Would Natalie?

Natasha Gregson Wagner achieved her primary aim with the HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind – to revive interest in her mother’s career, even more than trying to quell speculation about Natalie’s death.  Worked for me at least, since I was moved to view or re-view some of the Wood movies, not enough to offer a full career summary, but enough to touch on the high points, and revisit where they fit in my personal history of moviegoing.  I’m not offering up evaluations, let alone recommendations, just positioning her work in the context of her life and my own.  Since I’m not providing much detail, here’s a link to Natalie Wood’s filmography, which in turn links to entries on each of the films.

Natalia Zakharenko was born to Russian immigrant parents in 1938.  With a classic stage mother, she was appearing in films in her fourth year and became a star at eight, with her preternaturally natural performance in Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) as the wised-up daughter of a wised-up mother, who is wise enough to recognize the “real” Santa Claus when she sees him.  I must have seen this film on tv several times in the 50s.

Natalie Wood, as she was now known, was worked hard as a child star for innumerable unmemorable films.  She made a successful transition to ingénue with Rebel Without a Cause (1955), where she won an Oscar nom, but was subject to an underage affair with director Nicholas Ray.  Though supposedly she’d already been pimped out to Frank Sinatra at 15.  There are stories of her being brutally raped by some unnamed famous actor when she was 16.  Her story certainly fits the #MeToo pattern.  I was too young to see Rebel when it first came out, but on later viewings I came away unimpressed, even when trying to figure out why Ray was such a hero to some.

The Searchers (1956), on the other hand, made a big impression on me at the time, and John Ford’s Western continues to do so, on repeat viewings.  It’s a John Wayne movie, of course, with Natalie as the abducted niece he is searching for, and whom he despises when she is found to have gone native.  She took the role reluctantly, but it might have been the best film she was ever in.

I hadn’t seen any of her films from the late Fifties, but the peak seems to have been the title role in Marjorie Morningstar (1958), which I gather was racy in its day but seems creepy in ours, what with the romance between Natalie as Marjorie at 18, and Gene Kelly well into his 40s (especially with her own personal backstory).  I tracked that down on YouTube, and enjoyed it as a time capsule of cultural attitudes, but could not take it seriously as a film.  This time Natalie wouldn’t, thereby losing the man of her dreams but finding the one she was meant for.

Cash McCall (1960), however, I remember very well.  It was a period when my favorite movies were of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day ilk, comedies preoccupied with a question of interest to my pubescent mind:  will nice girls do it, or not?  This movie followed that template, up to a point, but contains a number of novel elements that made it stick in my mind.  Natalie of course is luscious as the daughter of a plastics factory owner, and James Garner (Maverick at the time!) is a corporate raider looking to buy the company (but only to get close to her).  Long before LBOs and asset-stripping became routine topics of business news, this film dives deep into the divide between “company men” and swashbuckling entrepreneurship.  In décor and dress, attitudes and behavior, it’s hilarious as another time capsule, but far from stupid.

In 1961, Natalie had two contrasting high-profile releases. West Side Story was the one I was aware of at the time, so I assume my main image of her was as the virginal Puerto Rican girl Maria.  I watched the oh-so-familiar musical drama again recently, and still felt its pull, despite some necessary bracketing.  It’s too bad that the whole film couldn’t have been shot on real NYC streets, as the opening sequence was, and there’s a bit of drag in general after Robert Wise replaces perfectionist Jerome Robbins as director, and energy leaks away.  The film won 10 Oscars, but Natalie got no love from the Academy or anyone else, criticized for mouthing the dubbed singing and being a movie star instead of a Broadway veteran.  I think she looked the part and performed admirably, though undermined by pairing with Richard Beymer, the uninspiring Romeo to her yearning Juliet.

The film I didn’t see the year I turned 14 was Splendor in the Grass, with its reassuring message that nice girls will go crazy if they don’t.  I came to it years later, while building my video collection as part of Either/Or Bookstore, and filling in the filmography of fellow Williams alum Elia Kazan.  This is the film for which Natalie did win a Best Actress nomination (losing to Sophia Loren), and here she was well-matched with Warren Beatty in his film debut.  William Inge won an Oscar for original screenplay. This is one of the great films of thwarted teenage passion, and I loved it just as much on a recent re-viewing.  As with so many of Natalie’s films, it has an uncanny resonance with her own life.  There’s a drowning scene that she initially told Kazan she couldn’t play because of her premonitions of a watery demise.  Twenty years later, she would drown after falling off a yacht named “Splendour.”

I am not a savvy navigator of the Hollywood rumor mill, but as far as I can piece it together, Natalie’s studio-arranged marriage to Robert Wagner ended at this time, supposedly because of her affair with Beatty but actually because she caught “RJ” in flagrante delicto with their butler, which needed to be hushed up.  (See “Daisy Clover” below.)  Natalie insisted she didn’t hook up with notorious ladies man Beatty until after her marriage broke up, but there’s no surprise that they had to resolve the sexual tension of Splendor somehow.

Unlike many other musicals, there wasn’t an original cast album of Gypsy (1962) in my house growing up, and I didn’t see the film, so I was surprised to recognize several of the Sondheim songs.  Those who knew the Broadway version lamented the loss of Ethel Merman, but I was perfectly happy with Rosalind Russell in the starring role, as the title character’s mother.  Again, there’s a very personal dimension for Natalie as Gypsy-to-be, since this is largely the story of a child performer at the mercy of a relentless stage mother.  Director Mervyn LeRoy exploits her ability to transform from awkward child to self-possessed adult, as she goes from second banana for her cute younger sister to a headlining burlesque star, though somewhat more believable in the former role than in the latter.  Natalie’s sexy all right, but not the sort to flaunt it.

When I was 16, Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) was a bombshell to me.  This here is adult entertainment.  Upon rewatching recently, I was quite surprised to see that this was meant to be a romantic comedy.  What stuck out in my memory was the utterly shocking scene of Natalie on the verge of getting a back-alley abortion, and the “doctor” in question no kindly Vera Drake.  Robert Mulligan’s whole film reeks of realism, shot largely on location in NYC.  Natalie was a nice Italian girl, dutiful daughter and sister, Macy’s shopgirl, who had one moment of abandon, and now has to pay the price.  Her slip was understandable because its object was Steve McQueen, professionally making the transition from action star to love interest, charming though not really plausible as an Italian musician.  She seeks him out at the musician’s hiring hall, because that’s all she knows about him.  He’s stunned, barely remembers her out of all his conquests, but he’s a decent guy and wants to help.  I don’t think it’s a spoiler to divulge that he turns into the conquest.  The stereotypical Italian family humor is a little thick, but this film has grit and insight.  Definitely holds up for me.

A supposedly adult film that was too childish for me to watch without fast forwarding, Sex and the Single Girl (1964) starred Natalie as Helen Gurley Brown, not as a frivolous Cosmo editor, but as very serious white-coated sex researcher.  Despite sharing the screen with Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall, Natalie could not redeem this piece of idiocy.  I would have been happier to have left it unseen, though its stupidity was amusing for a while.

Two films I was glad to see at this late date were among Robert Redford’s very first substantial film roles.  Inside Daisy Clover (1965) is definitely a film that resonates with Natalie’s biography, and Redford is the matinee idol who is matched to her by demonic Hollywood producer Christopher Plummer.  On the morning after their wedding, he disappears with a boyfriend.  But this Robert Mulligan film starts with Natalie as a young tomboy living in a beachside shack with demented mother Ruth Gordon.  She wants to sing and perform desperately, and doing so provides an escape into child stardom, till that turns out to be a trap and a cage as well.  The film’s mix of period parody and pulpy melodrama doesn’t quite gel, but there are many points of interest and appeal along the way.

Much the same could be said of Wood and Redford’s next collaboration, This Property Is Condemned (1966).  Sydney Pollack’s film, adapted from a short Tennessee Williams play (by Francis Ford Coppola among many others), is sweaty and sultry as Streetcar, but without the substance.  Natalie is the slutty daughter of a slatternly mother who runs a Mississippi boarding house for men who work for the railroad, trying to set herself up by pimping out the girl.  Bob is the company hitman who comes to town to lay people off.  Between two such beauties, how could sparks not fly, despite the sordid circumstances?  But cruel fate intervenes, and Bob makes tracks for New Orleans, where Natalie eventually follows and they meet again for an idyllic interlude, before their past catches up with them again.  Natalie took her shot at a Blanche Dubois role at a period of fragility in her own life, and that does shine through in this preposterous melodrama, but the film was a huge flop, and unjustly earned her a Harvard Lampoon award as “worst actress of this year, last year, and next.” Somehow she had the grace to show up and accept the award in person, which subsequently became a tradition.

Barely over 30, yet with more than 25 years in the business, Natalie dialed back her career until appearing in Paul Mazursky’s zeitgeist-y comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).  Natalie and hubby Robert Culp attend an encounter session at an Esalen-like resort, and in their liberated state invite their married friends Elliot Gould and Dyan Cannon for a weekend of marital swapping in Las Vegas.  I happened to watch the movie in a 50^th anniversary showing last year, and found it an amusing if light-weight Sixties flashback.  Now I see it as a fitting conclusion to my inquiry into whether lovely, nice Natalie would or wouldn’t.

Soon after that premature swansong, Natalie married British producer Richard Gregson and gave birth to Natasha, presumably for stability and/or escape, though the couple was not together long.  Thereafter she was linked to CA Governor Jerry Brown, an affair winked at in The Candidate (great film!), as she exits Robert Redford’s hotel room in a cameo.  Shortly after that, she remarried Robert Wagner, had another daughter and settled into family life and a diminished career, until the fateful night in 1981 when she fell off that boat and drowned in Catalina harbor, generating a mystery that remains unresolved.  All of which is covered in Natasha’s loving documentary remembrance, making a good case for Natalie’s films as “what remains behind.”