Natasha Page 8

  THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS, NATASHA’S THIRD film for Pichel, was released the same spring. Though it didn’t make much of an impression, it increased Natalie’s visibility. Goetz and Spitz, who had merged their company with Universal Pictures to form Universal-International, exercised her second six-month option on May 1, 1946, approved by “Mary” Gurdin, increasing Natalie’s salary to $150 a week. Actor George Brent, who played Colbert’s second husband in Tomorrow Is Forever, advised Maria to get Natasha an agent, taking her by the hand to Famous Artists Group, where Natalie Wood was signed to a three-year contract on May 8, represented by a cadre of six agents.

  A few weeks later, Mud filed an official document with the court to reflect her “true” name as “Maria S. Gurdin,” not “Mary.” The implication was that she had assumed the persona of Mary Gurdin to execute Natalie’s contracts; now that Natalie had Famous Artists, “Mary Gurdin” could be laid to rest. Mud was intelligent enough to recognize that Natasha needed a powerful agent and shrewd enough to keep her vise grip on her daughter’s career. “Even though Natalie had an agent, she would still read the trades and then she would ask them, ‘How about this picture, or that picture?’ She was very much on to things,” recalls Olga. According to a family friend, Maria still negotiated Natalie’s contracts; Famous Artists did “what she told them to do.” “My mother ran my career and did it well—seeing that I got the right parts,” Natalie later complimented. Mud, with Famous Artists, submitted her for virtually every child’s role that summer, capitalizing on her momentum from Tomorrow Is Forever.

  Natasha began to go by her screen name of “Natalie Wood” around this time, though she signed her letters to relatives and friends “Natasha,” or she would write “Natasha” in parentheses underneath “Natalie,” symbolizing the distinction in her mind between who she really was and her movie persona.

  Other sweeping changes came into her life near Halloween. Her mother felt cramped with a new baby, so the Gurdins purchased a somewhat larger house in less expensive Burbank, using Natalie’s studio salary. Maria gave no thought to Olga, who wanted to finish her senior year at Hollywood High. “I was in an operetta there, Sweethearts, and I really liked the people, liked my teachers. I didn’t want to switch schools yet again.” Olga chose to stay behind, renting a room from a Bulgarian neighbor which she paid for with her department store wages. Mud did not even bother to attend her operetta, claiming it was too far from Burbank. Olga, who was devoutly Russian Orthodox, accepted her mother’s heartlessness with her usual grace. “My girlfriend’s family came. It felt like my family.”

  Natalie had her own adjustment problems. She felt displaced transferring to public school in Burbank with other third-graders. “I didn’t like it at all—in those days, I didn’t like children. I didn’t think of myself as a child, and I didn’t like any of the things children were interested in. Also, studio school had been so far advanced I was way ahead of the kids in public school and I was bored.”

  With Olga out of the house, no one in the family had any friends. “My mother never got to know neighbors,” recalls Lana. “She had no sense of community or anything like that. Natalie was it.” Natalie’s touchstone was the faithful Edwin, who would hear from her via occasional letters telling him what her next movie would be. Maria set aside thirty percent of her daughter’s salary in a savings account as required by law and was conservative with the rest (“It was a little bitty house in Burbank,” remarks Lana), but it was Natalie’s money supporting the family. Six months had passed since she was seen on the screen, a lifetime to Maria. When she was rejected for a part, “I felt awful,” Natalie said later, “as if I had let everybody down.”

  Sometime after Halloween, Natalie’s agents placed her in contention for a small film at Twentieth Century Fox called The Big Heart. She was up for the part of a precocious six-year-old Manhattanite named Susan Walker, instructed by her divorced, disenchanted mother not to believe in Santa Claus. The picture, which would become the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street, “was actually being filmed as a low budget ‘B’ movie,” recalls one of the actors. Director George Seaton, a former stage actor, wrote the screenplay, called It’s Only Human, based on a story suggested by his friend Valentine Davies while they were vacationing with their wives. Darryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, read the script and sent Seaton a note saying he loved it. The title was changed to The Big Heart and Zanuck assigned Maureen O’Hara, who was under contract, to play Susan’s mother, a Macy’s personnel director who hires a replacement Santa for the Thanksgiving parade who believes he is Kris Kringle. To play Kringle, the producers hired English stage actor Edmund Gwenn. Zanuck suggested John Payne as the neighbor determined to restore both mother and daughter’s faith in miracles. “I was only eight years old,” said Natalie in later years, “but I remember very clearly that at that time, at Fox, they were doing many, many pictures. They had no high hopes for Miracle whatsoever. It was just a little extra picture that was sort of done on the sideline.” O’Hara, who had left for Ireland to see her parents and introduce them to her young daughter, had not even read the script.

  Mud, who had, noticed that Susan was a pivotal role, determined that her daughter would get the part. As if Natalie were not already confused playing different characters, changing her name from Natasha to Natalie, Mud now instructed her to watch Margaret O’Brien pictures and act like Margaret during her screen test for the role of Susan. Maria darkened Natalie’s hair and resurrected her pigtails so she would physically resemble O’Brien. “Margaret was the top child star, and Marie was so eager for Natalie to make it,” explains a confidant. “Marie said, ‘We kind of imitated Margaret, the look and the performance.’ ” Once they were friends, Natalie confessed her secret to Margaret. “There were a million little girls trying to do it,” observes O’Brien. “Natalie just did it better, I think.”

  Natalie got the part of Susan in The Big Heart in November, just as Darryl Zanuck was making final notes on an unusual, ethereally romantic Philip Dunne script called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, adapted from a 1945 novel, The Ghost of Captain Gregg and Mrs. Muir. The story, set at the turn of the century, was about a lonely young widow in London who moves with her small daughter to an English seaside cottage, where she falls in love with the spirit of a roguish sea captain. Zanuck had assigned the film to Fox producer Fred Kohlmar, who hired Dunne, admired for his tender characterization in How Green Was My Valley. Kohlmar convinced Joseph Mankiewicz, the literate screenwriter-director-producer, to direct. Mankiewicz was challenged by the idea of creating what he described as “essentially a ‘mood’ story,” a love affair between a woman and a ghost. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn agreed to play the leads, according to Dunne’s wife, Amanda, “and Tracy bowed out.” The handsome, acerbic English actor Rex Harrison, who had just had a major success with his first American film, Anna and the King of Siam, was cast to replace Tracy as the captain. With Tracy gone, Hepburn departed and several other actresses were considered to play Lucy Muir: Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, Olivia De Havilland. Zanuck decided upon Gene Tierney, the delicately beautiful brunette best known as the mysterious Laura from the 1944 Otto Preminger film. Petite Natalie, with her hair darkened to call to mind Margaret O’Brien, bore an amazing resemblance to Tierney, making her an obvious contender for the part of Mrs. Muir’s daughter, Anna. It was not a large role—young Anna is in a dozen or so small scenes and disappears when the film leaps forward in time—but it was a prestige film.

  In the final few days before she was to start The Big Heart, Natalie auditioned in front of director Joseph Mankiewicz for the part of Anna Muir, the English child. Mud’s punishing preparation and Natalie’s obsessive perfectionism were in evidence at the audition. As Mankiewicz would remember: “I asked her, ‘Did you read the whole script, or just your part?’ She answered, ‘The whole script.’ I then asked her, ‘How do you spell Mankiewicz?’ and she spelled it right, all the way down to the ‘cz.’ I told her she had the part.”
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  Director George Seaton had decided to incorporate the actual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade into The Big Heart and got permission to film inside the store, so Natalie and Mud flew to New York on November 17 to start location shooting. Fox sent Maureen O’Hara a telegram in Dublin, where she had just arrived, instructing her to cut short her family reunion. O’Hara was furious. “Because I didn’t know what the script was, I didn’t know what it was about, I didn’t know anything except I was ordered by my boss to be back in New York.” “It was a low-budget film,” observes one of the actors. “The producers were saying, ‘Let’s hurry up. We don’t have any money.’”

  O’Hara read the script when she unpacked, “and I thought, ‘I’m not so mad after all.’ ” Miracle on 34th Street was charmed from the beginning, according to O’Hara. “Every day, it was magic. We had a wonderful, happy, magical time making the movie. Edmund Gwenn was Santa Claus. I mean that literally. He believed he was Santa Claus.” So did Natalie, who found New York thrilling this trip, perhaps because she had Maria along for security. “I fell madly in love with Louie, the headwaiter at the Carlton, and had chicken salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

  On the set of The Big Heart, One-Take Natalie, her new nickname, impressed everyone. If the adult actors forgot their lines, she cued them. Seaton, the director, was amazed at how businesslike she was. Her only coaching came from Mud whispering, “Be Margaret O’Brien.” (Mud’s coaching was strictly at night; on set, she continued to let the director control Natalie: “Marie never interfered with the filming. Marie interfered with the negotiations, the contracts. Once she got what she wanted, then Natalie went to work.”) Natalie was in effect playing two parts: Susan, and Margaret O’Brien playing Susan. She was so effective, states O’Brien, “a lot of people think it’s me in the movie.” Natalie’s most vivid memory of the film, later, was “Edmund Gwenn teaching me how to act like a monkey,” a scene where her O’Brien impersonation is evident: O’Brien had imitated a monkey in exactly the same way in Meet Me in St. Louis two years before.

  Natalie may have mimicked O’Brien, but her talent was genuine. Seaton, her director on Miracle, said she had “an instinctive sense of timing and emotion” he had seen in only one other child. Natalie described her technique as a child actress, later, as instinctive. She first read the script; if she had any questions about her character or the story, she asked an adult. Then she re-read the script “many times.” The night before a scene, she memorized the next day’s lines, “visualizing the whole page.” When she played the scene, she said the lines the way she instinctually felt her character would. Her performances, as a result, were natural.

  The part of a skeptical child whose parent teaches her Santa Claus isn’t real was a radical departure from Natalie’s own life. Her mother took her to see a department store Santa that December. When Natalie jumped off Santa’s lap, Mud jumped on, whispering in Santa’s ear everything she wanted for Christmas. Olga, who was along, cringed with embarrassment. Playing Susan required Natalie to create a character different from herself. She drew on her intelligence to become Susan, as opposed to the waifish vulnerability she projected as Margaret.

  Natalie’s acting gifts were tested that month. While she was playing Susan, the cynical New Yorker, she flew back to California to perform her first scenes as Anna, the English child, then she returned to New York to finish location shots as Susan, switching back and forth between an American and British accent. She began each day on the set of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir walking up to Mankiewicz in his director’s chair and spelling out “M-A-N-K-I-E-W-I-C-Z.” Mankiewicz, who had never directed a child before, called Natalie “the smartest moppet” he knew. “I knew she would become an actress because she was always watching. She watched Edna Best,* she watched Rex Harrison.” Word of her simultaneous performances in Ghost and The Big Heart started to circulate at Fox, where the publicity department was calling Natalie a “wonder-child.” When she received the Box Office Blue Ribbon Award at the end of the year for Tomorrow Is Forever, Fox made overtures to Universal-International to buy her contract. Universal refused.

  Natalie was too busy to notice the fuss being made over her. She spent the end of December back at home in California on the Fox soundstage where Seaton was directing interior scenes on The Big Heart, occasionally racing over to the set of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. The exterior scenes in Ghost were being shot in Palos Verdes, north of Long Beach, which Mankiewicz had chosen to portray the English seaside. Fox set designers had constructed a gated Victorian as Mrs. Muir’s haunted cottage, where Natalie’s character, Anna, carves her name on a plank near the sea, the first of numerous water scenes in her films. Natalie would have fond memories of that winter:

  What a wonderful time that was for me. I was so young, and making movies, going to the studio every morning at dawn was magic. I’d check in on the set, have my makeup done and my hair wound up in one of those “period” hairdos and get all dressed up in a hoop-skirted costume. Then I’d run around that house all day pretending to be frightened by Rex Harrison’s ghost.

  If we weren’t on location, my mother would take me to lunch, and I’d have a couple of hours of school in the middle of the day. Then I’d report to [The Big Heart] set and they’d give me a modern New York hairdo and change my makeup, give me rosy cheeks and all those wonderful Bonnie Cashin winter clothes, and I’d play another part [Susan] for the rest of the day.

  Gene Tierney suffered a nervous breakdown several years after The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Screenwriter Philip Dunne’s wife, Amanda Duff, who was an actress herself, remembers, “Gene had to be sort of pampered” during filming. “She and I would both get upset about things very easily.” Actress Anna Lee, who played George Sanders’ screen wife in Ghost and had an emotional scene in the film with Tierney, “never detected anything too wrong in Gene until much later.” Lee was “very fond of her,” and of Natalie. Tierney tripped on a flight of stairs in February and broke a toe, suspending production for eleven days. She returned in a cast, which her costumes camouflaged.

  Natalie spent more time around Maureen O’Hara, her screen mother in The Big Heart. “She called me ‘Mama Maureen,’ ” recalls O’Hara, who felt that Natalie liked her “in a very happy, young girl’s way. She used to make these little ceramics that she used to bring me.” O’Hara’s impressions of Natalie and her mother differed from others who knew them in this period. She felt Natalie “absolutely loved” acting and “was a very happy little girl” without the underlying darkness that Orson Welles had perceived. “I never felt I wanted to protect her, ever. She didn’t have that vulnerability. You felt completely at home with her, she felt at home with you. There was never any feeling that she needed anybody.” From O’Hara’s point of view Maria was a wonderful mother. “Because she wouldn’t let Natalie in any way show any nonsense… she encouraged her and stood behind her and she didn’t interfere with any of the work.” O’Hara describes Natalie on the set of Miracle as: “Polite, charming, serious. Did her job and did her work, didn’t throw any tantrums, she didn’t cause any problems… she did what she was told.” Almost verbatim Maria’s edict to her.

  In middle age, Natalie remembered herself in this period as “trying to please everyone—my parents, the director, the stars, the electricians. I was a very good little girl.” A boyfriend Natalie confided in at seventeen wondered if her mother beat her to instill such eerily perfect behavior. Maria told a Fox publicist that winter that she pulled Natalie aside and threatened her in Russian with extra piano practice if she made a mistake on the set. “Mama was always there,” recalls Maureen O’Hara. Bobby Hyatt, who had a small but important scene in Miracle on 34th Street as a seven-year-old who testifies for Kris Kringle, saw Maria “tear Natalie to shreds” if she happened to miss a cue, forget a line, or didn’t hit her marks.

  Hyatt, who was the only other featured child actor in the movie, spent several weeks on the Fox lot accompanied by his mother, Jeanne, offering them a glimpse into
Maria’s stage-mother tactics. “She was out for nothing but stardom,” states Jeanne Hyatt. Maria refused to associate with the Hyatts and “whisked Natalie away” when she approached Bobby, because he was not a child star. Mud only wanted Natalie to be around people with status so they could advance her career. “Her mother wouldn’t even let her talk to the extras under pain of punishment. She could only talk to the adults, and then she was only allowed to talk to the directors, the writers and the producers.”

  Maria kept Natalie isolated and under surveillance even when she was at studio school, demanding a private tutor and a separate classroom. When Natalie and Bobby became friends as teenagers, Natalie revealed her mother’s strategy to him. During classes, Jeanne Hyatt and the other mothers played canasta or talked. “Marie would stay right in the schoolroom with Natalie,” relates Hyatt, to “intimidate the tutor into not daring to give her anything less than an A or B,” a studio requirement for child actors. “So as any kid would do, Natalie did not bother to do her homework or study for a test. Marie was teaching her that the only thing that was important was the grade, not the knowledge. All Marie wanted was to make sure that Natalie could read well, so she could read scripts… Natalie couldn’t add.”

  Bobby liked Mrs. Gurdin despite—or because of—her outrageous behavior. “She was so funny! She talked like the cartoon character Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle with the heavy Russian accent, except everything was so secret and in code words. She would squint her eyes and get this sinister look, like she’s telling you this deep secret, in these whispers—except her sentence structure, and her Russian accent, came across as comical. Natalie would look at me when her mother would do these sinister half-whispers and we would crack up. Then Marie would laugh. She thought we were laughing at her wisdom. It was a riot.”