There was a schizophrenic quality to Natalie’s life. In reality, she was having an illicit affair with a director her father’s age, participating in wild escapades with Hopper and Adams; for fan magazines, her publicist would send a young, wholesome actor to her house, accompanied by a photographer, and the trio would travel to a restaurant, where Natalie and her arranged escort would be photographed on a “typical date.”
Actor Ben Cooper, who got the assignment more than once, kept photos from one choreographed evening. In the first photograph, Cooper, a boyish twenty-two, stands in front of the Gurdins’ open front door, as a smiling Maria—in a mink-trimmed dress—kisses a ponytailed Natalie goodbye. In the second photo, Natalie, wearing an evening gown, and Cooper, in a three-piece suit, feed each other cherries off the top of a hot fudge sundae. That was the image of Natalie Wood press agents created for the public.
Not surprisingly, “Marie was an expert at the set-up date,” observes Robert Hyatt, who witnessed her in action when he and Natalie were at Republic. Mud, who took credit for inventing Natasha’s star persona, considered herself to be “Natalie Wood,” as much as her daughter. If Natalie got dressed to go to a premiere, Mud put on a formal gown as if she were going. Mary Ann recalls, “Natalie and I used to laugh about it all the time. Natalie would say, ‘Well I think I’ll wear this…unless Mom’s gonna wear it!’ ”
Cooper, Natalie’s staged date that spring, became friendly with her, howling over the fan magazine’s “screamingly funny” demand they share an ice cream sundae. Once the photographer was gone, “we went out and had a bite to eat, and talked.” Cooper, who had starred on Broadway as a child and worked with Nick Ray the year before in Johnny Guitar, had a similar enough background that he and Natalie related, though Cooper was a conservative, “kind of mature for my age.”
Cooper found Natalie to be “just a terrifically nice, sweet person” who was being consumed by insecurity and drive, “to do more, to be the best,” which she equated with Dean and the Method. Cooper got the impression Dean and his followers had her under a Svengali-like spell, “that they were manipulating and controlling her, and that she would do just about anything, at anytime,” which distressed him. “Here she was, a fabulous actress—just incredibly good, from the time she was a child, devastatingly good, and well-known—and it seemed that she needed more, and was allowing herself to be used by this group of guys, as if that was her acceptance. I felt that she felt she had to go along with whatever they wanted.”
Cooper drove Natalie home, “trying to see if I could get her to kind of pull away from Jimmy Dean and that group. Not for me, I just felt she was caught in a quagmire, and I really liked her very much.”
The second time Cooper was set up with Natalie, he spent a few minutes with her mother, giving him a glimpse into the reason behind Natalie’s secretly sybaritic lifestyle. “Her mother was firm, Russian: ‘You vill do this, you vill do that.’ ” Cooper found it revealing that Natalie “didn’t tell me anything unhappy about being a child actor. She shied away from talking about her mother. It was almost as if, ‘No, I’d rather not.’ ” Cooper analyzed that Natalie participated in Dean’s cult as the only way available to rebel, “because in film, the work is so structured you can’t be too rebellious there, or they’re not going to use you. So where else could she?”
Natalie’s sometime beau, Rad Fulton, was dismayed by the change. “It was like looking at a pretty little girl on one page, turn it over, you see an adult. She became a nasty little girl, as far as morals. Sometimes she spoke like a truck driver. Kind of hard to fathom, that happening that fast.” Actress Debbie Reynolds, who was twenty-two then, remembers seeing sixteen-year-old Natalie at parties, often with Nick Adams. Reynolds thought of her as “a woman with a young girl’s face.”
Jackie, who was with Natalie almost daily, began to worry that her behavior “sometimes felt destructive.” She noticed that Natalie needed to be the center of attention, in the midst of clamor, at all times. “If she was at home and the phone wasn’t ringing, she was unhappy—but it was always ringing—and if we were out someplace, she’d call her mother a hundred times to see if anybody had called. Like she wanted to fill her life with people so she didn’t have to think about anything.”
There was something vaguely melancholy about Natalie to Bev Long. “She always seemed a little tentative, a little frightened. She was sweet and lovely, and I never heard her say a bad word about anybody, but she was not a boisterously happy person. She was kind of delicate. I always felt she was vulnerable, and sensitive—which she was.” Long, who was only slightly older than Natalie, “felt terrible” when she found out Natalie was intimate with Ray. “So many times I wanted to say something, like, ‘God, Natalie…’ I used to think, ‘God, she doesn’t need to do that, why is she doing that?’ ” Long observed that Natalie always had to be with somebody, “particularly men.”
She flirted at the commissary with her tutor, the handsome but stalwart Hennessy, or when he took her to dinner during a night shoot. “She’d kind of play games like that, but I told her to knock it off—I didn’t want any kind of suspicion of anything like that.”
“Natalie wanted an affair with me,” asserts Leonard Rosenman, the film’s composer. Rosenman, while flattered (“I thought to myself, ‘Oh boy, I wish I was 150 years younger!”), chose to be Natalie’s friend, and to counsel her. He was impressed by her intellect, suggesting she go to college after she finished Rebel. Natalie seemed interested, but told Rosenman it was impossible. “She said that her mother just constantly wanted her to work.” (“She could have been anything,” avers Mary Ann, “she was so smart.”) The composer urged Natalie to get therapy, concerned about her home life and the fact that, at sixteen, she was involved with a forty-three-year-old man.
The perception among the young female cast was that Natalie was promiscuous. “I never understood it,” said Long. “Why did she need to do that? She was such a wonderful girl on her own.” Natalie’s close friend Nuell felt that Natalie was “pressing the limits” in defiance of her mother. “Somewhere, probably, she wanted someone to say, ‘Stop it. Don’t do that.’ ”
Throughout filming, Natalie was obsessed with a smoky, melancholy song recorded by Peggy Lee, called “When the World Was Young,” a bittersweet lament to lost youth that she sang constantly. “The song reminded her of her,” Jackie observed:
They call me coquette and mademoiselle,
And I must admit, I like it quite well.
It’s something to be the darling of all,
La grande femme fatale, the belle of the ball.
There’s nothing as gay as life in Paree,
There’s no other person I’d rather be.
I like what I do, I like what I see.
But where is the schoolgirl that used to be me?
You’ll see me at Cap d’Antibes or in Spain.
I follow the sun by boat or by plane.
It’s any old millionaire in a storm,
For I’ve got my mink to keep my heart warm.
And sometimes I drink too much with a crowd,
And sometimes I laugh a little too loud.
My head may be aching, but it’s unbowed,
And sometimes I see it all through a cloud.
Ah…the apple trees,
And the hive of bees, where we once got stung.
Summers at Bordeaux, rowing the bateau,
Where the willow hung, just a dream ago
When the world was young.
“It was sad…‘where’s the little girl that used to be me?’ ” reflects Jackie. “And I think that was the way she perceived a lot of her life, especially in those years. Because she was being kind of used, and even though she felt in love with Nick Ray, I’m sure there was a point where she’s saying, ‘Why am I sixteen, having sex with somebody that’s that old?’ ”
Jackie believed that Natalie “was such a sensitive person,” she fell in love with every man with whom she was intimate. Scott Marlowe, Natalie’s subsequent boyfriend, got the impression Natalie wanted to marry Nicholas Ray, suggesting that the relationship was not casual on her part.
Natalie and her great friend Mary Ann had soul-searching conversations about their relationships with men. Underneath her sexually rebellious behavior, Natalie was influenced by old-fashioned mores. “We got into heavy discussions about how men and women go in and out of heavy love affairs, and how men seem to function without a problem—hello/goodbye—and women are just devastated. And why? Is it the nesting syndrome?” Natalie felt incapable of fleeting sexual relationships without an emotional attachment, and was frustrated by the 1950s double standard dictating that “it ‘wasn’t nice’ ” for women to enjoy their sexuality. According to Mary Ann, in Natalie’s heart, she wanted to find one true love, marry him, and live happily ever after. “She was—quote unquote—‘seeking bliss.’ ”
She was also desperate to escape Fahd’s alcoholic rages and the gypsy-mystic regime of her obsessively ambitious mother, flinging herself into relationships in the hope she would find the security and love that was missing in her life.
Natalie said later her favorite scene from Rebel was one between herself and Dean that was cut from the film. The choice reveals much about what Natalie was feeling at the time:
It was in the car. I was waiting for him and he comes up and we talk to each other. There was a section of the scene where I imply that I’ve sort of been around, that I’m not really pure.
I say to him, “Do you think that’s bad?” And he says, “No, I just think it’s lonely. It’s the loneliest time.”
I thought it was a wonderful line—right on the cutting room floor.
Sometime during filming, Natalie’s affair with Nick Ray came to a bittersweet end. She told Mary Ann that Ray had cut it off, “but she had been in the business long enough to realize that these things happen…it was a little bumpy for her, but it was best.” Natalie offered a more poetic version to Jackie, saying she had gone to Ray’s bungalow one day when he was out, leaving behind her key, and the books he had loaned her, as a romantic gesture their affair was over.
Jackie thought that Natalie broke off the relationship with Ray in the hope that Dean would see her in a romantic way. “She and Jimmy were having a big fight when they shot their love scene, and it was really upsetting to her. She complained because she’d come on the set and he wouldn’t speak to her.” In Jackie’s view, Dean’s disinterest intensified Natalie’s desire. “She always wanted what she couldn’t have.”
Ann Doran would recall that Natalie finally “meshed” with Dean creatively. “Sal Mineo told me afterwards that he used to talk to her. Sal was a kind soul. He’d say, ‘Honey, it’s his way of doing things. Just get with him.’ And Natalie finally got with it.”
By the end of filming, she and Dean became close friends, with Natalie resuming her role as “Nurse Nancy,” comforting Dean through his distress over the news that Pier Angeli—still married to Vic Damone under pressure from her mother—was pregnant. “Pier was Jimmy’s whole life, I mean eat, live, sleep, breathe—it was so sad, that whole thing,” asserts Mary Ann, who often was present when Dean “poured his heart out” to Natalie. “She felt close to him, because the same type of situation had happened to her with Jimmy [Williams]. It was a few years before, but those wounds take a long time to get over.” In Mary Ann’s view, Dean brought out Natalie’s “huge maternal instincts. She was always going to make everybody better.”
Jackie saw Natalie’s friendship with Dean as a consolation prize after she was unable to turn the relationship into something romantic, an analog to Nick Adams’ friendship with her. “She wanted Jimmy, and she tried every way she could think of to get him to go out with her. If she couldn’t seduce him, she would take the friendship.”
Though Natalie told reporters, later, that she briefly “dated” Dean, all her friends understood the relationship to be platonic. (Hopper believes that Dean would not have become involved with a minor at such a critical stage in his career, and that he wanted to keep his personal life separate from the work.) Lana remembers him coming to the house to see Natalie, as would Maria, who described James Dean, later, as a “very nice boy” who surprised her by singing a song, in Russian, for her.
Lana confirms her sister was “obsessed” with Dean; Natalie’s later comments about him suggest that she idealized Dean even before his fatal car accident.
Once, when she was at Dean’s house with Jackie, Natalie found a scrapbook he put together. She sneaked it out for a few days so she could look at it, and as Jackie recalls, “It was the most pensive, sweetest…he had pictures of babies, and he had his favorite poem, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee.’ The sensitivity of this human being! In the back of the book, there was a little thing cut out of a newspaper, and it said, ‘Ways for a Boy to Get a Dog,’ and if that didn’t tear me apart!”
Natalie would later compare Jimmy Dean to the Little Prince, the magical character in the allegorical fable she adored, who believed “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.” She explained the dichotomy between the tender, poetic Jimmy Dean she idolized and the intermittently provocative costar who taunted her, by saying, “It was like two separate people: there was the Jimmy I was working with, and there was this other person on the screen.”
That June, while Rebel was in postproduction, Natalie drove onto the Warner Brothers lot with Faye Nuell, planning to have lunch at the commissary and loop some lines from the film. When she pulled onto the studio lot, the parking places were taken. As Nuell recalls, “There was a security guard standing there and he said, ‘Oh! Miss Wood!’ And he moved one of the sawhorses and made a parking place for her.
“She looked at me, and she said, ‘You saw that?’ ”
Natalie knew, in that instant, that Rebel Without a Cause had made her a star at Warner Brothers, four months before its release.
15 NICK RAY GAVE NATALIE A toy tiger after they completed Rebel, a gift suggesting her sexual paradox as a child-woman. She started to collect stuffed tigers with frenzy, acquiring so many she briefly would become known as “Tiger.”
Natalie had not set foot in Van Nuys High for months, but she considered it an accomplishment to graduate with the class of 1955, a symbol of her striving for a real life. She was deprived of even that opportunity to be herself when photographers showed up on June sixteenth to take shots of Natalie Wood, the star, as she left her house to attend the commencement ceremony. Natalie posed for them with Mud in countless contrived scenes at the front door, smiling effervescently in her cap and gown. Once she was alone, she burst in tears at losing a moment Natalie considered hers, not Hollywood’s. She and Margaret O’Brien celebrated their joint graduations that night at Peter Potter’s Supper Club, where Natalie resumed the Natalie Wood persona, “flouncing in with her fur,” making sure she got to the stage to give a live interview.
She spoke wistfully to a fan magazine of going to college one day to study art and literature, testing in the top ten percentile. Natalie was on a movie set within hours of graduating, canceling a vacation in Hawaii to start The Searchers, director John Ford’s now-legendary western about a loner with a deep hatred for Indians, played by John Wayne, who embarks on a five-year quest to recover his niece from Comanches, who kidnapped her in a vicious raid.
Although Natalie, who would be playing Debbie, the niece, thought “it was a big deal to do a picture with John Wayne” and considered her small part to be pivotal, the true reason she accepted The Searchers was that John Ford had agreed to Mud’s idea to cast eight-year-old Lana as young Debbie in the scenes through the kidnapping. (Ford had only one stipulation, according to Lana. “I was brought into the office to meet John Wayne, and John Ford said, ‘Can you pick her up?’ So he lifted me off the ground, held me up, said ‘Okay,’ and that was it.”)
Fan magazines would trill how Natalie’s little sister Svetlana Gurdin had chosen the stage name of “Lana Lisa Wood,” and that she was excitedly following in Natalie’s footsteps as a child actress, but it was all Mud’s doing. “She pushed me massively,” reveals Lana, who was filling the void in their mother’s life that Natalie’s growing independence created. Mud’s approach with “Lana Lisa” bore no resemblance to her consuming attention to Natalie, her golden girl. “She said, ‘This is what you’re doing, you’re going to work on this film. Get up, get showered, I’m taking you to a set, these are your lines, learn them.’ ”
Natalie would recall the imperious Ford as “tough, but kind to me” during the shoot, which took place on a Navajo reservation in the blistering summer heat of Monument Valley, Utah. The authenticity of the setting (“just dust and heat”) led to Natalie “frying” her skin from sunbathing, and spooked Lana, “because every night you could hear the Indians chanting and singing, and then there was a dust storm and we got trapped in the commissary.” The cast semi-roughed it, staying at the Goulding Trading Post, where Ford took his evening meals, expecting John Wayne and the rest of his stars to join him, “as he sat holding court at this long table…and we were all there to do his bidding.” That was the recollection of Wayne’s handsome son Patrick, who had a small role in the picture.
As the only teenagers on the remote location, Pat Wayne and Natalie drifted together, enjoying a mutual crush that was a sweet contrast to her adult experiences on Rebel. Patrick Wayne recalls, “We didn’t have to fake being in the frontier, we were living in it, so you were really looking anywhere for any kind of amusement. There were no movies, there was no radio, there was no television, there was nothing!” Outside the influence of her provocateurs, Hopper and Adams, Natalie turned to more innocent pleasures, playing cards or board games with Pat. “We spent a lot of time talking together on the set, and just related as two young teenagers about the same age. And I had a great deal of fondness for her, even puppy love.”
Pat Wayne, barely sixteen, was slightly awed by Natalie’s “world of experience, and the stories that she would tell me about things that she had done.” He was shocked that someone as dazzling as Natalie could be “neurotic” about a tiny bump on her wrist, which she showed him in secrecy one day, “but I guess she just had no sense of the fact that her charisma or her presence would overcome anything.” Natalie’s ambition to be a star nearly overwhelmed the relaxed Pat. “It wasn’t unattractive, but…she seemed like a person that had figured out that she was going to do what it took to be a success.”
She impressed Ford, who came back to the Trading Post after directing the climactic scene where John Wayne finds Natalie living among the Comanches, saying, “That girl was brilliant today.”
“Duke Wayne was a great guy for eyes,” costar Harry Carey, Jr., said later. “And every confrontation that was very dramatic that he had with Natalie—because he really wanted to kill her [character] because she’d been living with the Comanches for so long—he said she had such great eye contact, that she gave so much…he couldn’t stand actors or actresses that didn’t really look at him when they talked to him, and this with Natalie impressed him very much.”
John Wayne’s only personal comment about Natalie was to his son Pat. “He noticed that we were spending a lot of time together, and he said, ‘Just be careful where you’re going.’ I guess he was concerned that I was gonna become too involved with her and get upset or whatever. He was being fatherly.”
Natalie celebrated her seventeenth birthday on location for The Searchers, coming back to L.A. a year closer to the magic age of eighteen she believed would set her free. She splurged on a new Thunderbird convertible, gambling that Warners would exercise her option and she would have the security of a salary again.
She finished the summer in a social whirl—at a beach party in Malibu with actor Hugh O’Brian; spotted by gossip columnists having dinner with Pat Wayne; mugging with Nick Adams in a Hollywood costume shop; on the arm of Perry Lopez for the opening of the Greek Theater, then on to Ciro’s. Most of the “dates” were set up by publicists for the purpose of generating pictures for fan magazines of up-and-coming young stars at play, and Natalie threw herself into them with the élan she gave everything. In the photographs, she is always animated, makeup Max Factor perfect, a different bracelet over her left wrist at every event, her beau gazing at her magnetized.
Natalie was like a whirligig, spinning between boyfriends and phone calls and photo shoots and parties, making sure there were no empty moments. She said tellingly, “Actors are basically lonely people,” admitting to one writer that she was frequently lonely and depressed. Her bedroom had become a zoo of toy tigers—including a stuffed tiger’s head mounted on the wall, given to her by Mud. Dennis Hopper “thought it was cute and eccentric,” recalling “stuffed animals everywhere.” Natalie’s tigers were a replacement for the collection of storybook dolls that had been her nighttime companions up to then, hinting in interviews at her fear of being alone. “That’s why I have toy tigers around me—to keep me from getting lonely and depressed.”
Some of the young actors from her publicity dates buzzed around Natalie on their own time—so many that Mud and Fahd called her Scarlett, a role Natalie had a “burning ambition” to play. The beaus—Hopper, Adams, Lopez, actor Martin Milner—seemed to be more friends than boyfriends. Hopper fell into this curiously ambiguous category after they completed Rebel, “when we got into a relationship where we were going out to parties together and we would score for each other. She’d say, ‘I’d really like to have a date with him,’ and I’d say, ‘I’d really like to have a date with her,’ and we had great fun procuring for each other…we weren’t blind to the fact that we could see other people, but we were having sex all through our relationship.”
Natalie set up Hopper with Margaret O’Brien on a blind date, a mismatch that signaled the two child stars’ drifts in different directions. O’Brien recalls, “He was not my cup of tea, and I wasn’t his cup of tea…he was trying to be Jimmy Dean and I didn’t understand that scene at all, so I think he thought I was boring and I thought he was strange.”
Maria used a portion of Natalie’s Warner Brothers earnings to construct a swimming pool in the backyard, “so she could monitor the Rebel boys—Hopper and Adams,” according to Robert Hyatt, who heard her grouse about Natalie’s boyfriends, paranoid that Natalie would get pregnant, or fall in love, and leave home. Since Natalie had stripped her of her earlier power, Mud had to resort to subterfuge to try to retain control over her alter ego. She came up with the idea of building a pool to entice Natalie’s swarm of beaus to the house, so she could keep an eye on them—a plan that was not only manipulative but oddly perverse, since she and Natalie were terrified of drowning, and there was barely space for a wading pool. Lana recalls, “Natalie would get in, get wet and get out.”
Maria “tolerated” Hopper and Adams, in the Hyatts’ opinion. Hopper remembers Natalie’s mother having “talks” with him. “She never went into any details, it was just a lot of attitude. A lot of attitude. Didn’t like me, didn’t trust me. And it wasn’t dumb of her. Natalie did what she wanted to do.” Hopper, who inspired Natalie’s sexually liberated Zelda Fitzgerald personality, believed she was enjoying her sexual freedom “and didn’t have moral hang-ups in those areas,” unaware that Natalie would agonize over moral issues with her friend Mary Ann, who asserts “she wasn’t a ‘player.’ ”
Ed Canevari, who stayed with the Gurdins that September to visit his childhood best friend, found her to be the “same old Natalie” she was at four, when they baked cookies in her play-oven in Santa Rosa. The only difference was the mink stole Natalie threw over her sundress as they posed for pictures with her parents and Lana.
On September 29, Warner Brothers exercised the option on the first year of Natalie’s seven-year contract, but she was still clawing for recognition as an actress. From what she later told Scott Marlowe, she was upset at the way Warners had placed her credits at the beginning of Rebel Without a Cause, which she saw at an early screening. “Her billing was just lousy—she was just thrown in with everybody…so she went to Henry Willson and said, ‘Please, Henry, do something to change that billing, because I think this movie is going to help me a lot.’ And he was terrified of Jack Warner. So she went in on her own and begged him to change the billing.”
Natalie felt Warners was dismissing her as “just an ex–child star, and ex–child stars never did well historically.” She had a continuing inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Actors Studio, which she tried to disguise by demeaning it in interviews, saying, “I don’t like technique in acting…I believe if you have a feeling for acting it comes to you naturally, that you don’t need any training.” In truth, Marlowe reveals, “she wanted to model herself, in a strange way, after Jimmy [Dean],” demonstrated by a “beatnik phase” Natalie went through that fall, strolling barefoot with Nick Adams, mimicking strangers.
She was ecstatic to be cast as Clara in Heidi, a television special to be broadcast from New York starring Jo Van Fleet, Dean’s costar from East of Eden, another Kazan protégé whom Natalie regarded in “tongue-tied” awe. Warner Brothers made arrangements to send Adams and Sal Mineo to Manhattan with her to start promoting Rebel, scheduled for release in early October.
Natalie had to reconfront her fear of airplanes, a carryover from her trip to New York at the age of six, when pregnant Mud was unable to fly with her. She came up with a bizarre ritual of carrying her stuffed tigers with her, believing they were talismans, a superstition similar to Mud’s gypsy magic. “I won’t fly without them,” she said the next year. “I also have people write notes to me when I fly—silly little notes. That, plus the tigers, constitutes my good luck charms.”
While she was in New York, Natalie saw her first play on Broadway, “crying her eyes out” through two performances of Anastasia, a haunting mystery about the young grand duchess rumored to have survived the execution of the Romanovs, whose family portraits Natalie saw from her crib as a child. It was the role she would be preparing to play as her stage debut twenty-six years later, before she drowned.
The night before Natalie filmed Heidi, a Friday, September thirtieth, actor Dick Davalos, who played Dean’s brother in East of Eden, invited her and Adams and Mineo, Dean’s costars in Rebel, to dinner in Chinatown. “We were all together—all Jimmy’s friends,” Natalie would recall. “We were talking about what a great future he had, and how in a few years he’d be the greatest thing that ever hit Hollywood. Then Nick said he was sure Jimmy wouldn’t live past thirty, with all his rodeo riding and his racing.” Natalie told the group, “Jimmy’s going to outlive every one of us at this table.” The next morning, “We read the terrible, unbelievable news of Jimmy’s death in an auto accident. And we realized that he had been killed almost as we were talking about him the night before.”
Dean’s fatal accident in a speeding Porsche along Route 466 on his way to the races in Salinas, California, would have similarly eerie reverberations throughout the country, and on Rebel Without a Cause, which came out at the time of his funeral. “The way the world reacted to Jimmy’s death was what I had heard, but was not old enough to remember, about Valentino’s death,” observed one of the Rebel gang. Actor Corey Allen, whose character drives off a cliff while racing against Dean’s character (seen through much of the movie in a red jacket), remembers, after the movie opened, “young men running around in red windbreakers, and talking with their lips barely moving, and thinking that they would somehow become Jimmy.”
Theaters showing Rebel Without a Cause offered grieving fans a temple to worship Jimmy Dean as an actor, to mourn his passing, and to wonder what might have been, turning Nick Ray’s personal statement into “an epic,” and Natalie Wood into a star. “It’s a gruesome thought that she owes her stardom to James Dean’s bad driving, but it’s certainly true that his death helped establish him as an icon and that her association with him benefited her,” film critic Stanley Kauffman observed years later. “What might have happened otherwise, who knows?”
Natalie called it “a lucky picture” for her, “because that part had such dimension to it—more than the normal ingénue role for a fifteen-year-old girl, so I think that helped me get into more mature roles.”
While it was a lurid coincidence that car accidents contributed to Natalie’s fame from Rebel Without a Cause in three ways—Hopper’s head-on collision on Laurel Canyon helped her get the part, a tragic crash was the climax of the “chickie run” scene, and Dean’s fatal smash-up in his Porsche ignited the movie’s cult success—her poignant performance was memorable on its own. The Hollywood Reporter called Natalie “splendid,” with Ray proclaiming her “the greatest young actress since Helen Hayes.” She had the same vulnerability on-screen as an ingénue as she had playing an Austrian waif-child at six, clinging to Orson Welles. “She had an endearing quality,” as her actor pal Ben Cooper observed, “and I don’t think people can fake that.”
Natalie found out about Dean’s death during the taping of Heidi, reacting hysterically. She broke down in tears at the press premiere of Rebel, and kept a miniature bust of Dean as a shrine, recalls Lana. For days, reporters would call Natalie for stories about him, designating her the keeper of Dean’s flame. “I was embarrassed,” she told Hollywood correspondent Vernon Scott months later, “because it made me look as if I were capitalizing on his fame.” At the same time, she loyally defended her friend Nick Adams to Steffi Skolsky when she heard that Skolsky was “badmouthing” Adams for selling Dean trivia, a rumor Nuell and others confirm was true, though Natalie was too faithful a friend to believe it.
Her role as James Dean’s girlfriend in Rebel Without a Cause not only established Natalie as a mature actress, she suddenly became her generation’s idealized teenage girl. Her brown eyes sparkled from the cover of every movie magazine, featuring articles with headlines such as: “Natalie Wood Speaks Out,” “Teenage Siren,” “Natalie’s Teenage World,” “Going Steady with Stardom,” “The Dance She Couldn’t Miss,” “It’s a Wonderful Whirl,” “Togs for A Teen,” “It’s a Date!”
Natalie’s personality buried itself further as “Natalie Wood” became more famous. She felt pressure, in public, to become the air-brushed fantasy figure smiling from the pages of fan magazines, to please everyone, to be perfect, the way Mud trained her, to look beautiful at all times, to be a star. “She was very concerned about how her fans felt about her,” her sister Lana observed. “It was sometimes a burden for her, because she felt so indebted to everyone, felt that she had to appear a certain way, had to be a certain way.”
“I have to be ‘Natalie Wood,’ ” she would tell her friend Robert Hyatt.
Hopper recalls, “People would come to the table—we’d be sitting eating, in the commissary, or a restaurant or whatever—and Natalie would turn on this smile. This smile, you know? And the second the person left, the smile would drop and she would just go right back. She’d turn it on, and turn it off—it was incredible. I used to say, ‘I don’t know how you can do that, Natalie. How do you do that?’ She said, ‘Practice.’ ”
Every moment in Natalie’s day was dedicated to the pursuit of stardom. Even the court hearing for approval of her new contract at Warner Brothers—required by law because she was a minor—became a photo opportunity for Natalie Wood, her star alter ego—and her mother’s. She and Mud went to court together, with Natalie dressed to the nines, carrying her toy white poodle, Fifi. As they left the judge’s chambers, Natalie held up Fifi for UPI photographers, mugging adorably with her poodle, a picture that made newspapers across the country the next day, with captions such as “Pats of Joy,” reporting Natalie Wood’s new seven-year movie contract.
She opened her first checking account, depositing part of her Warners salary at the discretion of Maria, who controlled the rest as family income. Natalie had no concept how to function outside the artificial world Mud had created for her. “My first official act was to overdraw $400,” she said to a Hollywood editor. “I’m not very bright about money. I’m not domestic either. If I don’t learn how to cook, maybe I won’t have to.”
She cooperated fully with Maria’s star-driven regime, even though her own dream was to be a serious actress like Jo Van Fleet and other protégés of Kazan, creating an internal conflict that contributed to Natalie’s confusion about her identity. Her struggle to reconcile these two competing goals is evident from this interview she gave then:
Stardom is only a by-product of acting…I don’t think being a movie star is a good enough reason for existing. I want to contribute something of myself. I feel that it’s possible to be a star, yet be a good actor—like Brando, Clift, Eva Marie Saint and people like that. On the other hand, there are certain stars who are not actors. I don’t want to be that type. I know there are certain rewards for stardom. I can’t help being touched when fans want my autograph, but I like to think it’s because they like my work, because they like what I’ve done—not because I wear long earrings or drive a Thunderbird.
…It would be foolish of me to say I don’t want to be a star. But if I didn’t believe in what I’m doing, I’d rather go to work in a dime store.
That fall, Natalie heard about a picture in development at Alan and Sue Ladd’s production company on the Warners lot. The script was by novelist David Dortort, an Emmy nominee for adapting The Oxbow Incident, featuring character actor Raymond Burr. Dortort recommended the dark, heavy-set Burr, then thirty-eight, as the villain in the small-budgeted noir drama he was writing for the Ladds’ company, called A Cry in the Night. Burr was playing a sexual stalker who kidnaps a beautiful girl after he spies her necking in a car with her boyfriend. The stalker knocks out the boyfriend and drags the girl to a secret lair, where he intends to rape and possibly kill her before her boyfriend and her father, a police captain, can discover where he’s taken her.
Natalie “staged a campaign” to play the intended rape victim, which not only challenged her as an actress, but had obvious parallels to her violent encounter with the star she said held her sexual hostage. “It was so absolutely unbelievable,” recalls Dortort, who was unaware of Natalie’s experience. “She would come up, and practically break down the door, and say, ‘I want to play that girl!’…she really had some deep feelings, and an emotional response, to the character for some reason.”
Dortort had conversations with Natalie about the character, which he had written with a plot twist. “At first she’s terrified, but…she slowly but surely begins to dominate the man that kidnaps her and was going to rape and kill her.” Dortort asked Natalie to read a few scenes. “Watching her—and watching the animated face, and the eyes, she had wonderful eyes—she convinced me that she not only could do this part, but she almost needed to do this part.” For days, Natalie lobbied the producers. “She’d meet the Ladds on one of the studio streets and implore them, beg them, ‘I can do it. I was born to do this part.’ ” As with Judy, in Rebel, Natalie related to the character, and felt a passion to become her on-screen.
Natalie got what she wanted, again—approaching A Cry in the Night as if it were Chekhov, not a B movie, and she was Helen Hayes. “She always did the best job she could,” observed Hopper. “If she was doing something that was not important at all, she gave it the same energy as something that was going to be great. She really loved her work. That was her life.”
Her first day of shooting, early November, Natalie invited Richard Anderson, a reserved, contemplative actor loaned by MGM to play her boyfriend, to meet in her dressing room so they could go over their scenes, a rare gesture in a low-budget contract movie. Anderson, who was a mature twenty-nine to Natalie’s seventeen, remembers her as “very watchful,” “always fighting for better stuff,” a “fully engrossed actress” who was “really there.”
Lana, who had to be forced into doing The Searchers, was awestruck by her older sister’s absolute dedication to acting. “Every day of her life, she never thought about doing something else. She thought of what she could do to be better. She would analyze her script and write notes in the margins, and she was very, very careful, very meticulous with all of her roles. She would get an idea of who that individual was long before she would start the film.”
Natalie merged with her victim character in A Cry in the Night, forming a bond with Raymond Burr, her movie stalker. Their costar, Richard Anderson, noticed they “caught on immediately professionally,” and “had great sympathy for one another’s work, and what they were both trying to do.” Burr, a closeted homosexual or bisexual who seemed “overwhelmingly lonely,” according to screenwriter David Dortort, brought sympathy to the sexual psychopath, playing him as a persecuted mama’s boy with a kind heart beneath his brutish exterior. Burr’s gestures during script readings with Dortort—“bringing his hands around, fluttering a little bit”—suggested the rapist was secretly homosexual, like Burr, “and I put that into the character: that he wanted someone to talk to, someone who would appreciate him for what he was, and not criticize him.”
Natalie, whose character responds sensitively to her captor, found herself similarly drawn to the gentle giant Burr, who had infatuated her ever since she saw his deep-set bedroom eyes in A Place in the Sun with Mary Ann. Burr, a gourmand, invited her to dinner one night, ordering escargots at an elegant restaurant. Natalie had no idea they would be eating snails, setting the tone for Burr’s “Orson Welles makeover” of her that fall. “Burr was a very classy guy, and he saw her talent, and the potential in her, and he really wanted to cultivate her, the way Orson Welles did with Rita Hayworth,” suggests Mary Ann, “and it was done very lovingly.”
Natalie went out with Burr throughout filming, and afterward. “Natalie was so crazy about Raymond Burr,” Jackie recalls. “That was when she was kind of branching out, and learning more about literature. She said that when she would go over to his house, he could recite poetry. He was a real sensitive human being, and she had a wonderful time with him—fine wines, wonderful cook, extremely intelligent—but at the end of the day, he’d kiss her on the cheek and say, ‘Goodnight, Natalie.’ ”
According to Jackie, “It was the most devastating thing when she found that Raymond Burr was gay and there was no way they were going to have an affair, because she tried her darndest. She thought with her charm she could make the difference.” Burr’s preference for men stimulated Natalie’s tendency to “want what she couldn’t have.” She continued their relationship, in the hope she could “change” or seduce him, “like Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift.”
After Natalie’s confession she had been raped sadistically by a powerful star, the males in her life were either pseudo-boyfriends—Hopper, Adams, Perry Lopez, Martin Milner—or men of sensitivity, such as Nick Ray and Jimmy Dean, who possessed her Fahd’s tender, artistic nature. Her attraction to the gentle, homosexual or bisexual Burr followed this trend, providing Natalie with what Debbie Reynolds referred to as a “safety net.” Hopper, who performed in an ABC King’s Row Theater production of The Wedding Gift with Natalie that December, knew that she was seeing Burr and that Natalie considered it “dating,” not a friendship, speculating, “She may have gone into a period where she was interested in gay men.”
Her next serious boyfriend, Marlowe, believed that Natalie also viewed Burr as representative of a fantasy. “He was a protector of sorts. He would tell her things, worldly things—he thought were worldly and she thought were worldly. She wanted somewhere…she wanted a world, outside the world that was created for her: the child actress, the Warner Brothers contract; that mother, the dragon. She was living a frightening fairy tale.”
Natalie, moreover, may have found the relationship with Burr a catharsis from her confessed rape, since Burr played her attacker on screen, and her character formed a sympathetic attachment to him, managing to escape sexual assault.
Most of Natalie’s friends assumed that Burr was using the relationship partially as a “beard” to “cover his gayness,” as Hopper put it, a common practice in the repressed fifties. Burr claimed to have been married multiple times, to wives who died or disappeared under untraceable circumstances. “In those days, they were all in the closet,” asserts Dortort, who felt sorry for Burr. “To admit it was suicide. Absolute death.” Others presumed Burr dated Natalie to get his name in the gossip columns. Burr later told Robert Benevides, his longtime male companion, he was in love with Natalie.
Toward the end of filming, Warner Brothers got word their seventeen-year-old starlet was dating the corpulent, thirty-eight-year-old villain of their stalker movie. “Everything gets upstairs,” Anderson would say. “Whatever happens on the set—they have their watchers.” The studio pressured Natalie to stop dating Burr, considering the relationship destructive to her image and their film.
Natalie ended the year 1955 as she began it, embroiled in a complicated, scandalous, futile relationship with a middle-aged man.
16 IN HER NEW YEAR’S DAY column, Hedda Hopper predicted Natalie Wood as one of her “top picks for stardom” in 1956, a harbinger of what would be the most glamorous, clamorous year of Natalie’s life.
Warner Brothers launched a dizzying campaign to get Natalie nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause, capitalizing on her emerging popularity as a teen idol. They scheduled five separate magazine layouts in the Gurdins’ backyard at intervals, with an ecstatic-looking Natalie dressed in a variety of bikinis and bold bracelets to cover her left wrist, pretending to dive into the tiny kidney-shaped pool she avoided, in real life, like a death trap.
“We’d all get her in the pool and she’d do a little dog paddle,” one of the Hopper clique recalls. “I’d say, ‘Come on, you gotta learn to swim, I can teach you and we’ll take it slow,’ but the water was terrifying to her. We’d make fun of her when she would paddle around like a little dog, and we’d laugh, and call her all sorts of dumb names.”
Natalie demonstrated an obsessive dedication to Warners’ publicity department, helping to create an artificial version of her life for fan magazines to foster the studio’s image of Natalie Wood. She was still the people-pleasing Natasha she was at four—curtsying for grown-ups, singing songs with hand gestures, desperate that people like her.
The publicity was effective; a few months into 1956, Natalie was receiving more fan mail than any other star on the Warners lot. But the line separating Natalie from “Natalie Wood” blurred with each publicity layout she did. “They were very strange,” she said later. “It was like reading about somebody else. I didn’t feel synthetic, but lots of the stories were simply made up…there was so much invention.” Years later, in 1980, she would compare her experience to Brooke Shields’ teen fame:
The constant attention is what is so difficult. People say, “Come here, do this, do that, let me take your picture, get up early, go on this tour, go out with that person, don’t go there, do that, wear that dress.” That’s where all the confusion sets in.
If there were no publicity and acting was your only job, I don’t think anybody would get into very much emotional trouble.
That’s why I feel sorry for Brooke Shields…the stress of a relentless career where she’s being photographed every day, playing the sex symbol, doing commercials, posing for the cover of Vogue—being so visible, such a star! That’s difficult.
As she posed for fan layouts, Natalie was simultaneously completing the grueling abduction scenes in A Cry in the Night, performing with such intensity she dropped to ninety-one pounds and gashed her thigh on a rusty nail, prompting the studio physician to recommend time off, a warning Natalie ignored.
She continued her forbidden romance with Burr, which she told one close friend had become physical. Natalie was so engrossed with her career and with Burr—who sent her flowers every other day—her head was barely turned at a Thalians party at Ciro’s in January, when she chanced to encounter Robert Wagner, the Fox heartthrob she had been maneuvering to marry since she was eleven. They shared a dance and flirted enough to be mentioned in a gossip column the next day as “in a spin…and loving the spin they were in,” but nothing more came of it.
That winter, Warner Brothers capitalized on Natalie’s popularity, putting her in the first of two low-budget movies with Tab Hunter, the blond teen idol, who was also under contract to Warners. To promote them as romantic costars, the publicity department created the impression that Natalie and Hunter were dating offscreen, sending them to glamorous events photographed as a couple, planting suggestive items in columns (“Natalie Wood was seen coming out of Noel’s candy store with a red heart, on Tab Hunter’s arm”). “They were pushing us, so they really built us up,” recalls Hunter.
Natalie’s true personal life—puffing from dramatic cigarette holders, sipping champagne at supper clubs with her beau, thirty-eight-year-old screen heavy Ray Burr—was causing problems between her and Warner Brothers. She and Burr were pictured together at the Coconut Grove over cocktails, listening to Peggy Lee: Burr is in a tuxedo; seventeen-year-old Natalie wears an ultrasophisticated one-shouldered gown, her mink beside her to keep her heart warm, as Lee performs “When the World Was Young,” Natalie’s poignant trademark song. That month, Natalie’s Revlon-red smile radiated from the cover of People and Places, quoting her wanting to play a “femme fatale.”
Warners waged war over Natalie’s romance with Burr, and her glamorous nightlife, forbidding both. The end of January, Hollywood writer Joan Curtis ran into her at a party for forty “up-and-coming” young actors:
Natalie sat in a corner sulking…over the fact that the older man she was then tingling over had been declared off-limits by her studio, and as she was still under 18, she had been requested not to pose for any pictures with a drink in her hand. In fact, a studio man was present to see the edict was carried out. Her poured-on slinky black dress (which she borrowed from wardrobe) and heavy makeup seemed out of place for one so young…
The party—at a restaurant called the Oyster House—ironically was hosted by Robert Wagner. “My husband and I wondered why Natalie and Bob hadn’t discovered each other romantically,” Curtis commented for a magazine after the party. “Bob’s blond handsomeness seemed to compliment [sic] Natalie’s dark beauty to perfection.” Natalie, according to Curtis, thought only of her taboo boyfriend, Ray Burr. “Nick Adams confided to me that he was particularly distressed over the deep depression she was in.”
The same week, Jack Warner—the head of Warner Brothers—“chaperoned” Tab Hunter and Natalie to an industry banquet, sending an emphatic message about the image the studio wanted to promote. Hunter recalls: “Natalie and I used to kid, we used to say, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me they’re gonna try to make us into William Powell and Myrna Loy!’ Then we’d laugh like crazy about this.”
On February 10, the new Warner Brothers duo started filming The Burning Hills, a Louis L’Amour western in which Natalie wore a cascade of black hair and deep tan makeup to play a Mexican spitfire tending to Hunter’s cowboy wounds, a picture so camp, “she used to make jokes about it…and do all those terrible Spanish lines.” (Hunter, who later became a rancher, would remark, “The best thing in it was my horse.”) After living her part in Rebel, and as Burr’s near-rape victim, Natalie’s only comment to friends about The Burning Hills was, ‘Oh, hell, I’ve got to be up at five…’ She was more worried about wardrobe—to make sure that she had a bosom lift.”
Natalie’s pique at Warners for pressuring her to stop seeing Burr, and forcing her into a “Carmen Miranda accent” in a picture she found absurd, revealed itself when she began staging sick-outs on the set, behavior she had learned from Mud. Stuart Heisler—the same director who had forced her to dive from Sterling Hayden’s boat during The Star—telephoned a Warner Brothers executive one evening to complain, saying:
Something happened to Natalie Wood today and I just found out about it, and the more I think about it the madder I get…she went over to the lunch wagon, ordered a huge hamburger, ate it and then ordered a ham and egg sandwich on top of that. Then when it’s time for her to work (even though she was a little late in getting fixed up) she suddenly gets sick…
Unless Jack Warner or Steve Trilling tells me otherwise, I’m really going to let this girl have it. From what I get from the crew tonight, this seems to have been a pre-arranged sickness—and if she goes to a premiere tonight (which I have heard she may do) then I’ll really bawl the hell out of her…we will never finish the picture the way we want to and will do if this girl is going to start acting up…
Natalie was frustrated, telling a writer her goal was to be the “greatest actress” she could be, to play “character parts with realistic emotions,” using the model of Jo Van Fleet or Vivien Leigh, hoping she would “still be creaking on the stage at eighty.” During the first days of shooting the embarrassing Burning Hills, she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause, an exceptional accomplishment at seventeen. Natalie got a standing ovation on the set—validating her consuming passion to play Judy.
While she was struggling through The Burning Hills, Natalie found out that Warner Brothers had acquired the film rights to Herman Wouk’s popular novel Marjorie Morningstar, forming a similar obsession with its title character, a sheltered Jewish ingénue inspired to be a great actress, whose heart is broken by a middle-aged composer-director. “She read the book and she just threw the book down and she said, ‘This is my next movie. I’m gonna do this. I love this character—it’s just me!’ ” Variety announced in March that Warners had Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in mind, but Natalie was possessed to play Marjorie, another character with whom she identified, telling Seventeen magazine later, “Almost every girl falls in love with the wrong man, I suppose it’s part of growing up,” a reference to her affairs with Nick Ray and Raymond Burr.
Her verboten relationship with Burr took a more serious turn in early spring. He took Natalie to the Philharmonic, continuing his real-life role as Henry Higgins to her eager Eliza Doolittle. They went out several times a week, arranging to costar as Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII in a production of Anne of 1000 Days at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Burr regularly appeared onstage. The two made plans to go to Korea on a USO tour Burr was organizing that spring.
“He was just so good to her and for her,” thought Tab Hunter, whom the studio wanted Natalie to date. “She was like a colt, finding its legs—experimenting with things, learning about herself, trying to find herself as an actress. Raymond Burr was like a father figure, in many ways.”
Natalie told columnist Sheilah Graham that she and Burr had “an understanding for the future,” with Graham reporting, “It’s beginning to look like a marriage for young Natalie Wood and Raymond Burr.” When Louella Parsons put an item in her March 15 column denying any romance between Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter, stating, “Her real heart is Ray Burr, who’ll escort her to the Oscars,” Warners took drastic action. Within a week, Variety reported that Hunter would be Natalie’s date to the Academy Awards on March 21, with Natalie retracting her comments about Burr to Graham, saying, “He just helps me with my acting.”
Burr, who was cast within months as Perry Mason, said later, “I was very attracted to her and she was to me. Maybe I was too old for her, but there was so much pressure upon us from the outside and the studio, it got awkward for us to go around together.” According to Robert Benevides, Burr’s companion in the last thirty years of his life, “He was a little bitter about it. He was really in love with her, I guess.”
Natalie, trained by Maria to defer her own needs to the studio’s—whether it meant being terrified by water in a scene, keeping secret a broken wrist from a faulty stunt, or in this instance, losing someone she loved—accepted Burr’s immediate exile in exchange for Warner Brothers’ star-making buildup of Natalie Wood.
She attended the Academy Awards on the arm of Tab Hunter, chopping off her hair as her sole expression of rebellion. (Hunter had popped into her dressing room that afternoon as the studio hairdresser was styling it, and teased Natalie to “just cut it all off.” When he returned a few minutes later in his dinner jacket, Natalie said, “Surprise!” and twirled around, revealing a pixie cut she later called “plumas locas.” “She started a whole new trend that went all over—she made publicity all over the world with that.”)
Going to her first Oscars ceremony without Burr was not the only disappointment Natalie faced that night. She failed to win an Academy Award for Rebel Without a Cause, though the consolation was that she lost to Jo Van Fleet for her performance in East of Eden, which Natalie knew by heart. As ever, Natalie had her fur to keep her heart warm: a silver stole, identified in Warners’ publicity as a gift from her parents—paid for, by Mud, with Natalie’s money.
Within a few days, Warner Brothers announced its second picture to pair Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter, beginning in May. The Girl He Left Behind (or The Girl with the Left Behind, as Natalie later would deride it) was another “schlocky” production, so low-budget the studio would decide to shoot the picture in black and white. “Warner Brothers made me do [it],” she later conceded, a condition of the studio’s pact to make Natalie into a movie star in the old Hollywood tradition.
She returned to her submissive, dutiful self, “dating” up a storm with Tab Hunter, photographed in movie magazines dancing with him at a UCLA fraternity party where she served as Queen of the Dublin Ball, the model of a wholesome fifties teenager. While she was at UCLA, she ran into a few of her classmates from Van Nuys High, including one of Jimmy Williams’ former teammates, who found Natalie “totally unaffected and totally sweet,” despite her burst of fame, though it was clear, to all of them, she could no longer even pretend to fit into their world. “She honored us with her presence,” as the student chairman of the Dublin Ball would put it.
Natalie’s absorption in her career, and her mother’s drive to make her a star at all costs, affected her close camaraderie with Mary Ann, who had always been leery of Hollywood, and of Maria. “I was approached for auditions and stuff and I just backed off. It’s not my thing. I wouldn’t like that whole thing. And of course as I got older and I saw what was happening, I really backed off. Natalie kinda went one way, and I went one.” Though their paths diverged, the friendship remained sacred. A Van Nuys graduate who talked to Natalie at the UCLA ball remembers, “The first words out of her mouth were ‘Do you ever see Mary Ann?’ ”
Mud was on cloud nine over Warners’ publicity campaign to launch Natalie Wood as its newest star, and by the studio’s invented romance between Natalie and Tab Hunter, whom she considered “safe.” Maria had always been impressed by “gentlemen,” and was flattered that the well-mannered, respectful Hunter unfailingly addressed her as “Mrs. Gurdin,” presenting himself as the anti-Hopper. “I think it’s all in how the parent perceives who their daughter is going out with,” suggests Hunter. “For example, if I toot the horn and expect Natalie to come running out, or I’m a real slob about the whole thing. But I would never go over there without a jacket or tie on—unless it were a casual date—and I’d take Natalie to a nice place. And Mrs. Gurdin liked that.”
Warner Brothers promised Natalie a spring break in Hawaii between her back-to-back pictures with Hunter, purportedly as a bonus for breaking off her relationship with Burr. A few weeks before she left for her Hawaiian holiday, she spotted an actor of eighteen named Scott Marlowe, a dark, handsome, curly-haired intellectual with a Byronic intensity. Natalie was instantly captivated. “I was at the airport picking somebody up, and she just went—something,” Marlowe remembers. “She got a real vibration from me. We were very attracted to each other. And her mother was with her, and her kid sister, and maybe the father, I’m not sure—it was very early in the morning.”
Natalie boldly approached Marlowe, as she apparently had Hopper, offering her best imitation of a fearless flapper as romanticized by Fitzgerald. “She said, ‘Oh, I’d really love to see you and meet you again.’ She was just taken with me, I could hear it.” Marlowe, who had been living in New York taking classes at the Actors Studio, was “a little cocky” about dating a seventeen-year-old product of Hollywood. “I thought, ‘Well you know, this kid…’ ” When Natalie asked for his home phone number and then called him, “I was shocked.” She invited Marlowe to a movie premiere, accompanied by Nick Adams, Natalie’s constant companion.
Natalie was smitten with Marlowe, who represented, for her, the magic of both the Actors Studio and James Dean, once a friend of Marlowe’s, whose anti-Hollywood sentiments he shared. “She was so responsive to me. She’d see my work, or she’d come on the set to visit me, and I would tell her stuff that I had learned at the Actors Studio, at Lee Strasberg’s, all those people that I had studied with—and Kazan. She adored Kazan, and he discovered me in New York, and I used to tell her stories about him, and she just loved it.”
Natalie went to see A Streetcar Named Desire over and over again, seeming to “meld together” her awe for Kazan, for the movie, for Warner Brothers, and for Vivien Leigh, who was suffering from bouts of manic-depression. “She felt a great identification with her,” Marlowe noticed. “Wanted to be like her. And the lady was so sick.”
In Scott Marlowe, Natalie found someone to love who combined the artistic integrity she admired in Jimmy Dean with the intelligence that drew her to Raymond Burr and Nick Ray. Like Ray, Marlowe provided Natalie with books to stimulate her hungry intellect. “I was into philosophers, and I’d given her Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and a lot of kid stuff—Nietzsche and stuff like that—because I was going through a phase of learning, and wanting to know everything. I gave her a lot of plays—a book of ‘twenty best plays’—she had never read stuff like that. All she’d ever read was movie scripts, and bad movie scripts, usually.”
Natalie talked to Marlowe about her obsession to play Herman Wouk’s character, Marjorie Morningstar. “She was desperate to get anything that would further her. She had an incredible drive…I don’t know if she picked it up from her mother or it was forced on her, but she had an incredible sense of destiny and where she should be.”
Natalie took singing lessons that spring with a voice coach named Eddie Sammuels, who wrote a song for her called “Eilatan,” “Natalie” spelled backwards. Warner Brothers announced that Natalie would be going on a nightclub tour with a forty-minute song-and-dance routine prepared by Sammuels, plans that never materialized, though as Marlowe recalls, “She wanted to sing well, badly.”
On the surface, Natalie’s life seemed like a Sandra Dee movie fantasy of a teenage star: she had breakfast in her canopy bed every morning, brought to her by her mother, served on a tray in her cotton-candy-pink bedroom filled with toy tigers—gifts from famous male admirers, who called on her constantly ringing, pink rhinestone phone.
Warner Brothers flew her to Honolulu that April on an all-expense-paid “holiday,” with sightseeing activities scheduled by the studio, in the company of reporters and photographers from Movie Parade and Photoplay, recording her activities as a “diary” for Natalie’s fans. Maria went along, ostensibly as her chaperone, though she was really in Hawaii as the “shadow” Natalie Wood.
Natalie spent her private time reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, books from Scott Marlowe she carted onto the plane, along with her “lucky” toy tigers to protect her; Natalie Wood, the actress, was photographed for fan magazines on a catamaran in the ocean off Waikiki, arranged by Warner Brothers. The ride on the catamaran, a combination sailboat outrigger canoe, was Natalie’s first time on a boat. According to her Movie Parade diary, she leaned too far over the side and fell into the ocean. “We were pretty far out when it happened,” Natalie was quoted as saying. “Maybe I could have swam back—and maybe I couldn’t. Two native boys jumped in after me and helped me back in the boat. Whew! I get cold just thinking about it.”
After two weeks, Natalie was restless to get home “and to work.” She and Mud took an ocean liner, the SS Lurline, from Hawaii to San Francisco, re-tracing the last leg of the days-long journey young Marusia made with her first daughter, baby Olga, a quarter of a century before aboard the battleship Asama Maru, when she arrived to a mistress and a home that was one room of a hovel crammed with Russian sailors. This time, when Maria disembarked at San Francisco’s Port of Angels, paparazzi swarmed the dock, snapping pictures of her and her daughter as they clamored for a shot of Natalie Wood, the movie star composite of Maria and Natasha.
They spent a day or two with Olga, who had divorced herself from her mother’s and sisters’ Hollywood lives, living a quiet existence in San Francisco with her husband, Lexi, an insurance agent, and their two sons, five-year-old Lexi and three-year-old Dmitri. Natalie posed with her nephews for the San Francisco paper, with the headline “S.F. Actress Visits Here.” Olga, who once dreamed of a career in voice, contented herself with singing in the choir at the Russian Orthodox Church where her mother and Nick were married when she was ten.
“Sometimes when I visit my sister and see her two children, I wonder if she missed a lot by getting married,” Natalie told a movie magazine when she got home. “But when I look at her, she seems happy, and I guess that’s the difference between her and me. Right now, nothing could be further from my mind than getting married.”
Scott Marlowe, who picked up Natalie when she flew in from San Francisco and was with her every day in the weeks afterward, sensed deep disturbance beneath her outwardly glowing “actress” personality, which he traced directly to Maria.
“I was onto that mother from the very first date. Very first date. She looked me over with such a jaundiced eye and thought, ‘Uh-oh, there’s a problem here, I can see it.’ I think she spotted it at the airport, the very first day.”
Mud correctly assessed Marlowe as a threat to her possession of Natalie, in the same way Jimmy Williams was. Like Williams, Marlowe possessed a rebel strength capable of standing up to Mud. “I was a maverick,” Marlowe explains, “and Natalie liked that.” Natalie was also “madly in love with Scott,” observed her sister Lana, increasing the possibility she might leave home, abandoning Mud and the glamorous career they shared. Tab Hunter, who was filming his second movie with Natalie, recalls, “Natalie loved the fact that Scott was part of the Studio and that very kind of crazed crowd like Jimmy [Dean]…he was opposed to the ‘Hollywood’ image.”
Marlowe felt that Natalie’s mother had prostituted her to make her a star from the age of four, when she met Pichel, revealing itself as he and Natalie became intimate. “She was very, very experienced for a very young girl. She knew too much, more than a kid that age should know. She knew about all the men’s body parts, and about what to do, how to please, or how to get herself loved. She knew all those little things, and it was very sad. I was aware of it from the beginning.”
Natalie “had a very wistful kind of quality” that touched Marlowe, “a very sort of sad orphan’s quality. She was just incredibly appealing.”
He recognized Natalie’s terror of being injured during intercourse or of becoming pregnant as phobias instilled by her mother to keep her at home, making movies. “Her mother knew what she was doing. Her mother knew that she was with me, and she just made her fearful. Just scared her, all the time.”
When he found out that Natalie was afraid to be alone, a fear her mother encouraged, Marlowe refused to go out with Natalie at certain times, pushing her to spend time by herself so she could become independent.
“There was an edition of Freud that came in six paperbacks, that went through all his phases in analysis and therapy in women,” recalls Marlowe, who loaned his set to Natalie. “She devoured them.” When Natalie expressed suicidal feelings “in a very general way, in a sort of dramatic way,” Marlowe took her to see his therapist, concluding she wasn’t “seriously” suicidal. “She just wanted away from that scene: that mother, that father.” He perceived Natalie’s occasional drinking and heavy smoking as a way “to drown out all that stuff.”
Natalie’s “twisted and broken” wrist became a metaphor for her, the child abused at the hands of her mother and the studios. “That would have been so easy to fix,” Marlowe observed. “It was such a minor thing. But she wore it like a cross, a medal. Her mother also put it in her head that it would have laid her up too long in a cast.”
According to Lana, Natalie was afraid to have a doctor operate on her wrist, “for the same reason that she used to talk about plastic surgery and say, ‘I’m just going to have to grow old, because I’m too terrified to have anything done.’ ” Maria had attached herself to Natalie so symbiotically, Natalie assumed her mother’s phobia of doctors, just as she had her fears of drowning and dark water. For that reason among others, Lana would one day interpret her mother’s neglect as her own saving grace. “That’s what my analyst told me. I was saying, ‘Poor me, the forgotten, horrible, nobody cared…’ and my analyst told me, ‘No, you’re very lucky. Your mother didn’t influence you.’ ”
The bracelets that Natalie used to cover her left wrist in public were symbolic of the split, in her mind, between herself and “Natalie Wood”; when she put on the bracelet, she became the flawless movie star who was always glamorous and beautiful, the only standard Maria would accept.
Marlowe’s influence in getting Natalie to start therapy made him even more of a danger to Maria. “She did not like any kind of analysis at any time,” witnessed Lana. “She would get very angry: ‘What do you talk about when you go to the doctor? You probably talk about me with that doctor…’ ” In analysis, “Natalie realized how she’d been manipulated and used,” her later confidant Mart Crowley would comment. “She felt angry about it. With good reason.” According to Lana, “She just really didn’t like our mom. She liked our dad a lot, but she didn’t like the kind of person our mom was.”
Marlowe would recall attending an actors’ soiree at the Chateau Marmont with Natalie, where a hypnotist put her in a trance as a party trick. “He hypnotized Natalie in a room with thirty people…and just created the most nightmarish thing that came out of Natalie about the death of a dog. And she sobbed and sobbed.” Natalie was still disturbed when she came out of the trance. As they left the party, she told Marlowe how her mother had forced her to re-live her dog being crushed, to get her to cry for Pichel. “That mother was ruthless.” The incident was so unnerving to Marlowe, he avoided hypnosis afterward. “I remember taking Natalie home, at like six o’clock in the morning, and the mother was out of her mind with worry. I had a very old junky car. But it had nothing to do with our doing anything wrong—it was just that Natalie had to go on location for The Girl He Left Behind. She never cared where she was.”
Marlowe had deep feelings for Natalie, saying later, “She was the most meaningful woman in my life, Natalie Wood, the most wonderful woman.” According to Marlowe, she possessed the same fragile, vulnerable quality with him as she projected on camera. “That was real. That was all real.”
Natalie’s admiration for Marlowe was apparent while she was filming her second “B” picture with Hunter, playing the girlfriend of a reluctant Army trainee. “Scott was very serious and very dramatic and so ‘Method,’ ” Hunter recalls. “I remember one time Nat and I were doing a scene and we’d had a little bit of an argument and I said to her in the scene, ‘Well, what do you want?’ And she was really mad at me when we did the take, and she said, ‘I want to see some signs of you growing up!’—and she yelled this at me, she was so involved. So when we cut, I said, ‘Thank you, Rod Steiger.’ ” (The Hollywood Reporter would notice her efforts in its review, calling Natalie “one of those rare beautiful young women who gives you the feeling there is thought going on behind her lovely brow.”)
Through Marlowe, Natalie met an Actors Studio graduate that summer named Norma Crane, a blond actress nearly ten years older, who would become her closest friend around 1959 and until Crane’s premature death in 1973 from cancer, when Natalie quietly would pay all her medical bills and arrange for her funeral.
About the same time as she met Crane, Natalie acquired another new girlfriend, named Barbara Gould, a Fox bit player near her age, with whom she was close for the next year or two.
By June, Natalie was living part-time with Scott Marlowe, alarming Mud into the surveillance activities she had used on Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s first love. “Her mother would open my mail! Just dumb things, like a phone bill, anything, a personal letter.” She induced Nick Adams to follow Marlowe when he was with Natalie. “The mother had him actually spying on us and reporting back. I don’t know if he was being paid or not.” Mud did pay a struggling actor named Nicky Blair, who had a tiny role in Natalie’s new film, “and he had nothing to say, really, except that I used bad language. I had a vile, filthy mouth. I used to say ‘fuck’ a lot when I was a kid—I was just trying to be older—and he went to the mother and said that I had this filthy mouth.”
A few weeks prior to her eighteenth birthday, after an argument with Mud, Natalie proposed to Marlowe, in a manner reminiscent of Jimmy. “We were walking on the beach. She said, ‘Let’s get married.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ and she said, “Yeah, I want to get away from her. I want to get away from orders. And I feel that you’re my harbor and my shelter.’ ” Marlowe demonstrated Jimmy’s strength of character. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can do that, but you certainly can get away from these people.’
“She wanted to marry me. I didn’t particularly want to get married. But I knew that, probably, was the only way we would ever stay together, is if we got married, so I agreed. It was mostly her…she wanted to get away from that whole family and background stuff, away from that awful childhood.”
Though Natalie told movie magazines she felt sorry for her sister Olga because Olga missed a glamorous career to start a family, Natalie, in her heart, still desired what she sought with Jimmy at fifteen. “She wanted to have a normal life, and have a husband and kids,” she revealed to Marlowe. “Kids were very, very important to her.” How much of that was fantasy, or seeking “time lost” from her own childhood, Marlowe could not be sure.
Louella Parsons announced Natalie’s engagement to Scott Marlowe in a banner headline on July 2, quoting Natalie saying, “I’ve never loved any other man.” When Parsons suggested they might marry on Natalie’s eighteenth birthday—July 20—because she would no longer need her parents’ consent, Mud reacted like a Fury, setting out to sabotage Marlowe. “Her mother got frantic—frantic—and she gave out this story that I would never go to premieres.”
Mud warned publicists at Warner Brothers that Marlowe could ruin Natalie’s image because he disliked publicity and drove a “junk heap.” When he took Natalie to the opening of Moby Dick in his 1940 Cadillac on a rainy night, accidentally stepping on a woman’s train, “I was just taken to task in the press, saying that I was not good for her.” Maria escalated the anti-Marlowe campaign, enlisting Nick Adams, who gave interviews to fan magazines accusing Marlowe of using Natalie to further his career.
Warners took seriously Maria’s propaganda to break up the relationship with Marlowe, who had never played by studio rules. “When I came to this town, I was so inaccessible to those gossip people that they were out to destroy me. I’m not overreacting, either: they were out to destroy me. I was a threat to Warner Brothers and to Natalie. They just wanted to end it. And get on with her.”
Natalie was caught in a tug-of-war between her respect for Marlowe’s disdain of cheap publicity, versus her mother’s powerful influence and her now ingrained obsession with image and the pursuit of stardom. As she admitted a decade later, “I [even] used to worry about the fan mags!”
Mud’s scheme to discredit Marlowe extended to Warners’ publicity department, which issued “erroneous” press releases in mid-July stating that Natalie was demanding they cast Marlowe in her next picture or sign him to a contract. “It was a nightmare for me. Warner Brothers just tried to keep her away from me.”
The day she turned eighteen, July 20, Natalie had her first date with Robert Wagner, to attend a press screening of his new Paramount picture, The Mountain, followed by a dessert party with forty-eight other film stars and the press.
Over time, the Natalie Wood legend has been that Wagner telephoned Natalie to invite her to the premiere after photographers posed them together at an industry event, a publicity story that began to circulate after they married. Natalie and Wagner gave conflicting versions of the industry event—Wagner said it was a charity luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire, Natalie wrote that it was a nighttime “Hollywood party–fashion show.” They also offered differing accounts of when he phoned her for the date: Wagner said he was “captivated” and called right away, Natalie wrote that it was “a few weeks later.” Suspiciously, there is no record in the press of an event matching either description.
According to Bobby Hyatt, whose mother and he were still in close contact with the Gurdins, Wagner took Natalie to the July 20 press screening of The Mountain as an arranged date to fulfill agent Henry Willson’s earlier promise to Natalie that she could go out with Wagner when she turned eighteen.
Maria and others would also recall it as a studio “set-up” date, as would Marlowe, who was still engaged to Natalie and begged off going to the Mountain premiere, preferring to spend the evening at a friend’s place at the Chateau Marmont, where Natalie began the evening. “I remember she got dressed at the Chateau, and went on the date.”
Natalie chose a sea-blue chiffon dress and a tiny diamond tiara for her night with her childhood Prince Charming, though it was not the romantic fantasy she had envisioned at eleven. Robert John Wagner (“R.J.” to friends), who was twenty-six to Natalie’s eighteen, worshipped the older, conservative bastions of Hollywood, copying the style and mannerisms of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, to whom he had ingratiated himself as a teenager while caddying at the Bel Air Country Club, next door to his wealthy parents’ home. His perfect manners, polished prep school charm, and penchant for fifties slang like “the gonest” and “the coolest,” were the antithesis of the intellectual-poet-rebels who fascinated Natalie.
“She was sort of all into that whole Actors Group, and I was sort of a Happy Jack Squirrel kid, you know, with nothing on my mind, much, but my hair,” was the amusing, self-deprecating way Wagner would remember it in the late seventies, when he and Natalie were married to each other a second time. He admitted, “I really liked Natalie a lot, and I really wanted to strike up a little conversation…and she sort of resisted me a bit, actually, at the beginning, because I was so different than all the rest of them.”
Ironically, it was Wagner, not Natalie, who was star-struck in their first extended encounter after Natalie’s schoolgirl crush on the Fox lot in braces and braids. (“She was so beautiful—those eyes!”) Wagner, a high school graduate more interested in mimicking Hollywood stars than in his studies, found Natalie “a great intellect—she read like crazy.” Wagner’s career, from Fox bit player to Prince Valiant, had primarily been as a pin-up boy for teenage girls. He was awestruck by Natalie’s “wonderful talent…that driving ambition to be somebody.” His recognition of his limitations, and Natalie’s superior gifts, was honest almost to the point of poignancy. “She was much more accomplished an actor than I will ever be,” he said in midlife.
Their first evening together underlined the differences. Natalie would recall Wagner doing “perfect imitations of movie stars,” while he remembered, “She was so honest. She was real and very vulnerable.”
Maria, who had been worried about Natalie’s girlish infatuation with Wagner because of his representation by the homosexual Willson, dismissed him completely that night. “He came in and I thought, ‘Well, at least the studio sent one with good manners.’ That was my first impression of R.J.”
In her studio publicity, after she married Wagner, Natalie would help create the illusion she waited by the phone for Wagner to call from the time he brought her home from the premiere. Marlowe recalls, “She came back and we met at the Chateau later that night…and she said, ‘I had the most boring evening. He’s very sweet—and so boring. So boring. Please don’t let me do that again.’ And I said, ‘I can’t go to them. I can’t. I can’t sit through those Warner Brothers things.”
The next day, Wagner, the perfect gentleman, sent Natalie flowers to thank her for the date. She put them in a vase and went to the backyard to burn an effigy of her studio welfare worker, in ritualistic celebration of the fact that she was eighteen, and the law no longer required a guardian for her on the set.
Years later, Wagner seemed defensive about the impression he made on Natalie. “I was a different type than she was used to…she was running around with Jimmy Dean and those guys—you know, part of the rebel movement. Me, I was around the elite of Hollywood. Power, Webb, Stanwyck…Bogie, Betty, Coop—these were the people I was going around with, and it was a whole new world to her.” After sending the flowers, Wagner made no attempt to contact Natalie. It was just another date, he told columnist Sidney Skolsky the next year.
Natalie spent the next few days making plans for an imminent wedding to Marlowe, “And she made the mistake of telling her mother,” he recalls. “I think Barbara was gonna be the maid of honor, Barbara Gould. Natalie wanted Nick [Adams], and I just said, ‘No.’ ” Their plans were to have a simple ceremony, with just a few guests.
That week, Marlowe was called to New York to do a play, putting the wedding in limbo. Natalie aligned herself with her anti-establishment fiancé. He recalls, “She told Warners she wouldn’t go to any premieres again, or do publicity, and they got really insane. They got really crazy.”
Natalie’s second bold move was to fire Henry Willson, who had served his original purpose: setting her up on a date with Wagner. Willson was “screwing her career,” in Marlowe’s opinion, because he was too attentive to “his boys, the Rock Hudsons and so forth.” Natalie’s chief complaint was that Willson had not been aggressive enough.
Jackie Eastes was at Natalie’s house when Willson phoned for the last time. “She wanted Marjorie Morningstar, and he wouldn’t go to bat for her. He said, ‘You’re not right for the part.’ And she said, ‘If you don’t get me this part, you’re fired.’ I’d never seen her so forceful.” Years later, Natalie would ridicule Willson to the London Times, saying, “There was a Hollywood agent who made up names for his actors—Race Gentry, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter. He knew what he’s doing, I guess, but Tab’s the name of a soft drink. Low calorie.”
A desperate Maria implored Nick Adams to persuade Natalie to delay marrying Marlowe. Adams further assisted by “planting” a story in Army Archerd’s August fifteenth column in Daily Variety, stating that he and Natalie “might elope,” to Las Vegas, a “set-up” about which Natalie later bitterly complained.
She succumbed to mounting pressure from Warner Brothers and Mud, demonstrating the part of her personality that craved stardom, by participating in a month-long publicity tour to New York, Chicago and St. Louis with Tab Hunter to promote the release of The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind, arriving at the Los Angeles airport on August 21 in a plunging neckline, carrying her good-luck toy tigers to make it through the flight.
Natalie and Hunter were mobbed at the New York premiere of The Burning Hills, with fans swarming them like bees at each city Warners arranged for them to visit. “The tours we went on were phenomenal,” as Hunter recalls. “That kind of exposure when the studio gets behind you, it’s incredible…they wanted to make stars out of the both of us. We were the last of that sort of era.”
While Natalie was in New York, she had lunch at the society restaurant Twenty-One, with author Herman Wouk, hoping to convince him to cast her as the title character of his novel, the demure Marjorie Morningstar. She dressed for the luncheon with the same display of allure she had when she met Nick Ray to campaign to play Judy—mistakenly believing that glamour, rather than authenticity, would sell her, an influence of Maria’s that would stay with Natalie her life long. Wouk would write:
It was obvious to me, almost from the moment I saw her, that she was wrong for the part. This was not my “Marjorie”…she had a precocious, worldly look and an assured, fetching manner, which made her entirely different from my poor Central Park West dreamer. She wore a seductively cut red dress, a little too chic, I thought, for her age. Her hair was arranged in smart black bangs. Her make-up was stunningly smooth.
In answers to my questions about her background and her career she gave a fine performance of girlish demureness; too good a performance.
My Marjorie would have been stammering and feeble talking to a novelist 20 years older than herself. She would have said the wrong things. She would have spilled coffee, or dropped a fork. Natalie Wood carried off the interview with unshaken aplomb. She took charge…
An hour or so later, talking to the producer of the picture on the telephone, I advised him that I had met Natalie Wood, that she was probably a very good actress but, in my opinion, was out of the question for the role of Marjorie Morningstar.
Natalie’s seriously artistic side revealed itself in New York, as she sat in on classes at the Actors Studio, which Marlowe had arranged for her. Later, she would compare Stanislavsky’s teachings to “the way I’d been working all along. ‘Emotion memory’ is recalling something sad when you have a sad scene to do, and very early on I used to get myself in the right mood by thinking of a pet dog that died.”
Natalie returned from her star-making Warners tour the first few days of September, joining Marlowe for a “hideaway at the beach, to get away from her mother.” They rented a cottage in a Malibu hotel for a few days, resuming their discussions about getting married, a possibility that created panic in Maria and alarm in Warner Brothers executives, who were desperate to sever the maverick Marlowe from Natalie’s life.
While they were in Malibu, Nick Adams “appeared at our hotel,” Marlowe would recall, bringing his newest famous friend, Elvis Presley, to meet Natalie. Adams had encountered Presley, then twenty-one, a little over a week before on the set of Presley’s first movie, Love Me Tender. Presley, who deeply admired James Dean’s acting, knew every line in Rebel Without a Cause, and wanted to meet Natalie Wood because she had worked with Dean.
Presley, Natalie and Adams instantly became “almost a threesome—having a lot of fun together,” Natalie said then. They were spotted that week at a cinema in Hollywood called the Iris, seeing Hot Rod Girls and Girls in Prison, the day before Presley flew to New York for his historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, turning him into a cultural phenomenon.
With the world’s most famous singer expressing an interest in Natalie, Maria exerted the full measure of her power over her daughter to end her romance with Scott Marlowe, abetted by equally potent pressure from Warner Brothers. Natalie Wood, the movie star, relented. “I don’t know if you can imagine those days,” Marlowe later would reflect. “Everything was geared to publicity. Studios got together and made people’s lives, and had clauses in their contracts: what time they could go out, what time they had to be home, what they had to wear, what their hair was, what their photographs were like. They dictated how they lived or not lived. They said, ‘You do this and you’ll be okay; you don’t do this and things will be bad for you.’ And they meant it.”
The effect of Natalie’s enforced breakup with Marlowe was as devastating, in its way, as her broken engagement to Jimmy Williams, her earlier opportunity for a “real” life. “The mother just fucked it—just screwed it all up,” remarks Marlowe. “I was kind of a fort for Natalie. I just was there for her all the time.”
After the breakup with Marlowe, Natalie took her first trip to New York without her mother or a chaperone, to appear on The Perry Como Show. The experience was so disconcerting, she decided not to move out of her parents’ home until she got married. A friend she made that fall, actress Judi Meredith, noticed that Natalie needed to have “someone around her all the time.” “And when they are not,” Meredith said at the time, “she keeps in touch by phone. That’s why she calls her mother practically every hour, why she calls me at three and four in the morning, why she constantly talks to her agent, to the studio, a dozen different people. Even at home she can’t be alone for a moment.”
Natalie wanted to escape from Mud and her dysfunctional family, but the very neuroses Mud had instilled—primarily the fear of being alone—bound Natalie to her mother, as if Maria were a snake coiled around her neck.
With Marlowe exorcised from her life, Natalie spent more time with Elvis Presley and his companions from Tennessee, who had taken over part of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as their stomping grounds. Lamar Fike, a Presley pal with a rollicking Southern sense of humor, adored “the raving ingénue,” as he later described Natalie. “We used to call her the Mad Nat. Elvis and I thought it up. Natalie used to get so dramatic! I came in one day to his room at the Beverly Wilshire and she got up on the windowsill and opened the window up. And I said, ‘Elvis, Jesus Christ, she’s going to jump!’ And he said, ‘No, no,’ and then he said, ‘Nat, come and sit down and quit being so dramatic.’ And he was right. So we called her the Mad Nat.”
Her mother “pushed” the relationship with Presley, according to Hyatt. Maria visited Presley on his movie set with Natalie and struck up conversations with his mother, Gladys. Even Fahd liked Presley, according to Maria, who would remember her husband buying Elvis Presley records that fall. “Natalie was crazy about Elvis,” she claimed in later years. Natalie bought matching velvet shirts for herself and Presley, sneaking into movies with him throughout the late fall, finding him “complex and lonely,” not unlike herself. “Natalie was attracted to dark personalities,” Marlowe observed.
Her school friend Jackie, who was still friendly with Natalie, remembers Natalie telling her “what a polite, wonderful human being” Presley was, but “he was not what she wanted romantically.” Later in life, Natalie gave an interview to Presley biographer Albert Goldman, discussing her relationship with the singer:
He was the first person of my age group I had ever met who said to me: “How come you’re wearing makeup? Why do you want to go to New York? Why do you want to be on your own? Why don’t you want to stay home and be a sweet little girl? It’s nice to stay home.” We’d go to P.C. Brown’s and have a hot fudge sundae. We’d go to Hamburger Hamlet and have a burger and a Coke. He didn’t drink. He didn’t swear. He didn’t even smoke!…I thought it was really wild!
At the height of her friendship with Presley, in October, Natalie was sent to New York to appear in a live television drama called Carnival on NBC’s Kaiser Aluminum Hour, costarring Dennis Hopper, directed by George Roy Hill. Natalie played the daughter of a drunken carny worker who takes a job as a “cooch dancer” in a desperate bid to save her father’s job, then lies to cover for him. She would later refer to it as her best work as an actress, perhaps because she related to her character, who was supporting her alcoholic father.
Ironically, Scott Marlowe was NBC’s first choice to play Hopper’s role as the carnival barker in a tender romance with Natalie’s character. “I was doing a television show, and I couldn’t do it. My heart was wrenched.” Marlowe, who was still in contact with Natalie through “secret” phone calls she made to him through friends, watched her perform that night. “She was brilliant. The camera came in close and she had this big, big scene, she had to burst into tears—and she did it and she was brilliant. She burst right into tears. God, she was magnificent.” Daily Variety agreed with Marlowe, calling Natalie “touching and effective.”
She returned to Hollywood from her television triumph to begin dating an intense young actor she met before she left town, when she saw him perform onstage in End as a Man. Her companion that night was Ben Cooper, who recalls their reaction to actor Robert Vaughn, when they met him after the play at a small party: “Bob played a real rat, just a despicable bastard. And I told him, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you later; right now I still hate you.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘Thank you very much.’ He was just magnetic. You would hardly remember any of the other actors who were in the play. So when he and Natalie met, there was a lot of electricity.” Vaughn would say, “Being a reasonably sensitive fellow, it was apparent from the git-go that the girl and yours truly would see each other again—she had that look.”
By the time Natalie returned from New York, Vaughn had been signed to a two-picture-a-year deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and moved from a one-room apartment shared with his mother “into a magnificent three-story, ten-room penthouse on Orchid Avenue overlooking the lights of my newly discovered Hollywood.” Natalie introduced him to Hollywood’s haunts, as she earlier had Hopper. “My first Hollywood premiere was with Nat, who as a result of Rebel, was now the toast of Photoplay and Modern Screen, etcetera.” Vaughn simultaneously went out with Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith, “[and] since neither Judi or Natalie seemed to be concerned about the other’s role in my life—that life was good.”
Natalie was juggling Vaughn with Elvis Presley, who invited her to Graceland, his Memphis home, over Halloween. According to Marlowe, “She did a weekend, to make me jealous, with Elvis. That’s all it was about. She wanted to get back with me and so she took off with him.”
Natalie left town abruptly, without telling the studio or her new agency, William Morris, missing a publicity event and flying under an assumed name. Her “secret” visit to Graceland was captured by photographers moments after Nick Adams picked her up at the airport in Memphis, where she and Presley were stalked by fans everywhere they went: riding on his motorcycle, tooling around town in his Lincoln Continental, stopping at the Fairgrounds or for ice cream. Presley’s later friend Jerry Schilling remembers, “I was fourteen years old, playing touch football, and who should drive up but Elvis on a motorcycle, and who’s sitting behind him but Natalie Wood! All I could do was just stand there and stare.”
Presley allowed his fans to do almost anything, even look through his windows. He explained why to a bewildered Natalie, who recalled, “I hadn’t been around anyone who was religious. He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people, otherwise, God would take it all away.”
Both Lana and Maria would later say that Natalie phoned home toward the end of her visit, asking Mud “in code” to call her back on the ruse that Warner Brothers needed her in Los Angeles. Presley’s friend Fike, who was in Memphis, claims that was “a lie,” that “Natalie really cared for Elvis,” though he acknowledges “it just didn’t work out” between them. “She just didn’t like the whole set-up, didn’t like the guys around, which most girls didn’t.” Faye Nuell, Natalie’s friend from Rebel, still a confidante, felt Natalie, who preferred “worldly” men, had always considered Presley more a friend than a boyfriend.
Natalie flew back to Hollywood from Memphis in tight toreador pants, clutching her stuffed tigers, greeted at the airport by Robert Vaughn and by photographers, eager to snap Elvis’ “new girlfriend.” Pictures of Natalie Wood, smiling ebulliently, waving to her fans, appeared in newspapers across the world the next day. Michael Zimring, her new William Morris agent, saw Natalie privately, “and when she came back she looked like a rat that died. I don’t think she’d been to sleep for a week.” Zimring took Natalie to task for leaving town without informing him or the studio, though he felt sorry for her. “I tell you, she had a tough family thing. She was a good kid. She was a little wild, but basically she really was a good kid. I really was fond of her. She took care of her family: I mean let’s face it, she supported them. Her father was a mess.”
Marlowe recalls, “She appeared at my door the following weekend,” still hoping to marry him. “She wanted to be married badly—to somebody—I know. I think she just wanted out—of that mother, and that relationship. And out of feeling suicidal so much.” Natalie and Marlowe gave it a last go, but it was “not meant to be,” they would both say. “Barbara Gould tried to get us back together, but we split up.”
In the end, Scott Marlowe, like Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s true loves, represented a too extreme break from her codependent relationship with Maria, and their shared Hollywood fantasy, movie star “Natalie Wood.”
Robert Vaughn briefly filled the void in Natalie’s life through November. He remembers her then as “a full blooming late teenager, with all the passion, humor, vulnerability and craziness that time suggests. She could also drink a Volga boatman under the table. She introduced me to the ‘way of the world’ in Hollywood’s last glamorous days, and I shall treasure our fleeting time upon that ‘wicked stage’ all of my days.” At the same time, Vaughn had a strange premonition about Natalie, a disturbing feeling that something was wrong. “Even then, I had some concern, based on her zest for life, that she might not realize her full ‘Biblical’ four score and ten, and said so to my friends.”
When Vaughn escorted Natalie to a party given by Elvis Presley that December at the Santa Monica Pier, which Presley had “bought out” for his friends for the evening, “Natalie, with profound sadness, stared at the black waters, and told me how deeply afraid she was of drowning.”