Natalie

(Dark Glamour The Turbulent Life and Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood From Biography Magazine (August 2002) Michael Sauter )
"In so many ways I think it's a bore to be sorry you were a child actor - so many people feel sorry for you automatically. At the time I wasn't aware of the things I missed so why should I think of them in retrospect? Everybody misses something or other."
"You get tough in this business, until you get big enough to hire people to get tough for you. Then you can sit back and be a lady."
Actor Roddy McDowall called her "the prettiest girl I ever knew." A lot of people felt that way about Natalie Wood. A pettite brunet with great, dark, flashing eyes, she brouth a luminous presence to a variety of famous roles: as James Dean's teenage soulmate in Rebel Without a Cause (1955); as Warren Beatty's small-town sweetheart in Splendor in the Grass (1961); as the tragic young lover Maria in West Side Story (1961). She had a face the movie camera adored, and she was every inch the glamour girl offscreen as well, posing for paparazzi with her foot-long cigarette holders, full-length furs, and five-inch heels. The spotlight just seemed to suit Natalie Wood, Who made her first movie at the age of 4. As her huband Robert Wagner once quipped, it was "as if she had Movie Star stamped on her birth certificate."
But she wasn't just any movie star. At her peak in the early 1960s, only in her mid 20s, Natalie Wood was already a three-time Oscar nominee, and second only to Elizabeth Taylor on Hollywood's A-list. Yet it was more than beauty and box-office clout that made her a favorite cover girl on gossipy movie magazines. It was also the frequent drama of a private life filled with both heady romance and recurring heartbreak. For all her fame, she seldom found happiness. In a town that has never lacked for tragic endings, hers was one of the very saddest.
Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko on July 20, 1938 in San Francisco, she was the daughter of Maria and Nikolai, Russian immigrants who changed their surname to the less foreign-sounding Gurdin while she was still a baby. When “Natasha” was 4, the Gurdins moved up the coast to picturesque Santa Rosa, where Nikolai, a manual laborer, struggled to find steady work but managed to afford a small house. There, Natasha enjoyed the only semblance of normal childhood she’s ever know. (The family included her older half sister Olga from Maria’s first marriage; little sister Lana, who would also become an actress, was born in 1946.)
On her 18th birthday, Natalie eagerly went on a studio-arranged publicity date with actor Robert Wagner. As a young girl she’d had a crush on the eight-years-older Wagner, having seen him on the 20th Century Fox backlot. But now it was he who was instantly smitten. “Natalie was so beautiful,” he later recalled. “I fell head over heels in love with her.”
After a year’s courtship, Natalie and “R.J” (he was known to his friends by his first two initials) married on December 28, 1957. They were blissful newlyweds, and the gossip columnists ate it up. “Their happiness dazzles you,” gushed Hedda Hopper. “It’s like coming too close to a high-voltage light.”
But Natalie discovered that she hadn’t grown up quite enough to manage both marriage and career. There were the usual pressures of trying to lead a private life in the public eye, the loneliness of long separations on location, the temptations and jealousies of being beautiful people paired off in films with other beautiful people. Not long into married life, Natalie found herself confused, depressed, and in therapy. “My unhappiness was a complete mystery to me,” she said. “I loved my husband. We were in good health. According to the press we had everything one could desire, but all I felt was torment. I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life, and now I was expected to function as an adult woman.”
But when all was said and done, Natalie’s marriage ended because of the sexual indiscretions of her handsome husband. According to Natasha, The biography of Natalie Wood by Suzanne Finstad (Harmony, 2001), Natalie discovered him one night in a compromising position with another man. (Wagner has denied the incident.) Shocked and shattered, she walked out on him the same night, and never told the world the real reason why. In April 1962, Natalie filed for divorce, telling reporters, “Everyone searches for happiness. I guess I haven’t found it yet.”
But Natalie Wood did want to live. She rebounded in her career with the critically lauded Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). By then, she had also found love again, with English theatrical agent Richard Gregson, who provided a sense of stability she’d never known. She and Gregson married on May 30, 1969, and the following year she gave birth to her first child, Natasha. She considered it “the happiets moment of my life.” But domestic harmony didn’t last long. Before her daughter’s first birthday, Natalie discovered that Gregson was having an affair with her secretary. Enraged and unforgiving, she immediately started divorce proceedings.
In the wake of another failed marriage, Natalie spent the autumn of 1971 “terrible depressed.” However, by early 1972 Robert Wagner had re-entered her life. Coming off his own failed marriage to actress Marion Marshall (which had produced his first child, Katie Wagner), he had met Natalie by chance at a party and kept in touch. Shortly after the New Year, Wagner invited her to visit his new Palm Springs house. “I felt like a kid again,” Natalie later said. “I just got on a plane and flew there… we were together from that moment on.”
On July 16, 1972, Natalie and R.J. remarried on a friend’s yacht in Malibu. The second time around their union was destined to be different. Natalie put her movie career on hold, declaring, “I’ve worked steadily since I was 4 years old. I just want to take care of a family for a change.” Giving birth to her second daughter, Courtney, on March 9, 1974, Natalie devoted herself to wife-and-motherhood while Wagner brought home the bacon with frequent TV roles and film-work. A decade after they’d divorced, gossip columnists now christened Natalie and R.J. “Hollywood’s Dream Couple.”
But gradually, this lifelong performer grew restless out of the limelight. By the late ‘70s, Natalie was itching to revive her career, even though she was now over 40 and no longer high on Hollywood’s radar. After ill advised comback attempts with Meteor (1979) and The Last Married Couple in America (1980), she found a more promising vehicle in the big-budget sci-fi film Brainstorm. On location for the movie in North Carolina, far from home and family, Natalie struck up a friendship with leading man Christopher Walken. There were whispers that the two were having an affair, but more likely it was a mere flirtation between co-stars.
Reunited in time for Thanksgiving 1981, Natalie and R.J. threw their traditional holiday party, then invited Walken to join them for a weekend cruise around Catalina Island on their yacht, The Splendor. Late that Saturday night, after an evening of dinner and too much drinking, Wagner realized that his wife was missing from the yacht. Distraught, he alerted the Coast Guard and police, who began an all-night search. They found Natalie lifeless body early the next morning, floating less than two hundred yards from shore.
Although the tabloids speculated about a romantic triangle, a drunken argument, or the possibility of foul play, the official investigation arrived at a less sinister scenario: Natalie, alone on deck and a little drunk, somehow slipped and fell overboard. A poor swimmer with a lifelong fear of deep water, she probably struggled just to stay afloat before succumbing to fatigue and hypothermia. But what really happened that night may forever remain a mystery.
Natalie Wood, dead at only 43, was buried on December 2, 1981, at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. All of Hollywood mourned. As her West Side Story director Robert Wise said, “I’ve never known the town to be so shocked and upset and rocked by a personality’s death as it was by Natalie’s.”
“Natalie lived more than most of us live,” Robert Wagner would say years later. “She felt more. She experienced more. She did more and gave more. She created a lot of light with her life. She caught her rainbows.”
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