Natasha (48 page)

Agreeing to star in the unknown Mazursky’s controversial parody about wife-swapping and the swinging mores of the late ’60s was a brave move by Natalie, who was the only major star in the ensemble cast. Elliott Gould, who played Ted, initially “shied away” from the picture, finding it “exploitative, and I was not confident and really quite scared about it.” Natalie made it clear she would not perform a nude scene, displaying further shrewdness by accepting a percentage of the profits as compensation for a reduced salary of $250,000. She had become astute with money since the financial fiasco of her early marriage to Wagner. Costello, who wrote Natalie’s checks when he was her
secretary, remembers, “No matter what, she went over the bills with me regularly and marked them to be paid or explained… she was very particular. In one instance, she received a bill and she had me go to the restaurant and check the price of the wine. She was a very tough cookie when it came to a dollar.”

The filming of
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
, shot in Los Angeles and Las Vegas roughly from Halloween to Christmas of 1968, was a halcyon interlude for Natalie. Sugar Bates, who styled her hair as she had since 1963, recalls, “Paul Mazursky, the director, was wonderful, and when they started working, she had a great time.” Natalie appeared to be over the moon about Gregson, whose divorce was finally falling into place. “She was so happy. Richard would call her all the time, and it was so romantic and she was just thrilled, and that was the first time I ever saw her feel that way.” Natalie, Bates observed, deeply wanted her marriage to Gregson to work.

Natalie’s focus on her personal life, and the anti-glamour that defined the “new Hollywood,” influenced by political unrest and the breakup of the studio system, reflected itself in her shrinking attendants on
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
. Natalie even did her own makeup. “There was no silly star crap,” as Mazursky put it.

In a
New York Times
interview on location, taking place in a Las Vegas casino, Natalie mocked her former self, the studio queen with clauses specifying the color of phone cords. “When you start out… you have great fun making them put all that in your contract: ‘I want so-and-so or I’m not playing!’… There’s a time for that. I’ve had mine.” She even alluded to her “Natalie Wood” alter ego, The Badge, during her interview, referring to it as “The Image” or “The Face.” She mused to the
Times
reporter, “The whole ‘star’ business seems so far away,” saying she was after “the really reals, they’re what I believe in.” While saying it, Natalie was wearing a silver lamé Chloe mini-dress and a fur coat. When a fan strolled past in the casino to admire her mink, she murmured, “Sable, darling,” displaying the still-extant split between Natalie and “Natalie Wood.”

She endeared herself forever to the awed, slightly nervous Elliott Gould, who pronounced Natalie “perfect, she was perfect.” Gould was especially anxious about the famous last scene in the film, where Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice (Robert Culp, Natalie, Gould and Dyan Cannon) are in bed together to swap spouses. Gould, who was to
remove his underwear while beneath the covers and fling them to the floor, wore an extra pair of “rugby jockey shorts” because he “just couldn’t be naked” next to Natalie Wood. “We were all embarrassed as hell,” Natalie later told Tom Snyder. “And Dyan and I really were making sure that we were all covered up, and that we weren’t nude. It seemed so
shocking
!”

Mazursky shot the scene as improvisation, with the option for the actors to go as far as they wanted in terms of nudity and swapping. “I recall there was some degree of manipulation going on for the four of us to physically interact… but I couldn’t do it,” states Gould. “Bob would have liked to have, and I think that Dyan was hysterical enough to perhaps go on and use her hysteria, but the anchor there was Natalie.” Gould was devoted to Natalie for her integrity and dignity. “Natalie was not just there as a star, she was there as a fellow human being, like a sister.”

After finishing
Bob and Carol
, Natalie tagged along to Austria the first three months of 1969 to watch Gregson and Redford film
Downhill Racer
, rolling up her sleeves to become a “functioning groupie,” Redford would joke. “She was just a
great gal
. She helped out, and loved doing it. She went around and carried things. It was just fun. She was just a lot of fun.”

While in Austria, Natalie pushed herself to learn to snow ski, which terrified her, for she was still under Mud’s spell that she was too fragile for sports. “She was very gutty,” Redford recalls of her skiing. “She’d
charge
into things, and try them.” True to Maria’s forewarning, Natalie broke her leg in early April, flying back with a cast to be a presenter at the Academy Awards.

The first of May, when Gregson’s divorce entered its final phase, Natalie sent invitations to her May 30 wedding, flaunting Mud’s warning, “May weddings bring tears,” one of Maria’s litany of ancient Siberian superstitions.

Natalie tried to convince herself she didn’t believe her mother’s Russian-gypsy lore, while at the same time, she incorporated it into her wedding, an elaborate “crowning” ceremony similar to Olga’s, taking place at Maria’s Russian-Orthodox cathedral, the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary. Significantly, Natalie wore shafts of wheat in her loose, long hair, a symbol of fertility in Mud’s Old World shamanism. Edith Head had designed a wedding gown inspired by eighteenth-century
Russian Court dresses, with Natalie looking like the Russian czarina Fahd made her at birth in her carriage fit for a Romanov. Gregson chose Robert Redford to be his best man, and Norma Crane was Natalie’s maid of honor. Among the guests was Warren Beatty, with his then-girlfriend, Julie Christie. Pictures of the wedding were like stills from
Dr. Zhivago
, with beautiful people in extravagant costumes in a moment of romantic ecstasy that was doomed.

Natalie spent the rest of the year “radiating happiness,” as newspaper accounts describe her, barely fazed by the surprise success of
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
that September, making Natalie three million dollars and “shooting her back… as a
movie star
,” Mazursky would boast. She would later tell Rex Reed this “was not the movie I would want to be remembered by.” More to the point, Natalie’s obsession was no longer movies, but motherhood.

She learned she was going to have a baby the beginning of 1970, when she was thirty-one, a moment of supreme happiness for Natalie, who finally had overcome her mother’s gothic warnings about childbirth. “There’s nothing like finding out for the very first time that you’re going to be pregnant, and to go through that first pregnancy,” she said later, “because no matter how fantastic the next one is, there’s just nothing quite as miraculous as that.”

Natalie announced she was semiretiring to devote herself to her baby, telling an L.A. newspaper she was having a “delayed childhood,” realizing she had “never had time to play” when she was growing up, for she had lost herself to child actress “Natalie Wood,” who was too busy pretending to be Maureen O’Hara’s daughter or Orson Welles’ ward to let Natasha be herself.

In the months before she gave birth, Natalie supervised the construction of a nursery, knitting baby clothes while Gregson flew back and forth to London on business. That June, when she was six months pregnant and Gregson was in the U.K., she accepted an invitation on a rainy night to what she would later call a “fateful” dinner party at the home of producer John Foreman and his wife, Linda, friends of hers and R.J.’s. Oddly, the Foremans had invited R.J., who was quietly separated from his wife, seating him next to Natalie, who would claim she never knew he was estranged from Marshall.

“We spent the whole evening together and reminisced about our love for our boat and the sea… we recalled all the good things,” Natalie said later. “We just sat there and talked. It wasn’t flirty or anything like that.” When the party ended, R.J. walked her to her car. “It was raining, and he was worried about my driving home to Bel Air by myself.” R.J. followed Natalie to her house, then stood on her front porch to say goodnight. “It was awkward, and I finally said, ‘Well, are you happy, R.J.?’ ” Neither R.J. nor Natalie would address the question, focusing on her happiness at being pregnant. Wagner said later he drove around the corner afterward, stopped his car, and cried.

Natalie later would call this the “important night” in their eventual reunion, and he would refer to it as “the greatest unexpected meeting of my life.” Whether there was more to the encounter than they shared publicly, or with friends, is unknown, though R.J. would later hint that Natalie was “experiencing unhappiness” in her marriage. “I think we realized there was still something between us,” Natalie later told a magazine.

The next day, R.J. sent Natalie roses, as he had after their first arranged date, “with a little note,” she would remember. “It totally dissolved me. I sat and cried for a while, and thought that was that.”

Lana would later reflect, “There was just something that Natalie could never get out of her mind about R.J. He was never gone out of her heart.”

To Natalie, R.J. represented a dream, the happily-ever-after she had imagined as a child, the idol whose picture she taped on her wall at eleven and fantasized marrying. Those powerful images were the reason she had been so traumatized when their marriage fell apart, and they were what pulled her toward him afterward, in the hope of restoring a cherished ideal that she had lost. “I always cherished that early marriage of ours,” she said of her reaction to seeing R.J. again. “Sort of a bittersweet reaction of what had happened to us. My memories of it were beautiful, and sad… I was tremendously moved at John’s party.”

After her poignant encounter with R.J., Natalie devoted herself to two other long-held dreams: the impending birth of her child, and a future trip to Russia, set up as a television special by Gregson, with himself as executive producer. Gregson also made arrangements to produce a film, starring Natalie, called
Thank You, Dr. Reinmuth
.

At the end of the summer,
Downhill Racer
, Gregson’s debut film with Redford, was given a sneak preview. The pregnant Natalie, her husband, and Redford all attended, with great expectations. It was a “disaster,” Redford recalls:

Redford and Natalie veered in different directions afterward. “She was married and decided to try motherhood, to go down that road, and was committing to that.” Gregson stepped away from Wildwood Productions around the same time. “Our partnership broke up, because he moved on to other, greener fields,” explains Redford. “He had a bigger fish to fry. I think he had a more ambitious program than mine, with just our company, because he moved on to other things.”

On September 29, Natalie’s fondest dream was realized when she went through natural childbirth at Cedars in Beverly Hills, giving birth to a daughter who was a virtual re-creation of herself as a baby, with flashing brown eyes and an elfin face. “I can definitely say that was the happiest moment of my life,” she later reflected.

Natalie chose to name her baby Natasha, the identity that had been taken from her; “giving herself another chance to start a childhood,” perceived Lana, who listened to Natalie talk about how she was going to rear her children, which would not include stardom. “She just wanted them to have a
childhood
… a real childhood, and not have any kind of concerns about anything other than being a child, getting along at school, having friends.” When Natalie noticed Mud begin to circle around baby Natasha, whispering to her that she was a “lucky” baby, “Natalie got upset,” recalls Lana, and kept Natasha away from her, eerily reminded of how Mud used to throw coins on the sidewalk and tell her that she was a magical child. Fahd simply was entranced with Natasha, as he had been with his first Natasha, calling his granddaughter “Natashinka.”