Natasha (26 page)

For several days afterward, Natalie haunted the Warners commissary hoping to see Ray, “all made up like a sophisticate.” Finally, Jackie pointed out to her, “If you want the part of Judy, you’ve got to go in there looking like a teenager.” Natalie returned to the commissary in flats, a skirt and a sweater, wearing very little makeup, her hair in a ponytail. Ray did a double take, telling her she looked beautiful and suggesting she stop by his office, where he invited her to dinner to discuss the part. Natalie “drove directly to the House of Seven and Nine and bought a new four-hundred-dollar wardrobe.”

Jackie stopped by her house that night to assist in Natalie’s ruse that Ray had invited them to meet him at the Chateau Marmont, a hotel resembling a castle on the Sunset Strip where Ray had rented a bungalow and conducted script sessions. Natalie dropped Jackie off at home and went to the Chateau alone; Ray took her to dinner at a restaurant called the Luau. She went to dinner alone with Ray several times after that, according to Jackie, who continued to tell the Gurdins she was with Natalie.

Natalie brought her
Rebel
script along when she met Ray, with her notes written in the margins. She was bursting with observations, ecstatic that Ray was interested in her comments, delirious at the possibility of playing Judy. “He was helping her, because she’d practice and read [with him],” recalls Mary Ann, who went to Ray’s bungalow with Natalie a few times. “And he spent a
lot
of time with her.” According to Mary Ann, Ray and Natalie were on similar intellectual planes. “Natalie’s head was always clicking with ideas, and all of a sudden here’s somebody who thinks the same way.” Natalie said later Ray was the first director “who wanted my ideas.”

The relationship turned romantic quickly. In Mary Ann’s view, “the affection and everything started because of the mutual respect for each other.” Natalie was clearly enthralled by Ray, who stimulated her intellectually, introducing her to the works of Hemingway, Poe, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, as well as
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a magical French fable about the innocence of childhood that would remain Natalie’s favorite book the rest of her life.

She was close-mouthed about her sexual relationship with the forty-three-year-old director, even with close friends, though she and Jackie sighed like the high school girls they were at the romantic way he
seduced her. Natalie told Jackie that Ray had taken her to a tiny, candlelit restaurant with pink tablecloths—Natalie’s favorite color—where they drank champagne. After dinner, they went back to Ray’s bungalow, where he told her, “I want to make love with you.” Natalie found Ray’s prelude to sex eloquent. “She said, ‘All the other guys just want to screw me. He wants to make love
with
me.’ It had a different connotation and it touched her. She said that when she had her first experience with him, she felt like a virgin for the first time.” Natalie was nervous about undressing with the much older, revered Nicholas Ray. “She felt like she had never done anything before. It was just a very special thing.”

Ray gave Natalie the key to his bungalow, and told her he wanted her to read for the part of Judy. Natalie, hoping the role was hers already, seemed upset. Ray continued to test other actresses through January and February—Moore, Nelson, Patricia Crowley, Kathryn Grant, Gloria Castillo—keeping his relationship with sixteen-year-old Natalie secret. “Nick Ray did not want anyone to know they were having an affair, and he wasn’t about to disclose this. Nor was Natalie. She was jailbait.”

Mud knew that Natalie was sexually involved with Ray, but she had lost the power struggle preceding
Rebel
—the dynamics between mother and daughter had changed and Natalie was in semi-control. “She was a little crazy about it at first,” concedes Lana. When Natalie left the house at night to meet Ray at the Chateau Marmont, Mud would sneak out, taking eight-year-old Lana with her to spy on her older sister. “Mrs. Gurdin was a shrewd woman,” as Jackie would observe. “She was out to protect her meal ticket.”

Maria parked on a side street with a view to the pool area adjacent to the Chateau, and would fix her piercing gaze on Nick Ray’s bungalow, waiting for Natalie to emerge. “She used to drag me out at night and we’d sit in the dark car, on the street, and watch the time—see when Natalie went in, when Natalie came out,” Lana recalls. “I used to fall asleep in the back seat, praying that we could just go home and I could go to bed.” At the first sign of Natalie leaving Ray’s bungalow, Mud would rouse Lana from her slumber so they could scrutinize Natalie’s appearance for evidence of sexual activity. “‘What condition? Was her lipstick messed up?’ I felt like a detective on a stakeout.”

Her mother accepted the affair with Ray, observes Lana, “because it was helpful to Natalie’s career.” “Believe me,” observes Robert Hyatt, “if Marie did not want Natalie in there, she’d have gone in there, grabbed her by the hair and yanked her out. This was a break of a lifetime for Natalie and they knew it. The professional movie mother of all movie mothers said,
‘This is it, you’re a star, go get this picture—do anything with anybody.’
” Interestingly, the normally garrulous Mud kept this aspect of her management of Natalie to herself, though close friends such as the Hyatts knew about it. “Marie didn’t want to talk about promoting Natalie to date older men for her career purposes.” Jeanne Hyatt, her good friend, was aware Maria supported Natalie trying out for
Rebel
, though Mud kept to herself Natalie’s trysts with Nick Ray in Bungalow #2.

Fahd played out his tragic role as a tormented Russian soul, turning a blind eye to his teen daughter’s love affair with a twice-married director the same age as he. “He knew, but you
see
what you want to see,” as Mary Ann would describe Nick’s response, “and he had had a heart condition.” “I remember my dad being
really
angry,” Lana said later. The sad truth was that Fahd was a shadow figure in his own household. As Hyatt would observe, “Nick never had a thing to say about any of it.”

Natalie and her teen friends romanticized her affair with Nicholas Ray, even the straightlaced Margaret O’Brien. None, including O’Brien, believed that Natalie was sleeping with Ray so he would cast her as Judy. “She did fall in love with Nick Ray, there was no question about it,” declares Jackie, who lived the experience vicariously. The worldly-wise Mary Ann felt Natalie “knew going in” the involvement was not permanent. “We all experience those love affairs where ‘who
cares
about next week,
today
is wonderful,’ which is part of growing up. And he was a very
kind
man, and he taught her a lot more than just the film.” Years later, Natalie would describe Ray’s impact on her life by saying, “He opened the door to a whole new world for me. It was just glorious.”

Natalie took inspiration from the great literary heroines in her borrowed novels from Ray, especially those of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She identified with Fitzgerald’s brilliant but tragic wife, Zelda, enamored of Zelda’s brazen sexuality and daring behavior, comparing it to her affair with Ray. “She became aware of these sort of historical female figures in romantic novels and so on—the independent woman.”

Natalie costarred with Gigi Perreau, her child actress rival, in a CBS Four-Star Playhouse called
The Wild Bunch
in February, where they played sisters, as they had in
Never a Dull Moment
. Gigi, who at fourteen still considered herself a child, was astonished at the change in Natalie in four years. “She was very beautiful, and seemed very exciting and very glamorous. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I will not ever be that old.’ ” The constant, for Perreau, was Natalie’s drive. “She announced many, many times, ‘I will do anything to be a star.’ Usually you have other things in your life that you want—it’s not such a burning, such a
single
goal.” Jackie reveals: “She wanted to win the Oscar—oh God—more than life itself.”

She clung to Ray during preproduction for
Rebel Without a Cause
. When he was busy, Natalie took her acolyte, Jackie, to sunbathe by the Chateau Marmont pool using Ray’s key, dressed in a leopard bikini and ogling his reclusive neighbor, Marlon Brando. Once, when they were poolside while Brando swam, Natalie “dismissed” Jackie to talk to a cast member. “She realized later she was ‘playing the star,’ and then she realized it wasn’t a kind thing to do. She said, ‘I’m very sorry, and it will never happen again,’ and it never did.” Typically, Natalie was kind to a fault. When Nick Ray telephoned one morning to invite her to Romanoff’s and Jackie had spent the night, Natalie included Jackie in the lovers’ lunch, buying her a new dress to wear. She waved her hand and laughed, “You can pay me back when you’re rich and famous!”

The luncheon was a young girl’s fantasy. Ray kissed the sixteen-year-olds’ hands as they walked into show-bizzy Romanoff’s, ordering them screwdrivers. During lunch, he studied Jackie as if she were “under a microscope,” asking for suggestions to make the teen characters in
Rebel
more realistic. The big news was that Ray had made arrangements for Natalie to screen-test. Because James Dean was in New York, he wanted her to do the test with Dennis Hopper, an eighteen-year-old he had just cast as a gang member. Ray raved about Hopper’s talent, and asked Natalie if she and Jackie would “show him around town,” handing Natalie five hundred dollars.

Natalie arrived for the test in full Natalie Wood makeup, facing “an assembly line” of Warner Brothers actresses, all reading with Hopper. According to Hopper, Natalie called him the next night. “She had to identify herself to me over the telephone for me to know which one she was, because I tested with about ten women that day.”

As Hopper relates the story, Natalie propositioned him almost before he said hello. “She was really funny. She told me she thought I was great looking and she really liked me and she wanted to have sex with me—which never happened before or since. Helluva line.” Hopper was instantly fascinated. “In the fifties, to be aggressive like that as a woman was really amazing—it was an amazing
turn-on
to me, for one thing. But it was certainly contrary to any kind of movement, or idea, at the time.” Natalie told him later she was emulating Zelda Fitzgerald.

Hopper relates that he picked her up at the Chateau and they spent the evening in the car necking, talking passionately “about acting, and wanting to be the best, and our place in history.” It was the beginning of an intense friendship between Natalie and Hopper, tainted by Natalie’s disclosure—which Hopper states came as they prepared to make love—that she had just left Ray’s bed. “I thought it was
weird
, okay? At the time. I was eighteen years old! I thought it was strange, I thought it was weird of her to be
doing
it… he was having an affair with a minor. It was illegal for me, too, but at least I was only a couple years older.” Hopper asserts they made love that night.

Natalie’s friend Jackie, who knew nothing about Natalie’s tryst with Hopper, expected, from Ray’s description, to meet someone Rock Hudson-handsome, with electric presence. Jackie found Hopper sweet and shy, with “interesting” looks, Kansas-naïve, with “this wonderful little boy quality that melted your heart.” Jackie remembers him hanging on Natalie’s stories about Hollywood, asking to see the movie star handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater; Natalie compared her hand size to Elizabeth Taylor’s, announcing, “One day I’m gonna be here.” They showed Hopper the Hollywood hangouts—Googie’s, the Villa Capri, the Luau—accompanied by Natalie’s pal, Nick Adams. After a few days, they were all fast friends.

Hopper asserts that he and Natalie were “boy/girlfriend” from the time they met through the end of filming. “She was seeing Ray, but she was
with me
.” Natalie’s close friend Mary Ann believed that Natalie was interested in Hopper “as a friend, as a coworker,” the same impression Jackie and the cast of
Rebel
would have. Their perception was that “Dennis was just madly in love with Natalie,” and she considered him a pal. Hopper responds, “I wasn’t in
love
with Natalie. I loved her. She was my best friend. But I wasn’t
possessing
her, as an object, which I do
know about. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. It was really much more complicated, and much more interesting, and much more
involved
kind of relationship for two young people.”

Adams, an impish blond, who worshipped Hollywood stars and was desperate to be famous, shared Hopper’s fascination for Natalie, recognizing that she viewed him as a buddy. “He chose the friendship over the romance because he just wanted to be around her. She was that kind of a person.” Natalie and Adams gave each other the nickname “Chort,” Ukrainian for “little devil,” enjoying a teasing, flirtatious friendship. Once, when Natalie was lying on the bed in her room, Adams dove on top of her and they rolled around, laughing until tears ran down Natalie’s cheeks. “Boy, we could never be lovers,” she giggled. “We could never stop laughing!” Adams had even charmed Mud, whose sense of mischief could be as vivid as her sense of drama, under the right circumstances. “I remember him coming into the house, grabbing Natalie’s mother and throwing her around, then planting a big kiss on her cheek.”