Natasha (6 page)

MARIA BELIEVED SHE WAS CARRYING DESTINY’S
child, the world-famous beauty the gypsy in Harbin had predicted as her second-born. She ingratiated herself to a rich, childless Russian couple, Theodore and Helen Loy (originally “Lopatin”), whom she met through friends in the immigrant community, asking them to be godparents, assuring wealthy patrons for the unborn child she was convinced fate had chosen for fame. Natalie, a childhood friend would observe, was stage-managed by her mother “from conception.”

The Zakharenkos, who were struggling to pay the obstetrician’s bills, managed to move out of the alley to a cheerful duplex nearby at 1690 Page Street by the time Maria went into labor the morning of July 20, 1938. True to the fortuneteller’s prophecy, her baby, a girl, resembled “an exquisite, perfectly formed china doll,” said a neighbor. Maria granted the wealthy Helen Loy, the fairy godmother, the manipulative privilege of naming her star-child. Loy chose “Natalia,” for the pretty blond daughter of a friend in China. It was Americanized to “Natalie” on the birth certificate, which omitted the Russian patronymic “Nikolaevna” (daughter of Nikolai). The petite infant with flashing dark eyes carried the ponderous name Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. She was called, simply, “Natasha.”

“As soon as she was born, she brought us some luck,” Maria boasted later. According to Maria, Nick placed a small bet on the Chinese lottery while she and Natasha were still in the hospital, winning “exactly the amount” owed the doctor. “She brought money, even when she was born!” her mother crowed.

Robert Wagner, the man Natalie would marry twice, said after her death that Natalie was born to be an actress, “as if she had the word ‘movie star’ written on her birth certificate.” If so, the handwriting was Maria’s. Maria
raised
Natasha to be a movie star, as she brazenly told a reporter later. She breast-fed Natasha at the movies, whispering in the darkness how she would be famous like the gypsy predicted; safeguarding her from imagined dangers as if she were the Lindbergh child. Maria would have crawled inside Natalia’s skin if she could.

Nick simply adored Natasha. Astonished at having fathered a child, he treated her as if she were a fragile figment of his imagination, insisting that visitors wear masks so they wouldn’t breathe on her. “He just went goofy over this little girl,” an acquaintance noted. Natalie returned the affection in her eulogy to her “Fahd” years later: “I never knew anyone so brave,” she said. There could be little doubt Natasha was Nick’s daughter; she was a miniaturized version of him: tiny but perfectly proportioned, with his striking features. The quality uniquely Natasha’s was in her eyes; deep, dark pools of sensitivity that seemed “to go way back to Russia or beyond.”

Natasha’s earliest memories were of the Romanovs, seen from her crib. She slept in Nick and Musia’s bedroom, where the walls were a
picture gallery of the Russian royal family, hung with care by Nick, a skilled artisan. Natasha, whom he called “Meelaya,” Russian for “dearest,” was his grand duchess Anastasia. “He went out and bought this absolutely ostentatiously beautiful carriage, and everybody in the Russian colony just thought he was totally googy to spend all that money,” said an émigré friend, who wondered how Nick, then an elevator operator, could afford it. “They didn’t have a penny to their name really.” Natasha was baptized in the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church on Fulton Street in a christening gown and gold cross provided by the Loys.

Maria paraded her in front of the other immigrant mothers in Golden Gate Park each morning in her royal carriage, “and everyone oohed and aahed” over adorable Natasha. “She was a Russian-American princess,” younger sister Lana would say later. Maria’s purpose in life was to promote Natasha; to the exclusion of her daughter Olga, who was ten when Natasha was born, “old enough to take care of herself,” in Maria’s pronouncement. Olga, who had the disposition of a saint, accepted it without complaint. Cast adrift by her mother at two, she had attached herself to her friend Lois and retreated into fantasy, cutting out pictures of movie stars. She was proud, later, she had been permitted even to babysit Natasha. “My mother didn’t let anybody else.”

Olga’s affection for her favored half-sister was a credit to Olga’s generosity and to Natasha’s endearing personality. Like young Maria, Natasha was a tiny bird of a child. Marusia, with her piercing eyes and blue-black hair, called to mind a raven; Natasha was a trusting sparrow. She connected emotionally with her “Fahd” or “Papa” or “Deda,” her nicknames for her father (she called her mother “Mud”), snuggling beside him at night, enchanted, as Nick read to her from the Russian fairy books of his childhood—fanciful tales of firebirds and wild animals transformed into princes. Natalie would carry this romanticized image of her father, and of Russia, throughout life. “He loved to read,” she said later. “Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Turgenev… he was a scholar.” Natasha, “a smart little thing,” absorbed her papa’s passion for language and for Russian novels. “She was such a brilliant child. It was amazing sometimes,” said Maria. “My husband, he was so clever, you ask him any questions, he always knew every answers, and she was like him.” Natasha learned to speak in Russian and in “American,” as
she called it. “We never talked baby talk to her,” said Olga. Natasha, as a tiny child, was an old soul.

When Natasha was one, her father, weary of being at the end of the alphabetical cattle call of immigrant laborers, changed the family name from “Zakharenko” to “Gurdin,” a friend’s surname. “Nick thought Zakharenko was too Russian,” explains Olga. “During the end of the Depression, there would be great big long lines for work and there was discrimination. The people with the most comfortable names to call were called out for jobs.” The effect of living in near-poverty, forced by his immigrant circumstances to take menial jobs, took its toll on a man of Nick’s sensibilities, contributing to his escape in vodka.

“Mud,” not “Fahd,” was the disciplinarian in the Gurdin household, which Natalie would unhappily recall as “very strict European.” She and Olga were instructed to curtsy, forbidden to use “foul language,” forbidden to ask questions. “My parents felt children should be in the corner, sheltered from listening to or understanding what the grownups were talking about,” she said as an adult. Maria was an austere taskmaster, seldom demonstrative or affectionate. Nick, when sober, was the tender parent. “He
loved
life,” Natalie eulogized. “He loved music, singing, dancing—and he was never embarrassed to let his feelings show.” Little Natasha listened delightedly as her Fahd played the balalaika; thrilled when he gathered the family for “an adventure.” He was also violent. “I remember him getting very drunk one time and breaking the balalaika,” recalls Olga. “I didn’t know whether he was going to get a pistol. He would, periodically.” No one knew when, if, or why Nick’s demons would be unleashed by vodka. Olga believed he was tormented by witnessing his grandfather buried alive during the revolution. Natalie, after years in analysis, would characterize her beloved Fahd as “complicated,” possessing a “Russian soul” she likened to “a volcano that just had to erupt from time to time.” To the child Natasha, the extreme chiaroscuro of his personality—the shifts from his “soft and gentle underside” to drunken “Russian explosions”—was frightening.

Nick’s “rampages,” as Olga referred to them, were often provoked by Maria, who “knew how to get to him.” The house was a battlefield, with Olga and Natasha in the crossfire. Natasha, from earliest childhood, hated confrontation.

Her favorite word was “pretend.” Olga wrote and performed playlets with Lois, using the communal garage as a make-believe theater with
sheets as curtains. Olga and Lois occasionally cast toddler Natasha, whose sun-dappled brown hair formed curls not unlike Shirley Temple’s. The sisters, twelve and two, performed together for family, including cousins by Maria’s older half-sister Kalia, who had immigrated from China to San Francisco and was married with children by a Russian named Sergei Liuzunie. “At that time they didn’t have television, so we would both be into the performing,” recalls Olga. “Turn on the music and dance and stuff.” Natasha obligingly played along with her big sister; whereas Olga had a
passion
to perform. She loved to sing, especially Russian music, and had an appealing voice, teaching her precocious baby sister hand movements to popular songs. Olga kept a scrapbook of her ninety-four favorite movie stars, collected over years of matinees with her movie-mad mother.

Maria ignored Olga, whispering to Natasha their secret: Natasha was going to be a famous star… a fortuneteller in China foretold it. “When we walked down the street, Mother would put coins on the sidewalk when I wasn’t looking and when I found them, she’d tell me it was magic, and that I was destined to be someone magical. For years I believed in magic,” Natalie said years later. “She
brainwashed
her that she was this special child,” a friend confirms. When Mud took Natasha to the movies and the camera, at the end of the newsreel, pointed to the audience, she would whisper dramatically:
“Natasha! It’s taking your picture
!” “I’d pose, and smile,” recalled Natalie, who thought the camera was directed at her. “My mother told me all these things and I’d believe them.” By three, Natasha sat through two-hour films without moving.

Natasha’s personality—intelligent, eager to please, and “dutiful,” the word she later used to describe herself as a child—formed the tragically ideal combination for Maria’s manipulation. “It was easy with her,” Maria once chillingly admitted. Mud patched Natasha’s dresses to pay for a piano to prepare her for stardom, pushing Natasha into lessons at three. “The teacher didn’t think she was old enough,” Maria recalled once. “She did beautifully. Whatever she does, Natalie does to perfection. Always.”

The irony in their mother’s fixation on Natasha was that “she
was
different,” her sister Lana concedes. “It’s like when you watch a film, a TV show, a commercial, see someone walking down the street—and they have something special about them.” Natasha had a touching orphan’s quality in her brown eyes that communicated a hunger to be loved. What part of that was Natasha, or the result of witnessing her troubled home life, is impossible to know.

Maria kept the fortuneteller’s prediction that Natasha was destined for stardom their secret. The other half of the prophecy—that Maria was going to drown—was family legend. “Mother thought that she would die drowning because the gypsy told her,” confirms Olga. “She was terrified,” concurs Lana. “She wouldn’t get in the water.” In her dramatic whisper and heavy Russian accent, Maria would hypnotize little Natasha, conjuring up visions of stardom and magic in one ear; warning, “Beware of dark water,” in the other. “She really created an impression in her mind,” relates Olga. Natasha was afraid to learn to swim; frightened even to have her hair washed, because her head would be submerged in the bath water. “She was always afraid of water, like I am, especially if it’s dark waters,” Maria said later. “My
mother
contributed to her fear of the water, because my
mother
was afraid of the water,” corrects Olga. “My mother was afraid of swimming, and she was told that she’d drown. So this communicated itself to Natalie.”

Natasha grew up in a house of paranoia—fear of Communists, gypsy curses, hysterical convulsions, drunken demons. Her mother was like a fictional character written in magic realism, with her accounts of mystical reincarnation and resurrection, guiding her life by superstitions and instilling them in her daughters. “Peacock feathers or pictures of peacocks are bad luck,” recounts Olga. “You don’t
pass
the salt, you put it down, otherwise you’ll get into an argument. If you give somebody tablecloths or sheets, you’re wishing for them to go away.” As an adult, Natalie would remark that she “didn’t like mystery” as a child, how Russian superstitions had created paranoia in her she did not want her children to have. Her mother trusted only Natasha’s father and Olga to babysit her; Fahd refused to allow her in crowds because she was so tiny.

Fear was in the air Natasha breathed.

WHEN THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR
in December 1941, the paranoid Nick believed they would bomb San Francisco, so he moved the family to the outskirts of the city, in Sunnyvale. The Gurdins lived in the low-income projects, Natasha’s fifth apartment by the age of three. Nick found work at the naval yard as a draftsman and Maria took a part-time job babysitting, entrusting Natasha to Olga.

Maria and her daughters’ diversion from this charmless existence, apart from movies, were holidays near the Russian River in the picturesque wine country, a two-hour drive north. Families, most of them Russian, shared rental cottages the immigrants referred to nostalgically as “dachas.” One such holiday, in September of 1942, Maria, Olga and Natasha took a scenic drive with a Russian friend through the nearby town of Santa Rosa. As the friend turned down a country road at the edge of town, Maria’s eye seized on a new bungalow. She asked her friend to stop the car. “I want that house,” Maria announced. She found a carpenter inside and engaged him in conversation, learning that the owner was in despair because his wife had run off with the contractor. Maria entreated the carpenter to phone the owner, who struck a deal with her that afternoon, selling his heartbreak house to Maria for a down payment of $100, all the money the Gurdins had. “She
conned
him into it,” marvels Olga. “I think he even gave her money to buy furniture.” Maria, who didn’t drive, forged her absent husband’s signature. “How she managed to get a loan, I don’t know,” said Olga. When Nick arrived to take Musia and the girls back to Sunnyvale, “I said, ‘Nick, we’re not gonna go back home. We have a home here,’ ” she recalled. Flummoxed by his wife’s machinations, concerned about the long drive to the shipyard, Nick was no match for the formidable Maria. The Gurdins’ deed to the property at 2160 Humboldt was recorded on September 28, 1942, at a purchase price of $5400, making the immigrants homeowners and establishing Maria as the business head of the family.

Maria’s almost mystic acquisition of the bungalow in bucolic Santa Rosa proved, ironically, to be a determining factor in Natalie’s Hollywood career. Director Alfred Hitchcock had discovered the charms of the Sonoma Valley just before Maria, selecting Santa Rosa to represent an idealized small town in his suspense thriller
Shadow of a Doubt
. Hitchcock began shooting in Santa Rosa in August, the month before the Gurdins moved to town. That September, a second picture,
The Sullivans
, a drama about five Iowa brothers recruited in World War II, set up location shooting. The timing was either synchronistic or Maria knew the two movies were being filmed in Santa Rosa and maneuvered the house purchase to be in proximity. In either case, she took her four-year-old golden child by the hand and followed the film crews. “She went to all of the locations. I don’t know
how
she found out,” said Olga.

When Maria would later talk about Natasha at this age, she described her as “always acting,” desperate to be in movies. According to Olga, four-year-old Natasha was a “natural” when she performed, but she was not movie-struck. Maria was the one stalking movie crews, seeking parts for herself and Natasha; Natasha “just went along.” Olga—who knew every star, studied drama in school, and got her Social Security card so she could work as an extra—was an after-thought. “I wouldn’t even come home from school. I’d know that wherever they’d be shooting, my mother and Natasha would be. So I’d walk over to some of the houses.” Olga was happy just to be included. “My mother made everything
fun.”

The Gurdins had been in town a few weeks when Maria heard about a ten-year-old Santa Rosa girl “discovered” by Hitchcock in July. Edna May Wonacott, the “Cinderella Girl,” as she was dubbed in the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
, was flown to Los Angeles for a screen test and given a part in
Shadow of a Doubt
. The end of October, Santa Rosa staged an “Edna May Day,” with a parade in her honor. Maria Gurdin became obsessed with Edna May Wonacott, following every nuance of her Cinderella story. Edna May, the bespectacled daughter of a grocer, had been downtown with two cousins, unaware Hitchcock was across the street, scouting for locations. She remembers: “We were standing on a street corner waiting for a bus—and him and Jack Skirball, the producer, were looking at the courthouse for angles. And then they turned around and started looking at me.” Maria read the front-page story in the newspaper, which reported that Hitchcock noticed Edna May because of her pigtails, asking her to sing a song for her screen test. Maria made mental notes, using Edna May as a role model for Natasha. The town went Edna May-mad. “People stopped by the market just to touch my dad.” Maria accelerated her efforts to get Natasha noticed by film crews. “She was a stage mother,” recalls a neighbor. “Push, push, push.”

By Thanksgiving, Hitchcock and the crew from
The Sullivans
were gone. Natasha enjoyed simply being a child. She baked cookies outdoors in an electric play oven with her first and only friend, a neighborhood boy named Edwin Canevari. Edwin was small for his age, like Natasha, and fiercely loyal. “We played husband and wife,” he recalls. Maria trusted no one else to play with Natasha. “She was watching her all the time, even when we were playing out in the driveway.” Natasha
was never a “physical” child, according to Maria: “She liked to play piano and do some artwork.” This was, to a degree, Natasha’s nature; the rest of her perceived delicacy came from being treated like a hothouse flower. The gypsy’s warning continued to haunt Natasha, further restricting her from physical activities. “Never did she go in the water,” pronounced Canevari. “She was deathly afraid of the water.” Maria encouraged Natasha to play the piano, taught her to embroider, and bought her the oven for her to sculpt with clay, heeding advice from Olga’s nurse in China, who told Musia that working with the hands “exercised” a child’s brain.

Life in the Russian River Valley was an idyll for the two sisters, who played amid the apple orchards and redwood trees, gathering walnuts and sweet chestnuts. Nick made a swing for the backyard and the family acquired a puppy. Natasha, who loved animals, adored her German shepherd. Remembers Olga: “I used to climb the hills with our dog, and pick cherries on cherry trees. We had rabbits in the back, that later ran over to the Canevaris’ because they had radishes.”

Inside the cottage on Humboldt Street, the spectre of the Russian Revolution possessed the Gurdin household like a sinister spirit. Canevari, who lived across the street, “heard about” Nick’s drinking problem, “but I never saw it.” He remembered Natasha’s father as a “nice guy, used to rub my head and call me Butch.” Nick’s drinking, violence, and disappearances were the family’s dark secret. Maria claimed Nick never hurt her in Santa Rosa, though she conceded it was better if he was “someplace else” when he was drunk. As a child actress, Natalie would confide in juvenile actor Robert Blake, who was an abused child. “She had
a lot
to recover from. They use those catch-phrases like ‘dysfunctional family.’ I
know
that to be the case. And I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘Well yeah, her father was a drunk that beat her up’ or ‘Her mother was an unloving rat,’ because I’m not gonna give you any of those things.” Who knows what Natasha experienced inside her netherworld?

Maria imagined the mother of a neighbor girl was conspiring to poison Natasha. “I don’t know why, but she always had that in her head. It was just a superstition,” recalls Canevari, who heard his mother and Mrs. Gurdin talk about Maria’s escape from Bolsheviks. He linked that experience to Natasha’s mother’s paranoia. “I don’t know what she went through in the revolution, but she was afraid Natasha was going
to get poisoned by this one and that one—just people in general.” Maria was “overprotective” to the point of “smothering” Natasha.

Something about Natasha inspired others to want to take care of her. “Even the seventh- and eighth-grade kids loved her,” recalls principal Ethel Polhemus. “I remember we were doing the Virginia reel, and she got started the wrong way. I just took her by the arm and turned her the other way—oh, the youngsters were disturbed at
me
!” Natasha had a winsomeness that was endearing. “I can still see that little girl. Her eyes were dark. She was such a
pretty
little thing, a darling girl. She was just a doll… kind of dancing all the time, very sprightly.” Natasha was extremely tender-hearted, refusing to go fishing “out of pity for the fish.”

That year, when Natasha was four, she and Olga took a walk for a root beer, their German shepherd puppy tagging along. On the way back from the store, the puppy and Natasha darted ahead of Olga to cross the highway. A truck suddenly appeared, crushing the puppy under its wheels as Natasha watched in horror. “I told her to look ahead and to never look back,” relates Olga. Natasha never made a sound, too traumatized to cry. It was to become a significant event in her life.

In January, Santa Rosa’s movie theater, the California, held a special premiere for
Shadow of a Doubt
, attended by Hitchcock’s daughter and celebrating his discovery, Edna May Wonacott, who had signed a seven-year contract with producer Jack Skirball. Maria, a theater usherette, further fixated on Edna May as the precedent for Natasha’s impending fame. The Wonacotts sold their grocery store, moving closer to Hollywood. When the story broke in the Santa Rosa paper, “girls started standing on street corners in pigtails and glasses.” Maria was possessed that Natasha become the next Cinderella Girl, though how she hoped to accomplish that was unclear. Natasha was more excited about the kindergarten play than Hollywood. She came up with the idea of putting white powder on her hair to make herself look like her character, an old woman, saying later it helped her “get into the mood of the part.”

That summer, as school let out, Maria Gurdin’s moment announced itself in the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat. “Movie Stars to Arrive in S.R. Today
,” read the June 13, 1943, headline. By serendipity—this time there could be no calculation on Maria’s part—Irving Pichel, a Harvard-educated stage actor turned director, happened to see
Shadow
of a Doubt
, concluding that Santa Rosa was the perfect backdrop for his next picture. The film was called
Happy Land
, a Capra-esque piece of Americana starring Don Ameche as a small-town pharmacist who realizes the value of his life through the loss of his son in World War II. The story came from a best-selling novel excerpted in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Fifty-two-year-old Pichel, known for his patriotic, anti-Nazi themes, had already cast a few Santa Rosans in bit roles in
Happy Land
, including Mayor E. A. Eymann, who was asked to play the mayor of the mythical Midwest town of Hartfield in a commencement scene. Mayor Eymann, the paper reported, was officially welcoming Pichel and actor Don Ameche, providing a schedule of the film crew’s locations around Santa Rosa, with the advisory that some of the scenes would “use upwards of 300 extras.” To Maria, the article was tantamount to a golden oracle.

Natasha stood perfectly still the next morning as her mother brushed her curly hair, instructing her how to create attention so the
Happy Land
director would notice her, coaching her on what to say so he would like her, reminding her to curtsy—repeating hypnotically the incantation that Natasha would someday be the most famous actress in the world. Natasha took her mother’s prophecy to heart, concentrating while Mud braided her gold-tipped hair into pigtails, observing herself in the mirror as she metamorphosed into a tiny Russian replica of Edna May Wonacott.

Mother and daughter walked downtown in search of the film’s director, determined to create the fairy tale that had serendipitously occurred for Edna May. They spotted the
Happy Land
crew near the courthouse, surrounded by curious spectators. Maria, holding on to Natasha, asked whoever walked by, “How does this work? Which one’s the director?” When actors in army uniform began to assemble for a parade scene, Maria thrust four-year-old Natasha into the lineup. As Natalie would later describe it, “My mother made me go march with the soldiers. I really didn’t want to do all this. I was kind of scared…. Mother, of course, wanted me to attract attention.”

After a few days, Irving Pichel began to notice a “quaintly pretty little child” with an “absorbed expression” who kept following the
Happy Land
company from location to location, watching them closely. The toddler seemed to be leading the wandering crowd. Natasha made such an impression on the director, he mentioned the tiny Santa Rosa girl
with the “winsome smile” a few years later as a tragic example of children being pushed into movies.

Pichel would have been chagrined to learn that what he observed was merely the prelude to Maria Gurdin’s plan to get Natasha a part in
Happy Land
. By the second week, when the film crew moved to the high school auditorium for the mayor’s scene, Maria had gleaned what she needed to know. “When she figured out that Irving Pichel was the director,” Natalie would later recall, “she said to me, ‘Natasha, go over there and sit on that man’s lap and sing him your songs.’ ” Pichel would remember the waif he had been feeling sorry for coming up to him one noon. “Mr. Pichel, can I be in the movies?” she asked plaintively. “You don’t want to be in the movies,” the grandfatherly-looking director advised. Natasha, unprepared for this reaction, reflected for a moment, according to Pichel. The moment was profound. If she had been capable of free will, Natasha’s response to Irving Pichel, and thus her life, might have been different. Instead she continued robotically, programmed by Mud to perform her piece. “She changed the subject by telling me that her name was Natasha Gurdin, that her birthday was July twentieth, that her parents were Russian and that she would like to sing me a Russian song, if I would like to hear it.”