Natasha Page 14

  Mud influenced Natalie in a newly harmful way that spring as she prepared to turn thirteen, for she had discovered boys. The object of her adolescent fantasies was a dairy farmer’s son from her art class named Jimmy Williams, the archetypal rebel in a leather jacket. As Jackie Eastes, one of the lovestruck, recalls, “He was kind of dangerous, in a way that he was very—he was like a bad boy, but not really… Jimmy just had a charisma. He worked at a farm around the corner from me, and I used to go and sit there, hours, just to be with him.” Natalie was erotically charged by the wiry Jimmy’s aura of power. “There was a group of us, about eight or ten of us, that ran the school,” Williams states matter-of-factly. “Not that we were better than anybody, it’s just that we were the ‘in’ crowd.” Williams, an eighth-grader, “wasn’t really overly impressed” with seventh-grade Natalie. “She was just another kid. So what, she’s in the movies.” Jimmy’s casual disinterest made him more provocative to Natalie, who “wanted what she couldn’t have,” according to a friend who met her then.

  Mud took immediate action, forbidding Natalie to date anyone in junior high. She warned her that if she even sat in a boy’s lap she would get pregnant, misinformation that alarmed Natalie, who was already terrified to have a baby, thinking she would die, Mud’s earlier admonition. Maria’s “sex education” of Natalie was partly ignorance (“She was all messed up,” relates Lana), for she offered the same advice about a boy’s lap to Olga, who “had to learn the facts of life going to city college and reading the physiology class book with my husband.” In the case of Natalie, Mud was deliberately instilling fears about boys so her star-child would remain under her black wing. “Her mother didn’t want to lose control,” asserts a witness to the manipulation, Natalie’s friend Mary Ann.

  Mary Ann got a closer view of Maria’s hypnotic power over Natalie that April when Natalie got a part in a Jane Wyman film, her first acting job since Mary Ann became her friend. Wyman had won the Academy Award two years earlier for Johnny Belinda, and would be nominated again for this picture. The movie was called The Blue Veil, an adaptation of a sentimental French film about a self-sacrificing spinster (Wyman) hired to take care of other people’s children via an agency known by its blue-veiled uniforms. Natalie was featured in the third vignette as the sort of wistfully appealing girl she played so convincingly; in this case, the sweet young daughter of a blowsy showgirl (Joan Blondell) too self-absorbed to pay attention to her. Desperate for love, Natalie’s character forms a deep attachment to her nanny (Wyman).

  The film, and her sympathetic role, were superior to the bit parts she had been playing, but it was an onerous blessing for Natalie, who had fallen under the sexual spell of eighth-grade rogue Jimmy Williams and was cast as a little girl in braids. “It seemed as though I’d spent my whole life in pigtails,” she later sighed. At the time, no one involved had any idea Natalie, nearly thirteen, was humiliated by the way she looked in the movie, a virtual re-creation of the seven-year-old she played in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, dressed in old-fashioned English schoolgirl frocks with braids coiled to her head. Mary Ann, who visited the set, was amazed at her pal’s professionalism at twelve. “Of course I’m sitting back and watching the whole scenario… she was like the old pro—not in years, but in experience. Usually when actors are working with a younger person, they’re kind of ‘Oh-oh,’ but with her it was wonderful. She was very sensitive and aware of others. If somebody didn’t feel well or somebody messed up their lines or something, she was just always there to be encouraging, so everybody just loved her.” Natalie’s genuine tenderness came through in her portrayal of the forlorn young girl. The Los Angeles Times would praise her performance for its “remarkable sincerity.”

  What impressed Mary Ann was her friend’s intellect, which she became aware of as Natalie prepared for the part. “This girl had a brain in her head. She could sit and memorize a script. I’d help her and she would just start verbatim and she knew everybody’s part, not just hers. She’d even prompt other people with their lines!” On set, Mary Ann was surprised to observe, the atmosphere was more technical than creative. “They would say, ‘Here, you do this. You do that. You walk here and you walk there and you smile.’ It was very structured. And she was a pretty young girl who could walk in a straight line, who could do this, do that. Very structured, very disciplined. And she was extremely good at this, and she would always do whatever to please the director, to fill the need.”

  The extent to which Natalie had been driven to this by Mud was revealing itself to Mary Ann: “Her mom wanted her to be a movie star from conception. And that was gonna happen, come hell or high water, at whatever cost.” Fahd’s ineffectualness had also become apparent:

  Natalie’s mother was the push and her dad just would never stand up to her. He’d try every once in a while—like sleeping in. Natalie worked real late sometimes and she was tired. And if we were supposed to go someplace the next morning, I’d come over and she’d be dead asleep, just dead to the world. Her dad would always be up and having coffee and we’d chit-chat. Mama was still sleeping, too, so he’d say, “We’ll let them sleep.” That woman would get up and call out, “Why is she sleeping?!!!”

  The dark, tragic triangle that had been created between Natalie and her parents laid itself bare to her first close friend. Mary Ann had great affection for Natalie’s father, who drove them around and whom she considered quiet and gentle, “the strong, silent type” who “catered to her mother, like most men do.” She had observed Maria “run over” Nick time and again while he shrugged it off, too weak and tormented to resist. During The Blue Veil, the family secret was exposed. “Every once in a while her father would get loaded and then he’d had it, and her mother would open her mouth and oh Christ, then it really hit the fan. It was horrible. When you sit there and take that kind of stuff for how long—when you blow, you blow.” When Mary Ann observed their brawls, it was usually over Maria forcing Natalie to do something, such as get up at four A.M. to go to the studio. “That’s why the father got into it with her all the time, and why he got so ugly and awful.” Natalie tried to ignore her parents’ fights, concealing how much it disturbed her. “That’s why she had a lot of the problems she had. She kept it all quiet and close because she didn’t want to show weakness… she would just brace herself and go on. Natalie was very good about that.”

  The feisty Mary Ann wasn’t. She was infuriated by Mud’s relentless pushing and the effect it was having on Natalie, who was a hypochondriac, frightened to be alone, talking to dolls, forbidden to go anywhere, miserable playing nine-year-olds, pressured by competing for parts, bored with acting, but “wouldn’t make ‘Mama’ unhappy. It’s hard to understand that, but ‘Mother’ preyed on this. She knew what was going on and knew how this kid was being torn apart. That, to me, was the sin.” Mary Ann stood up to Maria and encouraged Natalie to do the same. “She was becoming aware of what was going on, of what her mother was doing. She didn’t want to be pushed so hard.”

  Natalie returned to Fulton for the last few weeks of seventh grade after finishing The Blue Veil. One morning while she was in art class, Jimmy Williams, who sat at the desk behind her, reached over the inkwell and “started flipping her pigtail.”

  Natalie turned around to face her teenage crush. “Why are you doing that?” she asked.

  Jimmy stared back at her and teased, “‘Cause I don’t like pigtails.”

  “Well, cut ’em off,” Natalie taunted.

  Jimmy took a knife out of his pocket “and I cut that pigtail off.”

  It was a revelatory moment. “She wasn’t upset,” he declares. “I can remember that. And I know I didn’t get in trouble, so something happened. I believe that she went out of class and cut the other one off, or got some of the other girls to cut the other one off, and I think she told her mother she did it. ‘Cause she didn’t like ’em. And I don’t think she ever, never wore pigtails again. That was the end of it, right there.”

  Natalie had defied her m
other for the first time, severing the braids that made her famous, choosing her needs over “Natalie Wood’s.” The gesture was also rife with sexual symbolism. Appearing on-screen without pigtails was a rite of passage from child actress to young womanhood. The fact that it was Jimmy Williams who performed the rite for Natalie would have its own significance.

  CUTTING OFF HER PIGTAILS WAS THE attention-getting first step in Natalie’s journey to disengage from her mother and discover who she was inside “Natalie Wood,” the actress alter ego Maria had created for them both.

  The catalyst was Jimmy Williams. “She was gaga with him, like ‘Ooh, isn’t he wonderful?’ ” remembers Mary Ann. Jimmy was Natalie’s antithesis, a hot-headed rebel who challenged authority, with a mystique at Fulton as the last one standing in any altercation, despite his slight stature. “Jimmy had a temper, and when he got mad, he got mad and I think he could be pretty volatile,” relates a female admirer. Jimmy considered himself “a risk-taker,” following in the proud tradition of his great-great-great-grandfather, “the only person that fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Texas Revolution,” for which a monument was erected in his honor. “I wasn’t afraid of anybody or anything. I never got in a lot of fights, but I would never back down from a fight. And I got a reputation that they just didn’t want to mess with me.” Jimmy’s punk heroism sexually magnetized and emboldened Natalie, who was drawn to the qualities he embodied as ones that could release her from Mud’s iron grip. “Honestly, she kind of chased me from the time I cut her pigtail off.”

  Natalie came home from school without braids, demanding to wear lipstick, desperate to get Jimmy to notice her. “I couldn’t stand it anymore,” she later told a fan magazine. “I got my parents to sit down and… I told them how funny it felt to be different from the other kids. I tried to get over to them how really important it was to me. They didn’t change their minds right then and there, but I could see their resistance was lowered.” In fact, Natalie battled with Mud and won, appearing in the schoolyard the next day in a short bob with “gobs of makeup on, just horrible, overdone,” recalls Williams. “It was more like movie makeup, because I think that’s all she knew.” When she paraded past Jimmy and his group, “I made the statement that I thought that girls that wore too much makeup looked like a slut.” Natalie tattled on Jimmy to a classmate’s mother, who “set me down and gave me a lecture that I’ll never forget. I told her, ‘Well I didn’t call her a slut. I said girls that have a lot of makeup on look like sluts.’ ” Natalie never wore makeup after that, Jimmy noticed, “just enough to give her some sheen.” He ignored her anyway. “I wasn’t interested. She was younger than I was, and she wasn’t in my grade.”

  Natalie’s Max Factor face captured the eye of a college student, who asked her on a date. She accepted, leading to a war between her and Mud that revealed a willfulness beneath Natalie’s gentle demeanor. “Nobody told me whom I should date when I was a teenager,” she told a magazine in middle age. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway because I was very rebellious in those days.” Natalie was determined, according to Mary Ann. “She was just starting to stand up a little bit… between ‘I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I want to stop hurting.’ ” Natalie and her college swain “went down the street for a Coke and he let me drive his car,” she said later. “I think that’s about all it amounted to. I was small and skinny but I wore quite a bit of lipstick and tried to look much older and I don’t think the boy knew how old I really was.” Mud subjected Natalie to painful humiliations when she got home, holding her skirt up to the light to see if it was wrinkled, grilling her to make sure she hadn’t sat in her date’s lap or she’d be pregnant.

  “Fortunately, she got above that because of school,” reveals Mary Ann, who helped to reeducate Natalie on the facts of life. She didn’t need the information with her college beau, who merely served as an accessory for Natalie to make Jimmy jealous. Her plot was revealed before school let out for the summer, when Jimmy and a few friends were outside behind Fulton. They noticed a car circle the block, and a pair of college boys got out. A couple of Fulton students raced over to Jimmy with a message. “They said, ‘This guy out here says he’s Natalie’s boyfriend and you’ve been making eyes at her, and he wants to beat you up.’ ” Jimmy figured out Natalie’s plan. “I didn’t care… I just walked right across that field. If he wants a piece of me, he can have it. When I was about halfway across, they drove off, and that’s the last I ever heard or seen of him.”

  Natalie’s rebellion announced itself on schedule, for she turned thirteen over the summer holiday. Not only had she declared her dating independence, she was realizing for the first time that she had a choice whether to act. Her father’s heart condition improved enough for Nick to get a job at Warner Brothers building sets, easing some of the pressure on Natalie to work. She began to view acting from a different perspective, noticing actors whose work she admired. The turning point was that September, when she and Mary Ann went to see A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, directed by Elia Kazan. Natalie was transformed, in awe of Kazan and of Vivien Leigh’s performance. “She wanted that part s-o-o-o-o bad. She wanted to be Blanche!” recalls Mary Ann. “Oh, God, she wanted to be Blanche du Bois. She, at a young age, knew what she could do and how good she could be and that she would be successful.” Vivien Leigh became a role model for Natalie: a tiny, exquisite, dark-haired actress admired for her talent. Now, when Mary Ann teased her about her size, “she said, ‘Well, that’s all right. Because Vivien Leigh is as little as I am!’ ” Natalie was also struck, late that summer, by A Place in the Sun, enamored of actor Raymond Burr, and at how Elizabeth Taylor had made the transition from child star to ingénue.

  Natalie’s transition to more mature roles began that October, when she was called out of eighth grade to read for a part as Bing Crosby’s daughter, Babs, in a lavish Technicolor musical for Paramount ultimately called Just for You. Crosby was playing a widowed Broadway song-and-dance man trying to get closer to his teenage son and daughter while courting his leading lady. Crosby chose Jane Wyman, Natalie’s costar from The Blue Veil, to portray the actress. Mud was desperate for Natalie to play Babs, afraid that her career was over without her pigtails. She claimed later that Natalie was competing against Margaret O’Brien for the part, and that when Natalie showed up for the reading, the director “right away fell in love with her, but a producer have to approve it, too, so he gave Natalie a script, several pages, and said, ‘Read this as long as you want to and then read it with me.’ Ten minutes later she said, ‘I’m ready, Mother. I know it by heart.’ Not only her part—his, too! And he was so impressed, the producer, that they signed her up—and Margaret O’Brien lost the part.” O’Brien has no recollection of being considered for Babs, but the story illustrates the pressure Natalie felt to get the part. Mud’s restrictions on her hair and makeup disappeared “as soon as my mother realized that Natalie could still work looking older,” relates Lana.

  Natalie’s classmates remember her as proud of playing her first role in lipstick and out of pigtails. Both she and Jane Wyman underwent radical transformations from The Blue Veil to Just for You, only six months apart. Wyman went from an aging spinster on-screen to a glamorous Broadway star. Natalie metamorphosed from a gawky girl in braids to a young woman. The movies had finally caught up with her real age. Her character, Babs Blake, was a sweet, sophisticated teen desperate to be accepted into an exclusive girls’ school run by a headmistress played by the legendary Ethel Barrymore, then in her seventies.

  In the picture, Crosby takes his kids to a lakeside resort, giving Natalie a chance to wear a bathing suit, showing off her budding figure. Bob Arthaud (billed as “Bob Arthur”), who played Natalie’s older brother, recalls her as “a very beautiful little lady. She was ‘a lady.’ She was not in any way cheap or tacky or common.” On location at Lake Arrowhead, where the resort scenes were shot, Natalie stuck “very close to her mother,” accord
ing to Arthaud, who found her “a little aloof” with “a demeanor that was reserved.” Arthaud perceived none of the awkwardness Natalie was feeling. She appeared “very controlled and poised” and was extremely feminine. Like everyone who worked with Natalie, he was impressed with her intelligence and professionalism, finding her exceptionally “focused,” qualities she needed during filming, which Arthaud describes as an enjoyable but strict education.

  “There was a lot at stake. It was one of Ethel Barrymore’s last films and she was quite ill. And she told the cameraman and the director that she would give everybody one chance to get her scenes right and after that it was too late. So everybody was really on their toes. She did all of her scenes in one take.” Arthaud recalls a moment, off set, when he was in Barrymore’s dressing room with her, listening on the radio to boxer Joe Louis’s last match. “And when he lost the fight, she was propped up in bed with that mane of white hair and she said, ‘Sad when a champion dies.’ And I couldn’t help but think that was her.” Crosby had similarly high standards on the set. “What was really surprising about Bing Crosby to me was that he really was a very, very bright man. He knew everybody’s lines and knew everything about the camera. He always came across as this relaxed performer, but he was far from relaxed.” Wyman, whom Natalie admired, offered tips on how to look at the camera. “She said to ‘look at the eye nearest the camera, don’t play to both eyes, and don’t dart back and forth between one eye and the other, which is what amateurs do.’ And she also said that the pupil of the eye was the pinpoint of the soul and to ‘look into it, when you look at other actors, you look in their eyes.’ ” Natalie paid attention to it all. Her performance, especially her scenes with Crosby and Wyman, was subtle and tender.