Natasha (50 page)

The Hollywood-worshipping qualities in R.J. that had given Natalie pause on their arranged first date in 1956 united them in 1972, when Natalie had accepted the dominance of the star-driven,
Maria
side of the “Natalie Wood” persona. By choosing to remarry R.J., Natalie was choosing Old Hollywood, sublimating the part of her that was drawn to the “golden world” of Ray and Kazan.

After the Oscars, Natalie and R.J. set sail on a luxury crossing aboard the
Queen Mary II
, bound for London, to publicize
Madame Sin
and to enjoy a “pre-honeymoon.” Oddly, R.J. had seldom been on the water
between
his two marriages to Natalie. “When we got back together,” he said later, “we wanted to get back to sea.” In the freak manner of their original honeymoon cruise out of Florida, they encountered what R.J. described as “one of the worst storms at sea recorded in more than 100 years,” making headlines in newspapers and putting them in England two days late.

In their gilded tradition as a celebrity couple, they invited photographer Michael Childers on their pre-honeymoon. “We went off to Venice together, the three of us, it was great fun,” recalled Childers, who described Natalie as “the most glamorous star of that era. When she walked into a room, the room lit up! First of all, it smelled like Jungle Gardenia, a thousand gardenias. You never forgot an entrance. She was like the old school of actors: they knew that the camera was what brought them alive. They made love to the camera.”

Natalie and R.J. chose July 16, 1972, four days before her thirty-fourth birthday, as a wedding day, guided by astrologer Carroll Righter.
Neither was conventionally religious, and both had an interest in New Age spirituality. Natalie still resisted Maria’s occult ways, but she “was fascinated by universal New Age teachings,” according to her friend Faye Nuell. “She read a lot about it, she was always seeking.”

In a sentimental nod to their romantic few days off Catalina at the end of their first honeymoon, R.J. and Natalie decided to have their ceremony on a boat, at sunset, borrowing a friend’s yacht, called
The Ramblin’ Rose
, moored at Malibu in Paradise Cove. The only guests were family and a few friends, with Natalie and Natasha wearing matching gingham dresses, with a picnic for a reception. “It was marvelous in spite of the sea,” was Maria’s ironic comment to a magazine a few years later:

When they came back from their honeymoon cruise, R.J. and Natalie began “hunting all over the world for
our
boat,” as R.J. later put it, a quest that would take several years and lead to
The Splendour
, where Natalie would spend her last tragic night.

The Wagners spent the honeymoon months of their second marriage as gypsies, traveling back and forth from Palm Springs to Bentley to Natalie’s place in Tahoe to a townhouse in the Mayfair district of London, where R.J. was filming a BBC miniseries called
Colditz
to circumvent a restriction that blocked him from appearing on TV in the U.S., part of his legal dispute with Universal.

Maria sometimes went along as a nanny for Natasha, under Natalie’s close scrutiny. R.J.’s assistant, Peggy Griffin, who became close to Natalie early in the second marriage to R.J., remembers her relationship with her mother as “on and off” then. “Natalie had ‘issues,’ ” as Griffin describes it, “but she was also very family-oriented.”

Natalie’s purest relationship in her family was with Olga, whom she respected, admired, and had come to realize, with irony, was the happiest one in their Russian-Chekhov family of three sisters—the one who chose a simple life, leaving Hollywood, and their star-crazed mother, behind. “She thought the world of Olga. She always wished that they had lived in proximity to each other.”

Lana, like Natalie, was struggling to overcome a childhood warped by their mother’s mad genius. The effect on Lana of having felt invisible, worshipping and envying her famous sister, created complex issues between them, erupting when Lana’s husband sold pictures of Natalie and R.J.’s second wedding. R.J. bore a grudge. Natalie eventually forgave Lana, but their relationship was strained. As Lana perceives:

After years pining over what might have been, Natalie put her marriage to R.J. ahead of the complex and burdensome ties to her parents and younger sister, directing her perfectionism into being a wife. “She was very, very nice to R.J., she went out of her way to be nice to him,” observed Sugar Bates. “She would make life as good as possible for him—she sort of ran the house, but also she was the wifey kind of person, too.”

The vibrancy Natalie displayed as a teenager bubbled back after she remarried R.J. “She was always up to something,” recalls girlfriend Peggy Griffin, who palled with Natalie when R.J. was working. “She was a total ‘girl’ girl, always shopping and talking clothes and makeup and gossip and diets. She was such fun.”

R.J.’s influence on Natalie’s career was evident their first spring together. She retreated from an opportunity to be considered to play
Daisy in
The Great Gatsby
, instead embracing a television movie-of-the-week produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, costar-ring R.J., called
Love Song
, the first time since becoming a movie star that Natalie had considered television. There was a soupçon of reluctance in an interview Natalie gave early that summer, when she admitted that TV had less “prestige,” suggesting gamely that if George C. Scott could do it, so could she.

Two things attracted Natalie to the role, according to Gilbert Cates, the director she and R.J. requested: she would be playing a woman crippled by polio, “which would have been unique for her,” and the character, a lonely songwriter, had a scene in which she performs a song. “R.J. loved the idea, obviously, of the two of them doing the movie together.” There was a curious scene—either a strange coincidence or an intended parallel to their real lives—where Natalie’s character crushes a glass in her hands when R.J.’s character breaks her heart.

That June, Natalie wrote a letter to her friend, actress Ruth Gordon, Natasha’s godmother, expressing her new domestic bliss, including hers and R.J.’s plans for a third honeymoon in Mart Crowley’s guest house, followed by a few weeks by the beach, or house sitting for the vacationing Gregory and Veronique Peck. She was excited about the
Love Song
script, but even more thrilled by the short shooting schedule for television movies. Natalie seemed unenthused about returning to London for R.J. to film
Colditz
(“Jan.—Feb.—cold—ugh!!”), prattling to Gordon about remodeling R.J.’s house in Palm Springs. “We’re wildly happy,” she wrote Gordon, teasing that three-year-old Natasha was “running the whole house—I’m now not sure whether she’s going to be an actress or a director.” She signed it “xxxooo Natalie.”

Natalie cut off her long, sixties straight hair before starting
Love Song
(later called
The Affair)
that summer. “I remember when it came to learning how to walk like her character did, she wanted it to be authentic,” states Cates. “She had great respect not only for authenticity, but for other people’s feelings, two qualities that were not associated with conventional stars during that period. And I remember we got a nurse, and we brought someone in with the disease, and she watched how the person walked, and it was quite impressive.” Ironically, Natalie again faced opposition to using her singing voice. Cates recalls, “She and I absolutely wanted it to be her voice; Aaron Spelling wasn’t quite so sure.” Natalie prevailed. “She had a very sweet
voice, and she had great commitment… 90% of it’s commitment,” assesses Cates.

A few weeks before shooting began in Santa Barbara, Natalie found out she was pregnant, placing the TV movie in jeopardy. Cates had three concerns. “Firstly, healthwise for her, whether she could do the rigors of the movie. Secondly, whether we could do it in time before she’d show. Thirdly, she had horseback riding scenes.” Cates hired a double for the riding scenes, and Natalie and R.J. ensconced themselves in a glass house by the sea in Malibu to shoot
The Affair
, choosing the name Courtney, the character Natalie was playing, for their unborn child.

Natalie spent her thirty-fifth birthday, July 20, 1973, pregnant with R.J.’s child, shooting their second film together as husband and wife. The years of holding back tears through birthdays spent with business managers, and Mud, were in the past. That autumn, Natalie happily knitted a baby blanket, cheerfully disregarding the extra weight she was gaining, decorating a nursery in Palm Springs for what she was calling “the most wanted baby in the world.”

After years hidden behind The Badge, Natalie was rediscovering who she was. “She just was meant to be a mother,” her friend Griffin observed. “She just loved it. She read all the books about child rearing, and if she’d meet anybody with children, the topic would immediately go there. And it wasn’t just her kids, she just really liked kids.” Natalie became intrigued with the idea of doing a picture about what would have happened to her if her parents had stayed in Russia, part of her inner journey to understand “Natasha Gurdin.”

The only cloud over Natalie’s seemingly charmed life that fall was the cancer death of her nurturing friend Norma Crane, at forty-two. Natalie paid for all her medical bills and arranged Crane’s burial at Westwood Cemetery, near the remains of Marilyn Monroe. She ran into her old love, Scott Marlowe, at the funeral. “She started to cry when she saw me. R.J. grabbed my hand, and just was very warm. Natalie was devastated. She gave the closing speech. She handled the first part of it okay, then she totally folded. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. She was down on her knees, by the open grave.” Eight years later, at forty-three, Natalie would be buried beside Crane, in the shadow of Marilyn Monroe.

All of Maria’s dark, disturbing warnings to Natalie that she was too small to have a baby came back to haunt her on March 9, when she
was admitted to the emergency room at Cedars to give birth to her daughter with R.J. “I was in labor but the baby wasn’t falling. I was so scared. And physically, I was a wreck… I didn’t really know just what was going on. I thought something was wrong with the baby and they weren’t telling me.” Natalie started “fantasizing about terrible things,” she said later. After nine “hellish hours,” she delivered by emergency caesarean, a result of the umbilical cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck. It was a “disaster,” Natalie told writer Rex Reed.

Courtney Brook Wagner would be Natalie’s last child, though she often spoke of wanting more, especially a little boy.

While Natalie was nursing Courtney, she was offered a quarter of a million dollars to play what became the Faye Dunaway role in
The Towering Inferno
, a picture R.J. would be making at Fox that spring. She turned it down as “boring, insipid and worthless,” though she was restless after two years of quiet bliss in Palm Springs. “Palm Springs was wonderful,” Natalie said later. “But it got to be a bit
much
, you know? House guests every weekend. And then, during the week, nobody.” Her friend Tommy Thompson compared her to Napoleon in exile.

Natalie felt disconnected from “Natalie Wood,” from Hollywood, the only world she had known from the age of six. She convinced R.J. to look for a house in Los Angeles, and accepted a role that intrigued her as an erotically glamorous heiress in a Raymond Chandler-style caper ultimately called
Peeper
, costarring her brief flame Michael Caine. Natalie later told Tom Snyder she grew up believing it wasn’t possible to be a mother and an actress at the same time—Mud’s way of keeping her focus on work. Natalie decided to exorcise that demon.

She chose
Peeper
in part because it was filmed at Fox, where R.J. was working on
The Towering Inferno
, and where she could bring Natasha and Courtney to the set. Since Natalie was dabbling in movies again, she and R.J. made an agreement that one or the other of them would be with the girls at all times, a pact both took seriously.

Natalie went on a rigid 800-calorie diet to lose the fifty pounds she gained with Courtney. By June, when she started filming
Peeper
, she had a twenty-two inch waist and looked ravishing, according to the director of photography, Earl Rath, Jr. “She was getting a little older then, so I used a little softer lens, just to enhance the quality of her
face. Every shot, I’d glamorize. I’d make her look beautiful, which was not hard to do.”

Natalie was excited to be working again. She gave a party for the cast and crew the first day, and seemed “very up” throughout the highly technical production, which included night shooting and complicated interior shots on the
Queen Mary
. “She was right on top of it, knew her lines, and got it done,” recalls Rath, who found Natalie to be a “very nice, happy, bouncy kind of woman. She’d come in with a limo in the evening, we’d work all night long, and R.J. would drive down and pick her up.”