Pieces of My Heart (14 page)

In August 1957, Natalie was going on location for
Marjorie Morningstar,
and I went with her. The company was shooting at Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks, and Natalie and I lived together for the three weeks they were on location. Warner Bros. obviously felt that publicity about our relationship wouldn’t be helpful, because nothing leaked to the press. Mud was there at Schroon as well and served us breakfast in bed, which she probably didn’t do with Nicky Hilton.

After
Marjorie Morningstar
was finished, Natalie and I began to have serious talks about our future. We both realized that every day we had to be apart was a day we were uncomfortable. Put simply, we wanted to be together. The only possible problem we could both agree we had was our conflicting careers. We agreed that we should never be separated for more than a couple of weeks, which meant that movie shoots and publicity tours would have to be carefully scheduled.

On December 6, one year after our first serious date, Natalie got a present for me, an ID bracelet. I took her to dinner at Romanoff’s, but I hadn’t said anything about our anniversary, so I think she was worried that I had forgotten it.

I opened a bottle of champagne, poured two glasses, and handed one to Natalie. At that point, she noticed the diamond and pearl ring at the bottom of the glass. I told her to read what was engraved on it.
MARRY ME
, it said. She was totally surprised and immediately said, “Yes!” I ordered more champagne. At the bottom of her glass was a pair of pearl earrings. Another glass, and another charm for the
WOW, CHARLIE
bracelet. On the back of the charm was engraved
TODAY WE’RE ONE YEAR OLD
.

The next day Natalie wrote in her journal: “‘Two lonely stars with no place in the sun found their orbit—each other—and they were one.’ I sent this to R on the anniversary of our first love. It also turned out to be the day that we were engaged to be married, and the start of our real life.”

My father ran true to form. When I told him that I was leaning toward asking Natalie to marry me, he told me he didn’t want me to get married, not to anybody. He wanted me to wait until I was at least thirty. My response was to mutter, “Fuck you!” under my breath and do what I wanted to do.

Natalie and I were married a few weeks after that dinner, on Saturday, December 28, 1957. She was nineteen, I was twenty-seven. Warner Bros. wanted to control the wedding because of Natalie; Fox wanted to control the wedding because of me. I realized that if we left it up to the people we worked for, we would be married at the Hollywood Bowl, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic serenading us with “The Wedding March.” The hell with that.

So we snuck out of town and got married in Scottsdale, Arizona. The church was the Scottsdale Methodist Church. Barbara Gould was Natalie’s maid of honor, and my father was my best man. (He liked her a great deal, and I confess that I still wanted his approval.) There were only about a dozen people in the church, among them Natalie’s sister Lana, Mary Loos and her husband Richard Sale, my business manager Andy Maree and his wife Pru, and Nick Adams.

Natalie wore an ankle-length gown that was made of white lace and encrusted with hundreds of tiny seed pearls. Instead of a traditional veil, a mantilla of the finest lace covered her head. Natalie was my girl, and now she was my wife, so of course I was enchanted by her looks, but that day she surpassed herself. She was far beyond beautiful, she was exquisite, like a stunning portrait by Velázquez, except Velázquez never had a subject as beautiful as Natalie.

After the ceremony, we had a party at the Valley Ho resort and left. I had a train car pick us up and take us across the country to Chicago; then we changed trains to go to Florida. I had booked a place in Stuart, Florida, where we were going to go fishing. Well, Stuart was terrible, totally unromantic. We were there only a couple of nights; then we got on the train and went to New York, to the Sherry-Netherland.

On the way back, a fellow in Chicago told me we were being given a Corvette to drive back home. I showed up at the dealership, and the manager said he hadn’t heard about the gift, but I could take the car. We’re movie stars, right? Doesn’t the world always open its arms for movie stars? It seemed like the most logical thing in the world.

So Natalie and I piled into the Corvette and drove across the country. The Corvette was gorgeous—metallic gray finish with red leather interior—but it paled next to Natalie. Our drive across country was intimate, enveloping, and great; radio stations would announce that Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner were on Highway 32 outside of Lubbock, and a half-hour later there would be dozens of cars tailing us.

Except for times like that, during long stretches of the drive it felt like we were the only people alive, which was very much the way we both wanted it. Unfortunately, I found out that the gift of the Corvette was a practical joke cooked up by a guy at Warner Bros. named Frank Casey. It wasn’t a gift at all, and since I had put thousands of miles on the car, I ended up having to buy it from the dealership in Chicago, which struck me as a heavy joke.

After we got back to Los Angeles and began married life, we didn’t exactly integrate our very different social circles. Natalie’s friend Nick Adams hung around a little bit, but mostly the group Natalie had been hanging around with disappeared, and we started associating with Frank Sinatra and his circle and the rest of my friends. When it came to dogs, my other great love, Natalie had poodles, which are not my favorite breed, but because they were Natalie’s they were just fine with me.

We got back to Los Angeles in time for Christmas and spent the holiday at my apartment on Durant Drive. At that time there was a wonderful jeweler out here named Ruser, from whom I had gotten the apartment. Ruser had a superb engraver named Al Lee, and that first Christmas I started to give Natalie jewelry—bracelets and charms with things engraved on them that were particular to us and wouldn’t have as much meaning to anybody else. We never needed a specific holiday to lavish gifts on each other; a simple vacation would be as good a reason as any, or the anniversary of our first date.

I tended to give gifts that were small in size—I still love to give jewelry—but I found that Natalie liked to work large. She had a knack for fantastic gifts—she gave me a Jaguar XKE once, and another time it was a Mercedes coupe—and they were always complete surprises. We’d walk out of the house and there would be the car. “It’s yours,” she’d say.

From the beginning, Natalie made me spectacularly happy. It’s so unusual to be in perfect sync with another human being, to have everything understood by both of you simultaneously and to feel no need to explain anything, but at this point in our lives that’s what we had; it seemed like we even stepped on sidewalks at the same time.

I called her “Charlie,” “Nate,” or “Nat.” Sometimes I called her “Bug.” Mostly she called me “RJ,” although occasionally she would call me “R.” I think the bond between Natalie and me was so strong because we were in similar places psychologically, even though I was older. I was in flight from my father, and she was in flight from her mother. And we were discovering together, not just each other, but our talent and our place in the movie business.

Natalie’s great gift was her spectacular sense of life as well as her humor. One of the things I loved about her was that she was so genuine with other people. If she liked someone, she took time with that person. She was generous with herself, and when she turned her face toward you, you were the only person there. She didn’t scan the room looking for someone else more important, which is a trait most actors and actresses have down to a fine art. And one other thing: she was fun. God, she was fun.

Natalie was passionate on the subject of Vivien Leigh, her favorite actress, and the movies she could watch over and over were
Gone With the Wind
and, particularly,
A Streetcar Named Desire
. God, she loved that movie, and she loved all of Tennessee Williams—his particular poetic take on damaged souls. She liked to read a great deal, mostly novels, and liked to keep current on what was popular.

Her favorite designer for movie wardrobes was Edith Head, whom she trusted implicitly in terms of design. Natalie might have seen Edith as a sort of surrogate mother. Edith wasn’t there advising her about every little thing, but Natalie respected her intelligence a great deal. Edith knew the movie business backward and forward and, unlike Mud, was very objective. Certainly, she and Natalie talked about a lot of things besides wardrobe.

For Natalie’s personal wardrobe, she was always willing to experiment with different people and different looks, with the proviso that some things were not going to change—her love for Jax pants, for example.

When it came to music, she liked vocalists, some jazz and romantic dance music. And yes, she was a good dancer. Her taste in music was very current, whereas mine tended toward throwbacks—big bands and my passionate attachment to jazz. This, I think, was where the gap in our ages was most evident.

We found that it was very easy to get acclimated to each other’s tastes. The only thing about Natalie that initially brought me up short was her choice of perfume: Jungle Gardenia, which was Barbara Stanwyck’s favorite as well. I asked Natalie about it, and it turned out that more than ten years before we were married, when Natalie was a child actress, she had made a movie with Barbara called
The Bride Wore Boots,
and she had fallen in love with Barbara’s perfume. She decided when she was an adult she would use Jungle Gardenia as well. Well, okay, but it was always a bit disconcerting to me. However, I knew that when Natalie made up her mind, whether it involved a young contract actor she passed in a hallway or a perfume, she got her way, so I didn’t try to get her to change.

At this stage of her life, she was very ambitious and fascinated by actors who were doing things she wasn’t. She always had a great desire for the authenticity of New York—that’s where she met Jimmy Dean before they made
Rebel Without a Cause
—and she was fascinated by the actors who were working in television drama, the shows that Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer were directing, because they were so much more raw and passionate than the movies she was making.

For that matter, Elia Kazan excepted, they were more raw and passionate than the movies anybody was making. Those TV shows were far in advance of Hollywood in terms of their choice of material and the handling of that material, and they really pointed the way to the kind of movies Hollywood would increasingly make in the 1960s and ’70s. The vast majority of those ’50s TV shows would never have been made by Jack Warner.

Natalie’s fascination with New York translated into a fascination with young Method actors, guys who played the same brooding notes as Brando and Monty Clift but didn’t actually have their talent. Scott Marlowe, for instance. In Natalie’s mind, New York was always a sort of acting promised land.

I found her to be outwardly much less conflicted than most of the parts she played. She was naturally inquisitive about how things worked, and she was also very interested in how other people lived. I came to realize that she was extremely intuitive and perceptive about people—about who was honest, who was dishonest. She seemed to live in a perpetual state of joyful discovery, and since she had never met people like Fred Astaire or Clifton Webb, there was a real sense that she was coming into a new world. Her parents had kept her on a short rein, so by marrying me she gained, for the first time, a sense of real freedom.

We didn’t really talk about having a baby; we were very young, and we wanted to enjoy our togetherness before anything else. A child wasn’t completely out of our minds, but we didn’t work at it. We thought we had plenty of time, and besides, there were our careers. Natalie in particular was working all the time, going from one picture to another, as was I.

As a woman, Natalie had that radiance that made her one of those women everybody loved. She was everything I had imagined, and she immediately became the preeminent component of my life. My memories of those first years with Natalie are almost unmarked by any genuine stress between us. Those first years, as well as our later remarriage, had a purity of emotion that was never affected by any transient arguments.

A surprise party for my thirtieth birthday that Natalie threw for me at Trader Vic’s. The only guest was Spencer Tracy. What a present!
(COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
)

J
ust about the time Natalie and I were getting serious, I had made
The True Story of Jesse James,
a remake of a Henry King picture from 1939 that the studio assigned to Nicholas Ray. I was looking forward to working with Nick Ray on a western, but he was a very strange man. He was bisexual, with a drinking problem and a drug problem—a very confused and convoluted personality, even for a director, few of whom were as obviously tormented as Nick. I found Henry Hathaway, for instance, to be all about action; I don’t think he ever gave me a direction that involved the character’s state of mind. Hathaway thought in terms of direct lines of physical movement. But Nick was the complete opposite—he hardly ever gave you a physical direction. It was all about emotions, and that’s what he tried to put into the movie.

The problem was that Nick was always anesthetized; he’d stare off into space and then he’d say, “Try this. No. Wait. Don’t.” He liked acolytes; I have this mental snapshot of him wearing cowboy boots, surrounded by actors sitting around him on the ground. I remember thinking that he looked a little too comfortable. He was terribly enamored of Kazan, but he completely lacked Gadge’s focus. Every morning we’d all wonder how Nick was going to be today, which is no way to make a movie. I liked working for him—he was as close to the avant-garde as Hollywood got at that time—and he was very interesting in his various pathologies. I always enjoyed working with Jeff Hunter as well, and the picture turned out okay.

After Natalie and I got back from our honeymoon, I began
The Hunters,
with Robert Mitchum, directed by Dick Powell. I adored both of them. Powell was one of the great guys of all time, and Mitchum and I became fast friends. He insisted that I call him “Mother Mitchum.” One day we cooked up a juvenile practical joke—we hired a girl to sit on a bench at lunch-time without any underpants on. We were in Arizona, at an Air Force base, and from the reaction you’d have thought the men of the United States Air Force had never seen a woman’s private parts before. As word spread, we gradually brought the entire base to a halt. The fact that it was juvenile didn’t make it any less funny; actually, it made it funnier.

Mitchum and Dick Powell had worked together on a picture the year before, the very good
The Enemy Below,
so they already had a rapport. Mitchum wasn’t drinking at the time, although he did smoke a little grass. His marijuana bust in the 1940s hadn’t fazed him in the least; grass had remained his preferred method of relaxation.

Let me say something right here: Robert Mitchum was one fine actor. He belonged to that small tribe of actors who are more interesting in concealing emotion than expressing it. Most actors lunge to show you every card in their hand. That wasn’t Mitchum’s way. But that smooth, implacable surface hid things only up to a point. On those occasions when he let loose, in movies like
The Night of the Hunter
or
The Friends of Eddie Coyle,
the effect was powerful and startling.

The Hunters
was based on a fine novel by James Salter, but the script was far more conventional than the book, and in any case, beautiful prose can’t be directly translated into a movie. What’s left is the underlying story structure, which is often very ordinary.

Mother Mitchum wasn’t the only legend I got to know about this time. Fox had a project called
Lord Vanity,
a novel by Samuel Shellabarger, a first-rate historical novelist whose books—
Captain from Castile
and
Prince of Foxes
—had served as excellent vehicles for Ty Power. The proposed cast for
Lord Vanity
included Errol Flynn, me, Clifton Webb, and Joan Collins. Of course, I was terribly excited by the opportunity to work with Errol Flynn, one of a handful of truly legendary Hollywood characters. Flynn was making a much-heralded comeback at the time as a somewhat debauched character actor; his performance in
The Sun Also Rises
was being talked about for an Oscar.

I went over to Warner Bros., where Flynn was making
Too Much, Too Soon
. I was looking forward to telling him about the time he picked me up hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard years before. I asked about the location of his dressing room. “Around the corner,” they told me. I went around the corner, and there was a wooden building that looked like a little schoolhouse and could be wheeled around the lot.

The door was slightly ajar, and I said, “Mr. Flynn?” as I opened it. There he sat, facing the door, with his legs spread. Between his legs was a blond girl giving him what looked to be a very expert blow job. Flynn looked up, and his eyes locked with mine, which I’m sure were very wide. He slowly shook his head emphatically from side to side. I didn’t say a word, not even “Excuse me.” I just closed the door. Very tightly.

Unfortunately,
Lord Vanity
was never made. It might have made for an interesting picture; it would definitely have made for an interesting experience.

T
he marriage of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner sent the fan magazines into overdrive. There weren’t as many as there had been when I was a boy, but there were still about a dozen that catered to a predominantly female audience:
Photoplay, Modern Screen, Motion Picture,
and so on. The keynote of the fan magazines at any period was a throbbing, melodramatic view of show business. Every date was a possible marriage, every marriage was a coupling of titans, and every movie was
Gone With the Wind
. The fan magazines are all gone now, but the attitude still survives on TV shows like
Entertainment Tonight
and
Access Hollywood
.

Natalie and I were the latest model off the assembly line. Preceding us were Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, and Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. I realize now that the fan magazine sensibility could subtly affect your attitude about yourself. What’s DeMille’s line in
Sunset Boulevard
? “A dozen press agents can do terrible things to the human spirit.” Among other things, all that publicity can make you feel bulletproof when in fact you’re not.

In this period, we were mostly living on my salary, because Natalie had refused all the scripts Jack Warner sent her after
Marjorie Morningstar
. The only picture she regretted turning down was
A Summer Place,
not because it was particularly good, but because it was particularly successful. Warner was infuriated and put her on suspension.

It wasn’t just Jack’s tacky taste in projects that made her angry. She was also grossly underpaid. Finally, in early 1959, Warner gave Natalie a new contract that started at $1,000 a week and ran up to $7,500 a week. The most important thing, as far as Natalie was concerned, was the provision that for every picture she made at Warner’s, she could make another picture for somebody else. She didn’t trust Jack Warner and believed she’d have to do her quality work for someone else.

She was right, more or less. The first picture she made back at Warner’s was
Cash McCall,
a programmer with Jim Garner that was strictly designed to exploit his new fame stemming from the
Maverick
TV show.

I
first met Frank Sinatra when I was about twenty-four, shortly after he had broken up with Ava Gardner. Like most guys of my generation, I had tremendous admiration for him as a man and as a musician. He was such a tremendous influence, as much as Brando was in another sphere—the dialogue, the Jack Daniel’s, the manner, everything. And in his work he was like Brando in another way: the combination of an overtly tough masculinity on the surface and, just beneath that, total emotional openness. My friendship with Frank easily broadened to include Natalie, and we both became part of his circle.

One day we were all in New York when Natalie casually mentioned that she had never seen the East Coast, so nothing would do but that Frank had to charter a Beechcraft, and the three of us took a flight up the East Coast so that Natalie could see that part of America from the air.

Frank was an enormously exciting man to be around, but I don’t believe that he was ever content. He was very restless, both physically and in every other way. He wanted to get out there and get it done, and he didn’t have a lot of patience—or rather, he was somewhat patient with recording, but not patient at all with movies. If you were making a movie with Frank, you had to be on your toes, because he’d only do a shot once or twice, and he would get really pissed off if it didn’t go well. As I gained more experience, I would begin to see what he was talking about, because there is an awful lot of wasted motion in motion pictures.

Looking back, I don’t think Frank was comfortable with movies in the same way he was with music. With his music, he was in control. He knew what sound and what emotion he wanted before he walked into the recording studio. But there are so many more people standing between an actor and the audience than there are between a singer and the audience. He knew that a movie was going to be taken and edited in a way that he couldn’t control, and I don’t think he ever quite learned how to assert himself in movies the way he did in music.

That said, people think that because he would shoot only one or two takes he didn’t take it seriously, but that wasn’t the case at all. Spencer Tracy didn’t like a lot of takes either, and nobody thought he was casual about the work. Frank was very conscious of his lack of training; he was never sure that he would be able to reproduce an effect more than once or twice because he had to rely on emotion more than craft. He was very serious about his work; he went over his wardrobe, the look of the film, the dramatic arc. He didn’t just pick up a script, look at it, and shoot it. He prepared; I saw him in thrall to the words of
The Manchurian Candidate
.

As for his temperament, Frank would reliably be set off by someone not fulfilling their obligations in the manner he thought proper. Any kind of dishonesty or bullshit would infuriate him. And people were afraid of him because his explosions were not pretty.

He never spoke about Ava, not ever. It wasn’t a subject you could bring up, and he certainly never brought it up himself. Even casual references—“Ava and I were here one night,” that sort of thing—were conspicuous by their absence.

He adored Dolly, his mother. I was with him when he gave her a house, and it was touching; he so wanted her to be pleased. Dolly was one tough little broad—she would have been the first to tell you so—and probably the only woman Frank was ever submissive toward. He went to a great deal of trouble for her, and he wanted everything to be just right—he had personally bought and supervised the installation of the chandeliers and everything else.

Frank catered to Dolly, and it was so touching to see him that way. He was such a dutiful son that it’s appropriate that they’re now buried together in Palm Springs, although it’s impossible to believe that the ceaseless energy that constituted Frank could be contained in a small cemetery plot. When you listen to his music or watch his movies, there it is again—as vibrant as ever.

M
y next picture was
In Love and War,
written and directed by Philip Dunne, who was a top-quality human being and screenwriter but only a medium-quality director. Darryl’s absence from the lot was definitely having a negative effect on my career. My costars were Jeff Hunter, Hope Lange, Brad Dillman, and Dana Wynter. Dana later married the lawyer Greg Bautzer, who was one of the great cocksmen of the movie industry and a behind-the-scenes player who had a great deal of clout within the business.

Greg was my lawyer, and a good one, but he was a very volatile man—a couple of drinks and he was off to the races. Booze made Greg pugnacious, and he’d take a swing at anybody. Between the women and the liquor, Greg was not your typical lawyer.

Somewhere in here was a guest bit in a silly picture called
Mardi Gras,
which was only notable as the last movie directed by Edmund Goulding, who was, shall we say, an interesting man: a married, gay, former boxing champion.

The year 1959 brought
Say One for Me
with Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds, directed by Frank Tashlin. There was a period when it was not fashionable to say nice things about Bing Crosby as a human being, but I had a great deal of affection for him. As for Frank Tashlin, he was another issue entirely. For one thing, he didn’t want Natalie visiting the set, which I thought was rude and unprofessional.

Much more important than that was Tashlin’s attempted intercession for a friend of his who had written some songs that Tashlin wanted featured in the film. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, two great talents on whom both Bing and Frank Sinatra relied, had written the songs for the film, and here was Tashlin trying to use me as a guinea pig for someone nobody had ever heard of. “Jesus Christ,” I told him, “I’d rather have Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen write my material than your friend.”

He didn’t appreciate my response, and I didn’t appreciate his suggestion, so things were a bit chilly between Mr. Tashlin and myself—not that I cared. The movie was about a caddish nightclub owner on the prowl for a nice dancer played by Debbie Reynolds, and I did a little singing and dancing. I wasn’t Astaire, but I wasn’t terrible. Bing played a priest. Again. It was basically a riff on
Pal Joey,
but a riff that was too little, too late.