Pieces of My Heart (29 page)

Even though Natalie has been dead for more than twenty-five years, there are still unexpectedly painful moments, like a loose floorboard that snaps up and hits you in the face. Life does have to go on, and with the children I couldn’t be so overcome by it that I couldn’t keep their spirits up. And they were so very helpful to me, because they were getting hit by the same floorboards I was. Katie, the oldest, stepped up and took something of a maternal position with her sisters, which helped. The fact that we all held on to each other and kept going—Natalie would have wanted that. And the way the children have handled themselves in their lives, their strength, fills me with such pride. Natalie raised our children well.

On the way back from Gstaad, we took a New Year’s stopover in Wales, where Richard Gregson was living with his wife. Then it was back to Los Angeles and work. The
Hart to Hart
crew was so respectful and caring, and it felt good to be back, to feel the warmth of the lights on my face.

Over the years, I would have epic legal battles with Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, almost always about money due me that they refused to acknowledge was due me and that they had to end up paying me.

But.

In the worst days of my life, when I needed Aaron and Leonard,
really
needed them, they were there for me. Anything I needed was customized for me; if the production schedule had to be rearranged, then it was rearranged. If that cost them money, they didn’t utter a word of criticism. They were solicitous, they called, they bent whatever needed bending to enable me to function, and I will always be indebted to them for that.

Likewise, Stefanie was continually marvelous; she knew only too well what I was going through. Bill Holden’s death was devastating for her, and I’m sure there was much attendant guilt. There was a sense in which Stefanie and I were united by far more than working on a TV show; we were united in a shared grief.

The fallout went on for months…years. The Ahmanson Theater chose not to try to recast the production of
Anastasia
and canceled it. As for the incomplete
Brainstorm,
MGM tried to use Natalie’s death as an excuse to make an insurance claim and scrap the picture. The studio lost the case, and after some rewriting to give Natalie’s scenes to another character, the film was finally released in late 1983. Unlike the last films of other great stars, which often serve as a sort of summing up of their gifts and their meaning,
Brainstorm
was completely unworthy of Natalie. It wasn’t successful, and it didn’t deserve to be. If it hadn’t been Natalie’s last picture, nobody would remember it at all.

N
atalie’s will didn’t leave her sister Lana any money, just her clothes. A few days after I went back to work on
Hart to Hart,
Lana called the house and said she wanted her inheritance. Liz, Natalie’s secretary, explained that the will hadn’t been probated yet, but Lana kept calling and demanding her property, which included some fur coats that were particularly valuable. I wanted Natasha and Courtney to have those, so I told Liz to have the coats appraised and I would send Lana the money. The coats were appraised at $11,000, so I sent Lana a check for that amount and told her she could have everything else.

Damned if Lana didn’t take me literally. She pulled up in a truck and proceeded to strip Natalie’s walk-in closet down to the walls. She even took the underwear. The clothes ended up on sale in a store on Ventura Boulevard that dealt in secondhand clothing. Lana then promptly rushed to write a ridiculous book about her sister that was published a year after Natalie died. Her writing career went about as well as her acting career.

At least she was consistent.

O
nce some order was restored to our lives, my first priority was to keep my girls together. Courtney was very young and completely shattered, as only a young girl who has lost her mother can be. One of the problems that Courtney has carried with her through the years is that she didn’t know her mother that well. When something tragic happens, people go out of their way not to bring it up to the people involved because they know how painful it is. So Courtney didn’t talk with me or with anybody else very much about her mother; she buried a lot of those feelings, as did Natasha.

Natalie had custody of Natasha after her divorce from Richard Gregson, and the girls had become totally devoted to each other. Although Richard would certainly have been within his rights to ask for Natasha, I asked him if I could keep her with me so I could raise her and Courtney together. “The last thing those girls need,” I told him, “is to be separated from each other.” Thankfully, Richard agreed absolutely, so we raised the girls together, and very amicably. He could have Natasha for visits anytime he wanted, but her main residence was with me. Because of Richard’s decency, there were no more losses piled on top of what had already happened.

I’ve always believed that there’s a lot to be said for going back to the land, so soon after Natalie died I bought eighty acres from Richard Widmark in Hidden Valley. Dick held on to a large property next door, so we were gentleman ranchers together. With the help of a great old cowboy named Tom Ulmer, we raised cutting horses and grew hay. It was a working ranch, and I was out there on the weekends riding and running the tractor. We had five mares that produced five foals a year and fifty head of cattle that produced another fifty head—not enough to make any money, but enough to compel hard work and force me to work amid the natural cycle of life. I had had enough death, so I made up my mind that none of my animals would go out the door to the slaughterhouse; we sold them strictly as breeding stock.

I had every intention of holding on to the ranch, but one day a guy showed up unannounced and offered to buy it at any price I cared to name. I named a price, he nodded, and the deal was done. I took some of the money and turned around and bought another ranch, this one encompassing 184 acres. In retrospect, I believe the Hidden Valley ranch was a crucial component of my healing.

O
n Sunday, July 11, 1982, nine days before Natalie’s birthday, my mother wrote me a letter:

Dear RJ,

 

You are very much in my thoughts and prayers as I know this is a sad time for you with Natalie’s birthday and an anniversary just ahead—but although it’s hard to do—you must tuck these days away and only have happy memories—these you will always have—yours alone.

Have no regrets, RJ, as there was no one who loved their wife, children and home more than you did—and you were always so in tune together and you were so good to Natalie, so do not have any unhappy moments.

Natalie had a very full life for her age—much more than many actresses ever achieve at a much older age. She had a happy home life—beautiful children and a husband who adored her—so what more is there in life?

I feel very sad that she was taken at such a young time in her life, but there are things one has no control over—[so] remember only all the happy times you had together.

I love you dearly, RJ, always and always will until the end of time.

Love,
C.

 

Thank God for
Hart to Hart
. The show kept going, although it always gets harder the longer a show runs. The writers get bored and want to move on to something else because the characters are set. Besides that, relationships are the toughest things to write for television—or, for that matter, for any media. The nature of our show meant that we couldn’t spice things up by inventing domestic squabbles or kitchen-sink drama. But it was a wonderful company; Tom Mankiewicz and Mart Crowley ran the show and did a wonderful job, and the entire cast and crew were a pleasure to work with. The fact that we were a success meant that we were always able to get good actors, which keeps the regulars on their toes.

After our fifth season, our ratings were still good, and we had eight scripts ready for our sixth season. We were going to take the Harts to France, then shoot a couple more episodes in other European spots. And then a new regime at ABC canceled us because they wanted to make room for their own programming.

We were all totally shocked; Aaron and Leonard came out to the house while we tried to figure out a way to keep things going. The problem was that the network canceled us very late, and the other networks had already set their schedules. Today a show that was as successful as ours would be easily moved over to cable or one of the other networks, but in 1984 those alternative venues didn’t exist.

Once again, I was an actor at liberty.

I
had always promised Natalie that if anything happened to her, I would take care of her mother, which I did. At first, Mud handled my fan mail and would come by the house to see her granddaughters. I bought the condo that Natalie had been renting for her and gave Mud $2,000 a month for her expenses. But it was gradually growing apparent that she was getting a touch forgetful and could no longer live alone.

Lana moved in with Mud and brought her boyfriend with her. Lana and her boyfriend were in the big bedroom, and Mud was in the small bedroom, and in between were about ten cats. (Lana has always been an animal collector.) The neighbors finally demanded that we do something about the smell. The drapes were shredded from the cats, there were droppings everywhere, and rolls of toilet paper littered the floors. Basically, they were living like derelicts.

We moved Mud into her own apartment at Barrington Plaza, and we cleaned the old place up. For a time, Katie lived there. Then I got a call that Mud had set fire to her apartment. When we asked her what had happened, she said that she had been looking for her jewels under the bed with a lighted candle.

It was clear that Mud required constant supervision and needed to go to the Motion Picture Home, which, since it began in the 1920s, has provided a wonderful, nurturing refuge for elderly people from all branches of the industry. I called up Edie Wasserman to arrange it. Natalie and I had raised a great deal of money for the Home over the years, and I’ve continued to do so. Arranging residency for Mud would have been very easy.

But Lana didn’t want her mother to go to the Home, largely, I believe, because if Mud lived with her, she could live off Mud’s Social Security and my monthly check. Olga, Natalie’s older sister, is a wonderful woman and was very much on my side in this entire unfortunate business. Olga and I tried to pry Mud away and get her into the Home, but without Lana’s permission Mud couldn’t be admitted. It wasn’t long before Mud’s carelessness accelerated into dementia, and she had to be moved to a hospital. She died in January 1998, a month before she would have turned eighty-six.

About two years ago, I received a letter from Lana’s daughter asking for help for her child—Lana’s grandchild.

As I sat there thinking, I remembered how her husband at the time sold the pictures of mine and Natalie’s second wedding to the tabloids. I remembered all the misleading stories about Natalie she gave to the tabloids. I remembered how she ran up her mother’s credit cards. I remembered the way she ransacked Natalie’s clothes. And I remembered the last time I had given her money. She had come to me for help with her house and the water bill and so forth. I had given her a check for $25,000. A month later she was back for more.

I remembered all this, and I said no. To paraphrase Walter Huston in
Dodsworth,
“Family has to stop somewhere short of suicide.”

Then Lana appealed to the kids, and Natasha gave her some money. “It will never be enough,” I told her.

W
e stored all the paraphernalia from the
Splendour
in a facility in the valley. There was a great deal of memorabilia—wonderful photographs that we’d had framed and mounted, all the silver and china and clocks and barometers from the boat. In 1994 the Northridge earthquake hit, and a bridge collapsed onto the storage facility. There was nothing left. A bulldozer came in and loaded the shards onto a truck. Everything was carted away to a landfill.

Gone, all gone.

The first time I met Jill St. John, on a soundstage at Fox in 1959.
(© TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
)