Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Natasha (3 page)
For the three sisters:
Olga
, the lucky one,
Lana
, the survivor
AND IN MEMORY OF
Natasha
, the little girl lost inside
“Natalie Wood”
THE SOURCE MATERIAL for
Natasha
is located at the back of the book, set forth in chapter order. If an individual or a publication is quoted without being named in the text, consult the Notes section for identification.
For consistency and correctness, the Russian spellings of names are courtesy of Professor Olga T. Yokoyama, UCLA Department of Slavic Languages.
Natasha with her beloved, tormented Fahd.
The smile that lit
Miracle on 34th Street
.
Elvis called her “the mad Nat.”
Lana with Natalie on the set of
Cash McCall
.
The happiest moment of Natalie’s life was giving birth to Natasha, her second chance at childhood.
FIVE YEARS AGO, I happened to see a documentary about Natalie Wood. As I watched the clips from some of the fifty movies in which she appeared from the age of four, I was moved by the vulnerability behind her hypnotic brown eyes, by a pathos in Natalie made more tragic by her mysterious disappearance at forty-three in the dark water she feared all her life. Her daughters, who were only eleven and eight when Natalie drowned in 1981, expressed their grief with such poignancy the sadness was overwhelming.
Natalie Wood haunted me afterward. When I discovered there had never been an authoritative biography about her, I felt compelled to write about Natalie’s life, and her legacy, which has consumed the last four years of my life.
After interviewing close to four hundred people, watching her filmed performances, excavating ship’s logs, articles, photographs, birth, death, and marriage records dating from the 1800s, examining the sheriff’s and coroner’s official documents related to her drowning, making pilgrimages to every apartment, hospital, church, school, and house she lived in or attended, being taken by boat to the cove off Catalina where she was found in her nightgown that last, bizarre weekend, I am still moved by Natalie, who was as beautiful, and haunting, as those dark Russian eyes, and whose life is far more compelling than any of her movie roles.
Before she became Natalie Wood—Hollywood’s child—she was Natasha Zakharenko, the daughter of Russian immigrants who fled Bolsheviks. Her fame, and her drowning, had been foretold before she was born to her mother, Maria, who claimed to be Russian royalty and who created the actress personality “Natalie Wood,” a tale as rich, complex and mysterious as “Anastasia,” the role Natalie was preparing to play before she was lost at sea twenty years ago. From the time she
was a teenager to the night she disappeared off Catalina, Natalie was struggling to reclaim her lost identity as Natasha.
I am deeply grateful to the hundreds of people who contributed to this biography, including many who have never spoken publicly about Natalie before. My heartfelt thanks to her sisters Olga and Lana, who inspired the Chekhovian theme; to Natalie’s cousins, the Liuzunies, for their treasury of photographs and Russian history; to Sue Russell for audiotapes of Natalie’s mystic mother and alter ego, Maria Gurdin; to the Hyatts for invaluable confidences; to Natalie’s close friends Ed Canevari, Maryann Brooks, Jacqueline Perry, Peggy Griffin, Scott Marlowe, and Jim Williams, who bared their souls to tell Natalie’s powerfully moving story. It is a tribute to their affection for Natalie that this book is further enriched by the personal reminiscences of Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, Tony Curtis, Maureen O’Hara, Sydney Pollack, Karl Malden, and countless other legendary stars and directors whose lives she touched. I have tried many times, in many different ways, over the last several years to meet with Robert Wagner. My intent, from the outset, was to present a sensitive, truthful account of this tender star as a legacy to her family and her legion of fans.
My gratitude is extended to Ned Comstock, the curator of Special Collections at USC, as well as to the staff at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and to JoAnne Grazzini, who spent countless hours researching or coordinating transcribers, including the exceptional Hillary Gordon. Thank you to my family, to Tony Costello, Phyllis Quinn, Duane Rasure, Louis Danoff, Marvin Eisenman, Charles Higham, Pat Broeske, Barry Redmond, Ed Jubert, Doug Bombard, Betty Batausa, Ariel Kochane, Diana Rico, and Henry Jaglom for further support, assistance, or insight; as well as to Bill Ogden, Gerry Abrams, and J. K. Selznick for guidance. Lastly, to my editor, Shaye Areheart, for her patience and for sharing my passion to honor Natalie with this book.
Suzanne Finstad
Los Angeles, March 2001