Natasha (7 page)

“I remember singing ‘In My Arms,’ with gestures,” said Natalie, years later.
“ ‘Comes the dawn, I’ll be gone. Ain’t I never going to have a honey holding me tight…’”
The Jewish director by chance understood Russian, according to Olga, “and he just fell in
love
with her.” Ironically, Olga had taught Natasha to sing “In My Arms,” and created the hand movements that charmed Irving Pichel. But it was Natasha with whom he was smitten, taken by “those eyes… she looks at you and you can read her thoughts.”

Pichel was so enchanted with Natasha he offered her a small, non-speaking part in
Happy Land
. Mud’s improbable scheme to create the kismet that happened to Edna May had succeeded, establishing a precedent: if a formula worked, Mud copied it. The lesson for Natasha, from her staged encounter on Pichel’s lap, was more troubling. “I learned at an early age that if you are nice to men, you can get anything you want from them,” she said at thirty-one. After Natalie became famous, Maria would tell people Natasha was discovered by Pichel when he spotted her on the street, or that Natasha wandered away and impulsively jumped into Pichel’s lap—creating the deception that
Natasha’s first part, like Edna May’s, was an accident of fate. Natasha, Olga, Irving Pichel and Natasha’s friend Edwin knew differently.

Nick, by Maria’s and Natalie’s later accounts, disapproved of his daughter being in the movie, though Olga recalls no such objection. Whether Nick objected to Natasha acting or not was of no real consequence, for as Maria baldly told a reporter in the mid-sixties, “I made all the decisions in the family.”

Natasha’s cameo appearance in
Happy Land
required her to drop an ice cream cone in front of Marsh’s drugstore, where Don Ameche’s character worked as a pharmacist. The scene was to be shot in nearby Healdsburg, where the director had chosen a street with storefronts resembling middle America. An actress was hired to play Natasha’s screen mother, who was to pick her up after she dropped her cone.

Natasha did not seem excited about being in the movie, according to both Olga and her chum Edwin. Her sister thought “she kind of took it in stride, she didn’t buck it or anything, she enjoyed acting.” Edwin’s impression was that Natasha was being pushed. “You could see it in her face when her mother would come out and say, ‘Natasha, come over here,’ or ‘Sit here,’ or do this, do that.” As an adult, Natalie seemed unsure how she felt, at four, about appearing in
Happy Land
. “Obviously I wasn’t shy, because I did what I was told.”

It is perhaps revealing that she asked Edwin to go with her the day she was to shoot her scene. Pichel agreed to let Natasha’s friend appear in the movie with her, “playing a brother or something,” Canevari recalls:

Natasha, under pressure from Mud to do whatever the director asked, did not have the luxury of a child’s reaction. Upon hearing Pichel describe where on the sidewalk in Healdsburg he wanted Natasha to drop her ice cream and how to make it look natural,
Maria asked the director: “With tears or without?” Musia even managed to get herself insinuated into the scene, walking behind Natasha—portending her role in her daughter’s life. “Like having a shadow following you around,” as Canevari put it. The genial Pichel included Olga in the background, pairing her with a young man from Annapolis.

Maria made sure everyone would be looking at Natasha. She dressed her in a tiny frock, doing her hair in Shirley Temple ringlets with an enormous white bow, like Dainty June, the baby doll character in
Gypsy
, Natalie’s future film. Olga remembers dressing in the trailer with Ann Rutherford, the actress playing Don Ameche’s wife, who picked up Natasha and hugged her, one of the few memories Natalie would have of
Happy Land
. By the time she dropped her cone, precisely where she was asked, Pichel was beguiled by the little Russian girl who curtsied each time he appeared.

Maria kept Natasha deliberately underfoot the rest of the
Happy Land
shoot, hoping to further ingratiate her to Pichel, “and I fell, I must confess, violently in love with her,” he wrote later. According to Maria, Pichel sent attorneys to the house with legal papers to adopt Natasha, a story that would become part of Natalie Wood lore. Natalie herself repeated it, as an adult:

How much of the story is true, or Maria’s tall tale, is open to question. Olga, who was fourteen that summer, recalls Pichel visiting once, but there were no attorneys at the house. Her impression was that Pichel wanted a daughter because he only had sons, and that Natasha had requested a bunk bed if she moved into his house. But Olga is uncertain whether she heard this conversation, or if her mother told her about it later. “He
wanted
to adopt her, that I
know
. And Mother
agreed, but then she told him of course it was a joke.” In a later, highly suspicious version, Maria told the author of a book on celebrity mothers that Pichel wanted to
buy
Natasha and offered his life savings. (“I said, ‘No, I don’t sell my children,’ ” she recounted with great drama.)

Pichel, who was married with sons fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-two at the time, never mentioned to his children the possibility that Natasha might be adopted into the family. Nor did their mother. “It was probably folklore,” suggests the middle son, Dr. Julian Pichel, though he concedes his parents “did want a daughter—that’s true. I think that’s why I was called ‘Julie.’ ” All three brothers doubt that their mother, who resented the movie industry, would have consented to the adoption. Marlowe Pichel, who was fourteen, speculates his father may have wanted to help Natasha. “I do remember he was kind of smitten with her,” relates Julian. Pichel talked openly about his affection for Natasha in a magazine piece several years later, never mentioning wanting to adopt her. “I seriously believe it’s a complete fabrication,” declares Natalie’s younger sister, Lana, who heard their mother spin the yarn over the years. Natasha’s “memory,” at four, of attorneys creating an upheaval may have been implanted by Maria. Whether or not he tried to adopt her, Pichel’s fondness for Natasha was unique, according to Julian, who never knew his father to form an attachment to any other child actor. “There must have been something special about Natalie.”

Pichel stopped at the Gurdins’ to say goodbye to Natasha when he finished filming
Happy Land
around her fifth birthday, which was on July 20, 1943. The story that would appear throughout Natalie’s later movie career is that Pichel promised, during this visit, to keep her in mind when the right part came along. This was a falsehood invented by her mother, for the truth would have too nakedly revealed Maria.

As Irving Pichel left the house, he pleaded with Maria Gurdin to keep Natasha
away
from Hollywood, warning her that a child in the limelight will never be a normal child again.

Mud immediately wrote to Pichel, in the guise of a letter from Natasha. Charmed to hear from his Russian pet, Pichel began what he considered to be an affectionate correspondence with Natasha, but was actually an exchange of letters with Maria, writing
for
Natasha, who was too young to read—a foreshadowing of Maria’s intertwining of
their personalities. “She read me his letters,” Natalie would recall, describing it as “a big day” for Mud when a note arrived from Pichel. “Mother was excited,” affirms Olga.

When Natasha was with Edwin, or her sister, she never talked about movies, or about Irving Pichel. Edwin remembered them starting school that fall, “just kids playing in the backyard on the swing and baking cookies.” Olga, who had begun dating Edwin’s teenage brother Gino, “could care less” about the letters from Hollywood.

The correspondence, fueled by Maria’s ambition and Pichel’s fondness for Natasha, grew “quite voluminous.” The two began exchanging birthday and Christmas gifts, Pichel would recall, with Natasha receiving books, dolls and a record from the director. Maria followed closely through Pichel’s letters his upcoming movie projects, searching the plotlines for possible parts for Natasha, while continuing the artifice of an innocent exchange of letters from a child.

Maria’s movie fever peaked in January, when
Happy Land
premiered on the West Coast in a special midnight screening one Saturday at the California Theater in Santa Rosa. “She told about thirty neighbors —
everybody
— that the movie was coming to town, they all had to come see Natasha.”

Natasha’s film debut, though just a few seconds, was a showcase for her.
Happy Land
begins with a narrator folksily describing Hartfield as the camera sweeps Main Street, stopping at the storefront of Marsh’s drugstore. The next image is a close-up of Natasha’s dimpled legs, as an ice cream cone falls and splatters. The camera lingers in close-up on the sidewalk where the cone drops on the word “PHARMACY.” Natasha can be seen reaching down into the camera’s eye to pick up the cone, then hesitating. The camera stays on her legs and the fallen cone, as a pair of women’s shoes approach Natasha, silhouetted by the shadow of someone else’s legs walking by—the unseen Maria. Once Maria has passed, the camera returns to full body length, revealing Natasha being picked up by her screen mother. The image then widens to include several storefronts as Natasha’s movie mother carries her down the sidewalk. Olga and her film beau can be observed approaching the drugstore as the scene ends.

Irving Pichel had managed to accomplish, through clever editing and camera angles, what Natalie would spend years in analysis attempting to achieve: extricating her mother. “All you saw was her
legs—they cut her scene! Marie was so embarrassed.” The experience may have served to reinforce Maria’s role as starmaker as opposed to star, for she emerged from the theater singularly possessed with parlaying her daughter’s walk-on part into movie stardom. Mud’s obsession to make Natasha famous vicariously fulfilled her lost stardust dreams. As Lana would observe: “She was going to offer her daughter this incredible life, and she was going to get to live it with her as well.”

If Natasha was excited about seeing herself on-screen, there is no evidence. Maria was the zealot. She walked two miles to work as an usherette, and on her days off she took her girls to watch the same movies all over again. Natasha may have been baptized Russian Orthodox, but movies were her religion, the cinema her place of worship. The Gurdins did attend an Orthodox church in Santa Rosa, but its influence on Natasha was minimal compared to movies. Before she was able to read, Natasha could identify all the stars in fan magazines the way other children might name characters in Bible storybooks. Maria filled Natasha’s head with fantastic visions of the Hollywood studios, where she would be a great actress, as temples of gold. Natasha invented a game called “going to the studio,” using the garage as an imaginary film studio. “I used to ‘check in’ every day and I would pretend to be Sonja Henie, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan or some other star.”

That spring, as Natasha was completing school, Maria Gurdin toyed with the idea of moving to Hollywood. “Maybe she knew Pichel was doing a picture,” suggests Olga. Pichel
was
directing a movie in June, a war drama with Dorothy Lamour, called
A Medal for Benny
, as Maria almost certainly knew from his letters to Natasha. The story, by John Steinbeck, included the minor character of a young Mexican boy. The possibility that Natasha might be considered for the role, despite being Russian, female, and blond, was enough to lure Maria. Pichel, who opposed Natasha acting in movies, knew nothing about it, as evidenced by the fact that Maria turned to gypsy magic to divine whether to move to Hollywood. “My mother put little notes behind icons in the vespers everywhere in the house,” recalls Olga. “And actually the note said
not
to go, but she went anyway!”

Ignoring the forebodings from Pichel and her own gypsy ritual, Maria did not even wait for the school year to end. “We just sold everything,” relates Olga. Nick, as usual, was a silent partner to his wife’s
ambitious schemes. “Mother could work him,” was Olga’s appraisal of the dynamic between Nick and Maria. “This house gonna sell bee
-uuuu-
tifully,” the wizardly Maria purred to Nick, bragging later that she “got three times worth of what I paid for it.”

Edna May Wonacott was the deciding factor in Maria’s brazen decision. “The Wonacotts sold their grocery store, they sold their house, they moved to Hollywood… and so Mother sold the house,” relates Olga. The distinction was that Edna May had a seven-year movie contract. Maria was uprooting her family to Hollywood on the gossamer hope of her five-year-old daughter’s friendship with a film director who disapproved of Natasha acting in the movies. “She decided to go, whatever her reasonings were then,” recalls Olga, “and we all went together.”

Nick and Maria Gurdin appeared before a Santa Rosa notary to sign the deed granting their house to a couple named Mason and Abbie Ware on May 26, 1944. Natasha and the family would arrive in Hollywood a month before Pichel began filming
A Medal for Benny
.

Before they left, Maria planted this item in the Santa Rosa newspaper: