Pieces of My Heart (27 page)

Natalie hid nothing; you always knew exactly where you stood with her. If she started to get frustrated or even lost her temper over things that ordinarily would not have bothered her, we both knew what was happening.

So Natalie picked up some projects. But after she decided to go back to work seriously, the offers were not overwhelming. Beginning in October 1977, she made a terrible movie called
Meteor,
directed by Ronald Neame, whom Natalie disliked. She felt he was a bullshit artist, and not even a talented bullshit artist. As for me, I had done a panel with him where he came on with that standard line of hack directors from time immemorial: that actors have to be treated like children. Aside from the fact he was directly insulting the actor that was on the panel with him, it gave me a window into the reasons Natalie had disliked working with him.

It became obvious that Natalie wasn’t getting the kind of scripts she wanted. She looked spectacular, but she was a spectacular woman, not a spectacular girl. She was at that awkward age when the parts begin to dry up for leading ladies because there’s always another batch of beautiful twentysomethings on the horizon, and they’re easier to cast, not to mention cheaper.

It’s possible that her iconic status worked against her as well, because there was a trend toward a different style of actress: Jill Clayburgh, Goldie Hawn, Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, and Barbra Streisand were the hot actresses of the moment, and none of them were classic beauties. Sometimes they got parts they weren’t really suited for, which makes the resulting pictures look somewhat strange today. Mia Farrow is great in
Rosemary’s Baby,
but
The Great Gatsby
would obviously have been better served by somebody who was more conventionally beautiful. As always, there just aren’t enough parts.

My own experience told me that good TV is preferable to bad movies, so Natalie began to think about directing her energies in that direction. In March 1978, I was in Hawaii doing
Pearl,
and the whole family was with me. While we were shooting, Natalie was offered a miniseries adaptation of
From Here to Eternity
—the part Deborah Kerr had played in Fred Zinnemann’s movie. It was a good, rich part, and it was quality material, far better than anything she’d been offered lately in movies. She decided to make the move into TV.

The only area where TV really differs from movies is in the element of time. TV is quicker and cheaper than the movies. In some cases, that’s good; the fast pace gives you less time to ponder, but it also keeps you from seizing up and getting self-conscious. The negative corollary is that corners can easily be cut.

Natalie had been acting since she was a little girl, and she was a total pro. She had a concept about her work that was terrific; she always figured out an arc for her characters and knew where the character was at all times in the production schedule, so adapting to the different pace wasn’t intimidating for her. The only stipulation she made when she moved into television, with which I completely agreed, was to have a rehearsal period.

Ultimately, she was an actress who believed in the material. If the material and the director seemed right to her, she went for it, whether it was a movie, television, or the theater.

Natalie’s costar in
From Here to Eternity
was William Devane. I hadn’t been worried about her costars in the movies she’d made since we got back together—Michael Caine didn’t play around, and neither did Sean Connery. But I think I probably had a permanent warning bell in my head after
Splendor in the Grass,
and there were times when I may have been expecting it to go off. Natalie didn’t want me around when she was shooting a nude love scene in the ocean with Bill Devane. It made me nervous—needlessly so. She was first-rate in
From Here to Eternity
and won the Golden Globe for “Best Actress in a TV Series.” I was over the moon with pride.

Another reward from that show was Elizabeth Applegate, who was hired as Natalie’s personal assistant and remains by my side today. Liz has been involved in all of my professional and many of my personal activities ever since. She has sat with the kids while they did their homework, and she has sat with me through lawsuits. She helped me produce movies and TV shows and has been without question a great stabilizing force in my life.

NBC wanted to turn
From Here to Eternity
into a series and offered Natalie the chance to repeat her role. She turned it down and did
The Last Married Couple in America
with our friend George Segal.

In 1980 Natalie did a TV movie called
The Memory of Eva Ryker
. It was a dual part in which she played both mother and daughter. By this time, it was obvious that Natalie was determined to jump-start her career. She and Bill Storke optioned Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald and started work on setting up a movie version. She would have been wonderful in the part, although it occurred to me that, like Vivien Leigh in
Streetcar,
a total immersion in such a damaged character could very well have negative consequences for the actress playing her. (Playing Blanche Dubois had exacerbated Vivien Leigh’s manic tendencies.) Nevertheless, I thought the girls were big enough, and the part of Zelda was so great that it was worth the risk.

At the same time, Elizabeth Taylor was touring the country in a revival of
The Little Foxes,
and that gave Natalie the idea to make her stage debut. She had flourished during the intensive rehearsal period for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
and it had removed a lot of her fear of the stage. Robert Fryer was a friend who was also a movie producer and on the board of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. Robert sent her a copy of Guy Bolton’s play
Anastasia,
the basis for the 1956 movie in which Ingrid Bergman made her comeback as Anna Anderson, a homeless refugee with amnesia who gradually comes to believe (falsely) that she is the lost daughter of the Romanov dynasty.
Anastasia
was, I think, a canny suggestion dramatically, and it appealed to Natalie because of its romantic nature and her Russian heritage.

Natalie had seen Viveca Lindfors play the part in New York, and all it took was a commitment from Natalie for Robert Fryer to agree to do the show at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. The opening was scheduled for February 1982, and Natalie was determined to excel on a fast track. Arvin Brown agreed to direct, and Larry Olivier got Wendy Hiller to play the Grand Duchess—the part Helen Hayes had played in the movie.

While Bob Fryer was working on setting up
Zelda,
Natalie and I spent the last two weeks of May 1981 in France. It was a great, joyous trip. We left the kids in California and took our time driving down to the south of France, stopping at small places along the way. It was very low-key sightseeing, the sort of trip during which you rediscover how many things you have in common and how much you love each other. I surprised her one night in a restaurant when I gave her a ring. We concluded the trip by staying with David Niven at Cap Ferrat.

While we were in France, John Foreman called and offered her a part in a picture he was making at MGM called
Brainstorm,
opposite Christopher Walken. It was an interesting idea technically—the story concerned itself with a device that enabled personal experiences to be transferred from one person to another. Those sensory experiences were to be shot in 70mm, so that they would have a size and texture that was far more enveloping than the surrounding “real-life” footage. The director was Douglas Trumbull, who had done the special effects for
2001
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and directed
Silent Running.
Natalie’s part, as written, was ordinary, but the picture sounded like it could be cutting-edge, if only because of the technology and the fact that it was science fiction. It seemed like a good idea.

When we got back to Los Angeles, Fryer told us that he’d had trouble setting up
Zelda
. The story was completely downbeat—Zelda ended up in a mental institution and was killed in a fire some years after Scott Fitzgerald died. Natalie wasn’t commercially strong enough at that point to get the movie set up on her name alone. Natalie agreed to do
Brainstorm
in the hope that
Zelda
would follow in due time. She started location shooting around Raleigh, North Carolina, at the end of September.

In mid-October, I took a long weekend from
Hart to Hart
and flew to Raleigh to visit Natalie. During those couple of days, the little bell in my head went off. Chris Walken was a very exciting actor and a very exciting guy who delighted in taking great risks. The bell wasn’t exactly clanging, but I was aware that I didn’t have her full attention. She was more involved with the movie than she was with her family, and the thought occurred to me that Natalie was being emotionally unfaithful. I chose not to confront her with my feelings. I flew back to my series, and Natalie continued production on
Brainstorm
.

A
few weeks after my visit to Raleigh, I was doing
Hart to Hart
in Hawaii and Natalie was still working on
Brainstorm
. It was the first time we’d been separated since we’d remarried more than nine years before, but she was full of plans, and we were doing well.

The mood on my show was shattered on November 16 when William Holden was found dead in his apartment in Santa Monica. He had gotten drunk, fallen, and hit his head on a table. Not realizing how badly he had been cut, he had lain down on the bed and bled to death. He had been dead for four days before he was found. It was a terrible, ignominious death for a fine man and underrated actor who had been unable to shake his addiction to alcohol.

Bill Holden and Stefanie Powers had been separated for some time when he died, and I think the separation was permanent. Stefanie simply couldn’t live with Bill’s drinking anymore. That said, they would always have been friends, and she was completely devastated, as was everybody who knew Bill. He had given Stefanie a great deal, introducing her to Africa and other aspects of life that she had never experienced. She would always have been there for him, and it was typical of Stefanie that she took up his causes after he died. The William Holden Wildlife Foundation is only part of what Stefanie has done to perpetuate the things that mattered to Bill.

Bill’s death marked the beginning of the most shattering period of my life. There’s a temptation to see tragedy as inevitable, to look back with hindsight and say, “
That’s
where it went wrong.
That
was the moment when the dominoes began to fall.”

But I don’t think I really believe that. All I know is that, as I’ve said, life can change—irrevocably change—in a minute.

No, that’s not right. Life can change in a moment.

Natalie, 1960. (
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERNST HAAS/ERNST HAAS/GETTY IMAGES
)

T
hroughout our marriage, Catalina Island had been a large part of our lives. As I’ve mentioned, I had spent a lot of time there as a kid playing baseball with John Ford and his crew. When Natalie and I got together, she joined me in my devotion to the island. For the Thanksgiving weekend of 1981, we decided to take the
Splendour
out to Catalina. We invited Chris Walken, Delphine Mann, and another couple to be our guests, but the couple and Delphine had to cancel.

On Friday morning, November 27, we picked Walken up at Marina Del Rey, where our boat was docked, and made the twenty-two-mile voyage to Catalina. We anchored
Splendour
offshore from Avalon in the afternoon. A couple of hours later, we took the
Valiant
to the island, where we did some shopping. Then we went to a place we liked called the El Galleon and had margaritas and beer chasers. I found Chris Walken to be an interesting, pleasant man, and there was certainly nothing remarkable in the atmosphere.

Around nine o’clock we headed back to the boat, but Natalie was worried about the water, which had developed a swell. As always, Natalie was comfortable on the boat itself, but she didn’t like being in the water, or the possibility of being in the water, because she was a bad swimmer. She finally agreed to go back to Catalina on the dinghy, and we had some more drinks over dinner.

By this time we had had slightly too much to drink, and things were getting combative. When I suggested moving the
Splendour
closer to shore to avoid having to ride out the swells, Natalie gave me an argument, and I gave her an argument right back. She got angry and told Dennis Davern, who took care of the
Splendour
for us, to take her to Avalon in the dinghy. She spent the night at the Pavilion Lodge. Chris just shrugged and went below to his cabin. I secured the boat and went to sleep myself.

The next morning Natalie came back to the boat and everything was fine. She cooked breakfast for Walken and me on the
Splendour,
and I again suggested moving the boat to calmer waters. This time she had no problem with it. By 1:00
P.M.
, we were anchored offshore at the Isthmus Cove, on the northern end of the island, which is far more isolated than the southern end.

A little while after that, everybody took a nap. When I woke up, I found a note from Natalie saying that she and Chris had taken the dinghy and gone to the island. They went to Doug’s Harbor Reef for about two hours. I wasn’t angry, but I was agitated. I called the shore boat and joined them. It would be fair to say that I was upset, but not so much that I let on. We stayed at Doug’s for dinner, finally leaving for the
Splendour
around ten o’clock.

Again, we had had quite a bit of wine with dinner, but I would categorize our condition as tipsy; certainly, nobody was anywhere near drunk. We got back to the salon of the
Splendour
and had some more drinks. And it was at that point that I got pissed off.

Chris began talking about his “total pursuit of a career,” which he admitted was more important to him than his personal life. He clearly thought that Natalie should live like that too, which rather neatly overlooked the fact that she was the mother of three small children. He also said it was obvious that I didn’t share his point of view, which was an understatement.

I finally had had enough. “Why the fuck don’t you stay out of her career?” I said. “She’s got enough people telling her what to do without you.” Walken and I got into an argument. At one point I picked up a wine bottle, slammed it on the table, and broke it into pieces. Natalie was already belowdecks at that point. She had gotten up during our argument—she didn’t rush out, she just got up—and went down the three steps from the salon of the boat to the master cabin to go to the bathroom. The last time I saw my wife she was fixing her hair at a little vanity in the bathroom while I was arguing with Chris Walken. I saw her shut the door. She was going to bed.

By the nature of the disagreement, it was a circular argument, and the fact that neither of us was feeling any pain made it harder to break the circle. About fifteen minutes after Natalie closed the door, Chris and I moved from the salon up the three steps that led out onto the deck. If I had to categorize the emotional temperature, I would say that things were threatening to get physical, but the fact is that they never did.

After some minutes on the deck, the fresh air helped us calm down, and we came back into the salon and sat there for a while, but not long. At this point, everything was fine between us. Then Chris went to bed. I sat up for a while with Dennis Davern. And then it was time to go to bed.

I went below, and Natalie wasn’t there. Strange. I went back up on deck and looked around for her and noticed the dinghy was gone. Stranger. I remember wondering if she’d taken the dinghy because of the argument, and then I thought,
No way,
because she was terrified of dark water, and besides that, the dinghy fired up very loudly, and we would have heard it, whether we were in the salon or on deck.

On the other hand, if she wasn’t on the
Splendour,
where else could she be except on the dinghy? I found Dennis Davern and said, “I think Natalie took off on the dinghy.” At that point, I thought she had gone back to Doug’s Harbor Reef, the restaurant where we had had dinner.

I radioed for the shore boat and went back to the restaurant. Christopher and Dennis stayed on the
Splendour
. When I got to the island, the restaurant was closed. Natalie wasn’t anywhere around the dock area, nor was the dinghy.

By this time, it was about 1:30
A.M.
on the morning of November 29, and I was scared and confused. Dennis radioed for help on the Harbor Channel, which is monitored by the Bay Watch, a sort of private coast patrol. Then I called the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard came out to the boat, and they went through the
Splendour
from top to bottom, from the bilge on up. They checked everything. Then they started search and rescue, which is very difficult at night, crisscrossing the ocean surface with searchlights from Coast Guard helicopters. Hour after hour—nothing.

So we sat there through the night, in the salon, waiting to hear what happened. Chris Walken was there, Dennis Davern was there. Once in a while one of us would go to the bathroom, but there wasn’t much conversation because the only possible subject was Natalie and nobody knew anything.

I kept running the possibilities through my mind, and there weren’t many. She could have taken the dinghy to a cove someplace and the engine could have gone dead. But why hadn’t any of us heard the engine start? As for the other possibility, I knew what it was, but I didn’t allow myself to contemplate it. Aft, there was one step down to the dinghy, the only way on or off the boat when you were at sea. This step, which we called the swim step, was near the water line and could be very slippery.

In the morning, about 5:30
A.M.
, they found the
Valiant
in an isolated cove beyond Blue Cavern Point. The key was in the off position, the gear was in neutral, and the oars were fastened to the side. They radioed and told us that they had the dinghy, but Natalie wasn’t on it. We had just run out of options, but I didn’t allow myself to actually contemplate what that meant—it was too unthinkable.

Two hours later, they found my wife. Natalie was wearing a down-filled red parka Windbreaker, and that helped them spot her. The harbor master, Doug Bombard, was the one who got her out of the water, and he was the one who came onto the
Splendour
and looked at me.

I remember that the morning was sunny. I remember that I was standing on the aft deck when Doug pulled up and got out of his boat.

“Where is she?” I asked him.

Doug looked at me. “She’s dead, RJ.”

My knees went out; everything went away from me. Soon afterward, a helicopter came and took us to the mainland.

So many of the best times of my life had been spent in and around Catalina Island. It was always one of my favorite places on earth.

From the day Natalie died to this, I have never gone back.