anna’s offspring are swarthier, with sharper features than Stepan’s children by Natalie’s grandmother. Everyone has captivating eyes.
The picture helps to solve the riddle of Maria’s true age, which would become the subject of whispered speculation once she came to Hollywood. From the time she was twenty or so, she gave her date of birth as February 8, 1912. On the back of the 1919 family photo, she is identified as “11 years, 1 month,” which would mean she was born in 1908—the same year recorded in the ship’s log when she immigrated to America. Both Maria and Kalia, Kalia’s son cheerfully admits, “lied about their age.”
The photograph of Maria’s family, ironically, bears a resemblance to the romantic images of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, in formal portraits with their children, taken in the last days of the Romanov monarchy. Maria kept this family photo beside a framed portrait of the Romanovs in similar pose, to the day she died, prizing them as jewels. Aside from Natalie, her link to Russian aristocracy is what defined Maria to herself, true or false, for as one companion remarked, “She believed every word of it. That’s the mark of a good actress.”
Musia, or Marusia, as young Maria was affectionately called, was pampered from the time she was born because of her diminutive size. One of her stories was that she weighed only two pounds at birth, nearly dying. In the family portrait, she is nestled into her mother, cradled to her breast, as Marusia peers out with the smug self-possession of the favored child. She has an elfin quality, her dark hair pixie-short, with penetrating, birdlike eyes she compared to her father’s as green, her daughter Olga describes as a changeable gray-blue, and those who considered her malevolent called “black and beady.” Her expression, even at eleven, suggests cunning. She was a mischievous girl. Her German nanny was fired for making Marusia kneel; she learned to swear in Chinese from the cook. When she did so in front of her father, it was the cook—not Marusia—who “got a talking.” The young Marusia adored jewelry (a bold bracelet leaps out from her tiny wrist in the family photo). She collected pictures and books depicting the royal family “because I worship them,” she would say later, “almost like a god.”*3
Kalia, Maria/Marusia’s older half-sister, supported her grandiose accounts of governesses and fur coats and seamstresses for their dolls, though Kalia identified the origin of the family’s wealth as a factory that produced vodka and textiles, while Maria later said their father manufactured candles, ink and candy.*4 Kalia was not heard to repeat Maria’s boast that the town where they kept their dacha was named after Natalie’s grandfather. (“Because he was such a generous man. If a peasant is nice and he likes him, he’ll give him house, he gives him horse, he gives him land.”) According to Maria, her parents’ marriage was arranged to merge Stepan Zudilov’s fortune with Maria Zuleva’s name. Neither Kalia nor Maria, once in America, had photos of the family’s estate, or their dacha, to authenticate living such rarefied childhoods, though according to Kalia’s son, they behaved like it. “Didn’t cook, didn’t clean, had other people do that.”
This idyll, if it existed, came to a tragic end around 1919. A civil war erupted in Petrograd two years before, forcing Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. Bolshevik workers seized the Winter Palace by October, naming Communist Vladimir Lenin as their leader. The summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their five young children, Grand Duke Alexei and the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and presumably Anastasia.*5
Natalie’s grandparents kept an uneasy vigil at their home in Barnaul as the Bolshevik Revolution made its way toward Siberia. Sometime after March of 1919, the date they sat for their portrait, they were warned the Bolsheviks were coming. “They told us, ‘Run!’ ” said Maria, “because of Mother, the whole family would have been killed. They were killing aristocrats.” They left so quickly, she recalled, there was no time to find her favorite brother, Semen.*6
The Zudilovs, dressed as peasants, crossed the border into Manchuria, where they stayed a few days per Maria, a year by Kalia’s version. “Then the Czechs came and chased the Communists away,” Maria recounted, “so we came back.”*7
Marusia and her family returned to Barnaul to find Semen hanging from the archway of their front door, a rope around his neck. Ten-year-old Marusia went into violent convulsions. “I was so little and I loved him so much—he was such a nice half-brother. When I saw him hanging there, with the tongue and everything, I start to have convulsions, starting with the neck, then with leg and hands, and then I just drop.” The episode, a family legend, permanently affected Natalie’s mother’s nerves, leaving her subject to “the fits,” she called it, damaging her psyche in ways unknowable.
Marusia and her family remained in Siberia until the Bolshevik Revolution reached their door, when they fled for China, “because the Reds were killing everybody.” She and Kalia would provide essentially the same drama of the family’s escape: how they packed what jewels and belongings they could onto a train their father bought from the Chinese. According to Maria, Natalie’s grandfather buried “jewels and money and gold” worth “millions” in a waterproof box with a map of its location provided to everyone in the family “except me. I was young, they didn’t give me the plan.” A similar story surfaced from Kalia, though never, notably, the “plan.” Whether the tale of their escape and the buried family treasure is true remains cryptic. “The problem with stories from Russians,” one historian of the era observes, “is that they’re all probable.”
According to Natalie’s mother, her parents changed everyone’s names because they were afraid Communists would find them, exacting a promise from each child never to reveal the family’s true identity—a reaction a Russian émigré friend considered extreme to the point of “demented.” “Stepan Zudilov” is identified as Kalia’s father on her 1905 birth certificate, before the alleged name change, and “Maria Kuleva” is the name documented as that of Marusia’s mother on family possessions prior to the revolution. These are also the names Natalie’s mother would use to identify her parents on legal records once in the U.S., leaving little room for doubt that Natalie’s grandparents were born Stepan Zudilov and Maria Kuleva; though Olga, Natalie’s older sister, still expresses uncertainty those are their true names, “or if they changed them when they ran.” Olga and Natalie’s mother remained haunted all her life by the fear that Communists would come after her and “kill me like killed my brother.”
Once in Manchuria, little Marusia and her family stayed at a hotel in Qiqihar, where Natalie’s mother had the first of several alleged mystical experiences. As Maria later told the story, she “recognized” a house near their hotel as one she had lived in, remembering an outdoor playhouse and the ceiling of her bedroom, with “angels” on it. Her parents took her to the house, afraid she would have another seizure if they refused. Upstairs was a room with cherubim painted on the ceiling; in the backyard, concealed by spiders’ webs, Marusia found a decaying playhouse. Natalie’s mother believed in reincarnation ever after, despite the opposite position of the Russian Orthodox religion in which she was baptized, and to which she and her parents adhered. (“How can you explain that?” she would ask. “There was my angels!”)
Natalie’s grandparents settled in nearby Harbin, China, where so many Russians had fled, neighborhoods appeared to have been lifted out of Siberia. The family lived in such an enclave, in a “good” part of town. Stepan, Natalie’s grandfather, is presumed to have managed a soap factory. Natalie’s mother, Marusia, attended an all-Russian girls’ school, though Marusia’s eye was on “pretty young boys.” She went to church so she could “look at the boys, and look at what the girls are wearing—is my dress better than theirs?” Marusia had thick, naturally curly, crow-black hair and was preternaturally tiny—just five feet—“But she carried herself as if she were seven foot tall,” said an acquaintance from Maria’s senior years. “She liked to talk about how she had been a great dancer, and how she had been a great beauty.” Natalie’s studio press releases would later describe her mother as a “professional ballerina” in China. “That was made up,” admits daughter Olga. Teenage Marusia took one ballet class in Harbin. “For grace,” she put it later, claiming her parents withdrew her, believing dancers and performers fell into a category with “prostitutes.”
Marusia and her sisters placed absolute faith in Russian superstitions and “did gypsy stuff” using Romany magic, such as “looking in the mirror on a certain night between two candles and you can see the person you’re supposed to marry.” One day, the sisters had their fortunes read by a Harbin gypsy. The fortuneteller warned Marusia to “beware of dark water,” for she was going to drown. The gypsy also predicted her second child “would be a great beauty, known throughout the world.” Natalie Wood’s life, and death, would be dictated by the gypsy’s twin prophecies.
The fortuneteller’s predictions held an immediate power over Natalie’s mother. She refused to go near water, “especially if it’s dark waters.”
Marusia eloped in her teens, defying her parents by choosing a Russian-Armenian, the brawnily handsome Alexei Tatulov, originally “Tatulian,” the son of an Armenian Cossack who, legend has it, led a regiment against the Turks astride a white horse. Marusia was fleeing a father too strict for her ambition; her choice of a “ladies’ man” her girlfriends coveted revealed her vanity, and a competitive streak. (She told Olga, their daughter, she married Alexei “because he said he would kill himself if she didn’t.”) Natalie’s mother was not a true beauty, as she imagined, but her vivid personality was a magnet.
She became pregnant in 1928; claiming, later, that she weighed only seventy-five pounds and doctors ordered her to abort. She would tell Natalie she had several abortions before this, because she was too tiny. By Maria’s later account, her mother took her to a French doctor experienced with “narrow” Chinese women, who agreed to deliver her baby. Alexei brought a priest, she would recall, “because he thought I definitely was gonna die.” Marusia gave birth to her first daughter, Olga, on October 28, 1928. She alleged that it was without anesthetic, that her labor lasted five days, and “it felt like my bones were cracking, they were stretching, it was horrible.” “My mother,” Olga would later sigh, “told so many stories.”
Olga was originally called Ovsanna, christened in the Armenian Orthodox church. One morning, Stepan Zudilov took his infant granddaughter “for a walk,” secretly bringing Ovsanna to a Russian Orthodox priest, who baptized her in the Zudilovs’ religion, renaming her “Olga,” a Russian name. Olga/Ovsanna had her part-Armenian father’s dark eyes and gentle disposition.
When Olga was a little over a year old, Alexei and Marusia Tatulov made the bold decision to leave Harbin for America, Alexei’s dream, according to Marusia, who saw America as “just this amazing land, and the Communists will never get there.” Alexei boarded a ship called the Taito Maru in Kobe, Japan, on January 12, 1930. He arrived at the port of San Francisco, California, fifteen days later, identified in the ship’s logs as an “auto mechanic.” He had no job, no prospects, and fifty dollars in his pocket.
Marusia was rejected for the voyage, ostensibly underweight. She spent the next ten months in Harbin drinking a concoction of beer and milk to gain weight, a recipe she would one day give to actor Jack Lemmon, when Natalie starred in The Great Race. A Japanese nurse tended Olga while Marusia passed the time studying bookkeeping. She and Olga were issued their visas in November 1930, embarking on a grueling, month-long journey to the United States.
Dispossessed of her child’s nurse, Marusia had no maternal instincts. She continued to breast-feed Olga, who was now two, and the little girl cried without ceasing as they traveled by train from China into Korea, then Tokyo, where they boarded a ship, the Asama Maru, sailing first to Hawaii, finally to San Francisco, sleeping on bamboo mats. Natalie Wood’s mother’s life of privilege, if it existed, existed no more.
2 MARUSIA AND OLGA’S SHIP, THE Asama Maru, arrived at San Francisco’s Port of Angels on the eleventh of December 1930. Alexei met them at the pier, informing his wife he had a mistress. He still loved her, he told Marusia, but Armenians were “passionate” men who could not survive a year without a woman.
Marusia’s next shock was her home, one room in a bungalow co-occupied by a crowd of Russian immigrants who worked with Alexei at the nearby shipyards. “I thought, ‘What we gonna do?’ ” She had no money, a toddler, and spoke broken English. Marusia accepted the arrangement, consoled by the fact that she was further from Communists, about whom she was possessed by a terror bordering on the hallucinogenic.
Natalie’s mother’s escape from her demons, and her poverty, was the movies. She was “movie crazy,” relates daughter Olga, who remembers how her father would give her mother money for food “and we’d go to the Temple Theater instead.” Flights of fantasy transcended Marusia from the reality of having seen a brother hanged, or the squalor of her life in America. They infused her with the cheerfulness of the deranged. “She would say, ‘Believe in the best, expect something good to happen, and it will.’ ”
Ballet was Marusia’s secondary passion. She befriended Nadia Ermolova, a model who taught ballet to children, enrolling Olga in her class. Marusia danced alongside the little girls, “doing it more than we would.” Marusia left her toddler to her own devices. When she got a job as a church seamstress, lying that she knew how to sew, Marusia left Olga, then four, in the park while she went to work.
She was remembered as a “social climber” in the Russian community of San Francisco, which socialized at a Russian Center off Divisadero, where an Invalids Ball was held each year. Marusia was twice Queen and twice Princess, chosen on the basis of having collected the most money for Russian veterans. “Here we all were,” recalls a neighbor, “not two pennies to rub together, and Marusia is standing around on the corners gathering money for the Invalidzi.” A 1936 photo of Natalie’s mother as Queen shows her sitting in a ballgown wearing her crown, a satin banner draped across her chest, trophy in one hand, a spray of flowers in the other, looking as if she had assumed her rightful place on the Russian throne. The gossip where Alex worked as a janitor was that he “took” the dress from the emporium where he worked and returned it after the ball. Olga remembers her mother hiring a dressmaker a different year she was Queen, “using all her money for this one dress.”
Marusia began acting in plays at the Russian Center, then at the Kolobok, a Russian club, where she danced onstage, dragging Olga, who would “fall asleep on pool tables.” Marusia wanted to be an actress, in the opinion of her closest friend, Josephine Paulson, whose daughter Lois was Olga’s playmate, giving Olga the lifelong nickname “Teddi,” for Tatulov. Marusia read palms and threw tarot cards, “always into something.” She looked at apartments full-time, moving the family at whim.
Though her husband continued to have affairs, Marusia became pregnant in 1932. She collapsed on the street and was rushed to Mt. Zion Hospital, where her second reputed mystical episode occurred. She hemorrhaged during a blood transfusion, lost the baby, and was pronounced dead, regaining consciousness as a nurse prepared her to be embalmed. Marusia lay on the hospital bed, unable to speak or move to indicate she was alive. Alex arrived to accompany her body to the morgue, carrying dried flowers from a religious icon, sent by Marusia’s mother. As he placed the flowers on Marusia’s neck, she felt warmth. “I open my eyes and I start to scream. The nurse fainted, then she run out and said, ‘She’s alive!’ ” Marusia’s friend Josephine, Josephine’s daughter, and Olga all confirm the incident, which Natalie’s mother would consider a miracle, reinforcing both her religion and her belief in the mystic.
Marusia was still living with her husband, Alex, when she began dating a Russian sea captain, George Cetalopv, the “great passion” of her life. “My father had other interests,” as Olga explained, “and she had this interest.” One night Alex brought home for dinner a coworker from the sugar boats, a Russian immigrant named Nikolai Zakharenko. He was twenty-three; short, but well-built; with black hair, black eyes, and the refined face of a matinee idol. “God, he was so handsome,” Maria would swoon in her later years of the man who would become Natalie’s father. She continued to dally with her sea captain, but acquired Nick Zakharenko like a trophy. “All my girlfriends want him, and I thought, ‘If they want him, I have to get him!’ ”
Nick and Musia, his pet name for Maria, made a dazzling couple on the dance floor, where they won prizes dancing together. He impressed Maria with his gentlemanly manners, for Nick had a poet’s soul which expressed itself when he played the balalaika, a Russian string instrument. He was also possessed by a dark force that could explode after too much vodka. “Nick would get very moody and would hurt somebody,” recalled Olga, who was seven when they met. “He would fight.”
The underlying cause of Natalie’s father’s rage was not fully understood. His brother Dmitri believed it came from deep-seated hatred of Communists. The Zakharenko brothers—Nikolai, Dmitri and Vladimir—spent their childhoods in the eastern Siberian port of Vladivostok, where their father, Stepan, worked at a candy factory and their mother, the former Eudoxie Sauchenko, was known for her beauty. During the revolution, Stepan Zakharenko fought against the Bolsheviks. Nikolai, the eldest, was not quite ten when Communists killed his father. Eudoxie received financial aid from a brother who immigrated to California, enabling her to escape Vladivostok for Shanghai with her three handsome young sons. She remarried in China. Her new husband, a Russian naval engineer named Constantine Zavarin, determined to move the family to the U.S., far from Bolshevik forces. Their first stop was Vancouver, the end of 1927, when Nikolai was fifteen. By 1932 the family made their way south to Seattle, settling eventually in San Francisco. Dmitri and Vladimir Zakharenko survived their upbringing relatively unscathed; Nikolai emerged with psychic wounds even Dmitri considered an enigma. “He kept in touch with Russians that were in exile, and he read the Russian books—oh, and he was so proud of the Tsar’s family. I didn’t even think of them.”
Nick struck out on his own when he was twenty, mining for gold in the Rockies. Dmitri, who briefly joined him, described a tortured artist playing balalaika part-time with an orchestra, railing against Communists during drunken binges on vodka. “He worried about and hated the Communists so much…it kills you instead of the other guy.” Nick’s anger came out in fistfights, when “he’d just lose his temper and threaten some guy. He’d never back down.”
Alex Tatulov saved Nick’s life in such a brawl before he brought him home to dinner. Natalie’s mother, who thrilled to strong and handsome men, and to drama, may have found Nick Zakharenko’s furies exciting at the start. They also shared a fanatical attachment to the royal family and a frenzied paranoia about Communists. Maria ended her “arrangement” with Alex and set up housekeeping with Nick, taking Olga. She filed for divorce in October 1935, identifying herself as Maria and as “Marie,” a name she began to use arbitrarily. The new setup with Nick did nothing to deter Maria from carrying on her flirtation with George Cetalopv, the captain she considered her true love.
Maria became pregnant with Natalie in October 1937, six months after her divorce from Olga’s father. She and Olga, who was nine, lived in a cubbyhole apartment in an alley with Nick, who was working as a janitor at Standard Oil. The conception was noteworthy, for Nick thought he could not have children, according to Maria, who was still romantically involved with George Cetalopv. The baby, from all accounts, was Nick’s. He and Maria were married on February 8, 1938, in a small Russian Orthodox cathedral in the neighborhood, witnessed by Nick’s artist brother, Vladimir. Why she waited until she was four months pregnant with Natalie to get married is one of Maria’s mysteries. “George went on a trip because he was captain of the ship,” recalls Olga. “When he came back, she was married to Nick.” Olga wondered, then and later, why her mother married Nick and not George Cetalopv, the love of her life. “I asked her that once. She said she liked George too much, that she’d always be jealous of him. But who knows her story? Nick was very attractive…much more attractive than George.”
Maria may have delayed marrying Nick because of his alcohol problem, which concerned her. “He drank a lot,” she said later, “even when I married him. He was wonderful man—when he was not drinking.”
Her choice of Nick Zakharenko over George Cetalopv would prove prophetic to Maria, despite its disturbing consequences. She was glad she married Nick, she said at the end of her life, because he gave her Natalie.
3 MARIA BELIEVED SHE WAS CARRYING destiny’s child, the world-famous beauty the gypsy in Harbin had predicted as her second-born. She ingratiated herself to a rich, childless Russian couple, Theodore and Helen Loy (originally “Lopatin”), whom she met through friends in the immigrant community, asking them to be godparents, assuring wealthy patrons for the unborn child she was convinced fate had chosen for fame. Natalie, a childhood friend would observe, was stage-managed by her mother “from conception.”
The Zakharenkos, who were struggling to pay the obstetrician’s bills, managed to move out of the alley to a cheerful duplex nearby at 1690 Page Street by the time Maria went into labor the morning of July 20, 1938. True to the fortuneteller’s prophecy, her baby, a girl, resembled “an exquisite, perfectly formed china doll,” said a neighbor. Maria granted the wealthy Helen Loy, the fairy godmother, the manipulative privilege of naming her star-child. Loy chose “Natalia,” for the pretty blond daughter of a friend in China. It was Americanized to “Natalie” on the birth certificate, which omitted the Russian patronymic “Nikolaevna” (daughter of Nikolai). The petite infant with flashing dark eyes carried the ponderous name Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. She was called, simply, “Natasha.”
“As soon as she was born, she brought us some luck,” Maria boasted later. According to Maria, Nick placed a small bet on the Chinese lottery while she and Natasha were still in the hospital, winning “exactly the amount” owed the doctor. “She brought money, even when she was born!” her mother crowed.
Robert Wagner, the man Natalie would marry twice, said after her death that Natalie was born to be an actress, “as if she had the word ‘movie star’ written on her birth certificate.” If so, the handwriting was Maria’s. Maria raised Natasha to be a movie star, as she brazenly told a reporter later. She breast-fed Natasha at the movies, whispering in the darkness how she would be famous like the gypsy predicted; safeguarding her from imagined dangers as if she were the Lindbergh child. Maria would have crawled inside Natalia’s skin if she could.
Nick simply adored Natasha. Astonished at having fathered a child, he treated her as if she were a fragile figment of his imagination, insisting that visitors wear masks so they wouldn’t breathe on her. “He just went goofy over this little girl,” an acquaintance noted. Natalie returned the affection in her eulogy to her “Fahd” years later: “I never knew anyone so brave,” she said. There could be little doubt Natasha was Nick’s daughter; she was a miniaturized version of him: tiny but perfectly proportioned, with his striking features. The quality uniquely Natasha’s was in her eyes; deep, dark pools of sensitivity that seemed “to go way back to Russia or beyond.”
Natasha’s earliest memories were of the Romanovs, seen from her crib. She slept in Nick and Musia’s bedroom, where the walls were a picture gallery of the Russian royal family, hung with care by Nick, a skilled artisan. Natasha, whom he called “Meelaya,” Russian for “dearest,” was his grand duchess Anastasia. “He went out and bought this absolutely ostentatiously beautiful carriage, and everybody in the Russian colony just thought he was totally googy to spend all that money,” said an émigré friend, who wondered how Nick, then an elevator operator, could afford it. “They didn’t have a penny to their name really.” Natasha was baptized in the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church on Fulton Street in a christening gown and gold cross provided by the Loys.
Maria paraded her in front of the other immigrant mothers in Golden Gate Park each morning in her royal carriage, “and everyone oohed and aahed” over adorable Natasha. “She was a Russian-American princess,” younger sister Lana would say later. Maria’s purpose in life was to promote Natasha; to the exclusion of her daughter Olga, who was ten when Natasha was born, “old enough to take care of herself,” in Maria’s pronouncement. Olga, who had the disposition of a saint, accepted it without complaint. Cast adrift by her mother at two, she had attached herself to her friend Lois and retreated into fantasy, cutting out pictures of movie stars. She was proud, later, she had been permitted even to babysit Natasha. “My mother didn’t let anybody else.”
Olga’s affection for her favored half-sister was a credit to Olga’s generosity and to Natasha’s endearing personality. Like young Maria, Natasha was a tiny bird of a child. Marusia, with her piercing eyes and blue-black hair, called to mind a raven; Natasha was a trusting sparrow. She connected emotionally with her “Fahd” or “Papa” or “Deda,” her nicknames for her father (she called her mother “Mud”), snuggling beside him at night, enchanted, as Nick read to her from the Russian fairy books of his childhood—fanciful tales of firebirds and wild animals transformed into princes. Natalie would carry this romanticized image of her father, and of Russia, throughout life. “He loved to read,” she said later. “Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Turgenev…he was a scholar.” Natasha, “a smart little thing,” absorbed her papa’s passion for language and for Russian novels. “She was such a brilliant child. It was amazing sometimes,” said Maria. “My husband, he was so clever, you ask him any questions, he always knew every answers, and she was like him.” Natasha learned to speak in Russian and in “American,” as she called it. “We never talked baby talk to her,” said Olga. Natasha, as a tiny child, was an old soul.
When Natasha was one, her father, weary of being at the end of the alphabetical cattle call of immigrant laborers, changed the family name from “Zakharenko” to “Gurdin,” a friend’s surname. “Nick thought Zakharenko was too Russian,” explains Olga. “During the end of the Depression, there would be great big long lines for work and there was discrimination. The people with the most comfortable names to call were called out for jobs.” The effect of living in near-poverty, forced by his immigrant circumstances to take menial jobs, took its toll on a man of Nick’s sensibilities, contributing to his escape in vodka.
“Mud,” not “Fahd,” was the disciplinarian in the Gurdin household, which Natalie would unhappily recall as “very strict European.” She and Olga were instructed to curtsy, forbidden to use “foul language,” forbidden to ask questions. “My parents felt children should be in the corner, sheltered from listening to or understanding what the grown-ups were talking about,” she said as an adult. Maria was an austere taskmaster, seldom demonstrative or affectionate. Nick, when sober, was the tender parent. “He loved life,” Natalie eulogized. “He loved music, singing, dancing—and he was never embarrassed to let his feelings show.” Little Natasha listened delightedly as her Fahd played the balalaika; thrilled when he gathered the family for “an adventure.” He was also violent. “I remember him getting very drunk one time and breaking the balalaika,” recalls Olga. “I didn’t know whether he was going to get a pistol. He would, periodically.” No one knew when, if, or why Nick’s demons would be unleashed by vodka. Olga believed he was tormented by witnessing his grandfather buried alive during the revolution. Natalie, after years in analysis, would characterize her beloved Fahd as “complicated,” possessing a “Russian soul” she likened to “a volcano that just had to erupt from time to time.” To the child Natasha, the extreme chiaroscuro of his personality—the shifts from his “soft and gentle underside” to drunken “Russian explosions”—was frightening.
Nick’s “rampages,” as Olga referred to them, were often provoked by Maria, who “knew how to get to him.” The house was a battlefield, with Olga and Natasha in the crossfire. Natasha, from earliest childhood, hated confrontation.
Her favorite word was “pretend.” Olga wrote and performed playlets with Lois, using the communal garage as a make-believe theater with sheets as curtains. Olga and Lois occasionally cast toddler Natasha, whose sun-dappled brown hair formed curls not unlike Shirley Temple’s. The sisters, twelve and two, performed together for family, including cousins by Maria’s older half-sister Kalia, who had immigrated from China to San Francisco and was married with children by a Russian named Sergei Liuzunie. “At that time they didn’t have television, so we would both be into the performing,” recalls Olga. “Turn on the music and dance and stuff.” Natasha obligingly played along with her big sister; whereas Olga had a passion to perform. She loved to sing, especially Russian music, and had an appealing voice, teaching her precocious baby sister hand movements to popular songs. Olga kept a scrapbook of her ninety-four favorite movie stars, collected over years of matinees with her movie-mad mother.
Maria ignored Olga, whispering to Natasha their secret: Natasha was going to be a famous star…a fortuneteller in China foretold it. “When we walked down the street, Mother would put coins on the sidewalk when I wasn’t looking and when I found them, she’d tell me it was magic, and that I was destined to be someone magical. For years I believed in magic,” Natalie said years later. “She brainwashed her that she was this special child,” a friend confirms. When Mud took Natasha to the movies and the camera, at the end of the newsreel, pointed to the audience, she would whisper dramatically: “Natasha! It’s taking your picture!” “I’d pose, and smile,” recalled Natalie, who thought the camera was directed at her. “My mother told me all these things and I’d believe them.” By three, Natasha sat through two-hour films without moving.
Natasha’s personality—intelligent, eager to please, and “dutiful,” the word she later used to describe herself as a child—formed the tragically ideal combination for Maria’s manipulation. “It was easy with her,” Maria once chillingly admitted. Mud patched Natasha’s dresses to pay for a piano to prepare her for stardom, pushing Natasha into lessons at three. “The teacher didn’t think she was old enough,” Maria recalled once. “She did beautifully. Whatever she does, Natalie does to perfection. Always.”
The irony in their mother’s fixation on Natasha was that “she was different,” her sister Lana concedes. “It’s like when you watch a film, a TV show, a commercial, see someone walking down the street—and they have something special about them.” Natasha had a touching orphan’s quality in her brown eyes that communicated a hunger to be loved. What part of that was Natasha, or the result of witnessing her troubled home life, is impossible to know.
Maria kept the fortuneteller’s prediction that Natasha was destined for stardom their secret. The other half of the prophecy—that Maria was going to drown—was family legend. “Mother thought that she would die drowning because the gypsy told her,” confirms Olga. “She was terrified,” concurs Lana. “She wouldn’t get in the water.” In her dramatic whisper and heavy Russian accent, Maria would hypnotize little Natasha, conjuring up visions of stardom and magic in one ear; warning, “Beware of dark water,” in the other. “She really created an impression in her mind,” relates Olga. Natasha was afraid to learn to swim; frightened even to have her hair washed, because her head would be submerged in the bath water. “She was always afraid of water, like I am, especially if it’s dark waters,” Maria said later. “My mother contributed to her fear of the water, because my mother was afraid of the water,” corrects Olga. “My mother was afraid of swimming, and she was told that she’d drown. So this communicated itself to Natalie.”
Natasha grew up in a house of paranoia—fear of Communists, gypsy curses, hysterical convulsions, drunken demons. Her mother was like a fictional character written in magic realism, with her accounts of mystical reincarnation and resurrection, guiding her life by superstitions and instilling them in her daughters. “Peacock feathers or pictures of peacocks are bad luck,” recounts Olga. “You don’t pass the salt, you put it down, otherwise you’ll get into an argument. If you give somebody tablecloths or sheets, you’re wishing for them to go away.” As an adult, Natalie would remark that she “didn’t like mystery” as a child, how Russian superstitions had created paranoia in her she did not want her children to have. Her mother trusted only Natasha’s father and Olga to babysit her; Fahd refused to allow her in crowds because she was so tiny.
Fear was in the air Natasha breathed.
4 WHEN THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL Harbor in December 1941, the paranoid Nick believed they would bomb San Francisco, so he moved the family to the outskirts of the city, in Sunnyvale. The Gurdins lived in the low-income projects, Natasha’s fifth apartment by the age of three. Nick found work at the naval yard as a draftsman and Maria took a part-time job babysitting, entrusting Natasha to Olga.
Maria and her daughters’ diversion from this charmless existence, apart from movies, were holidays near the Russian River in the picturesque wine country, a two-hour drive north. Families, most of them Russian, shared rental cottages the immigrants referred to nostalgically as “dachas.” One such holiday, in September of 1942, Maria, Olga and Natasha took a scenic drive with a Russian friend through the nearby town of Santa Rosa. As the friend turned down a country road at the edge of town, Maria’s eye seized on a new bungalow. She asked her friend to stop the car. “I want that house,” Maria announced. She found a carpenter inside and engaged him in conversation, learning that the owner was in despair because his wife had run off with the contractor. Maria entreated the carpenter to phone the owner, who struck a deal with her that afternoon, selling his heartbreak house to Maria for a down payment of $100, all the money the Gurdins had. “She conned him into it,” marvels Olga. “I think he even gave her money to buy furniture.” Maria, who didn’t drive, forged her absent husband’s signature. “How she managed to get a loan, I don’t know,” said Olga. When Nick arrived to take Musia and the girls back to Sunnyvale, “I said, ‘Nick, we’re not gonna go back home. We have a home here,’ ” she recalled. Flummoxed by his wife’s machinations, concerned about the long drive to the shipyard, Nick was no match for the formidable Maria. The Gurdins’ deed to the property at 2160 Humboldt was recorded on September 28, 1942, at a purchase price of $5400, making the immigrants homeowners and establishing Maria as the business head of the family.
Maria’s almost mystic acquisition of the bungalow in bucolic Santa Rosa proved, ironically, to be a determining factor in Natalie’s Hollywood career. Director Alfred Hitchcock had discovered the charms of the Sonoma Valley just before Maria, selecting Santa Rosa to represent an idealized small town in his suspense thriller Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock began shooting in Santa Rosa in August, the month before the Gurdins moved to town. That September, a second picture, The Sullivans, a drama about five Iowa brothers recruited in World War II, set up location shooting. The timing was either synchronistic or Maria knew the two movies were being filmed in Santa Rosa and maneuvered the house purchase to be in proximity. In either case, she took her four-year-old golden child by the hand and followed the film crews. “She went to all of the locations. I don’t know how she found out,” said Olga.
When Maria would later talk about Natasha at this age, she described her as “always acting,” desperate to be in movies. According to Olga, four-year-old Natasha was a “natural” when she performed, but she was not movie-struck. Maria was the one stalking movie crews, seeking parts for herself and Natasha; Natasha “just went along.” Olga—who knew every star, studied drama in school, and got her Social Security card so she could work as an extra—was an afterthought. “I wouldn’t even come home from school. I’d know that wherever they’d be shooting, my mother and Natasha would be. So I’d walk over to some of the houses.” Olga was happy just to be included. “My mother made everything fun.”
The Gurdins had been in town a few weeks when Maria heard about a ten-year-old Santa Rosa girl “discovered” by Hitchcock in July. Edna May Wonacott, the “Cinderella Girl,” as she was dubbed in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, was flown to Los Angeles for a screen test and given a part in Shadow of a Doubt. The end of October, Santa Rosa staged an “Edna May Day,” with a parade in her honor. Maria Gurdin became obsessed with Edna May Wonacott, following every nuance of her Cinderella story. Edna May, the bespectacled daughter of a grocer, had been downtown with two cousins, unaware Hitchcock was across the street, scouting for locations. She remembers: “We were standing on a street corner waiting for a bus—and him and Jack Skirball, the producer, were looking at the courthouse for angles. And then they turned around and started looking at me.” Maria read the front-page story in the newspaper, which reported that Hitchcock noticed Edna May because of her pigtails, asking her to sing a song for her screen test. Maria made mental notes, using Edna May as a role model for Natasha. The town went Edna May–mad. “People stopped by the market just to touch my dad.” Maria accelerated her efforts to get Natasha noticed by film crews. “She was a stage mother,” recalls a neighbor. “Push, push, push.”
By Thanksgiving, Hitchcock and the crew from The Sullivans were gone. Natasha enjoyed simply being a child. She baked cookies outdoors in an electric play oven with her first and only friend, a neighborhood boy named Edwin Canevari. Edwin was small for his age, like Natasha, and fiercely loyal. “We played husband and wife,” he recalls. Maria trusted no one else to play with Natasha. “She was watching her all the time, even when we were playing out in the driveway.” Natasha was never a “physical” child, according to Maria: “She liked to play piano and do some artwork.” This was, to a degree, Natasha’s nature; the rest of her perceived delicacy came from being treated like a hothouse flower. The gypsy’s warning continued to haunt Natasha, further restricting her from physical activities. “Never did she go in the water,” pronounced Canevari. “She was deathly afraid of the water.” Maria encouraged Natasha to play the piano, taught her to embroider, and bought her the oven for her to sculpt with clay, heeding advice from Olga’s nurse in China, who told Musia that working with the hands “exercised” a child’s brain.
Life in the Russian River Valley was an idyll for the two sisters, who played amid the apple orchards and redwood trees, gathering walnuts and sweet chestnuts. Nick made a swing for the backyard and the family acquired a puppy. Natasha, who loved animals, adored her German shepherd. Remembers Olga: “I used to climb the hills with our dog, and pick cherries on cherry trees. We had rabbits in the back, that later ran over to the Canevaris’ because they had radishes.”
Inside the cottage on Humboldt Street, the spectre of the Russian Revolution possessed the Gurdin household like a sinister spirit. Canevari, who lived across the street, “heard about” Nick’s drinking problem, “but I never saw it.” He remembered Natasha’s father as a “nice guy, used to rub my head and call me Butch.” Nick’s drinking, violence, and disappearances were the family’s dark secret. Maria claimed Nick never hurt her in Santa Rosa, though she conceded it was better if he was “someplace else” when he was drunk. As a child actress, Natalie would confide in juvenile actor Robert Blake, who was an abused child. “She had a lot to recover from. They use those catchphrases like ‘dysfunctional family.’ I know that to be the case. And I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘Well yeah, her father was a drunk that beat her up’ or ‘Her mother was an unloving rat,’ because I’m not gonna give you any of those things.” Who knows what Natasha experienced inside her netherworld?
Maria imagined the mother of a neighbor girl was conspiring to poison Natasha. “I don’t know why, but she always had that in her head. It was just a superstition,” recalls Canevari, who heard his mother and Mrs. Gurdin talk about Maria’s escape from Bolsheviks. He linked that experience to Natasha’s mother’s paranoia. “I don’t know what she went through in the revolution, but she was afraid Natasha was going to get poisoned by this one and that one—just people in general.” Maria was “overprotective” to the point of “smothering” Natasha.
Something about Natasha inspired others to want to take care of her. “Even the seventh- and eighth-grade kids loved her,” recalls principal Ethel Polhemus. “I remember we were doing the Virginia reel, and she got started the wrong way. I just took her by the arm and turned her the other way—oh, the youngsters were disturbed at me!” Natasha had a winsomeness that was endearing. “I can still see that little girl. Her eyes were dark. She was such a pretty little thing, a darling girl. She was just a doll…kind of dancing all the time, very sprightly.” Natasha was extremely tender-hearted, refusing to go fishing “out of pity for the fish.”
That year, when Natasha was four, she and Olga took a walk for a root beer, their German shepherd puppy tagging along. On the way back from the store, the puppy and Natasha darted ahead of Olga to cross the highway. A truck suddenly appeared, crushing the puppy under its wheels as Natasha watched in horror. “I told her to look ahead and to never look back,” relates Olga. Natasha never made a sound, too traumatized to cry. It was to become a significant event in her life.
In January, Santa Rosa’s movie theater, the California, held a special premiere for Shadow of a Doubt, attended by Hitchcock’s daughter and celebrating his discovery, Edna May Wonacott, who had signed a seven-year contract with producer Jack Skirball. Maria, a theater usherette, further fixated on Edna May as the precedent for Natasha’s impending fame. The Wonacotts sold their grocery store, moving closer to Hollywood. When the story broke in the Santa Rosa paper, “girls started standing on street corners in pigtails and glasses.” Maria was possessed that Natasha become the next Cinderella Girl, though how she hoped to accomplish that was unclear. Natasha was more excited about the kindergarten play than Hollywood. She came up with the idea of putting white powder on her hair to make herself look like her character, an old woman, saying later it helped her “get into the mood of the part.”
That summer, as school let out, Maria Gurdin’s moment announced itself in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. “Movie Stars to Arrive in S.R. Today,” read the June 13, 1943, headline. By serendipity—this time there could be no calculation on Maria’s part—Irving Pichel, a Harvard-educated stage actor turned director, happened to see Shadow of a Doubt, concluding that Santa Rosa was the perfect backdrop for his next picture. The film was called Happy Land, a Capra-esque piece of Americana starring Don Ameche as a small-town pharmacist who realizes the value of his life through the loss of his son in World War II. The story came from a best-selling novel excerpted in the Saturday Evening Post. Fifty-two-year-old Pichel, known for his patriotic, anti-Nazi themes, had already cast a few Santa Rosans in bit roles in Happy Land, including Mayor E. A. Eymann, who was asked to play the mayor of the mythical Midwest town of Hartfield in a commencement scene. Mayor Eymann, the paper reported, was officially welcoming Pichel and actor Don Ameche, providing a schedule of the film crew’s locations around Santa Rosa, with the advisory that some of the scenes would “use upwards of 300 extras.” To Maria, the article was tantamount to a golden oracle.
Natasha stood perfectly still the next morning as her mother brushed her curly hair, instructing her how to create attention so the Happy Land director would notice her, coaching her on what to say so he would like her, reminding her to curtsy—repeating hypnotically the incantation that Natasha would someday be the most famous actress in the world. Natasha took her mother’s prophecy to heart, concentrating while Mud braided her gold-tipped hair into pigtails, observing herself in the mirror as she metamorphosed into a tiny Russian replica of Edna May Wonacott.
Mother and daughter walked downtown in search of the film’s director, determined to create the fairy tale that had serendipitously occurred for Edna May. They spotted the Happy Land crew near the courthouse, surrounded by curious spectators. Maria, holding on to Natasha, asked whoever walked by, “How does this work? Which one’s the director?” When actors in army uniform began to assemble for a parade scene, Maria thrust four-year-old Natasha into the lineup. As Natalie would later describe it, “My mother made me go march with the soldiers. I really didn’t want to do all this. I was kind of scared….Mother, of course, wanted me to attract attention.”
After a few days, Irving Pichel began to notice a “quaintly pretty little child” with an “absorbed expression” who kept following the Happy Land company from location to location, watching them closely. The toddler seemed to be leading the wandering crowd. Natasha made such an impression on the director, he mentioned the tiny Santa Rosa girl with the “winsome smile” a few years later as a tragic example of children being pushed into movies.
Pichel would have been chagrined to learn that what he observed was merely the prelude to Maria Gurdin’s plan to get Natasha a part in Happy Land. By the second week, when the film crew moved to the high school auditorium for the mayor’s scene, Maria had gleaned what she needed to know. “When she figured out that Irving Pichel was the director,” Natalie would later recall, “she said to me, ‘Natasha, go over there and sit on that man’s lap and sing him your songs.’ ” Pichel would remember the waif he had been feeling sorry for coming up to him one noon. “Mr. Pichel, can I be in the movies?” she asked plaintively. “You don’t want to be in the movies,” the grandfatherly-looking director advised. Natasha, unprepared for this reaction, reflected for a moment, according to Pichel. The moment was profound. If she had been capable of free will, Natasha’s response to Irving Pichel, and thus her life, might have been different. Instead she continued robotically, programmed by Mud to perform her piece. “She changed the subject by telling me that her name was Natasha Gurdin, that her birthday was July twentieth, that her parents were Russian and that she would like to sing me a Russian song, if I would like to hear it.”
“I remember singing ‘In My Arms,’ with gestures,” said Natalie, years later. “ ‘Comes the dawn, I’ll be gone. Ain’t I never going to have a honey holding me tight…’ ” The Jewish director by chance understood Russian, according to Olga, “and he just fell in love with her.” Ironically, Olga had taught Natasha to sing “In My Arms,” and created the hand movements that charmed Irving Pichel. But it was Natasha with whom he was smitten, taken by “those eyes…she looks at you and you can read her thoughts.”
Pichel was so enchanted with Natasha he offered her a small, nonspeaking part in Happy Land. Mud’s improbable scheme to create the kismet that happened to Edna May had succeeded, establishing a precedent: if a formula worked, Mud copied it. The lesson for Natasha, from her staged encounter on Pichel’s lap, was more troubling. “I learned at an early age that if you are nice to men, you can get anything you want from them,” she said at thirty-one. After Natalie became famous, Maria would tell people Natasha was discovered by Pichel when he spotted her on the street, or that Natasha wandered away and impulsively jumped into Pichel’s lap—creating the deception that Natasha’s first part, like Edna May’s, was an accident of fate. Natasha, Olga, Irving Pichel and Natasha’s friend Edwin knew differently.
Nick, by Maria’s and Natalie’s later accounts, disapproved of his daughter being in the movie, though Olga recalls no such objection. Whether Nick objected to Natasha acting or not was of no real consequence, for as Maria baldly told a reporter in the mid-sixties, “I made all the decisions in the family.”
Natasha’s cameo appearance in Happy Land required her to drop an ice cream cone in front of Marsh’s drugstore, where Don Ameche’s character worked as a pharmacist. The scene was to be shot in nearby Healdsburg, where the director had chosen a street with storefronts resembling middle America. An actress was hired to play Natasha’s screen mother, who was to pick her up after she dropped her cone.
Natasha did not seem excited about being in the movie, according to both Olga and her chum Edwin. Her sister thought “she kind of took it in stride, she didn’t buck it or anything, she enjoyed acting.” Edwin’s impression was that Natasha was being pushed. “You could see it in her face when her mother would come out and say, ‘Natasha, come over here,’ or ‘Sit here,’ or do this, do that.” As an adult, Natalie seemed unsure how she felt, at four, about appearing in Happy Land. “Obviously I wasn’t shy, because I did what I was told.”
It is perhaps revealing that she asked Edwin to go with her the day she was to shoot her scene. Pichel agreed to let Natasha’s friend appear in the movie with her, “playing a brother or something,” Canevari recalls:
So my mother took me down to the set. When I got down there, there were all these big lights. And I was only about 5 years old—hell, I didn’t know what was going on. And I saw all these lights and they had these big sheets of metal making thunder and stuff, shaking them—and I took off running. It scared the hell out of me and I took off running and that was the end of me.
Natasha, under pressure from Mud to do whatever the director asked, did not have the luxury of a child’s reaction. Upon hearing Pichel describe where on the sidewalk in Healdsburg he wanted Natasha to drop her ice cream and how to make it look natural, Maria asked the director: “With tears or without?” Musia even managed to get herself insinuated into the scene, walking behind Natasha—portending her role in her daughter’s life. “Like having a shadow following you around,” as Canevari put it. The genial Pichel included Olga in the background, pairing her with a young man from Annapolis.
Maria made sure everyone would be looking at Natasha. She dressed her in a tiny frock, doing her hair in Shirley Temple ringlets with an enormous white bow, like Dainty June, the baby doll character in Gypsy, Natalie’s future film. Olga remembers dressing in the trailer with Ann Rutherford, the actress playing Don Ameche’s wife, who picked up Natasha and hugged her, one of the few memories Natalie would have of Happy Land. By the time she dropped her cone, precisely where she was asked, Pichel was beguiled by the little Russian girl who curtsied each time he appeared.
Maria kept Natasha deliberately underfoot the rest of the Happy Land shoot, hoping to further ingratiate her to Pichel, “and I fell, I must confess, violently in love with her,” he wrote later. According to Maria, Pichel sent attorneys to the house with legal papers to adopt Natasha, a story that would become part of Natalie Wood lore. Natalie herself repeated it, as an adult:
He said to my mother, “Oh, your daughter is so adorable, I’d love to adopt her. What would you think of that?” My mother thought he was joking. She speaks, still, with a heavy Russian accent and sometimes she doesn’t quite understand or make herself understood. So she thought he was joking and he thought that she was serious. The lawyers arrived at our house one day while the “Happy Land” filming was still going on…there was a big upheaval in the household.
How much of the story is true, or Maria’s tall tale, is open to question. Olga, who was fourteen that summer, recalls Pichel visiting once, but there were no attorneys at the house. Her impression was that Pichel wanted a daughter because he only had sons, and that Natasha had requested a bunk bed if she moved into his house. But Olga is uncertain whether she heard this conversation, or if her mother told her about it later. “He wanted to adopt her, that I know. And Mother agreed, but then she told him of course it was a joke.” In a later, highly suspicious version, Maria told the author of a book on celebrity mothers that Pichel wanted to buy Natasha and offered his life savings. (“I said, ‘No, I don’t sell my children,’ ” she recounted with great drama.)
Pichel, who was married with sons fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-two at the time, never mentioned to his children the possibility that Natasha might be adopted into the family. Nor did their mother. “It was probably folklore,” suggests the middle son, Dr. Julian Pichel, though he concedes his parents “did want a daughter—that’s true. I think that’s why I was called ‘Julie.’ ” All three brothers doubt that their mother, who resented the movie industry, would have consented to the adoption. Marlowe Pichel, who was fourteen, speculates his father may have wanted to help Natasha. “I do remember he was kind of smitten with her,” relates Julian. Pichel talked openly about his affection for Natasha in a magazine piece several years later, never mentioning wanting to adopt her. “I seriously believe it’s a complete fabrication,” declares Natalie’s younger sister, Lana, who heard their mother spin the yarn over the years. Natasha’s “memory,” at four, of attorneys creating an upheaval may have been implanted by Maria. Whether or not he tried to adopt her, Pichel’s fondness for Natasha was unique, according to Julian, who never knew his father to form an attachment to any other child actor. “There must have been something special about Natalie.”
Pichel stopped at the Gurdins’ to say goodbye to Natasha when he finished filming Happy Land around her fifth birthday, which was on July 20, 1943. The story that would appear throughout Natalie’s later movie career is that Pichel promised, during this visit, to keep her in mind when the right part came along. This was a falsehood invented by her mother, for the truth would have too nakedly revealed Maria.
As Irving Pichel left the house, he pleaded with Maria Gurdin to keep Natasha away from Hollywood, warning her that a child in the limelight will never be a normal child again.
Mud immediately wrote to Pichel, in the guise of a letter from Natasha. Charmed to hear from his Russian pet, Pichel began what he considered to be an affectionate correspondence with Natasha, but was actually an exchange of letters with Maria, writing for Natasha, who was too young to read—a foreshadowing of Maria’s intertwining of their personalities. “She read me his letters,” Natalie would recall, describing it as “a big day” for Mud when a note arrived from Pichel. “Mother was excited,” affirms Olga.
When Natasha was with Edwin, or her sister, she never talked about movies, or about Irving Pichel. Edwin remembered them starting school that fall, “just kids playing in the backyard on the swing and baking cookies.” Olga, who had begun dating Edwin’s teenage brother Gino, “could care less” about the letters from Hollywood.
The correspondence, fueled by Maria’s ambition and Pichel’s fondness for Natasha, grew “quite voluminous.” The two began exchanging birthday and Christmas gifts, Pichel would recall, with Natasha receiving books, dolls and a record from the director. Maria followed closely through Pichel’s letters his upcoming movie projects, searching the plotlines for possible parts for Natasha, while continuing the artifice of an innocent exchange of letters from a child.
Maria’s movie fever peaked in January, when Happy Land premiered on the West Coast in a special midnight screening one Saturday at the California Theater in Santa Rosa. “She told about thirty neighbors—everybody—that the movie was coming to town, they all had to come see Natasha.”
Natasha’s film debut, though just a few seconds, was a showcase for her. Happy Land begins with a narrator folksily describing Hartfield as the camera sweeps Main Street, stopping at the storefront of Marsh’s drugstore. The next image is a close-up of Natasha’s dimpled legs, as an ice cream cone falls and splatters. The camera lingers in close-up on the sidewalk where the cone drops on the word “PHARMACY.” Natasha can be seen reaching down into the camera’s eye to pick up the cone, then hesitating. The camera stays on her legs and the fallen cone, as a pair of women’s shoes approach Natasha, silhouetted by the shadow of someone else’s legs walking by—the unseen Maria. Once Maria has passed, the camera returns to full body length, revealing Natasha being picked up by her screen mother. The image then widens to include several storefronts as Natasha’s movie mother carries her down the sidewalk. Olga and her film beau can be observed approaching the drugstore as the scene ends.
Irving Pichel had managed to accomplish, through clever editing and camera angles, what Natalie would spend years in analysis attempting to achieve: extricating her mother. “All you saw was her legs—they cut her scene! Marie was so embarrassed.” The experience may have served to reinforce Maria’s role as starmaker as opposed to star, for she emerged from the theater singularly possessed with parlaying her daughter’s walk-on part into movie stardom. Mud’s obsession to make Natasha famous vicariously fulfilled her lost stardust dreams. As Lana would observe: “She was going to offer her daughter this incredible life, and she was going to get to live it with her as well.”
If Natasha was excited about seeing herself on-screen, there is no evidence. Maria was the zealot. She walked two miles to work as an usherette, and on her days off she took her girls to watch the same movies all over again. Natasha may have been baptized Russian Orthodox, but movies were her religion, the cinema her place of worship. The Gurdins did attend an Orthodox church in Santa Rosa, but its influence on Natasha was minimal compared to movies. Before she was able to read, Natasha could identify all the stars in fan magazines the way other children might name characters in Bible storybooks. Maria filled Natasha’s head with fantastic visions of the Hollywood studios, where she would be a great actress, as temples of gold. Natasha invented a game called “going to the studio,” using the garage as an imaginary film studio. “I used to ‘check in’ every day and I would pretend to be Sonja Henie, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan or some other star.”
That spring, as Natasha was completing school, Maria Gurdin toyed with the idea of moving to Hollywood. “Maybe she knew Pichel was doing a picture,” suggests Olga. Pichel was directing a movie in June, a war drama with Dorothy Lamour, called A Medal for Benny, as Maria almost certainly knew from his letters to Natasha. The story, by John Steinbeck, included the minor character of a young Mexican boy. The possibility that Natasha might be considered for the role, despite being Russian, female, and blond, was enough to lure Maria. Pichel, who opposed Natasha acting in movies, knew nothing about it, as evidenced by the fact that Maria turned to gypsy magic to divine whether to move to Hollywood. “My mother put little notes behind icons in the vespers everywhere in the house,” recalls Olga. “And actually the note said not to go, but she went anyway!”
Ignoring the forebodings from Pichel and her own gypsy ritual, Maria did not even wait for the school year to end. “We just sold everything,” relates Olga. Nick, as usual, was a silent partner to his wife’s ambitious schemes. “Mother could work him,” was Olga’s appraisal of the dynamic between Nick and Maria. “This house gonna sell bee-uuuu-tifully,” the wizardly Maria purred to Nick, bragging later that she “got three times worth of what I paid for it.”
Edna May Wonacott was the deciding factor in Maria’s brazen decision. “The Wonacotts sold their grocery store, they sold their house, they moved to Hollywood…and so Mother sold the house,” relates Olga. The distinction was that Edna May had a seven-year movie contract. Maria was uprooting her family to Hollywood on the gossamer hope of her five-year-old daughter’s friendship with a film director who disapproved of Natasha acting in the movies. “She decided to go, whatever her reasonings were then,” recalls Olga, “and we all went together.”
Nick and Maria Gurdin appeared before a Santa Rosa notary to sign the deed granting their house to a couple named Mason and Abbie Ware on May 26, 1944. Natasha and the family would arrive in Hollywood a month before Pichel began filming A Medal for Benny.
Before they left, Maria planted this item in the Santa Rosa newspaper:
SIX-YEAR-OLD S.R. GIRL GOING TO HOLLYWOOD FOR ROLE IN MOVIES*8
Little Natasha Gurdin, 6-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas S. Gurdin of 2168 Humboldt Street, will leave shortly—probably about the first of the week—for Hollywood and her chance at a motion-picture career.
Selected by Director Irving Pichel for a possible part in A Medal for Benny, Paramount film story planned to be made here in the spring, the little blonde, dark-eyed girl, will probably be given a screen test upon her arrival in the film center.
If finally selected for the role her light tresses will be darkened, to fit into the proposed role of a Mexican child.
Pichel met Natasha while he was here last summer directing Don Ameche, Frances Dee and Harry Carey in Happy Land. While he was here last week viewing proposed “locations” for the production company, Pichel visited Natasha and proposed the part in the new picture.
The article was pure fantasy, a brash announcement of the shameless promotion of Natasha that soon would distinguish Maria within the ranks of Hollywood stage mothers.
5 NATASHA’S CHILDHOOD, IF SHE HAD one, ended when she left Santa Rosa in the spring of 1944. She felt an oppressive burden, at five, to be a success in Hollywood, thinking she was responsible for the family’s upheaval.
The move was wrenching for her and fifteen-year-old Olga, who would remember standing near the swing Nick built for them in the backyard, watching wistfully as their mother piled everything they owned into the car. Six-year-old Edwin walked over to say goodbye. “That killed me when they moved. I told Natasha I was going to miss her. I even gave her a hug goodbye.” Natasha’s last, flickering image of her childhood was of Edwin, her only friend, waving a forlorn farewell in front of the first house she and her sister had known. “I’m sorry we moved from Santa Rosa,” admits Olga, expressing the one regret she would convey from a childhood of injustices. “But even if we’d stayed, Natalie would have found her destiny, I guess.”
So effectively had Maria subjugated the minds of both daughters and her husband, all departed for Hollywood convinced Natasha would be in the movies. Whether her eventual stardom was fated, or manipulated by Maria, is the existential mystery. “She was destined for this life, because of that mother,” suggests a close friend. “And the father. He was as guilty, he just was silent.”
Natasha slept through her pilgrimage to the promised land, squeezed between Olga and the family belongings in the back seat of the car. Nick drove straight through the night, stopping to pick up a hitchhiker, a whimsy of Maria’s. Olga kept a picture, among her mementoes, of the hitchhiker, posed alongside Natasha and their mother.
The Gurdins pulled into Hollywood around the beginning of June, 1944. They arrived virtual peasants: Nick did not have a job, they had no money, no home, no resources. The family’s hopes were pinned entirely on Natasha.
Maria arranged for the Gurdins to stay with Olga’s former ballet teacher, Nadia Ermolova, who had a small apartment and dance studio on Fountain in the bowels of Hollywood. From there “she called Irving Pichel, and did some little sob act. That they were very poor in Santa Rosa, and Natasha loved him so much, and could they come see him?” Pichel was surprised, then dismayed, as he later wrote: “The family turned up in Hollywood, where, Mrs. Gurdin revealed to me, she was interested in a career for Natasha.” The director guiltily likened himself to “a modern Pied Piper who had, however unwittingly, piped the child out of her Hamelin town.” He had a long, sobering talk with Maria and Natasha about child stars, explaining how their families suffer and how child actors miss having normal childhoods. To do that to Natasha, Pichel advised Maria, would be a tragedy. “The mother, like the daughter, appeared to accept my judgment,” he wrote later. Within a week, Pichel began filming A Medal for Benny. Natasha Gurdin was not among the cast.
The calculated kismet upon which Maria had gambled the house, the family’s security and Natasha’s mental health did not go as she had planned, or the gypsy foretold.
Contrary to the impression she gave Pichel, Maria was neither chastened, daunted, nor persuaded by his alarm at the prospect of Natasha getting into movies. She simply determined to find another entrée. To that end, the Gurdins remained in Nadia Ermolova’s cramped apartment through the summer and into the fall. Olga wrote despairing letters from Hollywood to Lois, her childhood companion in San Francisco, who remembered it as “a hard move for my friend.” Natasha, who turned six that July, sent frequent, heartfelt scrawls to Edwin, suggestive of how lonely she was. Hollywood was not the kingdom of palaces her mother conjured. “When I first saw a studio I was five and expected red velvet and gold,” she later said.
In a letter to Edwin that September, Natasha enclosed two photographs of herself, taken the same day in the front yard. Both are of Natasha in a full-skirted Russian costume with a head kerchief. In one photo, her mouth is painted with red lipstick and she playfully strikes a Russian dancer’s stance, mugging for the camera. The other shows Natasha without makeup, holding out the sides of her Russian dress in a stilted pose, a pained smile forced onto her desperately sad face. They illustrate the schism she was feeling about her life.
The haunted expression behind Natasha’s eyes in the second photograph provides a glimpse into the pressures she was experiencing. Maria had discovered The Hollywood Reporter, and foraged it daily for a part for Natasha, assimilating industry gossip like an agent on the make. “She’d read all the trade news, and keep up with what movie was shooting and who was doing it,” relates Olga, who recalls her sister “trying for different things.” Natasha was competing for roles against experienced child actors with agents and show business connections while she was being led around town by her Russian mother on the lure of a thirty-second cameo in Happy Land. “When I would go on an interview for a part and not get it—to me it was a total rejection. I thought they were turning me down.” Natasha was guilt-ridden, feeling responsible for the family’s move from Santa Rosa, desperate to please her overbearing mother, mesmerized into believing she must have a magical life. When she said her prayers at night, Natasha asked God to please make her a movie star.
The family made ends meet through Maria’s machinations. According to Olga, her mother got Nick a job as a carpenter at one of the studios, “maybe through Pichel or somebody, I’m not quite sure.” They scraped together enough money to move out of Nadia’s by the first of the year, relocating to a small stucco cottage at 9060 Harland, off Doheny in West Hollywood. Nick made a swing for the backyard, where Natasha could pretend, at least, that she was back in Santa Rosa.
Maria had been unsuccessfully making the rounds in Hollywood with Natasha from June of 1944 to February of 1945 when she read in the trades about a movie Irving Pichel was directing called Tomorrow Is Forever. It was adapted from a popular wartime novel condensed in the Ladies Home Journal, based on a tragic, operatic poem by Tennyson called “Enoch Arden.” Orson Welles, a Hollywood wunderkind from his masterpiece of four years before, Citizen Kane, was cast as an Army lieutenant so disfigured in World War I he nobly chooses to let his wife think he has died. The wife, played by Claudette Colbert, discovers she is pregnant with her husband’s child at the same time he is presumed dead; after giving birth to a son, she remarries. Pichel was looking for a little girl to play the difficult role of an English-and-German-speaking Austrian refugee from the Second World War whom Orson Welles’ character adopts while recovering from his injuries in Vienna.
“My mother got all excited about this,” recalls Olga, who participated in Maria’s strategy to get Pichel to cast Natasha as the Austrian orphan. Maria chose not to contact the director, knowing he would discourage her. She somehow managed to get Natasha’s name onto a list of six girls auditioning for Pichel at the end of February. “When I saw it there,” Pichel said later, “I was depressed.” The pressure on Natasha was mounting. Six years of Maria’s incantations had her believing the only thing that mattered in life was to be a great actress. “Ever since I was knee high,” she would say later, “I’ve been waiting for my break.” For months she had been paraded by Mud in front of casting directors who barely looked up. This was her friend, Mr. Pichel. She had to get the part; her family was depending on her. However burdened she felt, Natasha did not confide in anyone. Her desperation was internalized, hidden beneath the façade of the good little girl. As an adult, Natalie would tell Lana that most of her anxieties were from the pressures she felt at six to succeed in Hollywood.
Prior to the casting call, Maria carefully assessed Natasha, as Olga, her forgotten daughter, would recall; plotting how she could present her so Natasha would stand out from the competition. The afternoon of the audition, five pretty, painted little girls sat in Pichel’s office wearing frilly dresses and Sunday curls. Natasha walked in with braids in her hair, dressed “the way she plays in the backyard,” giving her an air of naturalness. Maria claimed, later, Pichel had advised her to do this, but it was Mud. “She was very alert. If all the other mothers did one thing, she’d say let’s pick something that’s not gussied up.” In this case, Maria was emulating Margaret O’Brien, the gifted child star known for her dark pigtails and solemn grace—as Natalie would admit to O’Brien years later. “We kind of laughed about that,” confirms O’Brien, “pigtails and everything.” Maria was returning to her Edna May axiom: if a formula works, steal it.
The role of Margaret Ludwig, the bilingual Austrian war refugee in Tomorrow Is Forever, demanded a child actress with the gifts of a Margaret O’Brien. The character has been traumatized by seeing both parents killed by Nazis and anguishes over the frail health of her guardian (Welles), who has spirited her out of Vienna to America. Little Margaret has several heartrending scenes. In one, she reacts hysterically when a toy makes a popping noise, reminding her of the gunshots that killed her mother and father. The other occurs at the end of the film, when Welles’ character succumbs to pneumonia and Margaret sobs, “Everyone who belongs to me dies.” Pichel had chosen one of these scenes for the screen test, which had to be spoken in a German accent.
According to Natalie’s eventual mythology, studio publicity, and her mother, her screen test was flawless. This was not so. “She played the scene and it was not very good,” recalled Pichel. It was frankly remarkable Natasha had not suffered a nervous breakdown, asked at six to perform an emotional scene using a German accent with no acting experience, believing her family’s welfare hinged on her performance, enchanted by Mud to expect magic. “I remember proudly telling my mother afterward that I hadn’t cried even though they asked me to,” Natalie said years later. “My mother got mad and said, ‘What do you mean, you didn’t cry?’ ”
Pichel’s reaction to Natasha’s poor audition was relief. He explained to Maria that he needed a little girl who could cry at will. “I took her mother aside and advised her not to feel too badly but, on the contrary, to be happy about it, as I was.” His parting words to Maria were, “Natasha is too nice a little girl to be anything but a normal little girl.” There was no argument.
Privately, Maria was frantic, remembers Olga, a witness to the crisis at home. After a night of “great commotion,” Mud commanded Natasha, anguished at her imperfection, to telephone Pichel and beg him for a second chance. Then Maria got on the phone. She told Pichel Natasha had been crying desperately because she lost the part, that she had been so happy to see him she could not play a sad scene, “but if you will give her another chance, she will, she knows, be good.” Pichel, moved by Natasha, agreed to another screen test.
Maria hung up the phone, possessed with getting Natasha to cry on cue. The task of preparing her for her screen test fell to Olga, a cruel irony lost on Mud. Maria’s older daughter did as she was told though “it just seemed funny to me, because I was only what, sixteen?” While coaching Natasha, Olga remembered her drama teacher in Santa Rosa instructing the class to think of something sad when they needed to cry. She told Natasha to think about the day their dog was killed in Santa Rosa. Natasha looked stricken, reliving the nightmare of her puppy darting in front of a truck. “I got her to cry,” recalls Olga. Maria, hovering nearby, made mental notes of the technique.
Outwardly Natasha “seemed to get through the scene pretty well,” her sister thought, unaware Natasha had been emotionally scarred. “From that time on, whenever I did a movie, I always counted the crying scenes,” Natalie said later. “That was a barometer of how difficult the part was going to be for me.” The true horror of that stigma was yet to come.
Maria took Olga out of Hollywood High for Natasha’s screen test. Pichel would recall Natasha stepping aside before her scene. In those moments, Olga whispered to her to think about their little dog, coaxing Natasha into tears. Then something else occurred, Natalie would later confide to actor Robert Redford. Her mother pulled her to the side, where no one could see, “took a live butterfly out of a jar and tore the wings off it.” Tenderhearted Natasha went into hysterics as her mother called out, “She’s ready!” grabbing her by the hand and pushing her in front of the camera. Natasha cried so profoundly Pichel was moved to write about it later, describing her tears as “seeming to come from the depth of some divine despair.” Her audition broke Pichel’s heart, and with it his resolve to keep her from becoming a child actress.
Twenty years later, when Natalie told Redford the story, he wondered, “How can anyone survive this? But she did.” She survived, but Natasha was never the same, in ways that would gradually reveal themselves.
Maria’s ruthlessness with the butterfly and the dead puppy was a warning how far she would go to advance Natasha’s career to the detriment of her daughter. Though she was still only a child, Natasha was beginning to understand that her mother was living through her. The narcissism and drive that put Marusia on street corners collecting coins to become Queen of the Ball had been redirected toward her daughter, where it would be commingled for the rest of their lives. Fahd was relegated to the sidelines, too ineffectual to be her advocate.
Pichel cast Natasha Gurdin in Tomorrow Is Forever that March, saying, “After that second test, there was never any question—Natasha was ‘in the movies.’ ” It was a dream come true, Maria would later reminisce to a friend. “But it was Marie’s dream, it wasn’t Natasha’s,” as the friend would perceptively observe.
International Pictures, the studio producing the film, agreed to pay Natasha one hundred dollars a week, minimum Screen Actors Guild wages, to play the part of Margaret Ludwig. When the picture was completed, the studio had the option to extend her contract for up to seven years. Maria functioned as Natasha’s de facto agent, using the bookkeeping skills her father suggested she learn in China and her own shrewd intelligence to evaluate the contract. “When there’s a small print, I have to read it,” she said once, “I always looking out for everything.” Because Natasha was a minor, the contract with International had to be executed by a parent. Maria assumed the task, signing as “Mary” Gurdin, for reasons unknown. By using so many names—Maria, Marie, Musia, Marusia, now Mary—contriving the mystery that her real Russian name was a secret, in a strange way, Maria had no identity. She was merging with Natasha.
Natasha had her own identity crisis when the movie contract was executed. William Goetz and Leo Spitz, the producers who founded International Pictures, decided “Natasha Gurdin” was too ethnic for their child star. After discussing it, possibly with Pichel, they Americanized “Natasha” to “Natalie,” and came up with “Wood” after a director they both knew named Sam Wood, who directed A Night at the Opera and Pride of the Yankees. The choice was either an homage to Wood, as Natalie generally told the story, or he happened to walk by at that moment, in a different version. In either case, Natasha had no say. Goetz simply walked up to her and declared, “From now on your name will be Natalie Wood.” “I hated it,” she said later. “It didn’t conjure up a pretty image.” “Couldn’t we make it Woods instead of Wood?” she suggested. “Then I could think of trees and forests.” “Don’t fret,” she would recall Goetz replying. “When you see ‘Natalie Wood’ up in lights, you’ll love it.” Maria (“Mary”) promptly signed an amendment authorizing “Natalie Wood” as her daughter’s professional name and screen credit, taking away Natasha’s identity at six. The Gurdins did not legally change their daughter’s name, probably because she was a minor. As she became famous as Natalie Wood, she would preserve her real name for legal purposes, remaining Natasha Gurdin all her life, the one vestige of the little girl she once was.
Natasha’s hint of spirit concerning her name was the last time she would question an adult for seven years. Mud spent countless hours before Tomorrow Is Forever admonishing her to do anything Pichel or the producers asked, to be polite to the adults, be on time, never forget her lines, and curtsy when introduced to a grown-up. Small wonder that as an adult actress, Natalie was once compared to a wind-up doll. Mud’s plan was to turn Natasha into the most cooperative child actress in town, so that her contract would be extended and studio heads, directors, and casting agents would want to hire her. “Be nice to the director,” Natalie recalled Mud saying, over and over. “Even when I’d disagree, I’d have to smile and be sweet, and listen.”
Since Natasha did not know how to read, Olga and Mud read the script of Tomorrow Is Forever aloud to her, telling her which lines were hers. She memorized her part as the Austrian orphan by hearing her mother and sister read it, a process Natalie would recall as extremely difficult, since “I had to do it with a German accent and I had to learn a bit of German.” According to Olga, Natasha had no voice coach and learned the German phonetically, extraordinary for a six-year-old. Robert Blake, who befriended Natalie when they were child actors, estimated her IQ at 150 or 160, “Phi Beta Kappa smart.” Natasha quite possibly had a photographic memory, something Musia discovered reading the script to her. “She had unusual memory. She will memorize not only her part, but all who’s with her.” An early boyfriend, while acknowledging Natalie’s intellect, ascribed her childhood memorization of complete scripts to sheer terror. “That mother did something to her at night—she must have—in bed…getting her to remember all those lines as a kid.”
Natasha approached playing a war orphan opposite Orson Welles much as she had appearing in the kindergarten play, as an exercise in make-believe. Just as she put white powder in her hair to transform into an old woman, the studio hairdresser bleached her Russian brown hair Austrian blond so she could become Margaret Ludwig—braiding it, ironically, into pigtails. “Acting to me was just like playing house or playing with dolls.” Olga or Mud explained to Natasha who the characters in the film were “in language I could understand,” and she “played pretend.” How Natasha felt about acting is less clear; sadly, even to her. “My feelings were largely submerged. I’d been told to act, and I simply acted without questioning,” she reflected in middle age, speculating, “something in me obviously wanted to act. When I was told to do so, I cooperated and enjoyed it.” Natalie’s analysis was probably correct, for as Pichel observed from his experience as a director, “If a child doesn’t want to act, you can’t make him.”
Natasha’s first day on a movie set as “Natalie Wood” was March 30, 1945. Her first scene was with Orson Welles. She walked onto the International Pictures lot with her mother, wide-eyed, expecting “velvet curtains and tinsel,” the way she imagined, from Mud’s fantastical descriptions, when she played “going to the studio.” “I couldn’t understand these rundown buildings. I thought they would be divine, all glitter and gold, and here were these old barns.” She was “terribly disillusioned.”
The towering Welles—her first leading man, as he was to call himself—made a lasting impression on tiny Natasha. She was struck by the huge star’s “booming voice” and found him instantly kind, “always very helpful. I remember he was quite temperamental also—but never towards me.” Something about the Russian child with the quaint curtsy melted Welles’ heart, as it had Pichel’s. “I was just a little in love with Natalie, since the first time we met. I never stopped loving her. I never will,” he said later. Their first scene together captured that chemistry, despite Welles’ dismissive comments about the film years later. When Pichel called action, Natasha, by some supernatural process, became Margaret, haunted by her parents’ murders, clinging to her guardian. Her accent and her German were eerily authentic; in her ice-blond braids she seemed reborn an Austrian. Welles, who had been a child prodigy, found her talent “terrifying,” as he told Life magazine that fall in a quote that often would be repeated. “I’ve had a lot of experience with child actors,” he later observed, “but Natalie was far and away the most memorable—even more so than Liz Taylor. She was a professional when I first saw her. I guess she was born a professional.” Welles was more correct than he imagined, for Natasha had been prepared for this moment since conception. She responded with genius to match Welles (who would claim to a friend, years later, that he “discovered” Natalie Wood).
Maria shrewdly and uncharacteristically withdrew into the background when Natasha was performing, correctly intuiting that her lack of interference would please the director and everyone on the set, increasing her daughter’s likelihood of being hired again. She stood off to the side, her sharp eyes darting everywhere, noticing the tiniest detail, reminding Natasha, by her dark presence, to be letter-perfect. Welles would recall shooting six or seven takes of a scene where he held Natalie in his lap. “Should have been just one take,” remembered Welles, “but I kept blowing my lines. Not Natalie. She was six years old at the time, but she was already a perfect little pro.” Mud’s fanaticism to create the model child actor left Natasha no room to be a child, or to be anything less than perfect, fostering a perfectionism Natalie would struggle with all her life: “I always felt I had to know my lines perfectly and not keep anybody waiting.”
Natasha’s raw performance in Tomorrow Is Forever was nearly perfect. The role of a shattered war orphan suited the sadly beguiling quality she herself possessed. Pichel even incorporated Natasha’s curtsy into her character. Years later Natalie would remark that she was best playing sad characters because she could use the dark experiences in her life. Natasha’s demons bled through her portrayal of Margaret. Welles noticed it during filming, commenting later on “those two great dark, deep-looking eyes,” remarking how “they could dance with fun…[yet] they were shadowed too by something else, some deep reflection of…tragedy.”
The tenderness of Orson Welles’ relationship with Natasha carried over to their scenes. When the hulking Welles, as the ailing guardian, starts to remove his heavy overcoat, tiny, wistful Margaret—Natasha—races to his side, helping him out of the sleeves, a poignant gesture that reveals her love for him but also her fear that if he died she would be lost. The gesture, and Natasha’s sensitive performance, were instinctual. As Welles put it, “Natalie acts from her heart, not from the script,” proving that the pathos in her extraordinary screen test was more than Maria’s gimmickry with a butterfly.
Natasha missed the last half of first grade shooting Tomorrow Is Forever. According to child labor laws, child actors had to have three hours of schooling every day. Natalie studied on the set between scenes with a studio tutor. “The way it works,” recalls a kid actor who later worked with her, “[is] when the kids show up in the morning they go straight into wardrobe and makeup so they’re prepared. Then they go to the teacher. The teacher would have a time clock and you start doing your schooling. The assistant director’s job is to get that schooling out of the way—so they do it in increments. In about twenty minutes they would say, ‘Okay, we need Natalie.’ So she would go out and rehearse. Then they would say, ‘Okay, go back to school.’ While the lighting and everything is being done, the kid would be in school. It was very rare to get the whole three hours in.” “I had to take my lessons on the set during the times they were lighting the scene,” Natalie recalled, “so I learned to concentrate. If a lamp fell down I probably wouldn’t hear it.” Because she was underage, Natasha was also required to have a welfare worker and one of her parents with her on the set at all times. She was surrounded by an entourage of adults—her tutor, Maria, the welfare worker—in the middle of a sea of activity all day, every day, on the movie set. At night, Mud hovered about her like a hummingbird. The only time Natasha was alone was when she went to bed at night. Solitude began to frighten her.
The emotional scene Natasha performed at her screen test was scheduled a month into filming. She anticipated it with “absolute terror,” traumatized by Mud’s pressure on her to cry on cue. Maria borrowed Olga’s tactic while Pichel was setting up the scene, reminding Natasha of her dead dog. Then she took it a step further. “Her mother would drag her behind a flat and tell her some horrendous story about tearing the wings off birds to get her hysterical, and then drag her back.” This would be the technique Maria used with Natasha from then on. “She would get me all worked up and say to the director, ‘Start shooting.’ ” Mud’s brutality was effective; Natasha sobbed on Welles’ shoulder in perfect German. Crying would remain her bête noire forever after.
Natasha also had fun on Tomorrow Is Forever. Welles taught her magic tricks, “always pulling cards out of my pigtails.” She discovered she “loved grown-ups,” which was not surprising, for Mud had turned her into a miniature adult. Her best friend on the set was a dwarf named Shorty, Welles’ valet. “We became great pals, Shorty and I, and we kind of hung out together between takes,” she later recalled. “And I remember Claudette Colbert. She was always dieting. My mother used to be amazed that ‘Miss Colbert doesn’t seem to eat any food, she just drinks fruit juice and vegetable juice.’ She was thin as a reed. She had a little atomizer that she used to spray something—air, I think—into her eyes. She wanted them to sparkle. She was very sweet to me.” Natasha observed it all, noticing how Welles changed the lighting to suit him, studying Colbert, “learning how to be a better actress.” Welles taught her, by example, to keep a sense of humor about being a star. Colbert, her first female Hollywood role model, impressed Natasha as “kind and maternal…you felt that about her, not just in her performances but in life.” The same would be said, in the future, of Natalie Wood.
Colbert became a mother figure to Natasha, in the movie and on set. “I always felt it sad somehow that in real life, Claudette never became a mother, for she had so much to give that way.” Natasha found her “exceptionally sensitive and understanding and empathetic,” qualities noticeably absent in Mud. Colbert returned the compliment, describing Natasha as “smart” and “sensitive,” an opinion shared by Pichel, who concluded with some regret after directing her that Natasha had “the sensitivity, the temperament, the understanding of that cross between child and adult—the actress.” Natalie Wood was a child-woman at six.
Her mature behavior on the set earned her a reputation in Hollywood as “very easy to handle.” “Like I taught her,” said Maria, “to be courteous to the grown-ups.” Natasha was akin to a marionette; Maria pulled the strings and Natalie Wood performed.
Mud’s strategy, and Natasha’s talent, achieved Maria’s desired end. Goetz and Spitz exercised the option to extend “Natalie Wood’s” contract with International Pictures before she had even completed looping her scenes. By the terms of the option, her weekly salary would increase in increments each year she was under contract, beginning at $125 per week and graduating to $750 a week by the final year. Within twelve months of arriving in Hollywood, Maria had secured a seven-year contract with a major movie studio for Natasha. She was not quite seven years old.
On May 22, a package arrived at the Canevaris’ in Santa Rosa, addressed to Edwin. Inside was an 8½-by-11 glossy of Natasha, as Margaret, in Tomorrow Is Forever, dressed in a gingham pinafore with puffed sleeves, her peroxide hair in braids, tiny hands folded primly on her lap, smiling sweetly for the camera. On the back of the photo Musia had written a letter, purporting to be from Natasha:
Dear Edwin!
Sending you my picture, Studio changed my name, my screen name is Natalie Wood. Thank you for a lovely hankies. I am wearing them to studio. If you will see something about me in Santa Rosa paper (newspaper) please send it to me. I am collecting all my publicity, I have a scrap book. My best regards to your mama and papa,
Love Natasha.
-1945-HOLLYWOOD
Natasha, who was learning to read, signed the picture herself, copying her sister Olga’s perfect penmanship. “To dear Edwin, My best friend,” she wrote neatly, “love Natalie Wood,” adding, in parentheses, “(Natasha).”
It was a psychologically complex correspondence, foreshadowing, among other things, the interweaving of Maria’s persona with Natasha’s; Natasha’s identity complex; and Mud’s total domination of her movie star daughter. “God made her,” she would say years later, “but I invented her.”
6 BEFORE FILMING WAS COMPLETED ON her first movie, a fan magazine called Motion Picture had already interviewed “Natalie Wood” for a profile called “Six-Year-Old Siren.” Pichel made immediate arrangements to borrow her from International for his new movie at Paramount, The Bride Wore Boots, to start in July, putting Natasha back to work within three weeks, over what would have been her summer holiday.
Mud’s paranoid behavior blossomed into hysteria now that “Natalie” was on the cusp of fame. She never let Natasha out of her sight and would not allow her to play at other children’s homes because she was afraid Natasha might be kidnapped, instilling a disturbing new element to her growing fear of being alone, “this feeling that it was somehow dangerous.” Natasha put off bedtime until as late as possible, “babbling” for hours, populating her bedroom with storybook dolls—believing that Bo-Peep, Cinderella, and twenty-eight other doll characters kept her from being alone. “I talked to my dolls and toys and I thought they came alive at night,” she told a writer when she was an adult. “Sometimes I stayed up all night to see what they would do.”
Mud’s restrictions, and the absence of school, isolated Natasha. Her sole companion, apart from Olga and a cat named Voska, was a three-year-old boy who lived next door. Natasha called him “Father,” for reasons she didn’t tell. She lived in her imagination, inventing stories, identifying with the dark Russian fairy tales in Fahd’s books, envisioning when she would travel to the Russia of Mud’s romantic description, cloaked in ermine, riding through snowdrifts on the trans-Siberian express. Her reality was a childhood so lonely she named “Mr. Pichel” as her best friend when asked by a reporter from Motion Picture, referring wistfully to Edwin, her “boyfriend” in Santa Rosa.
Natasha’s first day on Pichel’s new movie was July 20, her seventh birthday. Mud and Fahd gave her a party, inviting all the neighborhood children with whom she was forbidden to play. They wore colorful hats and ate cake, bringing presents and singing “Happy Birthday.” Natasha, who had never been to a child’s party, was so overcome she cried. She told Mud afterward when she grew up she wanted to be a mother and have a hundred and fifty kids, “and they’re all going to have to give me presents on my birthday.”
Natasha’s kiddie party was a brief diversion from her real life, acting in movies. The war ended a few weeks after she turned seven, and Pichel’s new picture reflected the changing times. The Bride Wore Boots was a daffy comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as an equestrienne married to a citified writer comically inept around horses (Robert Cummings). Natalie Wood and a cherubic six-year-old named Gregory Muradian played their children, given little more to do in the film than provide background scenery and play appealingly with a goat. Off camera, Gregory was “quite enamored of” his movie sibling, Natasha, whose Aryan blond braids as Margaret Ludwig had been replaced by a halo of golden brown curls. Most of the children’s scenes were shot on location at a horse ranch, where Natasha and Gregory romped. After her demanding bilingual performance opposite Welles, Natasha essentially had to show up and look adorable. Her enduring memory was of Stanwyck’s perfume. The Bride Wore Boots also introduced Natasha to horses, a passion of Stanwyck’s. The film itself was a pallid imitation of Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn screwball comedies, though it was pleasant and Natasha was beguiling. Pichel, borrowing from Hitchcock, appeared briefly in a scene.
Natasha finished shooting her part in September and returned to school, where she continued to be shadowed. Olga walked her to class every day, under instruction from Maria, who was still convinced that kidnappers lurked around every corner.
Tomorrow Is Forever would not be out until after Christmas, but “Natalie Wood” was already getting attention. Her profile in Motion Picture hit the newsstands, predicting she would be a candidate for a child Oscar and proclaiming her a prodigy. Maria controlled every aspect of her daughter’s emerging persona and Natasha followed orders like a good little soldier. “I want to be a movie star,” she “bubbled” to Motion Picture, repeating the mantra Mud chanted to her since birth.
In November, Life magazine sent a reporter and a photographer to the Gurdins’ cottage in West Hollywood to prepare a story on the seven-year-old actress who had Orson Welles at her feet. They took pictures of Natasha, tanned and topless, on the backyard swing; lying on the grass stroking her cat. Mud, hoping to glamorize Natalie’s image, lied to the reporter, telling him her husband, Nick, was an “engineer,” constructing an intricate tissue of falsehoods about how “Natalie Wood” got into the movies. She told the reporter that Pichel stumbled onto Natasha shooting Happy Land and sent for her to star in Tomorrow Is Forever. Then she fabricated an elaborate story that Natasha’s father disapproved, so she “tricked” him by pretending to visit a friend in Los Angeles and “sneaking” Natasha to a screen test. Natasha begged to do the movie, said Maria, so she returned to Santa Rosa, convinced her husband, and sold the house.
When the Life pictorial came out at Thanksgiving, Maria Gurdin’s outlandish lies were printed as fact, creating a Hollywood myth concerning the discovery of Natalie Wood that would crystallize, with time, into legend. Even Lana, who was born after the Life article, believed her mother’s propaganda that Pichel sent for her sister from Santa Rosa to star in Tomorrow Is Forever, repeating it over the years as “the story that I have been told my entire life.” The image of a movie star is illusion, a concept Mud, the ultimate fantasist, instinctively grasped. “Marie Gurdin was a highly imaginative genius,” an industry friend once observed. “She managed to form, to invent, to chisel this image of Natalie Wood.” In an irony, Life pronounced Natalie “stiff competition” for Margaret O’Brien, whose look Mud had brazenly copied. Life also reported that three studios were trying to buy Natalie’s contract from International. Whether this was true, or more of Maria’s hyperbole, is unsubstantiated.
Mud would do anything to get a foot in the door for Natasha. She read and re-read the trades, enrolling Natasha in ballet and classical dance with Tamara Lepke, hiring a piano instructor so she would be prepared to play any role. “They put a lot into her—piano lessons, dancing lessons—always to further her.” Olga, who sang in Hollywood High operettas, had her voice lessons suddenly discontinued by Maria, who was insensitively oblivious to her elder daughter’s talent. “I just decided to work and pay for my own lessons,” relates Olga. To earn money, she babysat after school, “and I would work at department stores on Hollywood Boulevard.” The Gurdin household was like a miniature studio dedicated to the training of just one star: Natalie Wood. Recalled Natalie: “My mother used to tell me, ‘No matter what they ask you—“Can you sing, dance, swim, ride?”—always say yes. You can learn later.’ ”
For all her gurgling to magazines about wanting to be a movie star, Natasha didn’t seem excited about being in movies, her sister remembers. What compelled Natasha to act was not the desire to perform; it was a compulsion to please. She defined “acting,” at six, as “doing things for people.” Natasha, by nature, took pleasure in bringing joy to others. When Maria was in her seventies, she told this story about Natalie:
I remember when she was, I think, in first or second grade in school. And there was a teacher—very homely, nobody liked her, and she was kinda strict, too. And when Natalie see person like that she just loved them—and want to make them happy. And she was old maid, that teacher. Her name was Grace Loop. And when it was Valentine Day, Natalie said, “Mother, let’s go and get the biggest Valentine box with the candy for my teacher.” And the teacher start to cry. She say, “Nobody give me…” She loved Natalie.
And then when Natalie go back to the studio school and she was not her teacher anymore, she would send Grace Loop present for Christmas. Present for her birthday, too. And then one time suddenly it was stopped. Was car thrown Grace Loop. To the end, she have contact with Natalie.
It was this innate sensitivity to other people’s feelings that made Natasha such an affecting child actress, and explained how she remained unspoiled. Singer Lena Horne’s daughter Gail attended grammar school with Natasha that year as fame struck, and she remembers her fondly as “tiny, pretty Natalie, our resident movie star.” Olga, who had every reason to resent her, considered it a treat to take Natasha to the movies.
Maria’s driving ambition and Natasha’s urgency to please were a dangerous cocktail. “I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt,” she said later. Olga would observe her sister at ballet recitals “concentrating so hard she put her tongue out the left side, biting her cheek.” At seven, Natasha was playing Chopin. She studied Olga’s movie scrapbook like a textbook, memorizing details of the ninety-four stars’ lives, repeating them in interviews. When she watched movies, Natasha got so emotionally involved, once at a cinema with Olga, “she was watching the movie and I guess had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know it, so she must have been letting it out very slowly…and I was just so proper, I took her home right away. But she wet her pants!” When she wasn’t in a movie, taking ballet or piano to prepare for a movie, or going to the movies, Natasha played “making movies.”
Nick, according to a brother, was proud of the fact that his daughter was acting. If it bothered him, as Natalie and Maria later maintained, he was too passive within the marriage to exert any authority, or to buffer Natasha from Mud. The fact that his wife had gotten him a job through his six-year-old daughter’s connections underscored his impotence; the word in the Gurdins’ Russian circle in San Francisco was that Natalie was the breadwinner in the family. Nick was “miserably unhappy,” according to his younger daughter, Lana, who was conceived that June, between Natasha’s films for Pichel.
Maria consequently dominated Natasha, inflicting strange paranoias to sculpt her into stardom. She refused to let Natasha go “on toe” too soon in ballet class, concerned that her calves would look too large on the screen. “After each exercise, I rubbed her with oil—the whole body I rubbed, not just the legs, so she wouldn’t get the bulging muscles ballerinas usually get.” When Natasha told her mother she wanted to be a ballerina and a movie star, Maria “said no. Ballerinas don’t live very long, and it’s bad for the heart.” Mud repeatedly told Natasha she was frail. Both parents refused to let her run or play outside, for if she got hurt, she wouldn’t be able to work. “I was so overprotected, I used to think I was as delicate as people said I was.” Natasha began to imagine she had various illnesses, acquiring new fears—fast cars and earthquakes—to supplement her existing ones, dark water and being alone. “Natalie had a lot of fear in her,” states a childhood friend, “all misplaced fear.” Natasha’s refuge was animals. Besides her cat, she had three turtles. Mud and Fahd bought her a German shepherd that year, to replace the puppy she saw killed. Natasha called him Rusty.
She needed a haven. Her sister Olga remembers walking into the house that winter to find Nick, drunk, holding a knife to Maria’s pregnant belly. Olga created a diversion so her stepfather would come after her, deciding it would be better if he stabbed her than her pregnant mother. Though no one was hurt, it was a harrowing incident; a signal, to Olga, she should leave Nick’s house. She stayed, but warily, forming the opinion that her mother was partially responsible because she could provoke Nick. It was a strange, complex marriage. Maria was still in romantic contact with the sea captain from San Francisco’s Russian colony, where the gossip was that she was pregnant by a Hollywood producer. She told Olga the reason she didn’t leave Nick was that “she was always afraid of him.”
Whether Natasha was present when her Fahd held the knife to Mud’s stomach that winter is unclear, though she certainly experienced violence. “She had a very tough, troubled life,” reveals Robert Blake, a confidant from their years as child actors. “The things that she told me about her childhood, which are nobody’s business, but they were tough. In today’s world, Natalie would have been in child abuse groups…the courage and the strength that it took for her every day to get out of bed and pursue her life—she spent her life rowing upstream.” Lana, who was born late that winter, described her father as “a mean drunk. He wasn’t actually an alcoholic. He didn’t drink all day long. He would get drunk probably once a week. He was just a really unhappy man.”
Because Mud was nearly eight months pregnant with Lana, she sent Nick with Natasha to New York for the January premiere of Tomorrow Is Forever, possibly the only occasion when Lana would come before Natalie for Maria. It was a medical necessity, or Mud would never have missed the public unveiling of her creation, Natalie Wood. It was the first time she and Natasha had been apart. Mud must have been histrionic, sending her star-child on an airplane, across the country, without her. One of Natalie’s crippling fears, later in life, was flying on planes, a fear that probably originated with this trip. The stress of the separation from Mud was evident in Natasha in other ways. While she was in New York, the studio sent her to children’s hospitals and F.A.O. Schwarz, the famous toy store, for publicity shots for Tomorrow Is Forever. A mob of people clamored around International’s new child star, tugging at her pigtails, which Fahd did not know how to braid correctly. “Fans pulled the ribbons off my pigtails,” she would remember. “I was terrified.” Pictures from the event reveal Natasha clutching her “mama doll,” Gabriella, like a life preserver, masking her terror with an overanimated smile, prattling manically about wanting to be a movie star when she grew up. “My goodness!” she exclaimed, between flashbulb pops. “That time I didn’t blink!” As an adult, Natalie would seldom make a negative remark in public about her child acting experiences, not wanting people to think she didn’t enjoy it, saying that it was “a bore to complain”—still the consummate trouper. She revealed her true feelings indirectly, telling interviewers she would not want her child to act, as she had.
Natasha did experience one genuine thrill while promoting her movie in New York that January: snow. Although Tomorrow Is Forever would not be released until the spring, Natalie Wood was praised by New York newspapers, whose critics had attended the celebrity premiere.
Svetlana Gurdin’s birth, on March 1, coincided with Natalie’s first flush of fame, where the spotlight would lopsidedly, at times cruelly, remain. Giving birth was Mud’s first, and last, maternal act toward her third daughter. As soon as she got home from the hospital, she relinquished Svetlana to Olga so she could devote herself to Natasha. Olga had already dropped out of school to babysit Natasha while Mud was in the hospital, inciting rumors at Hollywood High that Svetlana was her baby. “Natalie was under contract to the studio, and it was the law that I had to be with her,” rationalized Maria. In truth, Mud believed she had a calling. Years later, she happily cooperated with a fan magazine for an article called “I Neglected Lana So Natalie Could Be a Star.” “I was a non-person,” observes Lana. Maria, who hand-selected the wealthy Loys as Natasha’s godparents, saw no reason to choose a godmother for Svetlana, nor would she bother to teach her to curtsy. “I think I lived there, I’m not sure,” remarks Lana.
Olga, who was a conscientious student, began to worry about missing class and returned to high school. Maria hired a nanny for Svetlana and accompanied Natasha to San Francisco the middle of March. International arranged a luncheon at the St. Francis and a press conference at the Warfield to “present” Natalie Wood to reporters, certain that her performance in Tomorrow Is Forever would attract even more attention when the film was released. “Natalie,” under Mud’s scrutiny, performed with mechanical animation. Reporters remarked on her poise, dutifully noting the vital statistics of her young life as she “rattled off facts,” including her mother’s fabrication that Pichel brought her to Hollywood to star in the movie. The accompanying articles must have thrilled Mud, announcing Natalie Wood as “the Margaret O’Brien of tomorrow.”
Natasha and Mud returned to West Hollywood to read her first major review. Look magazine was only mildly complimentary of Tomorrow Is Forever, calling it old-fashioned, but the magazine extolled Natalie as a “real prize” and a rival to Orson Welles, with whom she was pictured in a nearly full-page close-up. Inside the Gurdin home circumstances were less sanguine. When the nanny fed Svetlana a banana and she choked, Maria fired her and commandeered her husband to quit his job and stay home with the baby. Irving Pichel’s warning—that a child star upset the family balance of power—had sprung disastrously to life. Becoming a babysitter to Svetlana was the final indignity for Nick. His days, Lana would recall, consisted of drinking, reading and playing the balalaika. “There was nobody for him to talk to, there was nobody who understood that he was leading a life that he detested.”
The pressure on Natasha from this turn of events was overwhelming. At the age of seven, she was supporting the family. She also felt guilty that her mother was sacrificing her life and creativity for her career. “I think if she had been able to express herself in some way…she would have been much happier,” Natalie would remark after giving birth to her own children. Lana believes their mother had to have been unhappy. “But I don’t think she ever knew it. Not consciously. How can you live your life for one person and have nothing else in your life?” A companion of Maria’s in the last years of her life posits that Maria had everything she ever wanted, “her dream of being an actress, her dream of having wealth—but she had it through Natalie.” From the time Mud saw her cameo cut from Happy Land, she transferred her dream of stardom to Natasha, living the fantasy through her creation, “Natalie Wood,” the composite of mother and daughter. When Natalie received an invitation that spring to the Hollywood premiere of Tomorrow Is Forever, Maria, her alter ego, was beside her, strolling down the red carpet under the spotlight, gaping at Gary Cooper, Greer Garson, Gene Tierney, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, the movie stars whose pictures she cut out of fan magazines. Natasha, who had memorized their faces and life stories, found it enjoyable; Mud reveled in it. Natalie did her acting when she was given a part to play; Maria was an actress in her everyday life. As Lana recalls, “You couldn’t take her anywhere, go anywhere, with anybody, because she would sing and dance at the drop of a hat and drive you crazy.”
Tomorrow Is Forever received mixed notices when it opened at the Pantages in early April, though it would become a box office success. Louella Parsons, the influential gossip columnist, singled out Natasha before the movie came out, writing in her column: “Little Natalie Wood, as a tiny refugee, gives a remarkable performance for a child. She eats your heart out.” It was the official Hollywood seal of approval.
7 THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS, Natasha’s third film for Pichel, was released the same spring. Though it didn’t make much of an impression, it increased Natalie’s visibility. Goetz and Spitz, who had merged their company with Universal Pictures to form Universal-International, exercised her second six-month option on May 1, 1946, approved by “Mary” Gurdin, increasing Natalie’s salary to $150 a week. Actor George Brent, who played Colbert’s second husband in Tomorrow Is Forever, advised Maria to get Natasha an agent, taking her by the hand to Famous Artists Group, where Natalie Wood was signed to a three-year contract on May 8, represented by a cadre of six agents.
A few weeks later, Mud filed an official document with the court to reflect her “true” name as “Maria S. Gurdin,” not “Mary.” The implication was that she had assumed the persona of Mary Gurdin to execute Natalie’s contracts; now that Natalie had Famous Artists, “Mary Gurdin” could be laid to rest. Mud was intelligent enough to recognize that Natasha needed a powerful agent and shrewd enough to keep her vise grip on her daughter’s career. “Even though Natalie had an agent, she would still read the trades and then she would ask them, ‘How about this picture, or that picture?’ She was very much on to things,” recalls Olga. According to a family friend, Maria still negotiated Natalie’s contracts; Famous Artists did “what she told them to do.” “My mother ran my career and did it well—seeing that I got the right parts,” Natalie later complimented. Mud, with Famous Artists, submitted her for virtually every child’s role that summer, capitalizing on her momentum from Tomorrow Is Forever.
Natasha began to go by her screen name of “Natalie Wood” around this time, though she signed her letters to relatives and friends “Natasha,” or she would write “Natasha” in parentheses underneath “Natalie,” symbolizing the distinction in her mind between who she really was and her movie persona.
Other sweeping changes came into her life near Halloween. Her mother felt cramped with a new baby, so the Gurdins purchased a somewhat larger house in less expensive Burbank, using Natalie’s studio salary. Maria gave no thought to Olga, who wanted to finish her senior year at Hollywood High. “I was in an operetta there, Sweethearts, and I really liked the people, liked my teachers. I didn’t want to switch schools yet again.” Olga chose to stay behind, renting a room from a Bulgarian neighbor which she paid for with her department store wages. Mud did not even bother to attend her operetta, claiming it was too far from Burbank. Olga, who was devoutly Russian Orthodox, accepted her mother’s heartlessness with her usual grace. “My girlfriend’s family came. It felt like my family.”
Natalie had her own adjustment problems. She felt displaced transferring to public school in Burbank with other third-graders. “I didn’t like it at all—in those days, I didn’t like children. I didn’t think of myself as a child, and I didn’t like any of the things children were interested in. Also, studio school had been so far advanced I was way ahead of the kids in public school and I was bored.”
With Olga out of the house, no one in the family had any friends. “My mother never got to know neighbors,” recalls Lana. “She had no sense of community or anything like that. Natalie was it.” Natalie’s touchstone was the faithful Edwin, who would hear from her via occasional letters telling him what her next movie would be. Maria set aside thirty percent of her daughter’s salary in a savings account as required by law and was conservative with the rest (“It was a little bitty house in Burbank,” remarks Lana), but it was Natalie’s money supporting the family. Six months had passed since she was seen on the screen, a lifetime to Maria. When she was rejected for a part, “I felt awful,” Natalie said later, “as if I had let everybody down.”
Sometime after Halloween, Natalie’s agents placed her in contention for a small film at Twentieth Century Fox called The Big Heart. She was up for the part of a precocious six-year-old Manhattanite named Susan Walker, instructed by her divorced, disenchanted mother not to believe in Santa Claus. The picture, which would become the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street, “was actually being filmed as a low budget ‘B’ movie,” recalls one of the actors. Director George Seaton, a former stage actor, wrote the screenplay, called It’s Only Human, based on a story suggested by his friend Valentine Davies while they were vacationing with their wives. Darryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, read the script and sent Seaton a note saying he loved it. The title was changed to The Big Heart and Zanuck assigned Maureen O’Hara, who was under contract, to play Susan’s mother, a Macy’s personnel director who hires a replacement Santa for the Thanksgiving parade who believes he is Kris Kringle. To play Kringle, the producers hired English stage actor Edmund Gwenn. Zanuck suggested John Payne as the neighbor determined to restore both mother and daughter’s faith in miracles. “I was only eight years old,” said Natalie in later years, “but I remember very clearly that at that time, at Fox, they were doing many, many pictures. They had no high hopes for Miracle whatsoever. It was just a little extra picture that was sort of done on the sideline.” O’Hara, who had left for Ireland to see her parents and introduce them to her young daughter, had not even read the script.
Mud, who had, noticed that Susan was a pivotal role, determined that her daughter would get the part. As if Natalie were not already confused playing different characters, changing her name from Natasha to Natalie, Mud now instructed her to watch Margaret O’Brien pictures and act like Margaret during her screen test for the role of Susan. Maria darkened Natalie’s hair and resurrected her pigtails so she would physically resemble O’Brien. “Margaret was the top child star, and Marie was so eager for Natalie to make it,” explains a confidant. “Marie said, ‘We kind of imitated Margaret, the look and the performance.’ ” Once they were friends, Natalie confessed her secret to Margaret. “There were a million little girls trying to do it,” observes O’Brien. “Natalie just did it better, I think.”
Natalie got the part of Susan in The Big Heart in November, just as Darryl Zanuck was making final notes on an unusual, ethereally romantic Philip Dunne script called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, adapted from a 1945 novel, The Ghost of Captain Gregg and Mrs. Muir. The story, set at the turn of the century, was about a lonely young widow in London who moves with her small daughter to an English seaside cottage, where she falls in love with the spirit of a roguish sea captain. Zanuck had assigned the film to Fox producer Fred Kohlmar, who hired Dunne, admired for his tender characterization in How Green Was My Valley. Kohlmar convinced Joseph Mankiewicz, the literate screenwriter-director-producer, to direct. Mankiewicz was challenged by the idea of creating what he described as “essentially a ‘mood’ story,” a love affair between a woman and a ghost. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn agreed to play the leads, according to Dunne’s wife, Amanda, “and Tracy bowed out.” The handsome, acerbic English actor Rex Harrison, who had just had a major success with his first American film, Anna and the King of Siam, was cast to replace Tracy as the captain. With Tracy gone, Hepburn departed and several other actresses were considered to play Lucy Muir: Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, Olivia De Havilland. Zanuck decided upon Gene Tierney, the delicately beautiful brunette best known as the mysterious Laura from the 1944 Otto Preminger film. Petite Natalie, with her hair darkened to call to mind Margaret O’Brien, bore an amazing resemblance to Tierney, making her an obvious contender for the part of Mrs. Muir’s daughter, Anna. It was not a large role—young Anna is in a dozen or so small scenes and disappears when the film leaps forward in time—but it was a prestige film.
In the final few days before she was to start The Big Heart, Natalie auditioned in front of director Joseph Mankiewicz for the part of Anna Muir, the English child. Mud’s punishing preparation and Natalie’s obsessive perfectionism were in evidence at the audition. As Mankiewicz would remember: “I asked her, ‘Did you read the whole script, or just your part?’ She answered, ‘The whole script.’ I then asked her, ‘How do you spell Mankiewicz?’ and she spelled it right, all the way down to the ‘cz.’ I told her she had the part.”
Director George Seaton had decided to incorporate the actual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade into The Big Heart and got permission to film inside the store, so Natalie and Mud flew to New York on November 17 to start location shooting. Fox sent Maureen O’Hara a telegram in Dublin, where she had just arrived, instructing her to cut short her family reunion. O’Hara was furious. “Because I didn’t know what the script was, I didn’t know what it was about, I didn’t know anything except I was ordered by my boss to be back in New York.” “It was a low-budget film,” observes one of the actors. “The producers were saying, ‘Let’s hurry up. We don’t have any money.’ ”
O’Hara read the script when she unpacked, “and I thought, ‘I’m not so mad after all.’ ” Miracle on 34th Street was charmed from the beginning, according to O’Hara. “Every day, it was magic. We had a wonderful, happy, magical time making the movie. Edmund Gwenn was Santa Claus. I mean that literally. He believed he was Santa Claus.” So did Natalie, who found New York thrilling this trip, perhaps because she had Maria along for security. “I fell madly in love with Louie, the headwaiter at the Carlton, and had chicken salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
On the set of The Big Heart, One-Take Natalie, her new nickname, impressed everyone. If the adult actors forgot their lines, she cued them. Seaton, the director, was amazed at how businesslike she was. Her only coaching came from Mud whispering, “Be Margaret O’Brien.” (Mud’s coaching was strictly at night; on set, she continued to let the director control Natalie: “Marie never interfered with the filming. Marie interfered with the negotiations, the contracts. Once she got what she wanted, then Natalie went to work.”) Natalie was in effect playing two parts: Susan, and Margaret O’Brien playing Susan. She was so effective, states O’Brien, “a lot of people think it’s me in the movie.” Natalie’s most vivid memory of the film, later, was “Edmund Gwenn teaching me how to act like a monkey,” a scene where her O’Brien impersonation is evident: O’Brien had imitated a monkey in exactly the same way in Meet Me in St. Louis two years before.
Natalie may have mimicked O’Brien, but her talent was genuine. Seaton, her director on Miracle, said she had “an instinctive sense of timing and emotion” he had seen in only one other child. Natalie described her technique as a child actress, later, as instinctive. She first read the script; if she had any questions about her character or the story, she asked an adult. Then she re-read the script “many times.” The night before a scene, she memorized the next day’s lines, “visualizing the whole page.” When she played the scene, she said the lines the way she instinctually felt her character would. Her performances, as a result, were natural.
The part of a skeptical child whose parent teaches her Santa Claus isn’t real was a radical departure from Natalie’s own life. Her mother took her to see a department store Santa that December. When Natalie jumped off Santa’s lap, Mud jumped on, whispering in Santa’s ear everything she wanted for Christmas. Olga, who was along, cringed with embarrassment. Playing Susan required Natalie to create a character different from herself. She drew on her intelligence to become Susan, as opposed to the waifish vulnerability she projected as Margaret.
Natalie’s acting gifts were tested that month. While she was playing Susan, the cynical New Yorker, she flew back to California to perform her first scenes as Anna, the English child, then she returned to New York to finish location shots as Susan, switching back and forth between an American and British accent. She began each day on the set of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir walking up to Mankiewicz in his director’s chair and spelling out “M-A-N-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z.” Mankiewicz, who had never directed a child before, called Natalie “the smartest moppet” he knew. “I knew she would become an actress because she was always watching. She watched Edna Best,*9 she watched Rex Harrison.” Word of her simultaneous performances in Ghost and The Big Heart started to circulate at Fox, where the publicity department was calling Natalie a “wonder-child.” When she received the Box Office Blue Ribbon Award at the end of the year for Tomorrow Is Forever, Fox made overtures to Universal-International to buy her contract. Universal refused.
Natalie was too busy to notice the fuss being made over her. She spent the end of December back at home in California on the Fox soundstage where Seaton was directing interior scenes on The Big Heart, occasionally racing over to the set of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. The exterior scenes in Ghost were being shot in Palos Verdes, north of Long Beach, which Mankiewicz had chosen to portray the English seaside. Fox set designers had constructed a gated Victorian as Mrs. Muir’s haunted cottage, where Natalie’s character, Anna, carves her name on a plank near the sea, the first of numerous water scenes in her films. Natalie would have fond memories of that winter:
What a wonderful time that was for me. I was so young, and making movies, going to the studio every morning at dawn was magic. I’d check in on the set, have my makeup done and my hair wound up in one of those “period” hairdos and get all dressed up in a hoop-skirted costume. Then I’d run around that house all day pretending to be frightened by Rex Harrison’s ghost.
If we weren’t on location, my mother would take me to lunch, and I’d have a couple of hours of school in the middle of the day. Then I’d report to [The Big Heart] set and they’d give me a modern New York hairdo and change my makeup, give me rosy cheeks and all those wonderful Bonnie Cashin winter clothes, and I’d play another part [Susan] for the rest of the day.
Gene Tierney suffered a nervous breakdown several years after The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Screenwriter Philip Dunne’s wife, Amanda Duff, who was an actress herself, remembers, “Gene had to be sort of pampered” during filming. “She and I would both get upset about things very easily.” Actress Anna Lee, who played George Sanders’ screen wife in Ghost and had an emotional scene in the film with Tierney, “never detected anything too wrong in Gene until much later.” Lee was “very fond of her,” and of Natalie. Tierney tripped on a flight of stairs in February and broke a toe, suspending production for eleven days. She returned in a cast, which her costumes camouflaged.
Natalie spent more time around Maureen O’Hara, her screen mother in The Big Heart. “She called me ‘Mama Maureen,’ ” recalls O’Hara, who felt that Natalie liked her “in a very happy, young girl’s way. She used to make these little ceramics that she used to bring me.” O’Hara’s impressions of Natalie and her mother differed from others who knew them in this period. She felt Natalie “absolutely loved” acting and “was a very happy little girl” without the underlying darkness that Orson Welles had perceived. “I never felt I wanted to protect her, ever. She didn’t have that vulnerability. You felt completely at home with her, she felt at home with you. There was never any feeling that she needed anybody.” From O’Hara’s point of view Maria was a wonderful mother. “Because she wouldn’t let Natalie in any way show any nonsense…she encouraged her and stood behind her and she didn’t interfere with any of the work.” O’Hara describes Natalie on the set of Miracle as: “Polite, charming, serious. Did her job and did her work, didn’t throw any tantrums, she didn’t cause any problems…she did what she was told.” Almost verbatim Maria’s edict to her.
In middle age, Natalie remembered herself in this period as “trying to please everyone—my parents, the director, the stars, the electricians. I was a very good little girl.” A boyfriend Natalie confided in at seventeen wondered if her mother beat her to instill such eerily perfect behavior. Maria told a Fox publicist that winter that she pulled Natalie aside and threatened her in Russian with extra piano practice if she made a mistake on the set. “Mama was always there,” recalls Maureen O’Hara. Bobby Hyatt, who had a small but important scene in Miracle on 34th Street as a seven-year-old who testifies for Kris Kringle, saw Maria “tear Natalie to shreds” if she happened to miss a cue, forget a line, or didn’t hit her marks.
Hyatt, who was the only other featured child actor in the movie, spent several weeks on the Fox lot accompanied by his mother, Jeanne, offering them a glimpse into Maria’s stage-mother tactics. “She was out for nothing but stardom,” states Jeanne Hyatt. Maria refused to associate with the Hyatts and “whisked Natalie away” when she approached Bobby, because he was not a child star. Mud only wanted Natalie to be around people with status so they could advance her career. “Her mother wouldn’t even let her talk to the extras under pain of punishment. She could only talk to the adults, and then she was only allowed to talk to the directors, the writers and the producers.”
Maria kept Natalie isolated and under surveillance even when she was at studio school, demanding a private tutor and a separate classroom. When Natalie and Bobby became friends as teenagers, Natalie revealed her mother’s strategy to him. During classes, Jeanne Hyatt and the other mothers played canasta or talked. “Marie would stay right in the schoolroom with Natalie,” relates Hyatt, to “intimidate the tutor into not daring to give her anything less than an A or B,” a studio requirement for child actors. “So as any kid would do, Natalie did not bother to do her homework or study for a test. Marie was teaching her that the only thing that was important was the grade, not the knowledge. All Marie wanted was to make sure that Natalie could read well, so she could read scripts…Natalie couldn’t add.”
Bobby liked Mrs. Gurdin despite—or because of—her outrageous behavior. “She was so funny! She talked like the cartoon character Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle with the heavy Russian accent, except everything was so secret and in code words. She would squint her eyes and get this sinister look, like she’s telling you this deep secret, in these whispers—except her sentence structure, and her Russian accent, came across as comical. Natalie would look at me when her mother would do these sinister half-whispers and we would crack up. Then Marie would laugh. She thought we were laughing at her wisdom. It was a riot.”
Hyatt’s affection for Marie Gurdin did not alter his severe opinion of her as an immigrant who wanted to make a million dollars in America using her daughter as “the family’s ticket to fame and fortune.” Bobby Hyatt and his mother watched Maria scavenge for film roles at Fox while Natalie was on the lot shooting The Big Heart and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir that winter, as Hyatt recalls:
In those days lunch was a social event at the studio commissary. Between twelve and two, there would be waves of people coming from different soundstages on other movies and you could meet up for lunch. The mothers would sit together and us kids would eat together and visit. Natalie was never allowed to do that. Her mother would read Variety and find out what movies were coming up, or she would go to the casting office and say, “Anything coming up for a kid?” Then she would find out who the director and producer were and she would go to the commissary and try to reserve a seat at their table, or if she wasn’t able to do that she would manipulate the seating so that she would get the table right next to them so that Natalie was right there. Natalie was supposed to smile and wave at them and look cute. And that’s how she got jobs.
Mud’s commissary politics probably led to Natalie being cast that February in a Fox picture called Summer Lightning, a leaden farm drama about two stepbrothers, one good, one evil, competing for a mule team and the local beauty, played by June Haver. It was based on a novel called Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay, a phrase used to drive mules, the eventual title of the film. Darryl Zanuck had been developing Summer Lightning for Fox with screenwriter and first-time director F. Hugh Herbert since the summer before, and had already recommended child actress Connie Marshall to play the part of Haver’s spirited kid sister “Bean.” Just before filming, Natalie edged out Connie Marshall for the role, her third Fox film in three months. Bobby Hyatt, whose mother was too polite to aggressively promote him, half-admired Marie Gurdin’s naked, wily ambition, for as Jeanne Hyatt admits, “Natalie’s mother saw to it that she got the parts.”
Bean McGill, Natalie’s character in Summer Lightning, her first color film, was a know-it-all tomboy who eavesdrops behind bushes, inside clotheslines, and around barns to meddle in her sister’s love life, providing comic relief from the heavy-handed melodrama. To play Bean, Natalie wore overalls, braids, and worked with a dialogue coach to talk like Ma Kettle, displaying a clever, spunky charm and natural comic timing. (In one scene, cranky character actor Walter Brennan, who plays a neighboring farmer, catches Natalie’s character spying and confronts her. “Don’t you know what happens to little girls what snoops?” he asks menacingly. Natalie, as Bean, looks him square in the eye. “Sure!” she says brightly. “What?” barks Brennan. Natalie/Bean cocks her head to the side and answers smartly, “They get hep to things!” Brennan, watching Natalie, barely suppresses a smile.) Most of Natalie’s scenes were with actor Lon McCallister, the heroic brother, who wins Bean’s sister (June Haver) and the mules with the help of Bean’s practiced snooping. An unknown starlet named Marilyn Monroe appeared briefly in a scene with Natalie and Haver as a barely seen friend, Monroe’s film debut.
Since the story took place on a farm, the exterior scenes for Summer Lightning were shot at a ranch owned by Twentieth Century Fox. Natalie was in animal heaven, feeding chickens and riding mules. In one scene, she got to milk a cow. Another required her to swing over a shallow part of the river from a rope attached to a tree branch and jump off at the river’s edge. Though Natalie barely got wet, she had to learn to swim enough to paddle convincingly on-screen, the only motivation that would get her in water. She had such fun with the farm animals shooting Summer Lightning she told a Fox publicist in February it was her favorite movie so far.
When Oscar nominations were announced that month, Natalie was overlooked for her inspired, naturalistic performance as Margaret in Tomorrow Is Forever, probably because the film had not been embraced by critics. The oversight had little impact on her burgeoning career, due to Natalie’s talent and Mud’s canny exploitation. For a spell, in February 1947, Natalie was acting in three pictures at the same time—The Big Heart, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Summer Lightning—shuttling back and forth between the Fox lot, Palos Verdes and Century Ranch, slipping in and out of so many accents, costumes, and characters she had a difficult time remembering whom she was playing. One day she became disoriented making the transition from Anna Muir to Susan Walker. “In one I was a sweet kid, in the other a bratty kid. That can be very difficult for an eight-year-old to handle.” Natalie’s English accent faltered in her performance as Anna, the only tangible evidence of the identity crisis she was experiencing drifting in and out of three fictional personalities. Between Bean, the Missouri farmgirl, Victorian Anna Muir, and pretending to be Margaret O’Brien portraying sophisticated New Yorker Susan, “I was playing so many parts, I had a hard time finding me.” Natasha, her true self, was submerging into the characters “Natalie” was impersonating. At times, she would remember, “I took on their characteristics, emotionally at least…I was young enough to be impressed by their personalities.”
Natalie spent so much time playing movie characters, the movies she was in began to seem real. Occasionally she got confused, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. In the signature scene in Miracle on 34th Street, Natalie (as Susan) tugged on Edmund Gwenn’s beard and discovered it was real, concluding he must be Santa Claus. “I still vaguely believed in Santa Claus,” she said later. “I guess I had an inkling that maybe it wasn’t so, but I really did think that Edmund Gwenn was Santa. And I had never seen him without his beard—because he used to come in early in the morning and spend several hours putting on this wonderful beard and moustache. And at the end of the shoot, when we had a set party, I saw this strange man, without the beard, and I just couldn’t get it together.”
The pressure of being eight years old and playing three different characters in three movies, providing financially for her parents and two sisters, manifested itself that winter. Natalie awakened one morning paralyzed. She had overheard her parents whispering about a polio epidemic and was convinced she had been stricken with the disease. Her mother later told a magazine writer Natalie was “always frail and subject to small illnesses, and when she does not have a real illness, she imagines one.” Mud dismissed the psychological implications of her daughter’s hypochondria, which she had fostered by her paranoia and overprotectiveness. On a deeper level, Natalie’s psychosomatic paralysis was a warning sign that she was overwhelmed, a distress signal her parents ignored. “It was terrible for that kid,” observes one of Natalie’s first loves. “I don’t know how she survived it…being forced to cry, forced to laugh. Every night, the nightmare she would go through to learn lines, to have the mother on the edge of the bed, pretending to be nice—and all she cared about is that Natalie delivered the lines exactly, didn’t screw up, and that everyone said, ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ and ‘She’s as good as Elizabeth!’ or whatever they would say. For Natalie, that was such a big, big event: she would get her mother’s approval—this ogre, this monster.”
Natalie obediently returned to work after her polio false alarm. Robert Hyatt remembers her walking past the Fox soundstage with her mother, gazing wistfully as he and his mother played canasta with the studio teacher. Maria swiftly guided her to the dressing room. Natalie passed the time between scenes sequestered with her mother, knitting or drawing—following Mud’s Chinese maxim to use her hands to exercise her brain. “She wanted to play,” recalls Hyatt. “She would wait and smile at me when I would see her. Her mother would not allow her to mix and mingle with anybody.” Natalie never complained, observed Hyatt. “She always did what her mother told her.”
8 NATALIE’S CAREER SUDDENLY, UNEXPECTEDLY SKYROCKETED in May, as she was completing, ironically, Summer Lightning. The modest little film she made over the Christmas season with Maureen O’Hara and Edmund Gwenn, now known as Miracle on 34th Street, was given a preview screening by Fox a month before its June release. Louella Parsons, who attended the preview, described the audience reaction as “unbelievable.” Parsons gushed over Miracle on 34th Street in her column before the movie came out, pronouncing Natalie “just about perfect.”
Twentieth Century Fox was desperate to sign Natalie Wood to a contract, offering substantially more than her salary at Universal-International, where she was still under contract for another six years. Maria asked Fox to keep the offer a secret and made an appointment for Natalie to see Bill Goetz, the head of Universal, coaching Natalie ahead of time what to say. Natalie, accompanied by her mother, told Goetz that she was tired of acting and didn’t want to do it anymore. Maria feigned maternal concern. Could they, Maria pleaded, break their contract in a “friendly” way? Goetz, faced with the unpalatable possibility of forcing an eight-year-old to work—unaware Fox had made her a better offer—suggested they think about it for a week, according to Maria. “He thought in a week I gonna come back and cry and say I want it back. I play very naïve and stupid, and he thought I didn’t know anything about law or anything.” At the end of the week, Mud rescinded Natalie’s contract with Universal and immediately instructed Famous Artists Agency to commence negotiations with Fox. “It was very dirty trick, you know?” she admitted later. “But with Lana born, we need[ed] the money.”
Olga’s commencement from Hollywood High was in June, offering Natalie a rare chance to see her older sister, who was still living on her own in a rented room. Natalie eagerly dressed up and pinned on a corsage, but Fahd was too drunk to drive them to the ceremony. Olga graduated from high school as she had spent most of her eighteen years, without family to support her.
Natalie’s home life was nightmarish. “My earliest recollections of my mom and dad’s relationship were frighteningly stormy,” recalls Lana, who was a toddler then. She and Natalie played in the backyard in Burbank, where Nick built a swing for them; Svetlana splashed in an inflatable wading pool during the hot summer months in the San Fernando Valley. “The thing that always stayed with me was being in the pool, seeing my dad carrying a gun chasing my mom around the pool,” Lana relates. She and Natalie would watch their parents’ fights escalate until “Pop,” as Svetlana called Nick, lost control and became violent. “We were usually right in the middle of it. My mom was busy grabbing us and pushing one of us out the door and one out the window and then climbing out and screaming at my dad and saying to us, ‘You run back’ and ‘You hide’ and ‘You run’ and ‘You do…’—you know, it was bad.”
Child actor Robert Blake, who had a brother/sister relationship with Natalie from the time she was ten, learned about her house of horrors from Natalie. Making movies, he believes, saved her. “Being in show business was never her problem. That was her solution. Her problem was away from the camera. Her problem was a thing called family, love, security. I think the camera became her parents. It was her security blanket.” Blake suspected Natalie was a sexually abused child. “I never talked to her about it but I always got that feeling. Coming from that place myself, I can usually smell those kind of people.” Natalie’s first serious adult boyfriend, an actor named Scott Marlowe, had similar suspicions throughout their relationship. “All the signs were there. She would never never say anything about anybody. I’ve suspected her father. I’ve suspected a lot of people. A lot of producers. I suspected Irving Pichel even. You just don’t know, with that mother.”
Maria filled Natalie’s head with bizarre superstitions and medieval fears about sex from the time she was tiny, hissing when she tucked her into bed at night to “keep her hands outside the bedcovers” as if it were evil. She whispered gruesome stories in her low Russian growl about how her bones had cracked and stretched for a week when she gave birth to Olga, narrowing her eyes to slits and telling Natalie she would die if she had a baby because she was “too small.” Natalie listened, terrified, assimilating her mother’s sinister suggestions about sex and childbirth as she had her gypsy prophecies portending fame and warning of dark water.
Fahd was an enigmatic, tormented shadow figure. A childhood friend of Natalie’s who visited the house in those years remembers him “in the background, as if he didn’t exist.” Outside the house, he would pretend, at times, not to understand English. Nick wanted to disappear, from an existence he deemed wretched and a wife who “drove him crazy.” Vodka was another means of escape. “Until he’d finally get totally drunk and he would flip out. Then everything would calm down, Marie would run squawking around, fluffing her feathers, ‘He’s a bad man, he’s a bad man,’ and then she’d start in on him again. This was like a cycle.” Their father’s drinking and violent behavior was a sensitive topic as they were growing up for Natalie and Lana, who regarded Fahd tenderly, like a wounded wild animal; their mother, they believed, was the provocateur. Both sisters bore emotional scars from the domestic violence. “I still have an intolerance for people shouting,” declares Lana. Natalie hated confrontation of any kind.
Olga, who had grown into a sweetly pretty eighteen-year-old, met with a producer acquaintance of Natalie’s after graduation to see about getting into the movies. The experience left her disenchanted. Her father, Alexei, Maria’s handsome ex-husband, now a doorman at a San Francisco hotel, surprised Olga with a high school graduation trip to the Russian River near Santa Rosa, where she had spent her happiest years. While she was there she met a tall, good-looking college student, Alexei Viripaeff, who knew at a glance he wanted to marry “Teddi,” though she had her eye on someone else. At the end of the holiday, Olga made the choice to move in with her father in San Francisco and enroll in college, surrendering her fantasy of a Hollywood life. She reconnected with “Lexi” Viripaeff on campus and this time, it clicked. Lexi’s Russian-American background appealed to Olga, whose first language was Russian, and who felt an affinity for the music and adhered to the rituals of the Russian Orthodox church. “I was more Russian than my sisters,” she avers, “because I was more exposed to it.”
Natalie was almost nine and Svetlana only a year old when Olga left the fold at eighteen. The three sisters were almost from different generations, growing up in disparate contexts of their mother’s life. “Marie tried to encourage Natalie and Lana to speak Russian so they would be bilingual,” a friend recalls, “but they were more like American kids. They wanted to speak English. They did know a few Russian words, especially Natalie. If her mother and father were yapping in Russian, she could decipher what they were saying.” Once Natalie was born, Mud took an interest in cooking. Natalie’s comfort foods were rich, traditional Russian delicacies her mother prepared from family recipes: piroshki (tiny meat pies filled with cream cheese), beef stroganoff with kasha (buckwheat kernels), tvorojniki (cheesecake pastry). Maria instilled a fairy-tale romanticism in Natalie about Russia, telling her stories about “dachas hidden in forests” and other wonders of her childhood in Siberia before the revolution. The Gurdins’ house in Burbank, where Natalie spent several years of her childhood, was a colorful, eccentric fusion of her mother’s Russian-Chinese past. Mud dressed like an Oriental high priestess in floor-length kimonos and occasionally bought kimonos for Natalie. The house was an explosion of imitation Chinese furniture, Oriental bric-a-brac, exotic birds, three turtles, a Doberman, and a German shepherd.
For Natalie, home was just a place to sleep, learn her lines for the next day, and practice piano (she was playing Rachmaninoff now). Ballet class was her only activity outside the studio. Her goal was to be the best ballet dancer in the world. She didn’t have a single friend.
While Famous Artists and Mud were negotiating Natalie’s new contract with Fox, a director of legendary status named Allan Dwan selected her for the starring role in a picture he was making for Republic Studios in June. Screenwriters Mary Anita Loos and Richard Sale had written an unusual, mystical screenplay called Driftwood, about an eight-year-old orphan who drifts into a small town from the desert and disarms everyone by speaking only the truth, quoting passages from the Bible. The waif—dismissed as “driftwood”—is viewed with suspicion until the end of the film, when she almost dies from a virus and her genuine goodness is appreciated. The role of Jenny, the innocent-but-wise orphan, showcased Natalie’s strengths as a child actress: her perceptive intelligence, sweet charm, and sadly beguiling quality. Allan Dwan, who had been making movies since the silent era and twice directed Shirley Temple, told an interviewer years later what “intrigued” him about Driftwood was the opportunity to direct little Natalie Wood. “She had a real talent for acting, an ability to characterize and interpret, and she was a natural.”
Dwan shot the film in black and white, using religious imagery, which gave it an apocalyptic quality. He presented Jenny as a Christ-like figure who suffers and then offers redemption. Dwan was so impressed with Natalie’s subtle performance, he would later claim (like Orson Welles) that he had discovered her.
In fact, Natalie’s child acting career was at its pinnacle when Dwan was directing her in Driftwood. Miracle on 34th Street came out in June, creating a sensation, just as Louella Parsons had predicted, making Natalie Wood a household name. “It was literally a sleeper,” recalls costar Robert Hyatt. “Nobody thought that it was going to be a classic. Nobody thought that it would make Natalie a major star.” As one reviewer noted, “Miracle on 34th Street is, in short, something of a miracle in picture-making….” The prestigious New Yorker devoted a full paragraph to Natalie:
The most appealing of the lot, it seems to me, is a girl named Natalie Wood, who turns in a remarkably accurate performance as a progressive-school product indoctrinated against the whole idea of Santa Claus. My guess is that you’ll find yourself refreshed by this neat little lassy.
The Hollywood Reporter, Maria’s Bible, praised her daughter as “a totally unactorish child…[who] will bring an honest lump to audiences’ throats when she goes around muttering, ‘I believe. It’s silly, but I believe.’ Strangely enough, you are likely to believe, too.”
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was released a few weeks after Miracle. Though eventually it would be regarded as a classic, the “delicate borderline between imagination and reality” Joe Mankiewicz attempted to achieve with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison’s ghostly romance was not fully appreciated by audiences or by critics, who recommended the movie as a “novelty.” After Natalie’s attention-getting role in Miracle on 34th Street, her smallish part as Mrs. Muir’s English daughter seemed, one reviewer wrote, “rather lost to view.”
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir nonetheless added to her allure. In the same month, June 1947, Natalie was in the most popular movie in America, she had a featured role in a Joe Mankiewicz picture, and she was playing the lead in Driftwood. Fox agreed to sign her to a rich seven-year contract on June 30, beginning at $800 a week, increasing to $3300 a week by the seventh year—four times her salary at Universal. Maria also negotiated what may have been a precedent: the studio agreed to pay her for her “services” answering Natalie’s fan mail. Natalie herself had “no conception about money whatsoever. I just knew that whenever I got a part I would get a present.” (Her “reward” for Driftwood was a typewriter.)
Three days before her ninth birthday, Natalie appeared before a Superior Court judge to have the contract approved, because she was a minor. Photographs taken of her that day are heart-wrenching: a forlorn Natalie, her hair in pigtails, sits on a bench in the courtroom, knitting, the strain of adult pressures etched into her fourth-grade face. “Even though she said she loved being a young girl on the back lot, she got joy out of all that, I think sometimes she would like to have been just—you know, just a little girl.” Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons’ rival columnist, used to observe Natalie in the studios, “clinging” to her mother’s hand. “This tiny, poised little girl…with solemn, dark eyes, and straight hair in long braids. She wore Levi’s and sweaters, and stood out from other screen tots, many of them bleached, permanented, and beruffled.”
Natalie was finally permitted to make a friend during Driftwood. Her mother began exchanging show-business gossip with another mother on the set, Rosalie Infuhr, whose son Teddy had a featured part in the movie as a “mean little kid” whose pants are torn off by Jenny’s (Natalie) dog. Mrs. Infuhr stopped by the Gurdins’ house to see Maria from time to time and brought her son with her, throwing Natalie and Teddy together over several years. Infuhr remembers playing tag outside the Gurdins’ tract home in Burbank—a rare privilege for the overprotected Natalie, whose Doberman chased Teddy and tore off his shirt, in a case of life imitating the movies. Infuhr’s memories of Natalie at nine are of a “pretty outgoing” girl who liked to act and was “sharp” at her lines. He found Natalie’s mother pleasant and her father antisocial. “Nobody seemed to like that man. He seemed very quiet, and very sullen. When people were around he’d just disappear.”
Unsurprisingly, Natalie bonded more significantly with the adults on Driftwood. She began a permanent friendship with screenwriters Mary Anita Loos (the niece of Anita Loos, famous for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Richard Sale, who were courting at the time. She also got reacquainted with Walter Brennan, her costar from Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay, who had a supporting role in Driftwood. Natalie’s favorite scene as Jenny took place in a bathtub filled with bubbles, where Brennan’s character, a crochety old bachelor, scrubs her ears and lectures her about women. She felt like a “glamour girl,” Natalie said later. Frank Arrigo, the art director who set up the bubble-bath scene, went home raving about what a delightful child Natalie Wood was, “so easy to manage.”
Mud was having quite a different experience with Svetlana, whom she had decided to put into movies now that she was a toddler. Maria convinced the director, Dwan, to use Svetlana in a scene—calling her “Lana,” claiming she had named her after Lana Turner. The newly rechristened “Lana” resisted her mother’s efforts to control her from the beginning, crying throughout her debut scene, which had to be cut from the film. Mud had no tolerance for Lana, whom she described in a magazine as “a nervous child,” comparing her unfavorably to Natalie. Lana would not bend to their mother’s will, as Natalie did, nor was she selfless like Olga. “Lana was always very, very jealous,” Maria told a reporter late in life. “She wants me there. But Olga—she was never like that. She was very nice, she was very good.” Natalie adored her little sister. She put Lana in a wheelbarrow and pulled her around the Driftwood set like one of her storybook dolls.
Natalie took a trip north with her family soon after Driftwood, her first break in eight months and four movies. They visited Olga and the Liuzunies (Maria’s half-sister Kalia’s family) in San Francisco and stayed at a resort along the Russian River near Santa Rosa. Friends and relatives observed the dangerous dynamics in the family now that Natalie was famous. “Miracle on 34th Street changed their life,” avers Natalie’s cousin Constantine Liuzunie. “[Aunt] Musia lived for Natalie and that was her shining star—her only star—and all she could do was think about her and talk about her.” Lana withdrew into shyness. Nick made a last-gasp effort to assert his manhood, suggesting to Musia they use their “nest egg” from Natalie’s earnings and stay in northern California. “She said, ‘No way,’ ” recalls a Russian friend. “And so that was that.” His fate sealed, Fahd anesthetized himself with vodka and fantasized his escape, as Lana recalls. “His dream was that Communism would end and he would go back to Russia.”
Natalie was the only one in the family who bore her celebrity with grace. She was the same Natasha on that visit as she was at four, relates her cousin Constantine. Natalie remained unaffected by fame twenty-three years later in 1970, at the pinnacle of stardom, when she thoughtfully wrote Constantine (“Kotick,” as she addressed him in the Russian affectionate) to tell him how touched she was by a ring he made for her birthday. She recalled that long-ago trip, and him, in warm detail in her letter, saying that the ring he designed “brought back many happy memories of our childhood” and all the “clever and interesting things” he was always making. Natalie complimented her Russian cousin on the beauty of his work, but expressed it was his “thoughts and caring” that made his gift to her “truly precious.” She signed the note as “Natasha.”
Natalie played with her childhood pal Edwin at the Russian River camp that summer as if she had never left Santa Rosa or become a movie star. “It never went to her head,” he declares. Bobby Hyatt, the child actor forbidden to associate with Natalie, said that she was “a wonderful person from the time she was a little kid all the way up,” despite the way her mother aggrandized her. “Natalie became the queen, not because Natalie wanted to be the queen, but because Marie made her the queen.”
When she and Edwin played by the Russian River that summer, Natalie was still “deathly afraid” of water, even though she had learned to dog paddle slightly for Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay. “I can remember her and I laying on the beach and I used to get up—and I’m not a terrific swimmer—but I used to go in the river, you know, waist high, or chest high, and she wouldn’t get close.” Natalie never talked to Edwin about why she was frightened of the water, or the gypsy’s warning. “Never told me, never asked.”
Canevari remembers Maria keeping Natalie, who was nine, under military-like surveillance with boys. “If I had a guy, a buddy of mine, go up the river with me, she’d give me the third degree on who was this guy. She trusted me with Natalie because me and Natalie were kids together. If I wanted to go uptown and go and have a malt or a milkshake or something with her, it was okay, but if I had somebody with me, no way.” As a child, Natalie preferred boys, a trait she may have picked up from Mud, who used to say that all women were catty and all women were jealous of her.
Someone took a snapshot of Natalie with Edwin that long-ago summer, standing beside an orange tree in the Canevaris’ yard. “I told her I would keep it forever. That picture is still in my wallet.”
Natalie resumed her lonely Hollywood life in the fall. She started fifth grade on the Fox lot in a studio school that had become a ghost town. “By the time I got into the schoolroom at Twentieth Century Fox,” she later mused, “most of the child stars were already past me—Linda Darnell, Peggy Ann Garner, Roddy McDowall were gone. I was the only one in the class.” Natalie advanced scholastically due to the individual attention, but she was completely isolated. Since she wasn’t making a movie, there wasn’t even a film crew around. “It was a great event if I had another student to keep me company.”
She celebrated Halloween by reading reviews of Driftwood. As with Tomorrow Is Forever, Natalie’s complex performance was lauded while the picture she was in was criticized as overly sentimentalized. A typical review had this to say about Natalie as the truth-telling orphan: “Young Miss Wood gives with everything in the book, with a skill comparable with the best in recent times.” She was billed as “the delightful new child star” because of Miracle on 34th Street, which was still showing in theaters four months after its release and continued to play through Christmas and beyond. Natalie rode the crest of the Miracle on 34th Street wave, receiving her second Box Office Blue Ribbon Award for her performance as Susan. She ended the year with a life-sized trophy from Parents magazine, naming her “Most Talented Juvenile Star of 1947.” A pigtailed Natalie was pictured in newspapers standing on tiptoes, peering over the trophy in amazement. Magazines began to dub her “The Pigtail Kid.”
Miracle on 34th Street received three Academy Awards the next spring, for Best Screenplay (George Seaton), Best Original Story (Valentine Davies) and Best Supporting Actor (Edmund Gwenn). Natalie wasn’t nominated, but she was given a Critics Award in April for playing Bean, the eavesdropping tomboy in Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay, which came out that month. The film was backhandedly complimented as a “fascinating discourse on mules,” and would be remembered, if at all, for introducing Marilyn Monroe. Hollywood took notice of Natalie’s instinct for comedy, however, opening up a different range of characters for her to play beyond the sensitive waifs for which she was known.
Fox put Natalie in her first picture under contract in the summer of 1948, a full year since she had completed Driftwood. The movie was called Chicken Every Sunday, another sentimental family drama taken from a popular novel. Gene Tierney was suspended for turning down the lead, which briefly passed to Jeanne Crain and succeeded to blond character actress Celeste Holm. Holm played the sensible wife of a dreamer in 1910 Tucson who keeps her husband and family afloat by turning their home into a boarding house. Musical star Dan Dailey was cast as the impractical husband, with Natalie playing their younger daughter, her hair dyed blond to match Holm’s.
Though her part was minuscule, Natalie received star treatment at Fox. The studio provided a limousine and a driver to take her to and from Carson City, Nevada, to shoot the exterior scenes. Ruth Sydes, whose seven-year-old son, Anthony, had a bit part, recalls riding home in the limo with Natalie and her mother at the end of a day’s shoot in Carson City. “Natalie gets in the car and says, ‘No, no, no, I’m hungry, I want to eat.’ I was delighted, ’cause I was starving and so was Anthony, but Anthony was a secondary person, character, in the show and Natalie was the little princess. So we stopped immediately.” According to Sydes, “If someone of her age was neglected or put upon in a movie and Natalie felt they were not being looked after, she’d go after them and make friends with them,” including Sydes’ son Anthony. “She took care of him if anybody tried to do anything, ’cause he was three years younger. She had a real tender spot for the underdog.”
Natalie celebrated her tenth birthday during the shoot. The studio “made a big hoop-de-la” over it, remembers Sydes. “But she wanted all the other kids on the lot to come to her little party…and so they all went over and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. She was a very sweet girl…she had a certain kindness about her that you’re born with.”
Since Maria didn’t drive, Sydes offered to carpool her to the Fox lot. “I kind of expected not to like her,” she admits. To Ruth Sydes’ surprise, Maria “adopted” her. “She would take me places and she’d always pay. And this made her feel big, made her feel important.” Mud spent the long days on set with Sydes, spewing her shrewd wisdom about the studios, spinning yarns about how she had met director Irving Pichel on the boat from China, where he “discovered” Natalie. “I used to listen every hour to her telling me this one particular story.” Maria’s grandiosity began to surface in the Twentieth Century Fox biography of Natalie distributed to publicists, which identified her father as an “architectural designer” and her mother as a French former ballerina. Movie magazines described the Gurdins as “Franco-Russian.” Maria told friends she was an actress and a dancer. “Marie—Maria—used to make up stories all the time,” relates Robert Hyatt, who was later close to Natalie and her father. “Nobody knows where she came from, nobody knows exactly what her name is.” According to Hyatt, Nick wasn’t even sure of his wife’s origins.
Natalie got a microscope from her parents for completing Chicken Every Sunday and went directly into her next picture. The Green Promise was a curiosity financed by a flamboyant Houston oilman named Glenn McCarthy, who wanted to make “wholesome entertainment” and formed an alliance with actor Robert Paige to produce a low-budget movie for RKO extolling heartland values and 4-H clubs. He enlisted the 4-H organization to promote the film and staged a nationwide contest for a 4-H girl to play a small part. Paige cast himself in the agricultural drama as a county agent who tries to help a mean-spirited widower manage his farm as he woos the farmer’s eldest daughter. The story centered on the youngest daughter, Susie, Natalie’s character, who desperately wants to join 4-H and raise a pair of baby lambs. It was a showy, demanding role for Natalie, who had several crying scenes and a climactic sequence where her character sneaks out of a children’s costume party alone in a thunderstorm.
Fox loaned Natalie to RKO for the picture, which teamed her for a third time with Walter Brennan, as the cruel father mismanaging his farm. McCarthy and Paige wanted Marguerite Chapman, a glamorous brunette actress known for being “difficult,” to play Paige’s love interest. “The movie seemed so depressing to me, I was mad as hell that I had to do it,” she recalled. “I was in New York, having a great time at the Waldorf-Astoria way up in the Starlight Room…Greg Bautzer called, and he was representing Glenn McCarthy of Houston Oil. He said he’d give me a $5000 bonus if I did it, which I knew I’d never get. Bullshitter.” Two well-known juvenile actors, Ted Donaldson and Connie Marshall, both fifteen, completed the main cast as Natalie’s on-screen brother and spiteful middle sister. Paige chose a journeyman director named William Russell.
Russell started filming around Feather River near Sacramento, since most of the scenes were outdoors on a farm. “I came back from New York and the very next day I had to go to wardrobe with those godawful clothes, and here I was, one of the best-dressed women in the world,” complained Chapman. “God! I was depressed to begin with with the whole damn thing. I dragged myself out of bed every day.” Natalie’s other screen siblings and Jeanne LaDuke, an Indiana 4-H girl who won the contest for a bit part, had a ball on location, horseback riding or playing golf. Natalie socialized with them only once in three weeks, when she and Ted and Connie played a word game in Ted’s trailer “to see who could read the fastest.” Maria’s exclusionary tactics were not as obvious as with Bobby Hyatt, but Ted and Jeanne suspected she was isolating Natalie. Chapman noticed “her mother was with her constantly. There wasn’t any interaction personally, not at all. The moment she finished a scene, she was gone.” Maria kept her distance from the other mothers. The only time she and Natalie were seen off the set was in the dining room at the Feather River Inn, where everyone was staying. “They had this little pet chihuahua and it ate at the dining table, and that was a bit off-putting to some of us. They’d put it up and it would be licking stuff off the plate.”
Natalie shared a tutor with the 4-H girl, Jeanne LaDuke, who was also ten, her first company in many months. Jeanne, who came straight from her family’s farm in Indiana to be in the movie, viewed Natalie with fascination. “There was concern about what she ate, and she had dancing lessons and singing lessons…I wasn’t used to ten-year-olds who were that professional.” Jeanne thought Natalie was nice, not at all aloof. “The person who tutored us used to do cat’s cradles, taught us all kinds of wonderful string things,” their only extracurricular activity together. “I was considered a bright little kid,” relates LaDuke, who grew up to be a college math professor. “We seemed to be very much at the same level. I didn’t think of her as being a whole lot smarter than I, and I certainly didn’t think of her as being less smart than I, we were just good intellectual companions.” Ted Donaldson, a veteran child actor at fifteen, regarded Natalie as gifted. “No question about it. She didn’t ‘act’—I mean ‘acting’ acting.” Natalie got little guidance from her directors, including William Russell. “I don’t remember him spending a lot of time with anybody,” recalls Donaldson. “There was not a lot of time to spend with people—we got a small budget film, we got four weeks to do it.” Ted, who observed her mother’s control, felt Natalie “freed” herself when acting.
Marguerite Chapman clashed spectacularly with Maria. “I went around to talk to her one time, and it was ‘Natalie, Natalie, Natalie.’ And I wasn’t used to that, quite frankly I resented it. I was used to ‘Marguerite!’ ” Chapman was jealous that a child star had usurped her status on a movie set. “Everything was ‘Natalie, Natalie, Natalie’…one scene I had with her, I was fitting the bunny rabbit costume on her and I accidentally pricked her with a pin. I could’ve died. Cut right in.”
Ted’s mother and Connie Marshall’s mother talked about Maria privately, concerned that her behavior might cause permanent damage to Natalie, whom everybody liked, even Chapman, who said, “She was such a darling child, very polite and very professional.” According to Donaldson, “She seemed to be—I don’t want to say repressed, but I got the sense of things being held in, of being forlorn. It was a subject of talk among many people on that set. We thought she was a lonely kid, and we all ascribed this to the mother.” Part of it was Natalie’s fawnlike appearance. Jeanne LaDuke was struck by the difference in their sizes at ten. “I’m just a healthy farm kid…Natalie was very delicate and small.” “She was adorable as a child because she looked so lonely and so waiflike,” observes Donaldson, who perceived a “sadness” in Natalie. “I’m thinking now of a scene—we’re on the back of a truck, in between shots or something—and we’re singing songs and she’s enjoying it, she’s enjoying the camaraderie of making films and of being with people, even if these two [kids] that she’s with are five years older than she.” He caught glimpses of Natalie’s spirit and a sense of fun “when she let herself go,” which was rare with Maria around. In the film, Natalie’s character has several scenes with her pet black lambs, which she is seen tenderly caressing. “That’s probably the freest, most open, most Natalie expressing who she was, [was] at those moments,” assesses Donaldson. “I remember a certain kind of glow, and giving over to the moment with them. That was a very genuine thing.”
The climax of The Green Promise was a harrowing sequence that takes place at night, during a thunderstorm, when Susie, Natalie’s character, sneaks away from a children’s costume party at a neighbor’s farm to go home and rescue her lambs. Natalie, wearing her bunny costume, has to cross a precarious wooden bridge over raging water through wind and rain. The instant she steps to the other side, the bridge is rigged to collapse. According to Chapman, who was in a separate thunderstorm scene, Russell shot the bridge scene the last week of filming, when they were back in Hollywood on stage A or B at the Goldwyn lot. “That’s where we did that godawful scene. It was wet and damp with this rain. Stormy. Great big wind machines. What a godawful set.”
Natalie was petrified to do the scene, knowing the bridge would crash and she had to cross dark water. Her mother promised her nothing would happen to the bridge until she was on the other side, assuring her that she was safe. “They had huge airplane propellers blowing rain onto the set…and there was a waterfall and rushing water underneath,” she said later. Natalie started across the bridge in her bunny suit, covering her face with her hands as the wind machine whipped her back and forth, movie lightning streaked through the black sky, sound effect thunder rumbled, and manufactured rain blinded her. “They were telling her to hurry across, because the bridge is going to collapse,” recalls Lana. “When I was halfway across,” Natalie said later, “somebody pulled the lever prematurely and I was thrown into the water.” She managed to catch hold of the collapsing bridge, clinging to the edge as the current pulled her in the direction of the waterfall. “My mother leaped forward crying, ‘My child!’ ” Natalie later told a reporter, “and the director said, ‘Keep the cameras rolling! Keep the mother back!’ ” Natalie’s left wrist was broken and she nearly drowned. “I don’t even remember them fishing me out.” “It was so traumatic for her,” observes her later confidant, Mart Crowley. “She’d been lied to, for one thing. And then there she was, fearful of her life.” Ted Donaldson, who was off-set, remembers, “Something happened. I do recall that she did seem to be hurt. It seemed to me they continued shooting.” The incident was hushed. Marguerite Chapman, who was in her dressing room, never knew Natalie had been injured, or that a stunt had gone wrong. “Natalie told me…whoever was timing it thought she was on the other side and she wasn’t,” relates Lana. “It was an accident.”
Mud concealed Natalie’s broken wrist from the producers and Natalie finished the film. “Marie told me she was not going to tell the studio, [that] it was her secret,” recalls a friend. “She should have taken Natalie right away to get the bone cast.” Olga explains why: “She didn’t complain and she didn’t sue because if you sued the studio you were blacklisted.” Mud still refused to take Natalie to a doctor when filming was completed, telling Natalie doctors were evil. “I never like doctors,” she said once. “I cure myself with my own remedies.” There were hidden motivations behind Maria’s refusal to fix Natalie’s left wrist, Olga reveals. “My mother was afraid the doctors were going to talk. She was worried about Natalie being blackballed. And Mother was just worried about having operations.”
9 NATALIE WAS NEVER THE SAME after the bridge collapsed on her during The Green Promise. She had recurring nightmares in which she saw herself drown, so many they haunted her, commingling with the gypsy’s warning to her mother. Her fear of water, especially water that was dark, turned phobic. “It was a combination of injuring herself and thinking she was going to drown that really put this major fear of water in her mind,” suggests a friend from that period. “The most water she’d get in is in the bathtub. That was probably not a full bathtub.” She added thunderstorms and heights to her litany of fears. Child actor Bobby Blake, who met Natalie about this time, found her riddled with demons.
She continued to seek solace in her menagerie of pets, including a new bird she named “Gregory Peckwood,” after her favorite actor. She began to fantasize having her own horse, with a pasture where she could ride. Fahd (or “Deda,” as Natalie sometimes called him) showed his tender, artistic side to his troubled daughter. “When I had nightmares, Deda would talk to me in the middle of the night and draw me pictures of the corral or box stall he would build for my dreamed-of horse. And by his love and understanding he would fix my worries.”
Natalie’s relationship with Mud shifted, for the worse. In her view, her mother had forced her to do a terrifying movie scene, then lied to her that she could not get hurt, even though the bridge had collapsed too soon. The accident changed the way Natalie perceived Mud. She was no longer a “god” whose every wish must be obeyed or Natalie would suffer the torture of the damned. Maria had been exposed to her as a ruthless stage mother willing to risk her safety and then ignore her injury for the sake of a movie role. Natalie felt used by both her mother and the studio. As the bone on her broken left wrist began to grow into place unnaturally, “she blamed my mom for not having the wrist properly set, taken care of by a doctor…she was angry about that,” relates Lana.
Mud’s gypsy magic, Russian folklore and old wives’ tales took on ominous connotations for Natalie because of her malformed wrist, though a part of her still believed. Maria’s superstitions were the house rules, as Lana relates. If she or Natalie broke a mirror, “we would have to go out and throw it over our shoulder into a yard.” There were dozens more. “You don’t put hats on beds or shoes on tables. You don’t walk around opposite sides of a pole with someone because you’ll have a fight with that person. You don’t give sharp objects as gifts. If you give a ring or slippers, you have to give somebody money, otherwise you’ll split up. You don’t give scarves as gifts—they’re bad luck. If you sing before the sun comes up, then you’ll cry before the sun goes down—which used to drive me crazy, because I love to sing. You can’t let the moon shine on you at night—it’ll cause bad dreams, moon madness, insanity. Old European superstitions. Natalie really didn’t want to believe that any of these things held a grain of truth, ever.” But she did believe. Her mother’s mysticism was too imbedded in her subconscious. “Natalie was scared of peacock feathers,” recalls Lana, “because those were [supposed to be] evil…and whistling in a dressing room—she never did that.” Maria’s gypsy influence was inescapable. She told her daughters’ fortunes from cards she insisted remain untouched for twenty-four hours, which she sat on or held in her hands before reading. “She was always right, but she was only predicting things in the very near future—receiving letters, receiving news, becoming ill, taking a trip, things like that. Natalie didn’t like it.” Bobby Hyatt, who reentered Natalie’s life a few years later, remembers Maria reading his and Natalie’s palms at the studio “all the time,” though he claims she wasn’t accurate. “Natalie would never let her [mother] read the palm with her damaged wrist though, I noticed that. That was very interesting.”
Natalie’s feelings of bitterness and disillusionment toward Mud and the studio after her traumatic injury filtered into her feelings about acting, and about her life. She went through a kind of existential crisis at ten, wondering, suddenly, who she was. “I found it very difficult…to figure out if I was just responding to a situation as though it were a scene or whether it was how I really felt about something.” She realized as an adult that “from ages ten through twelve or so, I barely remember anything.”
Natalie spent seven months in the deserted studio school before starting her next picture. She became aware of how lonely she was, of “missing out.” “I did feel more comfortable in the company of grown-ups, because I wasn’t around little kids very much. So I went through a period feeling probably inordinately shy with kids my own age.” Ted Donaldson, who was fifteen, described her as “ten going on sixteen or thirty.” She considered herself a child freak, creating new paranoias. The thought of returning to public school “terrified” Natalie, especially speaking in front of a class. “I could do a scene, in a movie, and learn dialogue and do that with a fair amount of confidence, but…if I had to stand up in front of my own peers, kids my own age, and deliver a poem or speech, I just died! I was mortified.” After years in the studio with a tutor, in the constant company of adults, Natalie felt disconnected from children her age. She existed in a kind of twilight zone between fantasy and reality, movie life and real life.
Olga got married in February to Lexi Viripaeff. The formal Russian ceremony, which featured crowns for the bride and groom in an incensed Russian Orthodox church ablaze with candelabras, seemed fairy-tale romantic to ten-year-old Natalie, who wore her first long dress as her sister’s bridesmaid. It was Olga’s final disconnection from Hollywood, a bittersweet moment for Natalie’s overshadowed older sister. Olga settled into domestic life in San Francisco with Lexi, near her father and Lexi’s parents, whose house would eventually become theirs. Natalie sent her a black-and-white publicity picture when Olga returned from her honeymoon, inscribed “Dearest Teddi…from Natalie Wood.” They were in different worlds now.
The fact that Natalie gave her sister an autographed picture of herself was disturbing proof of Natalie’s confusion about who she was. Her constant nightmare, she said later, was that she had no identity—that her personality depended on the part she was playing. “I didn’t really have a very clear perception of myself. I was always Maureen O’Hara’s daughter or Claudette Colbert’s daughter…I was sort of discombobulated.” Fox assigned Natalie to play O’Hara’s daughter again in a picture called Father Was a Fullback in March, ending her half-year of lonely isolation at the studio school. The picture was like a family reunion for Natalie. She got to see “Mama Maureen” from Miracle on 34th Street, and spent time with her friends Richard Sale and Mary Loos from Driftwood, who cowrote the script and were now married. The set was homey, as O’Hara describes: “You’d just sit around and have a good time and enjoy each other and gossip and chat and tease. It was different than today.”
The cast’s bonhomie was evident in the film, an occasionally hilarious comedy with O’Hara as the wife of a small-town college football coach (Fred MacMurray) who is frustrated by his team’s losing streak and unable to cope with his teenage daughter’s budding sexuality. A Broadway ingenue named Betty Lynn played the lovestruck daughter; Natalie was her smart-alecky kid sister, a character similar to Bean. Though the part wasn’t large, Natalie had the movie’s funniest lines, which she delivered gleefully, a challenge according to O’Hara, who remembers the director, John Stahl, as “difficult to work with because he shot sometimes as many as fifty takes. You’d say, ‘Mr. Stahl, is there something we should change?’ and he’d say, ‘No, no, no, do it again.’ And then you’d be shocked because he might print take three and you’d think, ‘What was he looking for?’ He would be the same with Natalie as he was with me and Fred MacMurray.” MacMurray later commented he’d “never seen a child of such energy and delightful innocence” as Natalie, “and yet she knew everything.” Natalie’s happiest memory of the movie was wearing Betty Lynn’s false eyelashes and makeup.
While she was filming, Glenn McCarthy staged a celebrity extravaganza in Houston to jointly promote the opening of his grand hotel, the Shamrock, and his first film, The Green Promise. He entreated another Texas millionaire, Howard Hughes, who owned RKO, to persuade Darryl Zanuck at Fox to allow Natalie to participate. She and Maureen O’Hara were flown to the premiere and a torchlight parade “with more national known figures…than have been in Houston since the National Democratic Convention.” Jeanne LaDuke, the 4-H child who had a small part in the movie, remembers a young Houston girl so overcome at the parade she had to be restrained. The Texas showman whipped civic organizations into a similar frenzy, eliciting raving endorsements for his farm movie from every institution from the PTA to the Girl Scouts to the Daughters of the American Revolution, in addition to 4-H clubs. Film critics disparaged McCarthy’s publicity as “ballyhoo” and dismissed his movie as “schmalz.” Natalie’s superior work as a child actress was once more lost in a mediocre film. As one critic wrote, “She plays the role with rare sensitiveness, changing moods from blissful dreaminess to crushed disappointment at an instant.” Her desperate struggle to keep from drowning as the bridge collapsed remained in the film, a memento of her lost innocence.
Natalie received positive notices again that summer when Father Was a Fullback was released, though the film failed to impress critics, the pattern of her child acting career. In August, Samuel Goldwyn hired her from Fox to play yet another busybody kid sister in an issue-oriented low-budget drama called Our Very Own. Ann Blyth, a popular star of twenty-one, was cast in the lead as Natalie’s oldest sister, a high school senior who learns from a conniving middle sister that she’s adopted. Goldwyn wanted actress Jane Wyatt, who had just turned thirty-eight, to play their understanding mother. “I was so thrilled to be in a Goldwyn picture, but I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the script,” she recalls. “I wanted to be in something that was a really, really typical Goldwyn script.” Wyatt’s true concern was portraying a mother. “I’d just finished playing opposite Gary Cooper and Cary Grant! I remember Mr. Goldwyn telling me, ‘Don’t be so silly, little girl. This is just right for you.’ ” One day when Wyatt stepped off the set of Our Very Own, still in costume, a producer named Gene Rodney happened to stroll by, striking up a brief conversation. He contacted her out of the blue several years later, asking her to play the mother in a television series called Father Knows Best, for which Wyatt would win three successive Emmys. “So that’s how I happened to be in Father Knows Best. He always remembered this little encounter.”
Natalie took a day off filming Our Very Own to attend a televised ceremony in which California’s Lieutenant Governor Goodwin Knight presented her with a silver cup as “Child Star of the Year” for 1949. The event was sponsored by an organization called the Children’s Day Council to draw attention to a newly created “Children’s Day.” It was Natalie’s last hurrah as a child star. Driftwood and The Green Promise, the two films in which she was the lead, had failed to ascend her to the rarefied ranks of Shirley Temple or Margaret O’Brien, despite her emotionally complex performances. She hadn’t been in a genuine hit since Miracle on 34th Street. The reality was painfully evident as she accepted her silver cup as Child Star of 1949. Mud put Natalie in a frilly dress with puffed sleeves and braided her hair into pigtails as if she were still five. Natalie, who had turned eleven that summer, appeared gangly and uncomfortable, her face frozen into an expression of forced gaiety.
“I found myself surprised when I heard that Natalie was actually eleven, because she looked more like a really little nine-year-old,” remembers Joan Evans, who played the jealous sister. “That was one of the things that Mrs. Gurdin did, was to make sure that the makeup and the hair and the clothes accentuated the little girl.” Maria forced Natalie to dress like a child so she could continue to play children’s parts, though she was years past her chronological age of eleven, as Jane Wyatt observed. “She was dignified. It was funny seeing a little kid dignified like that, but she was.” Wyatt was startled when Natalie walked over to a piano on the set, “and she played a whole Beethoven sonata. I was so impressed—this little girl, whirling through this very complicated piece.”
“She was definitely very solemn, very quiet,” confirms Joan Evans, who was fifteen then. Evans was shocked when Natalie transformed into an annoying chatterbox in her first scene, pestering a TV repairman. “We were all surprised in that little opening scene at how funny and cute she could be. Because it wasn’t the child that we saw.” Natalie’s acting had begun to seem forced at times, even manic, like a child overly desperate to please. Ann Blyth got the sense that Natalie “wanted to be good, she wanted to do the best work.” Between scenes, Maria would only permit her to talk to the director. “Her mother would usually sit in the doorway of whatever she had in the way of a dressing room on the set. The minute the scene was over, that’s where Natalie went. And her mother was standing there waiting….I don’t know what her mother felt was going to happen, but everybody thought her mother was very strange.” Jane Wyatt and Ann Blyth felt there was something very touching about Natalie, an “endearing” quality the camera captured. As Blyth, who also had been a child actress, remarked, “You can’t teach that to someone. That is something that owns you, and she had that ability.”
Joan Evans remembers Natalie covering her left wrist, when she was off camera, with “a very small brace—maybe an Ace bandage, a small flesh-colored thing.” She understood that Natalie had hurt her wrist and it was “problematic” for her. “She was so tiny, and the wrist bone was very prominent.” Evans suspected “anything imperfect was threatening to her mother. At that age, only your mother or your father can give you that kind of psychological feeling about something as relatively unimportant as that.”
Natalie went through the motions of life, drifting from Our Very Own into another smallish role as somebody else’s daughter. With her child stardom fading, Twentieth Century Fox let her option contract lapse. Though Nick was employed at the time building miniature props for one of the studios, Mud was possessed that Natalie continue to act, keeping her in pigtails to perpetuate what was left of her child-star image. Columbia put her in a tearjerker called No Sad Songs for Me, as the only child of a housewife dying of cancer, another of the weepy “woman’s films” of the forties. The picture was a showcase for stage actress Margaret Sullavan; Natalie was basically a backdrop. In later years, she would interpret the shift as a transition to “character” roles, but Mud’s plan was simply to keep her working any way she could. Taking smaller parts, Natalie said later, saved her from the tragic denouement of many forgotten child stars. “I was never a great, important child star like Shirley Temple or Margaret O’Brien. I was a child actress working regularly in films. There’s a difference. I was luckier than Shirley Temple. I did not have to carry the whole picture, and as I got older, I simply moved into older roles.” By comparison to popular child stars like Elizabeth Taylor, whose childhoods were played out in fan magazines, Natalie’s life was normal. “I never saw film stars at home. We had no maid, no cook, no swimming pool…” What she had was domestic violence, the Gurdins’ black secret. Lana recalls the Burbank years as a blur of fights with Pop drunk and her mother grabbing her and Natalie, “spending the night in motels, and spending the night at neighbors’ homes that you didn’t know.”
Natalie submerged into her idealized movie family, where she could pretend to be Polly, the cherished daughter of noble cancer victim Margaret Sullavan, who “was so into her character that it was a little hard to think of her as Margaret Sullavan.” She made a friend of Ann Doran, a respected thirty-something character actress cast as a socialite, who by coincidence would appear in four of Natalie’s next films. The hard-working Doran admired Natalie’s work ethic, which she ascribed to her mother. Doran liked Maria. “She was teaching Natalie good manners, and she did it from the time she was a little girl. On the set, if somebody did something for her benefit, Natalie would say thank you. She was not one of those, ‘I’m a star so you do it for me.’ And she would accept anything. She’d say, ‘If that’s what you want me to do, that’s what I’ll do.’ ” Doran believed that Natalie’s kindness was a result of her upbringing. “She was raised to be polite, and politeness means being kind to other people.” Doran did not consider Maria Gurdin a stage mother. In Doran’s view, a stage mother was one who coached her child, “ ‘Be sure and do this, this’ll be cute…’ Jesus, it used to drive me crazy. Natalie’s mother was not, believe me, was never the Hollywood horrible mother. I’d worked with others that freely I would have smashed them flat. Her mother was very quiet. She never told Natalie how to act. She figured the director knew how he wanted her to act. Her mother never interfered. Never, never, never.”
The self-supporting Doran was on the same treadmill workwise as Natalie, going from one supporting part to another with barely a breath between. She gave no thought to whether No Sad Songs for Me would be a success, or that it was the first motion picture about cancer. “What the story was didn’t mean a hoot in hell to me. I was only thinking who I was as a character in relation to the other ones.” She had the utmost respect for Natalie’s ability, at eleven, to get into character, which she watched her do in five films as a juvenile. “It was just her inborn talent. There are actors that spend their entire lives and don’t act at all, they’re just themselves. But Natalie was a different person on every picture she did.”
Maria revealed to Olga, in this period, her secret plan to leave Nick and live in San Francisco with her Russian sea captain. Olga approved. “He would have been very good for her. He didn’t drink, was a quiet, nice guy, nice with her. They made arrangements to go off together to get married…he was going to build this house for her and they would go on trips.” The next communication Olga received was a phone call from Nick’s brother Dmitri telling her that Nick had suffered a heart attack and her mother was with him at the hospital. When Olga next spoke to her, Maria had dropped her plans to elope. “I asked her how come, if you don’t like Nick, why did you go to the hospital? She used a Russian phrase that means ‘You get used to a dog.’ She wouldn’t admit—I’m sure she liked Nick, and maybe George was just a flirtation.” The true reason was apparent to Olga. “She couldn’t leave the Hollywood stuff. Mother was very much in love with Hollywood stuff.” Fahd might have died if Natalie hadn’t been home. Mud fainted when he had his heart attack, as she had during any trauma since her childhood convulsions. When she revived, Natalie was the only one with the presence of mind to phone a doctor.
Fahd’s slow recuperation placed excruciating pressure on eleven-year-old Natalie. “My father couldn’t work and the family depended on me,” she said simply in later years, as if that were normal. Since she wasn’t under contract anymore, Natalie had to compete for roles to bring in an income as her career was waning, at the most difficult age for child actors to find work: the preteen years. “I discovered the heartbreak and frustration of not getting parts…I was told on various occasions, ‘You’re too short. You’re too tall. You’re too young. You’re too old.’ It’s awfully difficult for an adult, much less a child, to accept rejection.” The rejection was more than personal for Natalie; she needed the job to support her parents. Mud’s ruthless ambition turned deadly. “They would do anything to get a part. Natalie and she both,” recalls a movie mother from that period. Maria thrived on the drama, recalls Lana. “The more dramatic life was for my mom, the better she liked it…the ups and downs—that was her bread and butter.” A child actress who competed against Natalie then remembers how, at auditions, Natalie would tell producers, “ ‘I’ll do anything.’ If they asked, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ she’d say yes, and ‘Can you tap dance?’ she’d say yes—and then be quick to learn. She just seemed to have no limits. I didn’t see any insecurity as to what she could do.”
She and Mud, with Famous Artists, managed to snare her a role in a Fred MacMurray/Irene Dunne screwball comedy at RKO called Come Share My Love, later changed to Never a Dull Moment, which started shooting around Thanksgiving. Dunne was cast as a sophisticated Broadway star who impulsively marries a handsome rodeo rider (MacMurray) with a ramshackle ranch and two rascally daughters. Natalie was one of the daughters; Andy Devine, the famous cowboy sidekick, played MacMurray’s matchmaking pal. Dunne recommended Ann Doran for the part of her rival. “We had so much fun on that picture,” Doran recalls. “Everything about it was fun. The director, George Marshall, liked to do silly things on the set and Fred was a nut! Irene went along with it, and she loved it.”
Doran was blissfully ignorant of the battle Maria was staging behind the scenes between Natalie and child actress Gigi Perreau, who was playing Fred MacMurray’s other daughter. Gigi (short for Ghislaine, with a hard “G”) was a cute, freckle-faced nine-year-old at the height of her popularity; Natalie was a gawky, aging child star of eleven-plus, all arms and legs and new front teeth. Mud schemed to edge out Gigi from the first contract negotiations, when “I got billing above Natalie,” recalls Perreau, “which just drove her mother crazy. Natalie, to her, was her little special jewel, and nobody could mess around with it.” Maria insisted on a clause in the contract guaranteeing Natalie an equal number of lines as Gigi. Gigi and her mother watched in disbelief as Natalie and Maria counted lines aloud together to make sure Gigi’s and Natalie’s came out the same. “I remember we had to stop filming at one point,” recalls Perreau, “because Mrs. Gurdin discovered I had two more words than Natalie did that day. She called the agent over and they had to do some re-writing to even things up.”
There was constant rivalry, according to Perreau. “On my side I think it was a very healthy normal competition. On Natalie’s, it probably wasn’t as much. She was very, very ambitious, almost to the point sometimes of being very obnoxious—because of her mother.” Perreau noticed, even between scenes, how Natalie seemed to have “enormous energy…she was just all over the place,” the same manic energy Natalie had demonstrated in her comedy scenes in Our Very Own. Her need to please, to keep pace with Mud’s fanatical drive, had reached a level of desperation, particularly since she was responsible for supporting the family. “Natalie was a very good vehicle for her ambitious mother,” Perreau analyzes. “Any other kid who didn’t want to do what they were doing would have rebelled. They would have said, ‘No, I’m not going to do it anymore.’ Natalie didn’t fight it…her mother would say, ‘Oh, there’s Mr. So-and-So, go up and give him a hug.’ But she didn’t mind the pushing. I never saw her object to the pushing.” Natalie made an important friend on the set just before Christmas. Gossip Louella Parsons, whose daughter Harriet produced the movie, stopped by one day. Mud made a point of introducing Natalie, who promptly got a mention in Parsons’ column.
Three days a week, Natalie studied ballet at a studio in Hollywood, which she and Maria took far more seriously than her schooling on the lot. The instructor was an elegant Russian named Michael Panieff, who had been a featured performer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. “The star system was still around at the time, and he was grooming those kids for anything and everything.” Natalie was the only one in the class of mostly preteen boys and girls who had acted professionally, a distinction Mud exploited by insisting she be the lead dancer at every recital. Natalie “didn’t flaunt it,” according to Don Zoute, who was in the class. “She didn’t put on airs by any means. She was just one of the kids.” The class “starlet,” in Zoute’s opinion, was a younger girl with curly hair named Jill Oppenheimer. “Panieff was old Russian school, where everybody was equal, no fancy costumes for the kids in the class. Jill’s mother dressed her in the little tutus with all the ribbons in her hair, and the jewelry and the makeup. She was gonna make a star out of her come hell or high water.” Another of Natalie’s classmates was a cute, slightly chubby redhead of seven nicknamed “Taffy.” By an odd coincidence, all three girls—Natalie, Jill and Taffy—would form lasting relationships as adults with actor Robert Wagner. Natalie would marry him, divorce him, and marry him again. Taffy, whose real name was Stefanie Powers, eventually would play his wife in the series Hart to Hart. Jill Oppenheimer, or Jill St. John, as she would call herself, would become Wagner’s wife after Natalie drowned. As ballet classmates, their only socializing was at Panieff’s Christmas party, when they lined up for a group picture.
Natalie typically gravitated toward the boys in the class—Zoute and another teenager named Robert Banas, who was her dance partner. Maria took them all on a picnic in Griffith Park, inviting them to the house beforehand to watch Natalie’s movie Driftwood. Natalie and Robert regularly went horseback riding together. “I remember her mother would give me some money so we could go to the drugstore and I could buy Natalie an ice cream, and then we’d come back and watch Driftwood. It was kind of a routine.” Maria was like a shadow trailing Natalie, even in Panieff’s dance class, recalls Banas. Lana, who was nearly four, “was pushed in the background. It was kind of pathetic.” Both Natalie and her mother approached ballet with the same determinism as Natalie’s movie career. “I think at one time she really wanted to compete as a dancer,” relates Zoute, who became a professional dancer himself. “She was very dedicated. I think it came through the training and working in films, where you had to be prepared. She was very, very serious about it. And she had potential.” Her dance partner, Robert Banas, thought Natalie “wasn’t exceptional but she was good, she was on point.” The dance phase of Natalie’s life came to a sudden end when Maria and Panieff had a “falling-out,” according to Zoute. “Panieff had quite a little performing group of children at the time, and her mother wanted him to change the name from Panieff to the Natalie Wood Dance Company, and I think that’s where the falling-out came. Because she was a very pushy woman.”
Mud’s competitiveness was even more cutthroat on the set of Never a Dull Moment. Andy Devine, the veteran comic actor, noticed that whenever he was in a scene with little Gigi Perreau and Natalie, Natalie would shove Gigi out of camera or sabotage her. Devine got so annoyed he would stop filming and ask the director to re-shoot the scene. “I later did a play with Andy,” recalls Perreau, “and he said to me, ‘How could you stand working with that little brat? Do you know that there’d be scenes where you would run in and the two of you were supposed to give me a hug, and she would deliberately put her hand over your face as she hugged me?’ ” Natalie invited her dance partner, Robert, to the set several times that winter. “It was very obvious what was happening,” he recalls. “Natalie was really upstaging Gigi.”
Gigi was certain Natalie’s mother had put her up to it. “I really and truly feel it was [her] mom. Natalie had already been taught tricks to upstage. She knew all of the little things that people do to get attention: like when other children are bouncing down, you be up, or you use your left foot instead of your right foot—because then all of a sudden your eyes go to that one.” Gigi spent the rest of the shoot “on guard when we were doing scenes together. I had to be sure that I didn’t allow her to—she’d push you aside a little bit, things like that, little things. I don’t think those are things that an eleven-year-old does automatically on their own.” Gigi was correct, confirms Lana. “My mom was always really nasty about other kids. Brutal.”
Gigi felt sorry for Natalie, despite their rivalry. “I remember feeling that I was so glad I had my mom, that my mom was normal. That I didn’t have her mom. I never thought her mother was mean…we just avoided her. She was just this little kind of witchlike creature.” It was clear to Gigi that Natalie was unhappy. She told Gigi she hated her braids. “She wanted to grow up, even at eleven and a half she wanted to grow up. There was no question but that she’d done enough things at that point and she was just very eager to be a teenager.” Natalie had a crush on actor Farley Granger, Ann Blyth’s movie boyfriend from Our Very Own, two pictures before. Gigi “got the feeling that she was very interested in boys.” Natalie’s oddly distended left wristbone was a source of increasing self-consciousness for her. She covered it with a western-style leather bracelet or hid it inside her sleeve in her scenes in Never a Dull Moment, telling Gigi there was a “scar” on her wrist. She was sensitive about what really happened, though “everybody knew that she did not like water,” relates Perreau.
Gigi, who attended a Catholic school and had a conservative upbringing, sensed a longing in Natalie for a family like Gigi’s. “It would have been interesting to have been able to talk to her about it, because I’m sure she felt such warmth and love from my mother and my siblings…and then she saw the kind of strange relationship with her own mother. I’m sure there were all kinds of psychological things going on.”
The director gave Natalie and Gigi western-style suede jackets when they finished filming. Natalie asked her costars to sign hers and started collecting autographs on the jacket. She related everything to Hollywood. She was her mother’s daughter.
Natalie entered the fifties in gloomy confusion that contrasted with the sunny ambience of the new decade. She had spent the last six years as Orson Welles’ ward, June Haver’s sister, Fred MacMurray’s daughter…or simply “driftwood.” She looked her age, nearly twelve, pretended to be nine or ten onscreen, and felt thirty. “It’s not only that child actors lose their childhood, it’s that they use up their childhood,” explains Natalie’s movie brother from The Green Promise, Ted Donaldson. “You have acted out much of your childhood. You use up a lot of the stuff that children only fantasize about, or maybe act out in games…so when you hit a certain age, a lot of changes start happening—girls have it before boys—and they don’t know who the hell they are.”
Natalie’s distress at being forced to look younger, the pressure she felt to compete, and her increasing ambivalence about acting all coalesced that summer on a movie she did for Fox called The Jackpot. The picture was an expression of the era, a family comedy starring Jimmy Stewart as a hard-working husband who wins a radio contest of prizes that turn his household upside down. The movie, which was taken from a piece in the New Yorker, was surprisingly biting, with subtle, intelligent performances, Natalie’s included, though her part was too insignificant to be noticed. The screenwriters were the witty wife-and-husband team of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who drew from an experience of their daughter Delia’s to create a scene for Stewart’s movie children, played by Natalie and child actor Tommy Rettig (who would become famous as Jeff on Lassie). “My mother used to say, ‘Everything is copy,’ ” recalled the Ephrons’ oldest daughter, Nora, a screenwriter-director, “and she meant it. One day my sister Delia got her head caught in the banister rails while peeking through them and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. Nine months later…my parents wrote it into The Jackpot for an eight-year-old Natalie Wood.” Nora Ephron was mistaken on two counts: the head-stuck-in-the-banister scene was performed by Rettig, not Natalie; and Natalie was twelve by the end of filming. The age issue was one of Natalie’s tribulations about The Jackpot. She was playing eight, which meant that she had to endure another movie in pigtails and pinafores, white anklets and saddle shoes, pretending to be four years younger than she was. To add to her discomfort, the makeup department put temporary braces on her teeth to give her character an even more awkward appearance. Without the western bracelet from her last movie, Natalie’s protruding left wrist was exposed below childish puffed sleeves. She felt so homely and humiliated making The Jackpot, “I cried.”
One day as she and Mud walked to the set, they encountered an exceptionally handsome young man with his hair combed to the side in a wave, dressed as a Marine for a Fox war movie called The Halls of Montezuma. As he passed, the actor said hello and smiled—a smile so blinding Natalie stopped to stare, in one of those moments, for a child, that crystallizes into permanent memory. For Natalie, an awkward eleven dressed to appear eight, the beautiful twenty-year-old with the dazzling smile represented all that was golden and glamorous and glorious, things that seemed unattainable to her in her braces and braids and ugly saddle shoes. “When I thought it was safe, I turned around and stared,” she said later, watching as her dreamboat disappeared. She lingered on the image, sighing to Mud, “When I grow up, I wish that I could marry him.” Natalie recognized the actor as a new Fox contract player named Robert Wagner. Wagner would have no recollection of his encounter with eleven-year-old Natalie Wood, his future wife. “I was just a staring kid as far as he was concerned.” (Wagner had also just met his second wife, Marion Marshall, an older blond actress playing a nurse in their scene together.) Natalie and Mud went to the Fox publicity department, asking for a head shot of the bit player from Halls of Montezuma. Natalie taped the picture of Robert Wagner to her bedroom wall, where she could gaze at the face of her fantasy husband, keeping her company beside forty-seven storybook dolls.
Natalie’s misery was the catalyst for the family’s move to Northridge, a less populated area of the Valley where she could keep a horse. With dance class stricken from her schedule, she lavished her free time on her trick palomino, Powder, purchased from one of the studios. She wanted to be a veterinarian, grasping for things outside show business to satisfy the longing that Gigi, Ted Donaldson, and others had apprehended in her. Natalie yearned to be normal, pleading with her parents to let her enroll in junior high, an early example of the survival instinct that Natalie possessed. She was still afraid to go to public school, but “I wanted so much to be like the other kids, and have friends of my own. I guess my parents saw my point because they let me have my way.”
Mud enrolled her in seventh grade at Sutter Junior High in Canoga Park, a Valley suburb, beginning September 11, 1950. Natalie spent the night before worrying that she wouldn’t fit in, that no one would like her, that she would seem “too Hollywood.” “I got the biggest shock of my life when I saw the other girls. They were dressed in pretty sweaters and straight skirts. When I looked down and saw my frilly dress and long pigtails, I felt like crying.” Her movie image, frozen at seven, made twelve-year-old Natalie appear freakishly juvenile. “I noticed how much older the other kids looked, how much more sophisticated they were. They had lipstick and tight skirts.” A few seventh-graders wearing falsies laughed at her. The humiliation went deeper than adolescent angst for Natalie. She was so driven to be perfect, to please, her self-esteem derived entirely from the approval of others. She went home traumatized. “It took me one day to get a costume change, but it was years before I got over having made such a fool of myself. I think I was a senior in high school before I began to realize that every other girl in the school felt as much like an orphan in the storm as I did.” Mud consented to the new clothes, but the Pigtail Kid’s braids were money in the bank.
Even in straight skirts and sweaters, Natalie still felt she was “on the outside looking in.” After a few days, the other girls seemed immature to her despite their padded bras. Natalie was accustomed to movie stars, in an adult world. “I made the earthshaking discovery that I didn’t belong.”
One weekend shortly after Natalie started seventh grade, Rosalie Infuhr and her son Teddy stopped by the Gurdins’ house in Northridge. While the movie mothers talked shop, Natalie and Teddy went outside to saddle Natalie’s palomino. Lana, who was four and a half, tagged along. “We decided to put her little sister on the horse,” recalls Infuhr. Natalie walked Powder through the neighborhood while Lana sat in the saddle, thrilled to be alone on a horse at four. As Lana was riding Powder down the street, with Natalie pulling the reins, some neighbor children tore past them on bicycles, shooting cap guns and screaming. The horse reared, throwing Lana onto the street. As she hit the pavement, a horrified Natalie watched as Powder kicked her baby sister in the head, knocking her unconscious. “Everybody was all upset,” remembers Infuhr. Lana had multiple skull fractures and fell into a coma. The superstitious Mud refused to take her to a hospital, demanding that medical equipment be sent to the house. She canceled a trip to San Francisco to see Olga, who had just had her first child, a son named Lexi. Maria lied to Olga, telling her that Lana had measles, so she wouldn’t have to implicate Natalie in the horseback riding accident. Natalie was tortured with guilt, blaming herself for Lana’s concussion, sick with grief over her sister. She sold her horse and kept a vigil at Lana’s bedside, holding her hand. When Lana regained consciousness after a week, “it was Natalie who was sitting beside me…tears streaming down her cheeks.” Lana’s concern was that she had distracted their mother from Natalie’s career for seven days.
Natalie fell into further turmoil that October when she was transferred to a newly constructed junior high called Robert Fulton, less than a month after enrolling at Sutter. Paramount immediately put her in a movie called Dear Brat, though the part was so small she missed less than two weeks of class. Dear Brat was intended to be a sequel to a pair of successful family comedies called Dear Ruth and Dear Wife, starring William Holden and Joan Caulfield. But as screenwriter Devery Freeman recalls, “Paramount said, ‘The only thing is, Dev, we can’t get Bill Holden. Oh and another thing is, we can’t get Joan Caulfield…but we want it to feel like they’re still in it…’ ” (Norman Krasna, who wrote the play on which the characters were based, requested that his name be removed from the credits, even though the film made money for Paramount.) Natalie’s character, described in the script as a “charming and earnest” girl of twelve, was so incidental she wore a dress from her own closet during filming. Her salary for six full days of work was $2333.
She was hoping her minor roles in mostly B pictures in recent years would allow her to assimilate at Fulton, but “everybody went gaga when Natalie showed up,” recalls an eighth-grader from 1950–51. One of the girls in Natalie’s class admits, “All of us were sort of in awe of her.” “She was already an established star,” as classmate Rochelle Donatoni explains, “and so it wasn’t like you would approach her and say, ‘Oh hi, I’m so and so…’ ” Other girls avoided Natalie because they were jealous. “They didn’t understand that I was dying to do their things, but they never asked, presumably because they figured I would automatically turn them down.” “I look back now and I realize how much she wanted to be accepted,” remarks a classmate named Helen MacNeil, who sensed Natalie’s longing by “her look. The way she looked at you.” Natalie was too shy to strike up a conversation and fell out of rhythm with the class, going to and from auditions. When she was at school, another Fulton student relates, “she seemed warm and she’d always smile—but she was out a lot, so you never felt that she was quite as much a part of the school as the people that were there on a daily basis.”
Natalie experienced a breakthrough when she met eighth-grader Mary Ann Marinkovich, a big-boned, tall brunette who wore pixie pink lipstick and was fearlessly extroverted. Mary Ann’s parents were immigrants from Croatia with a chicken farm in the Valley. “That was one of the common things we had going,” she assesses. “People that don’t come from foreign-born families sometimes don’t understand a lot of the things that go on, but we both did.” Mary Ann was brazenly confident and enough of a character to be unimpressed by Natalie’s fame. “I never bugged her about things, I never asked her about things. If she was here today, good; if she wasn’t, that’s fine. There was no pressure on her, where kids at that age are very cliquish and they demand loyalty et cetera, and she couldn’t. They didn’t realize she went to work, she wasn’t going to just play around. I had a little older attitude.”
Mary Ann was with Natalie at times when other junior high girls whispered jealously as they passed her by. “Natalie was really a very tender soul, and when people would rebuff her—and young girls are just the worst, they’re vicious—she would take this to heart and I would say to her, ‘Honey, you just can’t please everyone…the hell with it. Forget about that.’ I was a little harder, and I think it helped her to get over worrying about, ‘Gee, this one didn’t even smile at me when I walked by.’ She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. Believe me. There were times I wish she had been a little stronger, but she just would never dream of offending anybody. And believe me, there were times when she should have, but it wasn’t in her.”
Mary Ann was the first girlfriend Natalie ever had, the first friend she was permitted since Edwin. “The moment I met her mother,” recalls Mary Ann, “her mother said to me, ‘Oh, I want you to be Natalie’s friend because you’re very pretty.’ ” Mrs. Gurdin continued to scrutinize her, adding, “And because you’re strong, and you’re always thinking.” In Mud’s Machiavellian mind, Natalie’s life was a movie and she was the director. She cast Mary Ann as Best Friend, though Mud really didn’t want Natalie socializing with anyone who couldn’t advance her career. If she gave a party for Natalie, Mary Ann noticed, Maria only invited girls who were blond, so they weren’t in competition with Natalie. Though Mary Ann was dark, “I was bigger, totally different looking, so in her mother’s eyes, I wasn’t a threat. That’s why her mother fostered and really harbored the friendship.” Mary Ann used to tease Natalie about her tiny, five-foot frame, saying, “You actresses all look alike. Little paper dolls. You’ve gotta get somebody that wears a size ten shoe!” Natalie was sensitive about her size, which she worried made her seem even more juvenile. “She seemed poised, which you might consider more mature,” a classmate observes, “but because of her looks I did not get the feeling she was older. She had this really cute, darling face that made her seem if anything younger than her years—almost a baby face, like a doll.”
Natalie’s personality flowered under Mary Ann’s gregarious influence. They both attended Friday-night sock hops at the junior high, where the girls who weren’t too jealous to talk to Natalie found her “very down to earth. I don’t think any of us would ever say that she acted like a star. She was very sweet.” Natalie never mentioned the movies she was in unless “you asked her about it,” observes a classmate. “She wanted to be part of the clique.”
Natalie (“Nat” to her classmates) savored her first taste of freedom. She went to the beach with Mary Ann without mentioning her fear of the water, though as Mary Ann recalls, “We both got reactions to the sun, and sun lotion, and blew up like balloons, so we never went again.” They created code names. Natalie called herself “Mac,” and Mary Ann was “Boo Boo,” for reasons no longer clear to Mary Ann. The friendship liberated Natalie for brief intervals from the tyranny of Mud, and Hollywood. “It was a little relief of pressure being with me. There was no having to be ‘on.’ We could just sit in jeans and talk. And I think we all need that, and especially in the situation she was in, because she really didn’t have a chance to have girlfriends, or a lot of friends, so the time we had together was really very special.”
The only slumber parties Natalie attended were in her living room, with girls who met her mother’s casting requirements. Maria still wouldn’t let her go to anyone else’s house, for fear of kidnappers. Natalie had not been alone in the daytime since she became a child star at six. “I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone,” she once told a friend. “My mother and a social worker always went with me.” In bed at night, the only time she was by herself, Natalie was terrified someone would kidnap her, or that she would have another drowning nightmare. Her bedroom was a shrine to her paranoia, with storybook dolls atop the furniture, crowded onto the bed, spilling over to the floor, squeezed amid toy animals and her caged parakeet, Gregory Peckwood, helping her to pretend she was not alone. “All this stuff! Jesus Christ, nobody else could sit in there!” recalls Mary Ann. “She had all kinds of stuffed animals, and those dolls…it was just spooky.” Natalie had names for every doll and still talked to them, at twelve, as if they were real. “They always had to be in order,” remembers Mary Ann, “like they were taken care of. I thought about that every once in a while…because then it wasn’t the thing to do, and we were really kind of beyond that. But it was important to her…they had to be there. They were her friends.” Mary Ann was astute enough, even at thirteen, to understand the underlying cause of Natalie’s neuroses. “That stupid mother of hers did that—goddamn her.”
Mud’s disturbing dominance over Natalie became apparent to Mary Ann as she gained further entrée to the Gurdins’ inner sanctum. Mud (“Mother Superior”) kept Natalie physically and emotionally cloistered. Athletic activities were off-limits because “she might break a fingernail or something.” The obsession with Natalie’s health, appearance, and acting was “all Mama. Natalie didn’t care. She wanted to make babies and walk off into the sunset like all young girls do.” The dangerous element, in Mary Ann’s view, was Natalie’s pleasing nature. “That was the mother’s feeding ground. Natalie would never raise her voice to her mother or say no ever.” Natalie, according to her friend, was unaware of what Mud was doing, or the damaging effect it was having on her. “She really didn’t have the time to sit or think about it, because her head was going in so many directions—if it wasn’t school, it was scripts. Her mother had that all manipulated to keep this kid’s head really cranking, and it worked.”
Natalie auditioned for casting directors and producers throughout the fall, winter and spring of seventh grade, doing everything she could to make herself appealing. Robert Banas, her former ballet partner, has a vague recollection of Nick working as a studio guard, but it was Natalie’s acting that kept the family solvent during Fahd’s convalescence. The rumor at Fulton Junior High—sadly true—was that she bought the family’s house in Northridge. Natalie got good notices for Never a Dull Moment when it came out that winter, but the picture “wasn’t a great success,” admits costar Ann Doran. The Jackpot also under-performed, and Natalie got mixed reviews. When Dear Brat came out that spring, her bit performance wasn’t even mentioned. The pressure on Natalie to find work was almost unbearable.
Gigi Perreau, who was several years younger than Natalie but kept encountering her at auditions, describes the tension between them while vying for the same child’s parts as unnervingly intense, “Her mother was ruthless.” If being a child performer had ever been fun for Natalie, it wasn’t anymore. “I didn’t like it all so much,” she admitted later. Acting, which had come naturally for her as a little girl, seemed “very difficult” now that she was almost thirteen. “I suddenly became self-conscious. I felt awkward.” Worse, she was imprisoned in her movie childhood, a captive of the braids the public associated with “Natalie Wood.” “The point was that the studio wanted me to stay looking young. That was the image.” Whatever the studio wanted, Mud made sure Natalie provided. When she started junior high, Natalie “looked exactly like she looked in Miracle on 34th Street,” a classmate recalls, “except she was bigger. Same face, same pigtails.” A producer from this period convinced an executive from one of the studios not to sign Natalie to another long-term contract “because he thought I was going to turn out very homely.”
Her ungainly self-image was exacerbated by the fact that Natalie was being raised by a mother who worshipped glamour and the illusion of perfection as photographed in movie magazines. Maria had transferred her fascination with the Romanovs to Hollywood royalty. Making a star of Natalie became an alternative way for Maria to position herself as a member of aristocracy. Beauty was the key to this kingdom. “Looks were everything,” asserts Mary Ann. When Mud saw an unattractive child, she would tell her daughters, “If that was my kid, I’d drown it.” “My mom had to have a special child,” declares Lana, “she really wouldn’t accept anything else.” The pressure to look beautiful at all times imbedded itself in Natalie, who wouldn’t leave the house unless she was stylish enough for a magazine layout.
“Natalie was very concerned at how people would perceive her,” remembers Lana, who had her own problems as a child dealing with their mother’s perfectionism. “I was a mud fence. I didn’t have that ‘special’ thing, I really didn’t. I was incredibly introspective, very quiet and overly sensitive and I kept to myself.” Gigi Perreau felt sorry for Lana during the filming of Never a Dull Moment, when Natalie and Gigi costarred as sisters. “Little Lana was dragged along and kind of given things to do by the studio teacher. She was kind of like this little waif that wandered around while Natalie was getting all the attention.” Natalie was the star of the family, Natalie could do no wrong, was Maria’s mantra to the press. If she talked about Lana, it was pejorative. Lana felt overshadowed by her sister, Lana was high-strung, Lana was shy. Mud even told one reporter Lana “has a tendency to stoop—we are trying to correct that.” According to Mary Ann, Lana was cute, an opinion borne out by photos of her at five, revealing a spindly but appealing little girl. “It was sad,” comments Mary Ann. “She was not even the also-ran. Natalie’s mother structured her whole life around Natalie. It was almost like when anybody came into the house, she would put Lana in the back room—really, physically.”
To Natalie, Lana was still a “twerp” sister she teased by locking her in the closet and other “stupid and fun things,” though she was becoming aware that Lana “had a hard time of it because…our mother’s attention was focused on me, because I was the one working.” There was an unexpected blessing to Lana’s neglect, one Lana would discover, much later, through years in therapy. “We’re all shaped to a certain extent by our parents, and I’m sure a lot of that carried over for Natalie. It didn’t for me, because I wasn’t really raised by anybody. I wasn’t around our parents as much, and my personality being the way it is, I don’t think I really listened. Because I was left to my own devices I learned to rely upon myself, and what I believed was correct, and not what I was being told. Natalie was so coddled and watched over, that my mother had a much greater impact on her. Much greater.”
Mud influenced Natalie in a newly harmful way that spring as she prepared to turn thirteen, for she had discovered boys. The object of her adolescent fantasies was a dairy farmer’s son from her art class named Jimmy Williams, the archetypal rebel in a leather jacket. As Jackie Eastes, one of the lovestruck, recalls, “He was kind of dangerous, in a way that he was very—he was like a bad boy, but not really…Jimmy just had a charisma. He worked at a farm around the corner from me, and I used to go and sit there, hours, just to be with him.” Natalie was erotically charged by the wiry Jimmy’s aura of power. “There was a group of us, about eight or ten of us, that ran the school,” Williams states matter-of-factly. “Not that we were better than anybody, it’s just that we were the ‘in’ crowd.” Williams, an eighth-grader, “wasn’t really overly impressed” with seventh-grade Natalie. “She was just another kid. So what, she’s in the movies.” Jimmy’s casual disinterest made him more provocative to Natalie, who “wanted what she couldn’t have,” according to a friend who met her then.
Mud took immediate action, forbidding Natalie to date anyone in junior high. She warned her that if she even sat in a boy’s lap she would get pregnant, misinformation that alarmed Natalie, who was already terrified to have a baby, thinking she would die, Mud’s earlier admonition. Maria’s “sex education” of Natalie was partly ignorance (“She was all messed up,” relates Lana), for she offered the same advice about a boy’s lap to Olga, who “had to learn the facts of life going to city college and reading the physiology class book with my husband.” In the case of Natalie, Mud was deliberately instilling fears about boys so her star-child would remain under her black wing. “Her mother didn’t want to lose control,” asserts a witness to the manipulation, Natalie’s friend Mary Ann.
Mary Ann got a closer view of Maria’s hypnotic power over Natalie that April when Natalie got a part in a Jane Wyman film, her first acting job since Mary Ann became her friend. Wyman had won the Academy Award two years earlier for Johnny Belinda, and would be nominated again for this picture. The movie was called The Blue Veil, an adaptation of a sentimental French film about a self-sacrificing spinster (Wyman) hired to take care of other people’s children via an agency known by its blue-veiled uniforms. Natalie was featured in the third vignette as the sort of wistfully appealing girl she played so convincingly; in this case, the sweet young daughter of a blowsy showgirl (Joan Blondell) too self-absorbed to pay attention to her. Desperate for love, Natalie’s character forms a deep attachment to her nanny (Wyman).
The film, and her sympathetic role, were superior to the bit parts she had been playing, but it was an onerous blessing for Natalie, who had fallen under the sexual spell of eighth-grade rogue Jimmy Williams and was cast as a little girl in braids. “It seemed as though I’d spent my whole life in pigtails,” she later sighed. At the time, no one involved had any idea Natalie, nearly thirteen, was humiliated by the way she looked in the movie, a virtual re-creation of the seven-year-old she played in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, dressed in old-fashioned English schoolgirl frocks with braids coiled to her head. Mary Ann, who visited the set, was amazed at her pal’s professionalism at twelve. “Of course I’m sitting back and watching the whole scenario…she was like the old pro—not in years, but in experience. Usually when actors are working with a younger person, they’re kind of ‘Oh-oh,’ but with her it was wonderful. She was very sensitive and aware of others. If somebody didn’t feel well or somebody messed up their lines or something, she was just always there to be encouraging, so everybody just loved her.” Natalie’s genuine tenderness came through in her portrayal of the forlorn young girl. The Los Angeles Times would praise her performance for its “remarkable sincerity.”
What impressed Mary Ann was her friend’s intellect, which she became aware of as Natalie prepared for the part. “This girl had a brain in her head. She could sit and memorize a script. I’d help her and she would just start verbatim and she knew everybody’s part, not just hers. She’d even prompt other people with their lines!” On set, Mary Ann was surprised to observe, the atmosphere was more technical than creative. “They would say, ‘Here, you do this. You do that. You walk here and you walk there and you smile.’ It was very structured. And she was a pretty young girl who could walk in a straight line, who could do this, do that. Very structured, very disciplined. And she was extremely good at this, and she would always do whatever to please the director, to fill the need.”
The extent to which Natalie had been driven to this by Mud was revealing itself to Mary Ann: “Her mom wanted her to be a movie star from conception. And that was gonna happen, come hell or high water, at whatever cost.” Fahd’s ineffectualness had also become apparent:
Natalie’s mother was the push and her dad just would never stand up to her. He’d try every once in a while—like sleeping in. Natalie worked real late sometimes and she was tired. And if we were supposed to go someplace the next morning, I’d come over and she’d be dead asleep, just dead to the world. Her dad would always be up and having coffee and we’d chit-chat. Mama was still sleeping, too, so he’d say, “We’ll let them sleep.” That woman would get up and call out, “Why is she sleeping?!!!”
The dark, tragic triangle that had been created between Natalie and her parents laid itself bare to her first close friend. Mary Ann had great affection for Natalie’s father, who drove them around and whom she considered quiet and gentle, “the strong, silent type” who “catered to her mother, like most men do.” She had observed Maria “run over” Nick time and again while he shrugged it off, too weak and tormented to resist. During The Blue Veil, the family secret was exposed. “Every once in a while her father would get loaded and then he’d had it, and her mother would open her mouth and oh Christ, then it really hit the fan. It was horrible. When you sit there and take that kind of stuff for how long—when you blow, you blow.” When Mary Ann observed their brawls, it was usually over Maria forcing Natalie to do something, such as get up at four A.M. to go to the studio. “That’s why the father got into it with her all the time, and why he got so ugly and awful.” Natalie tried to ignore her parents’ fights, concealing how much it disturbed her. “That’s why she had a lot of the problems she had. She kept it all quiet and close because she didn’t want to show weakness…she would just brace herself and go on. Natalie was very good about that.”
The feisty Mary Ann wasn’t. She was infuriated by Mud’s relentless pushing and the effect it was having on Natalie, who was a hypochondriac, frightened to be alone, talking to dolls, forbidden to go anywhere, miserable playing nine-year-olds, pressured by competing for parts, bored with acting, but “wouldn’t make ‘Mama’ unhappy. It’s hard to understand that, but ‘Mother’ preyed on this. She knew what was going on and knew how this kid was being torn apart. That, to me, was the sin.” Mary Ann stood up to Maria and encouraged Natalie to do the same. “She was becoming aware of what was going on, of what her mother was doing. She didn’t want to be pushed so hard.”
Natalie returned to Fulton for the last few weeks of seventh grade after finishing The Blue Veil. One morning while she was in art class, Jimmy Williams, who sat at the desk behind her, reached over the inkwell and “started flipping her pigtail.”
Natalie turned around to face her teenage crush. “Why are you doing that?” she asked.
Jimmy stared back at her and teased, “ ’Cause I don’t like pigtails.”
“Well, cut ’em off,” Natalie taunted.
Jimmy took a knife out of his pocket “and I cut that pigtail off.”
It was a revelatory moment. “She wasn’t upset,” he declares. “I can remember that. And I know I didn’t get in trouble, so something happened. I believe that she went out of class and cut the other one off, or got some of the other girls to cut the other one off, and I think she told her mother she did it. ’Cause she didn’t like ’em. And I don’t think she ever, never wore pigtails again. That was the end of it, right there.”
Natalie had defied her mother for the first time, severing the braids that made her famous, choosing her needs over “Natalie Wood’s.” The gesture was also rife with sexual symbolism. Appearing on-screen without pigtails was a rite of passage from child actress to young womanhood. The fact that it was Jimmy Williams who performed the rite for Natalie would have its own significance.
*1 Spelled “Zackharenko” on the birth certificate and by the family.
*2 An “a” is added in Russian to the surnames of female children. Middle names derive from the father’s first name: in Maria’s case, “Stepanovna” for Stepan.
*3 Grammar will remain uncorrected to reflect the speaker’s personality.
*4 Maria’s version made more sense, according to a Russian scholar: the textile industry was based near Moscow then, far from Barnaul, and vodka was controlled by the Russian state, prohibited by 1914.
*5 A rumor, crystallizing into myth, would surface that Anastasia escaped.
*6 Kalia’s descendants recall it as Mikhael.
*7 Referring, most likely, to the Czech Army’s march across Siberia.
*8 Natasha was five.
*9 Best played the housekeeper.