Natasha (11 page)

Natasha did experience one genuine thrill while promoting her movie in New York that January: snow. Although
Tomorrow Is Forever
would not be released until the spring, Natalie Wood was praised by New York newspapers, whose critics had attended the celebrity premiere.

Svetlana Gurdin’s birth, on March 1, coincided with Natalie’s first flush of fame, where the spotlight would lopsidedly, at times cruelly, remain. Giving birth was Mud’s first, and last, maternal act toward her third daughter. As soon as she got home from the hospital, she relinquished Svetlana to Olga so she could devote herself to Natasha. Olga had already dropped out of school to babysit Natasha while Mud was in the hospital, inciting rumors at Hollywood High that Svetlana was
her
baby. “Natalie was under contract to the studio, and it was the law that I had to be with her,” rationalized Maria. In truth, Mud believed she had a calling. Years later, she happily cooperated with a fan magazine for an article called “I Neglected Lana So Natalie Could Be a Star.” “I was a non-person,” observes Lana. Maria, who hand-selected the wealthy Loys as Natasha’s godparents, saw no reason to choose a godmother for Svetlana, nor would she bother to teach her to curtsy. “I
think
I lived there, I’m not sure,” remarks Lana.

Olga, who was a conscientious student, began to worry about missing class and returned to high school. Maria hired a nanny for Svetlana and accompanied Natasha to San Francisco the middle of March. International arranged a luncheon at the St. Francis and a press conference at the Warfield to “present” Natalie Wood to reporters, certain that her performance in
Tomorrow Is Forever
would attract even more attention when the film was released. “Natalie,” under Mud’s scrutiny, performed with mechanical animation. Reporters remarked on her poise, dutifully noting the vital statistics of her young life as she “rattled off facts,” including her mother’s fabrication that Pichel brought
her to Hollywood to star in the movie. The accompanying articles must have thrilled Mud, announcing Natalie Wood as “the Margaret O’Brien of tomorrow.”

Natasha and Mud returned to West Hollywood to read her first major review.
Look
magazine was only mildly complimentary of
Tomorrow Is Forever
, calling it old-fashioned, but the magazine extolled Natalie as a “real prize” and a rival to Orson Welles, with whom she was pictured in a nearly full-page close-up. Inside the Gurdin home circumstances were less sanguine. When the nanny fed Svetlana a banana and she choked, Maria fired her and commandeered her husband to quit his job and stay home with the baby. Irving Pichel’s warning—that a child star upset the family balance of power—had sprung disastrously to life. Becoming a babysitter to Svetlana was the final indignity for Nick. His days, Lana would recall, consisted of drinking, reading and playing the balalaika. “There was nobody for him to talk to, there was nobody who understood that he was leading a life that he detested.”

The pressure on Natasha from this turn of events was overwhelming. At the age of seven, she was supporting the family. She also felt guilty that her mother was sacrificing her life and creativity for
her
career. “I think if she had been able to express herself in some way… she would have been much happier,” Natalie would remark after giving birth to her own children. Lana believes their mother had to have been unhappy. “But I don’t think she ever knew it. Not consciously. How can you live your life for one person and have nothing else in your life?” A companion of Maria’s in the last years of her life posits that Maria had everything she ever wanted, “her dream of being an actress, her dream of having wealth—but she had it through Natalie.” From the time Mud saw her cameo cut from
Happy Land
, she transferred her dream of stardom to Natasha, living the fantasy through her creation, “Natalie Wood,” the composite of mother and daughter. When Natalie received an invitation that spring to the Hollywood premiere of
Tomorrow Is Forever
, Maria, her alter ego, was beside her, strolling down the red carpet under the spotlight, gaping at Gary Cooper, Greer Garson, Gene Tierney, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, the movie stars whose pictures she cut out of fan magazines. Natasha, who had memorized their faces and life stories, found it enjoyable; Mud
reveled
in it. Natalie did her acting when she was given a part to play; Maria was an actress in her everyday life. As Lana recalls, “You couldn’t
take her anywhere, go anywhere, with anybody, because she would sing and dance at the drop of a hat and drive you crazy.”

Tomorrow Is Forever
received mixed notices when it opened at the Pantages in early April, though it would become a box office success. Louella Parsons, the influential gossip columnist, singled out Natasha before the movie came out, writing in her column: “Little Natalie Wood, as a tiny refugee, gives a remarkable performance for a child. She eats your heart out.” It was the official Hollywood seal of approval.

THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS
, NATASHA’S THIRD
film for Pichel, was released the same spring. Though it didn’t make much of an impression, it increased Natalie’s visibility. Goetz and Spitz, who had merged their company with Universal Pictures to form Universal-International, exercised her second six-month option on May 1, 1946, approved by “Mary” Gurdin, increasing Natalie’s salary to $150 a week. Actor George Brent, who played Colbert’s second husband in
Tomorrow Is Forever
, advised Maria to get Natasha an agent, taking her by the hand to Famous Artists Group, where Natalie Wood was signed to a three-year contract on May 8, represented by a cadre of six agents.

A few weeks later, Mud filed an official document with the court to reflect her “true” name as “Maria S. Gurdin,” not “Mary.” The implication was that she had assumed the persona of Mary Gurdin to execute Natalie’s contracts; now that Natalie had Famous Artists, “Mary Gurdin” could be laid to rest. Mud was intelligent enough to recognize that Natasha needed a powerful agent and shrewd enough to keep her vise grip on her daughter’s career. “Even though Natalie had an agent, she would still read the trades and then she would ask them, ‘How about
this
picture, or
that
picture?’ She was very much
on
to things,” recalls Olga. According to a family friend, Maria still negotiated Natalie’s contracts; Famous Artists did “what she told them to do.” “My mother ran my career and did it well—seeing that I got the right parts,” Natalie later complimented. Mud, with Famous Artists, submitted her for virtually every child’s role that summer, capitalizing on her momentum from
Tomorrow Is Forever
.

Natasha began to go by her screen name of “Natalie Wood” around this time, though she signed her letters to relatives and friends
“Natasha,” or she would write “Natasha” in parentheses underneath “Natalie,” symbolizing the distinction in her mind between who she really was and her movie persona.

Other sweeping changes came into her life near Halloween. Her mother felt cramped with a new baby, so the Gurdins purchased a somewhat larger house in less expensive Burbank, using Natalie’s studio salary. Maria gave no thought to Olga, who wanted to finish her senior year at Hollywood High. “I was in an operetta there,
Sweethearts
, and I really liked the people, liked my teachers. I didn’t want to switch schools yet again.” Olga chose to stay behind, renting a room from a Bulgarian neighbor which she paid for with her department store wages. Mud did not even bother to attend her operetta, claiming it was too far from Burbank. Olga, who was devoutly Russian Orthodox, accepted her mother’s heartlessness with her usual grace. “My girlfriend’s family came. It
felt
like my family.”

Natalie had her own adjustment problems. She felt displaced transferring to public school in Burbank with other third-graders. “I didn’t like it at all—in those days, I didn’t like children. I didn’t think of myself as a child, and I didn’t like any of the things children were interested in. Also, studio school had been so far advanced I was way ahead of the kids in public school and I was bored.”

With Olga out of the house, no one in the family had any friends. “My mother never got to know neighbors,” recalls Lana. “She had no sense of community or anything like that. Natalie was
it
.” Natalie’s touchstone was the faithful Edwin, who would hear from her via occasional letters telling him what her next movie would be. Maria set aside thirty percent of her daughter’s salary in a savings account as required by law and was conservative with the rest (“It was a little bitty house in Burbank,” remarks Lana), but it was Natalie’s money supporting the family. Six months had passed since she was seen on the screen, a lifetime to Maria. When she was rejected for a part, “I felt awful,” Natalie said later, “as if I had let everybody down.”

Sometime after Halloween, Natalie’s agents placed her in contention for a small film at Twentieth Century Fox called
The Big Heart
. She was up for the part of a precocious six-year-old Manhattanite named Susan Walker, instructed by her divorced, disenchanted mother not to believe in Santa Claus. The picture, which would become the Christmas classic
Miracle on 34th Street
, “was actually being filmed as a low budget ‘B’
movie,” recalls one of the actors. Director George Seaton, a former stage actor, wrote the screenplay, called
It’s Only Human
, based on a story suggested by his friend Valentine Davies while they were vacationing with their wives. Darryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, read the script and sent Seaton a note saying he loved it. The title was changed to
The Big Heart
and Zanuck assigned Maureen O’Hara, who was under contract, to play Susan’s mother, a Macy’s personnel director who hires a replacement Santa for the Thanksgiving parade who believes he
is
Kris Kringle. To play Kringle, the producers hired English stage actor Edmund Gwenn. Zanuck suggested John Payne as the neighbor determined to restore both mother and daughter’s faith in miracles. “I was only eight years old,” said Natalie in later years, “but I remember very clearly that at that time, at Fox, they were doing many, many pictures. They had no high hopes for
Miracle
whatsoever. It was just a little extra picture that was sort of done on the sideline.” O’Hara, who had left for Ireland to see her parents and introduce them to her young daughter, had not even read the script.

Mud, who
had
, noticed that Susan was a pivotal role, determined that her daughter would get the part. As if Natalie were not already confused playing different characters, changing her name from Natasha to Natalie, Mud now instructed her to watch Margaret O’Brien pictures and act like
Margaret
during her screen test for the role of Susan. Maria darkened Natalie’s hair and resurrected her pigtails so she would physically resemble O’Brien. “Margaret was the top child star, and Marie was so eager for Natalie to make it,” explains a confidant. “Marie said, ‘We kind of imitated Margaret, the look and the performance.’ ” Once they were friends, Natalie confessed her secret to Margaret. “There were a million little girls trying to do it,” observes O’Brien. “Natalie just did it better, I think.”

Natalie got the part of Susan in
The Big Heart
in November, just as Darryl Zanuck was making final notes on an unusual, ethereally romantic Philip Dunne script called
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
, adapted from a 1945 novel,
The Ghost of Captain Gregg and Mrs. Muir
. The story, set at the turn of the century, was about a lonely young widow in London who moves with her small daughter to an English seaside cottage, where she falls in love with the spirit of a roguish sea captain. Zanuck had assigned the film to Fox producer Fred Kohlmar, who hired Dunne, admired for his tender characterization in
How Green Was My Valley
. Kohlmar convinced Joseph Mankiewicz, the literate screenwriter-director-producer, to direct. Mankiewicz was challenged by the idea of
creating what he described as “essentially a ‘mood’ story,” a love affair between a woman and a ghost. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn agreed to play the leads, according to Dunne’s wife, Amanda, “and Tracy bowed out.” The handsome, acerbic English actor Rex Harrison, who had just had a major success with his first American film,
Anna and the King of Siam
, was cast to replace Tracy as the captain. With Tracy gone, Hepburn departed and several other actresses were considered to play Lucy Muir: Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, Olivia De Havilland. Zanuck decided upon Gene Tierney, the delicately beautiful brunette best known as the mysterious
Laura
from the 1944 Otto Preminger film. Petite Natalie, with her hair darkened to call to mind Margaret O’Brien, bore an amazing resemblance to Tierney, making her an obvious contender for the part of Mrs. Muir’s daughter, Anna. It was not a large role—young Anna is in a dozen or so small scenes and disappears when the film leaps forward in time—but it was a prestige film.

In the final few days before she was to start
The Big Heart
, Natalie auditioned in front of director Joseph Mankiewicz for the part of Anna Muir, the English child. Mud’s punishing preparation and Natalie’s obsessive perfectionism were in evidence at the audition. As Mankiewicz would remember: “I asked her, ‘Did you read the whole script, or just your part?’ She answered, ‘The whole script.’ I then asked her, ‘How do you spell Mankiewicz?’ and she spelled it right, all the way down to the ‘cz.’ I told her she had the part.”

Director George Seaton had decided to incorporate the actual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade into
The Big Heart
and got permission to film inside the store, so Natalie and Mud flew to New York on November 17 to start location shooting. Fox sent Maureen O’Hara a telegram in Dublin, where she had just arrived, instructing her to cut short her family reunion. O’Hara was furious. “Because I didn’t know what the script was, I didn’t know what it was about, I didn’t know anything except I was ordered by my boss to be back in New York.” “It was a low-budget film,” observes one of the actors. “The producers were saying, ‘Let’s hurry up. We don’t have any money.’”

O’Hara read the script when she unpacked, “and I thought, ‘I’m not so mad after all.’ ”
Miracle on 34th Street
was charmed from the beginning, according to O’Hara. “Every day, it was magic. We had a wonderful, happy, magical time making the movie. Edmund Gwenn
was
Santa Claus. I mean that literally. He believed he was Santa Claus.” So did Natalie, who found New York thrilling this trip, perhaps because she had Maria along for security. “I fell madly in love with Louie, the headwaiter at the Carlton, and had chicken salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

On the set of
The Big Heart
, One-Take Natalie, her new nickname, impressed everyone. If the adult actors forgot their lines, she cued them. Seaton, the director, was amazed at how businesslike she was. Her only coaching came from Mud whispering,
“Be Margaret O’Brien
.” (Mud’s coaching was strictly at night; on set, she continued to let the director control Natalie: “Marie never interfered with the filming. Marie interfered with the
negotiations
, the
contracts
. Once she got what she wanted, then Natalie went to work.”) Natalie was in effect playing two parts: Susan, and Margaret O’Brien
playing
Susan. She was so effective, states O’Brien, “a lot of people think it’s
me
in the movie.” Natalie’s most vivid memory of the film, later, was “Edmund Gwenn teaching me how to act like a monkey,” a scene where her O’Brien impersonation is evident: O’Brien had imitated a monkey in exactly the same way in
Meet Me in St. Louis
two years before.

Natalie may have mimicked O’Brien, but her talent was genuine. Seaton, her director on
Miracle
, said she had “an instinctive sense of timing and emotion” he had seen in only one other child. Natalie described her technique as a child actress, later, as instinctive. She first read the script; if she had any questions about her character or the story, she asked an adult. Then she re-read the script “many times.” The night before a scene, she memorized the next day’s lines, “visualizing the whole page.” When she played the scene, she said the lines the way she instinctually felt her character would. Her performances, as a result, were natural.

The part of a skeptical child whose parent teaches her Santa Claus isn’t real was a radical departure from Natalie’s own life. Her mother took her to see a department store Santa that December. When Natalie jumped off Santa’s lap, Mud jumped on, whispering in Santa’s ear everything she wanted for Christmas. Olga, who was along, cringed with embarrassment. Playing Susan required Natalie to create a character different from herself. She drew on her intelligence to become Susan, as opposed to the waifish vulnerability she projected as Margaret.

Natalie’s acting gifts were tested that month. While she was playing Susan, the cynical New Yorker, she flew back to California to perform her first scenes as Anna, the English child, then she returned to New York to finish location shots as Susan, switching back and forth between an American and British accent. She began each day on the set of
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
walking up to Mankiewicz in his director’s chair and spelling out “M-A-N-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z.” Mankiewicz, who had never directed a child before, called Natalie “the smartest moppet” he knew. “I knew she would become an actress because she was always watching. She watched Edna Best,
*
she watched Rex Harrison.” Word of her simultaneous performances in
Ghost
and
The Big Heart
started to circulate at Fox, where the publicity department was calling Natalie a “wonder-child.” When she received the Box Office Blue Ribbon Award at the end of the year for
Tomorrow Is Forever
, Fox made overtures to Universal-International to buy her contract. Universal refused.

Natalie was too busy to notice the fuss being made over her. She spent the end of December back at home in California on the Fox soundstage where Seaton was directing interior scenes on
The Big Heart
, occasionally racing over to the set of
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
. The exterior scenes in
Ghost
were being shot in Palos Verdes, north of Long Beach, which Mankiewicz had chosen to portray the English seaside. Fox set designers had constructed a gated Victorian as Mrs. Muir’s haunted cottage, where Natalie’s character, Anna, carves her name on a plank near the sea, the first of numerous water scenes in her films. Natalie would have fond memories of that winter: