Natasha

  PRAISE FOR NATASHA

  “Suzanne Finstad presents a poignant, intensely sympathetic portrait of the vulnerable, sensitive little girl who grew up to be the quintessential Hollywood star.”

  Los Angeles Times

  “Finstad also has a keen sense of how that city’s dream factory simultaneously turns women into stars and leaves them bereft… the woman who emerges in this biography is not a distant celebrity but a real person…”

  The Washington Post Book World

  “Emotionally compelling… Finstad is an effective storyteller… an unusually sympathetic look at an actress who used her personal demons to fuel the emotions that she brought to her roles even as she struggled to hide those demons from a public that worshiped her.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  “A haunting portrait of the late film star…”

  Chicago Tribune

  “Natasha is at once unusual, impressive, disturbing, and revelatory… impressive in its detail, in the author’s careful examination of the information and in the way it is skillfully woven into the story…. The information Finstad has discovered about Wood’s horrific childhood, her anxiety-ridden stardom, and her mysterious death is deeply disturbing.”

  Variety

  “[Finstad] pursued every thread, every story, every source she could find to develop a complete picture of the woman who grew up in the movies and died before completing her last one… a tragedy foretold at every turn of the page… an eerie tale.”

  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Finstad has crafted a page-turner here that is akin to watching a car wreck in slow motion. You don’t like what’s happening; you hate the result but you can’t avert your eyes.”

  Detroit Free Press

  “Remarkably researched and occasionally shocking… certain things stay with you…”

  The Baltimore Sun

  “Compellingly readable, carefully researched, and always sympathetic to its troubled heroine. The description of the last fatal voyage to Catalina is a powerfully gripping murder mystery in its own right.”

  The London Daily Telegraph

  “This book, which will likely be an instant bestseller, should give you a few sleepless nights… a page-turner that will leave you smitten with its heroine, rooting for her, and deeply moved by her passing.”

  New Jersey Bergen County Record

  “This is an ambitious and engrossing biography, acute in its insights.”

  London Literary Review

  “Fascinating… meticulously researched… the perfect guilty summer pleasure.”

  Houston Chronicle

  “Finstad’s research into Hollywood and Wood’s part in it is simply phenomenal… a detailed, realistic, and frightening portrait of a child forced outside herself to live the dreams and fulfill the needs of others by becoming the star known as Natalie Wood.”

  Rocky Mountain News

  “Sheds new light on Wood’s life, which has been clouded by time, myth, and Hollywood publicity… contradicting a half-century of Hollywood legend.”

  Reuters

  “Compelling and revealing… gripping… great depth.”

  Premiere

  Brimming with details… a lot of juicy tales about making movies… but the true drama is behind the scenes.”

  Biography

  “Gathers momentum, offering fleeting glimpses into the dynamics of Hollywood legends… but throughout the biography the brightest star is Wood…”

  The Oregonian

  “Natalie Wood’s life makes for an insightful, haunting, page-turner of a book as written by Suzanne Finstad in Natasha.”

  Palo Alto Daily News

  “A life entangled in mystical oddities… the climax—death by drowning—is reached with a Chekhovian inevitability… the most incredible secondary biographical character ever brought back to life… fraught with drama.”

  Toronto National Post

  “[This] thorough biography of film star Natalie Wood has all the traditional elements of a summer blockbuster…”

  Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Juicy… the actress seems to face a Marilyn Monroe-esque misfortune on every other page.”

  US

  “Exhaustively researched… enormously sympathetic to its subject… a touching tale of a star’s impossible struggle to attain normality.”

  Glasgow Sunday Herald

  “For once, the truth is more interesting than publishing fiction… clearly a labour of love and an eloquent portrait of an extraordinary woman with a lot of ‘demons.’”

  Nottingham Evening Post

  For the three sisters:

  Olga, the lucky one,

  Lana, the survivor

  AND IN MEMORY OF

  Natasha, the little girl lost inside

  “Natalie Wood”

  CONTENTS

  Note to the Reader

  Author’s Note

  ACT ONE

  Star Child

  (1908–1951)

  ACT TWO

  Rebel

  (1951–1957)

  ACT THREE

  Movie Star

  (1957–1966)

  ACT FOUR

  Motherhood

  (1966–1979)

  ACT FIVE

  Dark Water

  (1980–1981)

  Filmography

  Television Appearances

  Notes

  Photo Insert

  NOTE TO THE READER

  THE SOURCE MATERIAL for Natasha is located at the back of the book, set forth in chapter order. If an individual or a publication is quoted without being named in the text, consult the Notes section for identification.

  For consistency and correctness, the Russian spellings of names are courtesy of Professor Olga T. Yokoyama, UCLA Department of Slavic Languages.

  Natasha with her beloved, tormented Fahd.

  The smile that lit Miracle on 34th Street.

  Elvis called her “the mad Nat.”

  Lana with Natalie on the set of Cash McCall.

  The happiest moment of Natalie’s life was giving birth to Natasha, her second chance at childhood.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  FIVE YEARS AGO, I happened to see a documentary about Natalie Wood. As I watched the clips from some of the fifty movies in which she appeared from the age of four, I was moved by the vulnerability behind her hypnotic brown eyes, by a pathos in Natalie made more tragic by her mysterious disappearance at forty-three in the dark water she feared all her life. Her daughters, who were only eleven and eight when Natalie drowned in 1981, expressed their grief with such poignancy the sadness was overwhelming.

  Natalie Wood haunted me afterward. When I discovered there had never been an authoritative biography about her, I felt compelled to write about Natalie’s life, and her legacy, which has consumed the last four years of my life.

  After interviewing close to four hundred people, watching her filmed performances, excavating ship’s logs, articles, photographs, birth, death, and marriage records dating from the 1800s, examining the sheriff’s and coroner’s official documents related to her drowning, making pilgrimages to every apartment, hospital, church, school, and house she lived in or attended, being taken by boat to the cove off Catalina where she was found in her nightgown that last, bizarre weekend, I am still moved by Natalie, who was as beautiful, and haunting, as those dark Russian eyes, and whose life is far more compelling than any of her movie roles.

  Before she became Natalie Wood—Hollywood’s child—she was Natasha Zakharenko, the daughter of Russian immigrants who fled Bolsheviks. Her fame, and her drowning, had been foretold before she was born to her mother, Maria, who claimed to be Russian royalty and who created the actress personality “Natalie Wood,” a tale as rich, complex and myst
erious as “Anastasia,” the role Natalie was preparing to play before she was lost at sea twenty years ago. From the time she was a teenager to the night she disappeared off Catalina, Natalie was struggling to reclaim her lost identity as Natasha.

  I am deeply grateful to the hundreds of people who contributed to this biography, including many who have never spoken publicly about Natalie before. My heartfelt thanks to her sisters Olga and Lana, who inspired the Chekhovian theme; to Natalie’s cousins, the Liuzunies, for their treasury of photographs and Russian history; to Sue Russell for audiotapes of Natalie’s mystic mother and alter ego, Maria Gurdin; to the Hyatts for invaluable confidences; to Natalie’s close friends Ed Canevari, Maryann Brooks, Jacqueline Perry, Peggy Griffin, Scott Marlowe, and Jim Williams, who bared their souls to tell Natalie’s powerfully moving story. It is a tribute to their affection for Natalie that this book is further enriched by the personal reminiscences of Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, Tony Curtis, Maureen O’Hara, Sydney Pollack, Karl Malden, and countless other legendary stars and directors whose lives she touched. I have tried many times, in many different ways, over the last several years to meet with Robert Wagner. My intent, from the outset, was to present a sensitive, truthful account of this tender star as a legacy to her family and her legion of fans.

  My gratitude is extended to Ned Comstock, the curator of Special Collections at USC, as well as to the staff at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and to JoAnne Grazzini, who spent countless hours researching or coordinating transcribers, including the exceptional Hillary Gordon. Thank you to my family, to Tony Costello, Phyllis Quinn, Duane Rasure, Louis Danoff, Marvin Eisenman, Charles Higham, Pat Broeske, Barry Redmond, Ed Jubert, Doug Bombard, Betty Batausa, Ariel Kochane, Diana Rico, and Henry Jaglom for further support, assistance, or insight; as well as to Bill Ogden, Gerry Abrams, and J. K. Selznick for guidance. Lastly, to my editor, Shaye Areheart, for her patience and for sharing my passion to honor Natalie with this book.

  Suzanne Finstad

  Los Angeles, March 2001

  “NATALIE WOOD” NEVER REALLY EXISTED. THE actress with that name was a fictional creation of her mother, a disturbed genius known by various first names, usually Maria. How Natalie was discovered, why she went into show business as a child, her background, were all part of a tapestry of lies woven by Maria that began before Natalie was even born. “God created her, but I invented her,” her mother said once, after Natalie’s body was discovered floating in the dark waters off Catalina Island the Sunday after Thanksgiving of 1981, when she was just forty-three. Natalie Wood, the celebrity, was an entwined alter ego of mother and daughter so powerfully macabre her drowning had been predicted by a gypsy, years before, to happen to Maria, not Natalie. The person inside the illusion of “Natalie Wood” was lost for years, even to herself.

  Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko*, the real name of the actress known as Natalie Wood, was a child of Russia, once removed. Exactly where in Russia we may never know, for her mother, the source of the family history, was an unreliable witness, a feverishly imaginative woman who lived in a world of her own invention, only occasionally punctuated by the truth. Maria’s friends characterized this as colorful; others considered her devious; her youngest child eventually concluded she was a pathological liar. There was intrigue to Maria no biographer could fully unravel. She would have three daughters—Olga, Natalia, and Svetlana—three sisters, as in the Chekhov play. For Maria, there was only and ever Natalia. Her consuming obsession with Natasha, Natalia’s pet name, was the one thing no one questioned about Maria.

  The rest of her life was a masquerade, with Maria assuming different disguises.

  Natalie Wood’s mother came into the world somewhere in Siberia. It was most likely the town of Barnaul, as her oldest child, Olga, believed and ship’s records document, though she told a different daughter and a biographer that she was born in Tomsk. They are both close to Russia’s border with Mongolia, near the Altai Mountains. Maria’s early years were spent in this nethermost, Russian-Asian region of the more than four and a half million square miles known as Siberia, famous for its bitterly cold winters, romanticized for its forests primeval, and considered the ends of the earth.

  Maria claimed, throughout her life, to have grown up in fantastical luxury on a palatial Siberian estate with a Chinese cook, three governesses, and a “nyanka” (nanny) per child. But her most cherished belief, or delusion, was that she was related, through her mother, to the Romanovs, Russia’s royal family. Her stories—whether true or not, and most who heard them questioned their veracity—“kept you spellbound,” according to a young actor who befriended Maria in the 1980s, after Natalie drowned. “She herself was quite the actress. She spoke in a very dramatic whisper, so you had to lean in, and pay close attention. She used her hands as she would describe in great detail her genealogy from Russia. She would whisper, ‘We were descended from royalty…’ and you would just hang on every word.”

  What is known of Maria’s family is that her father, Stepan Zudilov, was married twice. He had four children—two boys, Mikhael and Semen, and two girls, Apollinaria (called Lilia) and Kallisfenia (or Kalia)-by his first wife, Anna. Anna died in childbirth with Kalia in 1905 in Barnaul, where the Zudilovs resided. Stepan took a second bride, who would likewise bear him two sons and two daughters in reverse order: a girl, Zoia, born in 1907, followed by Maria, then Boris and Gleb. Stepan Zudilov’s youngest daughter, Maria Stepanovna Zudilova*, would become the mother of Natalie Wood.

  According to Maria, her mother (also named Maria) was “close relations” to the Romanov family. It is believed her maiden name was Kulev. Whether she was an aristocrat is unknown. Kalia, Stepan’s younger daughter by his first wife and the only Zudilov child other than Maria to immigrate to the United States, would later tell her children, “Somebody in the line was a countess.” But as a Russian historian notes sardonically, “Everyone from Russia wants to be related to the Romanovs.”

  If Natalie Wood’s grandmother had royal blood, her mother undermined her own credibility by the thousand-and-one variations on her lineage she offered, Scheherazade-style. “One story was that her parents took her to China when she was a little girl and she became a Chinese princess through some mysterious circumstances that were never explained,” recalls a Hollywood friend. Another version that surfaced in studio biographies after Natalie became a child actress identified Maria as “being of French extraction.” According to her eldest daughter, Olga, this was a prank on Maria’s part. “When they would ask her if she’s French, she’d say, ‘Oh, yes…’ She knew how to speak French, because she probably had French nannies.” Even this was based solely on Maria’s word, for Olga never heard her mother actually speak a word of French (nor did Maria’s half-sister Kalia speak it). Maria’s white lie sustained itself all the way to a 1983 television tribute to Natalie Wood, during which Orson Welles, her first costar, refers to Natalie being “not just of Russian but also of French descent.” Maria, in the opinion of her daughter Lana (Americanized from Svetlana), was “frightening” in her ability to bend reality and convince others it was true, “because she did believe everything that came out of her mouth.”

  Maria told Lana that she was born to gypsy parents who left her on a hillside, where the Zudilovs found her and raised her as their own. “I heard that story my entire life.” Maria would laugh about it with friends after Natalie became famous, muttering, in her heavy Slavic whisper, “They used to call me ‘The Gypsy’! ” She could easily create that impression as an adult, with her raven hair, magical tales and musical accent. “I could almost see her,” remarked a Hollywood writer who spent hours with Maria, “waylaying me on a street with a bunch of heather, saying, ‘Buy this or you’ll be cursed for life.’”

  The idea that Maria was the displaced child of gypsies is “hogwash” in the pronouncement of her closest traceable living relation—Kalia’s son Constantine. No one in the family, including Lana, took this tale seriously. It originat
ed, Maria’s daughter Olga believes, as gossip among the family servants, for Maria was born, she told Olga, at the Zudilovs’ “dacha,” a country cottage, in the mountains. “And when my grandmother came back she had my mother, so the servants used to tell her, ‘You were born by gypsies,’ because she wasn’t born right there where they could see her.”

  One clue exists to help decipher Maria’s past. It is a photograph of the Zudilov family, retained separately by both Maria and Kalia, taken somewhere in Russia circa March 1919, according to the handwritten description. Maria’s family, judged by their portrait, appears to be of means. They are dressed à la mode, the girls in shirtwaists and sailor dresses, posed regally, projecting a patrician mien. Stepan Zudilov, Natalie Wood’s maternal grandfather, sits on a chair to the far left of the photograph, a stout but stately figure with a sweeping moustache, in a well-tailored three-piece woolen suit. At the center of the portrait, also seated, is his second wife, Maria, the putative Romanov. Maria evokes a gentle womanliness. She is possessed of a round face with soft features, girlishly pretty; her dark hair, contrasted by fair skin, is styled in marcelled waves. What distinguishes her as the grandmother of Natalie Wood are her liquid brown eyes: they hold the camera with their tender, slightly sad gaze.

  Stepan and Maria occupy the front row with their four children—Natalie’s mother, Maria, staring brazenly into the camera’s eye; thirteen-year-old Zoia; and the two boys, Boris and Gleb, six and four, seated side-by-side in identical Lord Fauntleroy suits. (Maria would later bizarrely refer to them as “twins.”) Standing behind Stepan’s second family are his four grown children by his first wife, Anna; including Kalia, the corroborating witness to the family history. Anna’s offspring are swarthier, with sharper features than Stepan’s children by Natalie’s grandmother. Everyone has captivating eyes.