Pieces of My Heart (13 page)

T
hese were years in which I didn’t have a steady girlfriend, so I named my new boat
My Lady
with more than a touch of irony. I didn’t have a steady lady, I had a boat.
My Lady
was a perfect bachelor’s boat, a twenty-six-foot Chris Craft. Ray Kellogg, the head of special effects at Fox, helped me take her out for a shakedown cruise. I docked her in Newport, near Claire Trevor’s boat. I was happy in my career, and I was happy aboard
My Lady
. I thought I had everything I wanted.

And then I met Natalie.

The first time Natalie Wood saw me, I didn’t see her, or at least I don’t remember seeing her. It was the spring of 1949, at Twentieth Century Fox, and Natalie was making
Father Was a Fullback,
with Fred MacMurray.

As she told the story, we passed each other in a studio hallway. We didn’t speak, but she always said I smiled at her. As we passed, she turned around and watched me go by, but I didn’t turn around. I have to take her word for this episode, which she mythologized over the years, because I honestly don’t remember it.

She was ten years old, I was eighteen, and she told her mother, who was walking with her down the hallway, that she had seen the man she was going to marry. And she also told the screenwriter Mary Loos, who was on the set of
Father Was a Fullback,
that she had just fallen in love with an incredibly handsome man, but she didn’t know who he was.

As the years went by, I would occasionally see Natalie around town, at parties and at premieres, but she never seemed like she was particularly interested in me, let alone interested in marrying me. What I didn’t know at the time was that she had retained Henry Willson as her agent simply because Henry had also been my agent, which was all she needed to know.

For the most part, we moved in entirely different social circles. While she was making
Rebel Without a Cause,
she was having an affair with Nicholas Ray and hanging around Jimmy Dean and Dennis Hopper, and I was with a much older crowd who generally regarded Nick and Jimmy as the barbarians at the gate.

We talked about that period a lot in later years. There was nearly a thirty-year age difference between her and Nick Ray, so the relationship was kept quiet, but I think she was looking for a father figure, and Nick was always happy to play the part of the all-knowing guru. Her family had been very opposed to her doing
Rebel;
they didn’t understand the part, or the film, but Natalie had worked with Jimmy Dean in a General Electric Theater TV show right after he shot
East of Eden
but before it was released. She knew about his gifts, which were primarily those of brilliant inventiveness and unexpected power. They had bonded before they did
Rebel Without a Cause
.

Natalie sensed what a break
Rebel
could be for her. She always had a wonderful ability to recognize life-changing moments when they presented themselves. Besides that, she was desperate to get away from the girl-next-door parts that Jack Warner was putting her in, and she was equally desperate to get away from her family, who had viewed her as a meal ticket since she was a toddler, which oppressed her practically as well as emotionally.

So
Rebel
spoke to all sorts of needs that Natalie had—career as well as family. Not only that, but within the film itself was a recognition that the families we make for ourselves are often far more meaningful than the families we are born into, which was something that would also have appealed to Natalie at that point in her life. At that stage, all she wanted was to get away from her biological family, so Nick, Jimmy, and Dennis Hopper formed a new family for Natalie.

I met Jimmy Dean a couple of times; I especially remember having drinks with him one night at Patsy d’Amore’s, but I can’t claim any insight into his character. Natalie never specifically alluded to it, but my impression of him was that he was bisexual; certainly, that was the scuttlebutt around town. At that point, Jimmy was always charging around on a motorcycle with Pier Angeli. I had worked with her sister, Marisa Pavan, on
What Price Glory?
, but for the most part he and Natalie were with an entirely different group than I was.

After Natalie made such a breakthrough with
Rebel Without a Cause,
Jack Warner showed his complete lack of understanding of what he had by teaming Natalie with Tab Hunter for a couple of pictures. To say that they didn’t strike any sparks was an understatement. By this time, Natalie was clearly maturing into something special. She had that same riveting, sexual quality that Ava Gardner or Elizabeth Taylor did, but in a smaller, subtler package—more of a gamine than an earth mother.

The first time I really remember talking to her was in June 1956, when we were both attending a fashion show at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and we were asked to pose for a few photos together. Again, she was pleasant and quite beautiful, but she made no particular moves in my direction that let me know she had maintained a mad crush on me.

A month later, on July 20, I took a leap and invited Natalie to the premiere of
The Mountain
. What I didn’t know at the time was that July 20 was her eighteenth birthday. I remember being unusually nervous before I picked her up. It was a big studio premiere, but that wasn’t it; I was excited about taking Natalie out, and I was also anxious about what Spencer Tracy would think of her. I needn’t have worried; he liked her very much.

At dinner afterward, we both sensed that things had changed. Time had altered the emotional dynamic, and we sparked to each other. I sent her flowers the next morning; then I called to tell her I had had a spectacularly good time. A little later, we went out again, this time for lunch, and she kept me waiting for three hours.

With anybody else, I would probably have left, but with Natalie…I waited. I think she was impressed by that, and by the fact that I wasn’t angry. The next night we went out again, to
My Lady,
and this time the sparks flew upward. It was December 6, 1956, a date we would remember all our lives. In her journal, Natalie wrote, “Our first serious date.”

I remember the instant I fell in love with her. Natalie had the most incredibly expressive brown eyes, dark and dancing and deep. One night on the boat, Natalie looked at me with love, her eyes lit by a Coleman lantern that was on top of the table. That was the moment that changed my life.

I was soon a part of Natalie’s family, who proved to be some of the most clinically interesting people I’ve known. Natalie’s mother was particularly bizarre. Her name was Maria, but everyone called her “Mud,” which I think was Natalie’s shortening of “Muddah,” a comic version of “Mother.”

I think Mud genuinely came to love me, but she had spun a terrible web of dependence around Natalie. Basically, Mud was afraid to let Natalie out of her sight, because Natalie was the breadwinner. It all began when Natalie was a child actress. Mud told her that a serial killer prowled movie theaters and stabbed young girls in the back. Result: Natalie didn’t like to leave the house to go to movies when she was a child. Natalie also developed a genuine fear of flying, although she eventually learned to cope with it.

Mud didn’t just tell Natalie these things as a means of controlling her; she was herself genuinely prey to irrational fears. For example, if a fire engine went by her house, Mud would rush over to see if Natalie was all right. That actually happened, and more than once. She was an interesting character, but more interesting at a distance. She was one of those people who always had to create tension. Everything was a drama. God, she was exhausting.

Mud wanted to control Natalie’s money and control her parts. She wanted to control who could be at one of Natalie’s parties, control who Natalie dated, control everything. For a long time she was a chaperone for Natalie, and a formidable one, always the first to announce, “Let’s go home.”

Around the time of
Rebel Without a Cause,
Mud finally relented and allowed Natalie out of the house by herself. But if Natalie went out on a date, Mud would look at her dress when she got home to see if it was wrinkled. And if Natalie didn’t get a part, it wasn’t because she was wrong for it, or hadn’t tested well; it was the agent’s fault, or the director’s, or the producer’s. Natalie lived in a cocoon, and the lives of the entire family revolved around her: Mud was the mother of Natalie Wood, Lana was the sister of Natalie Wood. Natalie struggled against these totally unhealthy relationships for most of her life.

For some reason, her mother wasn’t threatened by me. From the beginning, Mud responded to me very positively, as did Nick, Natalie’s father. But Nick was an alcoholic, and it was obvious that on the psychological level he had been cast off and didn’t matter. That particular family was a total matriarchy—a Russian matriarchy.

Mud was a White Russian who had been born in southern Siberia in 1912 and came to America in November 1930. Her first marriage was already on the rocks by the time she arrived in California, but Nick Gurdin, whose real name was Nikolai Zacharenko, was introduced to Maria by her first husband. Nick and Maria married in 1937, and Natalie was born in July 1938. Although Natalie believed Nick was her father, for all of her life Maria harbored a secret belief that Natalie was actually the result of a long-standing affair she had been having with a man named George Zepaloff.

Whether this was just another one of Mud’s romantic fantasies or the truth is irrelevant, because Mud lived in her fantasies far more than she lived in reality. From her point of view, I think I was better than any of the alternatives that had presented themselves because I was the sort of man she had dreamed of for her daughter. I was successful, famous, presentable, well connected, and I didn’t take any shit. I wasn’t one of the guys Natalie had been running around with. I was legitimate.

So Mud was not averse to our relationship, although she was very averse to Natalie leaving her sphere of influence. When Natalie told her she wanted to move out, Mud said, “What’s going to happen to us? Where are we going to go? How are we going to live?” The usual questions you’d get from somebody who’d been supported by her child since she was six years old.

Natalie had fallen in love with me, I think, but she wasn’t sure, and there were the suspicions that had always been encouraged by Mud, who had always told her to be wary of anybody outside the family who tried to get close to her. There would be episodes when she’d pull back, or even test me. Natalie was a full-blooded Russian and could be very moody and inscrutable; her Russian moods could drive me up the wall. I noticed that rejection could trigger her moods, or a perceived betrayal—the suspicion of having been lied to, or of someone being devious in some way. The bright lamp would suddenly switch off, and she would become gloomy and interior.

One night after dinner she asked me to drop her off at the Chateau Marmont so she could see Scott Marlowe, an actor she’d had a brief affair with. I didn’t know that Marlowe was basically gay and not really a threat, but I was still furious that she’d make such a request—it was diva behavior, something that’s never enticed me.

We didn’t see each other for a while after that, but we had patched things up by March 1957, when I had to go to Japan to make
Stopover Tokyo
—or, as I prefer to call it,
Stopover Acting.
Just before I left, I gave her a gold charm bracelet with
WOW, CHARLIE
engraved on it. It was a line of Brando’s from
On the Waterfront,
and we used to call each other “Charlie.” Once I got to Japan, Natalie and I burned up the long-distance lines talking to each other, but that wasn’t as easy then as it is now. It could take an hour or two to get a connection from Tokyo, so I spent a lot of time in my hotel room. One night I couldn’t find her. I called her mother and asked her if she knew where Natalie was.

“I think she’s with Nicky Hilton,” she answered. “They went to Mexico.” Nicky Hilton was Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband and easily one of the sleaziest people in Hollywood. He was a handsome but extremely nasty piece of work, and he lived off his father’s hotel business. I was just furious. I ripped the phone out of the wall and heaved it right through an open window. Outside, it was pouring rain.

I was sitting there fuming when, ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door. A very wet Japanese man with an umbrella was standing there holding my phone. It had hit his umbrella, he had picked it up and noticed the room number on the dial, and he had very kindly brought it back to me. Since Natalie was stepping out with Nicky Hilton, I consoled myself with Joan Collins.

Stopover Tokyo
was the only movie directed by Richard Murphy, a good screenwriter. If you haven’t seen it, don’t trouble yourself. The only compensation turned out to be the location. Japan was a fascinating place to be so soon after the war, and Joan was lovely to spend time with, but the film itself was a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.

Once I got back from Japan, I was able to quash the Nicky Hilton thing, and Natalie and I got very serious very fast. We spent many days and nights on board
My Lady
in the Catalina isthmus, with our single, small Coleman lantern illuminating our faces as we barbecued steaks for dinner. The boat’s table broke down into a double bunk, and overall
My Lady
was perfectly comfortable for two people, although too small for four. Not that we cared; when we were together, the presence of other people was superfluous. Natalie found that she was quite comfortable on board a boat, so
My Lady
became our designated getaway.