Gavin Lambert on Natalie Wood

Natalie Wood made her silver-screen debut aged seven, starred in some of America’s best-loved movies (Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers, Splendor in the Grass, West Side Story), and died, shockingly, in 1981. A friend of Wood’s for over 20 years, Gavin Lambert was the editor of Sight & Sound and has written numerous books and screenplays.

Setting the scene

Geoff Andrew: …this evening’s special event. I’m personally very pleased this evening to welcome Gavin Lambert because, apart from anything else, he knew an awful lot about Nick Ray — he was one of his first supporters. Also, of course, Nick Ray made this film — Rebel Without a Cause [1955] — for which Natalie Wood became even more famous than she had been already as a child star, and it was a significant development in her career. Also, we will obviously, later on, be screening Splendor in the Grass [Elia Kazan, 1961], which is another key landmark in her career, but you do need separate tickets for that — I imagine some of you have already got them, so do hang onto those tickets. Gavin will actually be introducing that film briefly before it starts.

Anyway I don’t really want to say very much, apart from to remind you, if you have mobile phones, please make sure they are turned off. No photography, no recording equipment, please. The other thing I should mention is that of course this evening is happening partly because Gavin has written a rather — well I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve read quite a lot of it — a rather wonderful new book on Natalie Wood, which will be on sale in the foyer and Gavin will be signing copies between the interview and the following film.

And now, really, all I’d like to do is to welcome both Gavin, who of course was an editor of Sight & Sound and… Linda… Linda [laughs]… and also, of course, he’s going to be interviewed by the current editor of Sight & Sound, so we’re keeping things in a nice tradition. Please welcome Gavin Lambert and Nick James [applause].

Nick James: Good evening everybody. This is a great honour for me, Gavin being a previous editor of Sight & Sound and also being somebody who ran off from Sight & Sound with a glamorous director from the United States — and maybe that’ll happen to me, who knows? But first of all, I just want to talk a minute about how the evening’s going to run. I’m going to talk to Gavin, mainly about Natalie Wood, for the next 50 minutes, and then I’ll open it up to questions from the audience. Essentially the subject of the evening is Natalie Wood. There will be two clips that we will show later on — one from Rebel without a Cause and one from Inside Daisy Clover [Robert Mulligan, 1965] which Gavin wrote the screenplay and the novel of.

But first of all, just a word from me about Natalie Wood — she seems to me to be a figure that’s on the cusp between the Hollywood studio system and the coming of the new Hollywood in the 60s and 70s, represented, perhaps, by the Actors Studio among other forces. But, Gavin, maybe we could begin by talking about Natalie’s family origins, because there is some deal of mystery about her parentage and where she comes from — she’s of Russian descent and her family are among those who had to flee the Revolution. That’s right, isn’t it?

Gavin Lambert: That’s true, yes. They were amongst many Russians who fled the Revolution and because California was the nearest place to get to, they went through China, some of them stopped off in China for a while, then they took a boat to either San Francisco or Los Angeles, and Natalie’s parents — the mother came from a well-to-do family; the father came from a working-class family. They met in San Francisco for the first time, and the mother had already had a marriage to a Russian-Armenian officer, who was stationed in Harbin, where her family stopped off for a while.

And he went ahead because he had an offer of a job in San Francisco, and he said he would bring — Maria, her name was, and their daughter, Olga, over as soon as he was settled. Well he did that but he also wrote a ‘Dear Maria’ letter saying actually I’ve found somebody else I like better, and they lived in a kind of weird ménage-à-trois for a few weeks in San Francisco, and, oddly enough, it was he who introduced Maria to the second husband — the man who became her second husband, who was Nick Gurdin, from Siberia.

Later on I was very interested in Natalie’s Russian parentage because she always struck me as extremely Russian. Mainly because there was a wonderful acting teacher in New York, who was Russian, whom I’m sure you know about — Stella Adler — who said that Russians always had this extreme sensibility of caring, loving, weeping, laughing. All their emotional reactions were very extreme, and I always felt that about Natalie, and indeed about the mother, although laughter was not her thing.

But, anyway, her mother was having — even after the marriage to the man supposedly her father — was having a long-term affair, had started it before she got married, in fact she was five months pregnant with Natalie when they got married, and it later seemed quite likely that Nick Gurdin was not the father. In fact it was the lover, whom she continued to see over the next 30 years. He was known as ‘the Captain’, because — he was also a Russian — he was a steward on the Matson Line — a cruise ship — that plied between San Francisco, Los Angeles and Hawaii. So she only saw him when he came into port, but that was enough to get things going.

So that is the background of Natalie’s very ill-matched parents, because… I don’t know, nobody seems to know whether the father ever knew about this, whether he thought that Natalie was really his daughter or not, but there was a tension in that marriage that was horrendous. And Nick was a basically nice, ineffectual, kind man, who became an alcoholic out of frustration and the feeling of failure, and when he was alcoholic he was not nice, and not gentle at all. So that is something that she grew up with.

NJ: He had also seen some terrible times, though, hadn’t he?

GL: Oh, horrible times, yes. I mean they used to flee out of the house because he was throwing chairs at Maria, with probably some justification, because she used to taunt him. I don’t think she ever, so far as I know, Natalie never knew this, that he taunted her about her affair, or his affair — he also was having an affair with a Mexican lady. Anyway, it was not a nice situation, as I think you’re probably getting the picture of, and they kind of stuck together because neither had any place else to go really, which is not the best reason.

Mother’s influence

NJ: Perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about Maria in terms of what she became, because she figures as a kind of classic stage mother, in some ways.

GL: Well, yes… she has been demonised, not without some justification, because there was a demonic side to her, she became obsessed with making Natalie a movie star, and indeed she was, at the start, very efficient about it. But I was interested in what made her so fanatical, something that Natalie’s husband Robert Wagner once said made her close to certifiable at times — she was so violently involved with Natalie’s career, so protective — she kept her away from any child-star rivals.

Natalie always said in later life, she said ‘one thing I remember about my childhood was I was never alone. She was always watching me.’ She also implanted all kinds of weird irrational fears in Natalie: she used to take her to the movies, but they had to sit in the back row of the theatre, and when Natalie said ‘I would like to sit closer to the screen,’ — she was by then about eight years old, Maria said ‘oh you can’t — Jack the Jabber will get you’ and told her the story of a serial killer who crept up behind young girls in movie theatres and stabbed them in the back. Well, for many, many years Natalie stayed in the back row whenever she went to a movie theatre. She was okay at a private screening, but in a public movie theatre she always sat in the back row.

That is just one example of the kind of weird stuff that she had to deal with as a child, and it was pretty hard to get over later on, when you think that was multiplied by four or five other similar fears that were implanted in her. But Maria had her practical side. She did actually launch Natalie’s career, really by accident — you know about this, of course.

NJ: Yes. I’m interested in this moment, because at this time Natalie is still called Natasha Gurdin and she is quite a precocious child, to some extent she’s always been making things up — a very natural talent at making things up. But there’s a moment, when they’ve moved to Santa Rosa, California, and director Irving Pichel is shooting a film called Happy Land [1943] and Maria gets to hear about this and… well you tell us what happens next.

GL: They’re shooting on location, 4th of July parade scene, and Maria brought Natalie, who was then almost six years old, to the scene, to watch it, and she waited until there was a break in the shooting while they changed the camera angle, and Irving Pichel went and sat in the director’s chair. And then she said to Natalie ‘I’m going to put you on his lap and you’ve got to make him love you.’

When Natalie told me this years later she made a gagging sound. But Natalie, who was a very obedient, well-brought-up child, and a little both loving her mother and scared of her, did exactly what she was told, and she made such an impression on Pichel that he found a little bit for her to play in the movie, in which she was given an ice cream cone, and then dropped it and had to burst into tears, as a matter of fact in the final version, you don’t see that, you just see her get the ice cream cone, but you don’t see her drop it — there’s a cut. But anyway, that impressed Pichel, she seemed to have a natural talent, which Maria claimed that she had, and he did tell Maria that when he was back in Hollywood, he was going to make a movie that might have a part for her and he would be willing to test her for a part.

And so three years later on this does actually happen, because Maria Gurdin has moved the entire family to Hollywood, knowing perfectly well this is what she needed to do, and we then have the Tomorrow Is Forever [1946] screen test. Tomorrow Is Forever was a soap opera, very slick of its kind, in which Natalie was — if she won the test — to play the ward of Orson Welles.

Orson Welles played a young American at the start of the movie, who is married to Claudette Colbert in an ideal, lovely, white-picket-fenced Baltimore family. And he goes off to the war and he is hideously wounded and has to have plastic surgery on his face, and as far as Claudette knows, he is dead. He doesn’t want to show himself again. Meanwhile she has married George Brent, and meanwhile Orson Welles, now masquerading as an Austrian, has adopted an Austrian orphan, who will be played by Natalie Wood — that’s the set-up. The rest is pretty predictable…

Anyway, Natalie was tested for it, and Pichel said to Maria ‘can she cry? She seemed to cry very well in that scene in Santa Rosa. But she’s got a very emotional scene and she really has to burst into tears.’ And Maria said ‘Natalie can do anything. Of course she’ll cry.’

Well, Maria drummed it into Natalie that the family’s entire future depended on her bursting into tears at a certain moment. And there was nothing more calculated to make that go wrong. This poor child, walking into a huge studio stage, facing a camera, things she’d never seen before, and told at a certain moment to burst into tears, she couldn’t. She dried.

And Pichel phoned Maria the next day and said ‘I’m very sorry, it’s not going to work.’ Maria, who was, as her elder daughter by the first husband once described it to me, an extraordinary con-artist, said to Pichel ‘listen, you’ve got to give her another chance. She’s terribly upset. You can hear her crying now in the background’ — well she’d had a few slaps I think — ‘and please, please, please, you must, her whole life depends on it, our whole lives…’ and she threw a very good Russian scene and Pichel agreed. Also he’d seen enough of Maria, I think, to have maybe an inkling of what the problem was.

And for the second test, before she went on, Natalie had said to her elder sister ‘what shall I do to cry?’ and the sister — unaware that she was really Stanislavsky before she’d ever heard of the man — said ‘do you remember that time we were in Santa Rosa, and your new puppy got run over by a truck? Think of that.’ So Natalie did, and she couldn’t stop crying, and the producer and the director were both amazed at the intensity of the emotion that she showed and she got the part.

Dark water

NJ: This is the point at which Natalie Wood’s career as a child start takes off. This is the era, remember, of Shirley Temple and she gets a Warners contract, negotiated by her mother, and gets named Natalie Wood, she gets this surname, I believe, from the director of King’s Row [1941], Sam Wood.

GL: Sam Wood, who was a friend of the producer.

NJ: She goes on to make a whole series of children’s films, which are enormously successful and from your book, you described them as being ‘mostly about orphans and children of dismal parents.’ Would you like to touch on one or two of these?

GL: Well the most famous one, of course, was Miracle on 34th Street [George Seaton, 1947], where she played the little girl who does not believe in Santa Claus. Of course at the end she does, because that was the kind of movie it was. And everybody in that movie ended up believing in Santa Claus. And Santa Claus actually found Natalie and her mother the house with the white picket fence that they’d been dreaming of.

Her best film, I think, as a child actress, was a movie called Driftwood [Allan Dwan, 1947] in which she played the granddaughter — she was orphaned — of a hell-fire preacher in the backwoods somewhere in the South, and he has a heart attack and dies in the middle of a hell-fire sermon, and she’s entirely on her own with her dog in the country. And a car passes by — it’s the local doctor of the nearest town — and he adopts her. Anyway, this is a film in which she really had the leading part, and she was surrounded by a lot of pretty well-known actors. Ruth Warrick, who played the first Mrs Citizen Kane, was in the movie, John Carradine, a lot of famous supporting players.

She held her own; she not only held her own… the screenwriter, who I managed to see, said that whenever they lost a line, or fumbled a line, she prompted them. And they didn’t mind, because it was not like a sort of cute, show-off, precocious thing, it was natural enthusiasm — she’d read the script and she knew it. And she really gives a remarkable performance in that. I don’t know whether there’s still a copy around. If there is it would be interesting to show.

Then later on, she got trapped in a series of family films about ideal American families in which any misunderstandings were resolved in the end and tears turned to hugs and smiles, which of course was the total opposite of her own home life. So that acting as a child became a kind of escape into a much nicer world than the world that she was living in, and she loved it. The studio was her refuge really and people were nice to her, and happy that she was good and applauded her. Of course then came the key moment when she was about fifteen, when she realised that this had been an absolute dream world, and she had to face the real world.

NJ: Just before we get to that point though, because the story of Natalie Wood is ultimately a tragedy, I was want to pick up on the first moment when the fear that she developed of dark water… the accident that happened on the film called The Green Promise [William D. Russell] in 1948.

GL: Yes, The Green Promise was a B-movie that she made shortly after Driftwood, actually, and there was one scene in it in which she had to run across a bridge over what was normally a deep dry gully in the country, but now was a raging torrent because of a thunder storm, and her two pet lambs were trapped on the opposite bank of this. And there was a rickety bridge and it was timed to collapse right after she reached the bank and rescued her lambs. She was not told about this. Her mother knew, the director knew, of course, and the special-effects man knew.

Anyway on the take, the bridge broke too early and she was stranded right halfway above this raging torrent of water, in the rain, at night. She managed to grab on to a plank of the broken-off further half and hoist herself up and get to the other side. Well, this was a double trauma: the first trauma was just the sheer terror of thinking she was going to drown and that she was not going to be able to cling on to this plank. Well she was finally able to, but it was a terrifying thing for a child of eight or nine years old.

The second trauma was that her mother knew about it and had never warned her that the bridge was going to be collapsed. So that was a very serious moment that haunted her all her life — she was always afraid of dark water. She didn’t mind going on the water in a boat, she didn’t mind going in a swimming pool, but she wouldn’t even go into a swimming pool at night. This really lasted for the rest of her life — it was a trauma. There’s a photograph in the book actually of Natalie, which I happened to find amongst her effects, which was taken right after she had done this shot, and she was wrapped in a blanket and looking absolutely terrified still — haunted.

NJ: She also had this slight injury from it — the distended wrist bone.

GL: Yes, she had… the only injury was a distended wrist bone, and this was — I’m talking about 1948/49. Maria’s reaction, of course, was to sue the studio, but she was advised that it was not a good move, it would not help her daughter’s career. But medically, the advice was don’t try and operate because it’s tricky and it’s only a small swelling — you could see that the one bone here was a little enlarged. But she was very sensitive about it and she always covered it up for the rest of her life, with a bracelet, if she went in the swimming pool, she put a Band Aid over it. In The Searchers [John Ford, 1956] you will see that she has a rawhide strip — also in another Western that she made. She would never reveal that, although I had seen it once — she took it off to show me — it was very very minor, but nevertheless it was a kind of symbolic wound, I think.

The rebel

NJ: Let’s perhaps go up to the moment when her career… the moment of transition between being a child actress and an adult actress. She has all these awkward films in which they’re still trying to keep her in pigtails, and then finally she gets the opportunity to make Rebel without a Cause. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

GL: Rebel without a Cause she heard about. She was in that awkward age that a lot of child actresses do not survive, and they do not become adult stars — Shirley Temple didn’t, for one obvious example. And she had heard about this script of Rebel without a Cause and she was determined to get an audition, or a test, or whatever, for the part. It was not only that she felt that her whole career — she was depressed about her career at that stage — she was now almost sixteen, and she really felt that this was the one thing that could save her as an actress.

Also it came at a moment in her life when the character of Judy in Rebel without a Cause, who is alienated from her family, longing to be independent, to assert herself, to have her own life, this of course hit a very strong nerve. She identified with it very strongly. So she really felt it was her lifebelt if she was going to go on acting. And she got her agent to give her a meeting with Nicholas Ray the director, who was at that time, I think, about 43, something like that — she was sixteen.

A very talented, impressive, troubled, formidable man, he was very attracted to her. He not only thought that she had talent, but he took her virginity, as they say, which she willingly gave, because she was in that mood, she was a rebel and she had several causes in fact at that time. One was for adventure, another was for a good part, and another was for an independent future. So it was a meeting of the person and the part and the man who could guide her in that.

So it was such a revelation to her, that she not only got the part, she not only accepted — and liked — the affair with Nick Ray, whom she admired very much, but also, when they were making tests and other actors had to stand in for James Dean who was already cast, one of the stand-ins was Dennis Hopper, who had a small part in the movie, and Dennis Hopper was stunned after they’d done the test to get a call from Natalie the next day saying ‘I’d like to see you,’ and she then proceeded to manage two affairs simultaneously. So she was, you might say, off to the races.

NJ: She discovered the sex drive that was there in her mother, perhaps.

GL: Yes, the mother had a high sexual charge and Nick Ray, so to speak, plugged hers in too, because she was, throughout her life, very sexually charged, and it comes across in many of her roles on the screen, I think.

NJ: And of course, we know about your own connections in this domain…

GL: My own connections?

NJ: Yes.

GL: Well yes, he was interested in me too, and I was interested in him. As a matter of fact the first time I met Natalie I was staying with Nick who had brought me over from London to be his assistant. This was two or three years after Rebel and I was living with him. and Natalie dropped by, she was then, I guess, nineteen, and we were introduced and I was very struck by her — she seemed so fresh, so eager, so unaffected, so interested in everything, and I noticed a sort of gleam of curiosity in her eye, whenever she looked at me.

And years, years later we were having dinner — this was when we became great friends — she suddenly said to me ‘you know, do you remember the first time we met?’ and I said ‘I do, and I remember that look in your eye and I always wondered exactly what it meant,’ ad she said ‘what it meant was I was wondering exactly what was going on between you and Nick Ray,’ and I said ‘well what you wondered was exactly what was going on,’ and so that cleared that little muddle up, but it was a nice bond between the two of us.

NJ: Perhaps you’d like to introduce the clip from Rebel without a Cause that we’re showing?

GL: Yes, it’s Natalie’s first scene in the movie, which is very cleverly structured. Three juveniles are brought into Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles at the same time. Natalie for just wandering the streets with too much make-up, James Dean for being drunk, Sal Mineo for running away from home. And they’re all in different booths, about to be interviewed by social workers. And Natalie’s scene with the social worker is almost a monologue, explaining her family situation, what she feels, what she wants from life, why she’s angry, and it’s a very remarkable piece of acting, I think, for somebody who had no training, and on whom the camera was very demandingly watching the whole time.

NJ: Shall we move off to the side? Could we roll the first clip, please?

[Clip: Rebel without a Cause]

NJ: Let’s remember that she was sixteen in that clip?

GL: Yes, just coming up to seventeen.

NJ: It’s astonishing, isn’t it?

GL: Yes, it’s quite extraordinary.

NJ: I was reminded immediately, while watching it, that there was an actual incident in her life which is only vaguely similar, but one that… she gets involved in a car crash, and in the same way as she’s trying not to go back to her parents then, she doesn’t want to go back Maria in real life, and invokes Nick Ray’s name to get her out of the situation.

GL: That’s true, yes.

On a contract

NJ: Once she’s done Rebel without a Cause, she’s whisked off as a contract player for Warners would be, to something completely different, to John Ford’s The Searchers, where she’s playing the kidnapped niece of John Wayne, who’s hunting her down, she’s been kidnapped by Indians, and it’s been several years. By the time they find her she’s already a teenager, but on this particular shoot she lived in fear of the figure of Ford…

GL: Well she didn’t want to do the film. She could only do Rebel without a Cause if she signed a seven-year contract with Warners. That was the condition if she got the part, and most of that was really seven years hard labour. And she didn’t feel she was right for the part in The Searchers and I think she was right about that. It’s not a great part in any way, but she had heard stories that Ford could be very intimidating and often very brutal, and her mood was not improved by the fact that her mother came along as her chaperone in Monument Valley. And they had to wait around two weeks before Natalie was due to start shooting, and she said ‘there’s nothing to do there really, except to walk to the dining room and back,’ and she got more and more impatient and then she was told that she would be finally called for her first scene in two days’ time. And it occurred to her, she said ‘I’m supposed to be — I’ve been brought up by Comanches like a Squaw and I’m going to be in all this ethnic costume and I ought to look a bit tanned.’

So she went to lay in the Arizona sun and got a terrible sunburn… so painful that the doctor had to bandage her up. And she sent a message to Ford that she would not be able to shoot the next day, and this message was sent through Pat Wayne, John Wayne’s son, whom she’d become friendly with, and when Pat Wayne came back to tell her Ford’s reaction, he was very embarrassed, and he said ‘I don’t think I can tell you what Ford said about you.’ She said ‘come on, tell me what he said.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘actually Ford said “tell her to go shit in her hat.” Natalie blew her top and said ‘listen I hate this part, I hate this place, I want to go home. Get me out of here. I’m telling the truth, I cannot act tomorrow.’ Pat Wayne went back to Ford, and this time he came to see her and he saw that she was in pain, and everything was kind of okay between them after that, but she never really liked him and she never really liked the part.

NJ: Also he was guilty of humiliating her future husband, wasn’t he?

GL: She didn’t know this at the time, but years later it didn’t make her think any better of Ford. Personally, though, she admired him as a director. Robert Wagner had been in — he was under contract to Fox — and he’d been in a film of Ford’s… I forget the title…and Ford always had a whipping boy on every movie, and he made Robert Wagner his whipping boy and used to call him Boob instead of Bob, and then he was due to make another film at Fox, What Price Glory [1952] And he was told that Ford was interested in using him again, and Wagner thought this very improbable — he’d been so mean to him, but the secretary at Fox said ‘no, he wants to see you, he’s really interested.’ So Wagner goes in to Ford’s office and Ford says ‘so, Boob, you really want to get this part, you really like this part?’ And Wagner said ‘yes, sir, I do, I would like to play it.’ ‘Well, you’re not going to.’ So Wagner starts to go out, thinking, ‘well that’s it, I’ve had enough,’ and Ford calls him back and says ‘Now you’re sure, you really would like to play this part,’ and Wagner says ‘yes, I told you,’ and Ford says ‘well I’ve given it to Jeffrey Hunter.’

NJ: This is the beginning of the role of films that makes Natalie at her heyday really. Perhaps you’d like to attempt, since you met her around this time, a psychological portrait of what she was like as a person at this time.

GL: You’re talking about during her time at Warners?

NJ: During her time at Warners, between 1956 and ‘64.

GL: Ah, well, at that time she was coming to the end of her contract with Warners and she had hoped very much that Marjorie Morningstar [Irving Rapper, 1958] might be a good film. It was the only one of the things that she’d been assigned to that she had any hope for, but the script was so changed and rewritten, that in fact it turned out to be a disaster, and she said ‘I was finally in tears halfway through the shooting, because halfway through I wanted to be an actress and then they changed their minds — I didn’t want to be an actress, I wanted to be a wife…’ and so on and so forth… and so that had been her biggest disappointment.

But she was beginning to learn things, you know, about the way the studio worked, about the way Jack Warner, who was a very shrewd, vain, dictatorial man… and around 1960 a big chance came up which was Splendor in the Grass, which you’re going to see later. Now Warner did not want her to make the film, because it was a good part. This was a policy of his, dating back to the time that he loaned out Bette Davis -who’d had nothing but rotten parts under Warners — to another studio, RKO, for Of Human Bondage [John Cromwell, 1934]. And that kind of established her as an actress and a lot of critics said ‘how dumb of Warner Brothers not to discover how talented she was.’ So Jack Warner was always very careful about only loaning out a contract actor for a bad role — he did not want to get that kind of treatment ever again.

So Natalie was clever enough to pretend she didn’t want the role. She said ‘I don’t care, I’m not interested.’ But Kazan was interested, and he interviewed her and he wanted her as he had also wanted Warren Beatty. However Jack Warner’s casting ideas were Troy Donahue and a new starlet under contract called Diane McBain, who was a nice starlet with a very limited future. But Jack Warner told Kazan ‘she’s got a lot of oomph.’ Anyway Kazan prevailed: she got the role.

This was the time when I started to know her a bit. She was still the eager, very touching, very charming, very bright girl that I remembered from a few years back, but she was also troubled. An actor friend of hers and mine described how sometimes he would notice a kind of ‘veil of melancholy’ cross her face and I saw exactly what he meant. She was someone who wanted so much to be happy, but had things that were making her unhappy that she was fighting against, and didn’t quite know how to fight against. In fact she finally found the answer in a psychoanalyst, whom she went on seeing for about ten years and who helped her a great deal.

But she was this girl who obviously was very special and unlike any other young actress that I’ve met, who obviously had a future and there was some kind of strange shadow over her and, you felt, even the future, and I didn’t know what it was and she didn’t know what it, but there it was… it gave her a certain mystery as an actress, I think, because people responded to her, they felt a vulnerability there that they couldn’t quite explain, and she couldn’t explain it. And it was a quality that she was both stuck with — because that’s what she felt, that was the kind of life at that time that she was living — but that also she could bring to many roles, and that really launched her, I think, as an actress, in Splendor in the Grass, which was her big turning-point.

Rebel Without a Cause was her big turning-point in an adolescent role. This was a young adult role and it got her her Academy Award nomination for leading actress as Rebel had got her for supporting actress. And that really launched her. It also launched her as a girl somehow at odds with the world because, like Judy in Rebel, this girl is having trouble with her parents, she is in the middle of a very passionate and very difficult love affair, she will, in the course of the film, have a breakdown, she will eventually recover, but she will never be quite the same again, and this was a role that Natalie brought an immense amount of personal feeling to, as well as, I think, great technique as an actress. And this was, to an extent, her life, I think, that she was… she could be such fun, she had great humour, she was lively, she was curious about the world, she was intelligent, and yet this veil would sometimes come down.

Downward spiral

NJ: During this period, probably the two dominant personal events in her life were her brief marriage to Robert Wagner, two years in which they lived the kind of full movie-star life, with the big house with pink and white marble you describe, crystal chandeliers, but also, after that marriage fell apart, an affair with Warren Beatty, which seems to have been particularly turbulent for her, and we have films like West Side Story [Robert Wise, 1961] and Gypsy [Mervyn LeRoy, 1962] and Love with the Proper Stranger [Robert Mulligan, 1963] maintaining her career but around about the time of 1964, when she makes The Great Race for Blake Edwards, she seems to be on a really serious downward spiral.

GL: She didn’t want to do the film for a start. She had had this first marriage with Robert Wagner, in which they were kind of touted as the golden movie-star couple. They were not ready for it. Also Natalie was in this state then, and still was by the time of The Great Race, of somebody who had been, all her life, told what to do: as a child star, as a contract star, she was always told what to do. And she had very little experience of living her own life. She was once asked if she was domestic, and she made a joke of it and said ‘oh, sure, I can order room service.’ She really didn’t know how to pack a suitcase — everything was done for her.

Later on in life she once said ‘the one thing about being a child star, and then a very young star under contract to a major studio — they took care of me… they took too much care of me.’ And that was part of the trouble with the marriage to Wagner, I think, they were very much in love with each other, but she felt panic-stricken, because she had to take all her own decisions, she was a wife therefore she had to run a house, all that. And she felt that the only way out of that was to go to an analyst.

And Wagner resisted this because he felt that would imply that he was somehow a failure as a husband and that he couldn’t help her. But in fact he couldn’t. She needed professional help. And the movie-star house, which I remember seeing, was of a grotesque, over-the-top quality. It had everything including, in Natalie’s bathroom, an oversize marble bathtub, with gold faucets, which were so heavy that it fell through the floor into the living room and, as Natalie said later ‘I think when that bathtub fell through the floor, that’s when our marriage fell through the floor.’

So in the following years that you were just talking about, she had divorced Wagner — they had divorced — and she had a very passionate, very turbulent affair with Warren Beatty. Now Natalie, all her life, was looking for two things which were actually rather hard to reconcile. She wanted somebody who would be exciting and adventurous; at the same time she wanted some kind of security. She usually got one or the other. With Warren she got a lot of adventure and a lot of fun and a lot of sexual excitement, but no security whatsoever. He would disappear suddenly, she never knew where he was.

With other ones, she would find a lot of very adorable devotion and care, and absolutely no excitement whatsoever. She was always looking for the one who could combine both, which turned out in the end to be Robert Wagner when she married him again and they found each other again years later. But that was her main problem. And with The Great Race, she had finished with Warren Beatty, who’d gone on to Leslie Caron. As Leslie once said ‘he did love actresses who had Oscar nominations…’ She had had two or three transient affairs that were leading nowhere that were perfectly okay, but obviously had no future.

She didn’t like the script, she had to do the film — it was a contract film that she had to do. She didn’t like Blake Edwards, she didn’t find that his humour was her kind of humour, and she made it very clear in fact, so that when there was the scene in which she had to have a custard pie thrown in her face in a barroom brawl, Blake Edwards personally aimed the pie at her and hit her straight on target.

But she was very depressed throughout the film, it went on and on and it was about three months over schedule, and about 5 million over budget, they were in Europe a lot of the time, she couldn’t talk to her analyst on the phone because in those days the phone thing was not so reliable. She missed him and was at a very low point in her life, when the film was almost over, to come back from location, she had about three weeks’ work left in the studio at Warners, she called her friend Mart Crowley, whom she originally met during Splendor in the Grass and who’d been her personal secretary for a while.

She said — it was a Friday night — let’s have dinner, there’s only three more weeks to go, let’s celebrate. And at the same restaurant there happened to be Warren Beatty, who came over and said hello and was perfectly charming and nice. That was it, apparently, and on the way back — Natalie and Mart were driving back — she said ‘oh, by the way Warren’s going to drop by, but would you mind staying the night?’ Now, she did not like to be alone and she had a housekeeper, but the housekeeper was away for the weekend, and Mart was naturally a bit puzzled by this — if Warren was coming to stay the night, she imagined something was going to happen.

Well actually, he was her backup, in the sense that if it didn’t happen, she did not want to be alone. And it didn’t happen, simply because Warren was still involved with Leslie Caron and I think it was a kind of last-ditch hope, when you’re at a very low point you clutch at anything: she’d run into Warren, she thought ‘oh maybe we can get back together, maybe it can work.’ Well it didn’t work and he was perfectly nice about it, but he left and by this time Mart had tactfully gone to bed, of course, and was woken up by a feeble knocking on his bedroom door, and opened the door and Natalie in a nightgown fell into his arms and was completely unconscious. So she was rushed to hospital and she had taken an overdose of pills and actually the doctor said ‘she may not make it; she’s taken a hell of a lot.’ They stomach-pumped her, all this.

The agents arrived and they said ‘well will she be able to work on Monday morning? This is what we want to know,’ and the doctor said ‘we don’t know.’ And he said ‘but whatever you do, do not call her mother, do not call her father, do not call her sister, that would probably make her reach for more pills.’ So, she did come around, finally, I think, late on the Saturday afternoon — this was the Friday night she’d been taken over, and she called Mart and she said ‘I’m okay, I need a dress, because I came here in my nightdress — I’m going home, so could you bring me some clothes.’ He did. She seemed absolutely fine. He drove her back home and he said ‘but you’re not going to the studio on Monday.’ She said ‘oh I must. I don’t want anybody to know about this.’ And he said ‘but, my god. You look terrible.’ She said ‘I know, but I’m going to get a lot of sleep and there are no close-ups on Monday and I’m going to get away with it.’ And he was amazed by her strength. She did that.

NJ: I’m very conscious of the fact that we’ve already got to the end of the time I’d allotted for us to talk and we haven’t quite got through her career yet, so let’s briefly introduce the clip from the film that is based on your own novel, and with a screenplay that you wrote, Inside Daisy Clover.

GL: Okay, this, I may say, was also a film that she identified with very much, because it was about a young adolescent, who’s signed by a major studio and her life is taken over… her identity is taken over in fact, and this scene we’re going to see is when she’s first taken to the studio because she sent the producer — this takes place in the 30s — a record with her voice on it. He’s looking for a new, young singing star and she gets the summons, and it’s her first adventure in a studio.

NJ: Roll the clip, please.

[Clip: Inside Daisy Clover]

NJ: The one thing that Natalie said about Inside Daisy Clover was that in every moment of Daisy’s life, she’s alone. Was Natalie always the person that you wanted to play that role?

GL: Well, when I wrote the novel, I didn’t have anybody special in mind. Then when the film project came up, it was a very simple decision in one way, that the producer Alan Pakula said ‘well, either we have a star, or we have an unknown, and the only star who could possibly play it is Natalie Wood, and I think we should go with her,’ and I was very happy about that because I’d seen a lot of Natalie’s work by that time and I knew how much that she wanted to play the part, and how strongly she felt about it, because it had certain resonance with her own life, and that is how it happened.

Sinatra and theatre

NJ: Well I think that, given the time problem, we’ll leave the rest of the career for people to read in your very fine book, especially the story of her untimely demise, which is very curious and interesting — and unhappy of course, but maybe we can open up to some questions. Yes…

Audience: It’s said that towards the end of her life, Natalie had grown tired of acting. Do you think that is so?

GL: No, she hadn’t grown tired of acting, she took three years off because… she had had one daughter by her second husband, and then she and Wagner had another daughter, and she always wanted children and then she was very involved with motherhood, and she took three years off. But she was very eager to get back to acting, but of course it was — from a career point of view — it was a tricky time for her to take three years off because she was, by then, in her late 30s, and when you’ve been a famous star, and when you’ve been a famous beauty, that’s when the wrong side of the hill is looming ahead of you, you know.

Audience: Nick Gurdin — was he a Russian Jew?

GL: He was Russian, oh yes.

Audience: Was he Jewish?

GL: No, neither was Jewish.

Audience: [partially inaudible question] Can I ask about the ‘protection’ that Frank Sinatra… apparently Natalie’s mother…

GL: Oh, no, that’s sort of tabloid stuff, I think. I think I heard some story of that kind: she first met Frank Sinatra when she was still under contract to Warners and she was going to be loaned out for a film with him called Kings Go Forth [Delmer Daves, 1958] and she was…

[tape turns over…]

GL: …first of all because it was yet one more ethnic role, they were always casting her as half Mexican or something, and in this she was half black; and secondly, since she was by that time very involved with Robert Wagner, she knew that Frank Sinatra was almost certain to make a move, and she was a bit nervous about that. In fact he did make a move, and she rather bravely turned him down at that time, but in apparently such a tactful way that he forgave her. He later made a move after the marriage with Wagner fell through and she accepted it, and they were long-time friends, and occasional lovers for many years, but as for protecting her, I’m not sure that Sinatra protected anybody except himself actually. I don’t see how he could have protected her.

Audience: I remember seeing a photograph of her about to appear in Anastasia, just before she died. She was going to appear, wasn’t she?

GL: Yes. As a matter of fact the last talk I had with Natalie, when she was just about to start Brainstorm [Douglas Trumbull, 1983], she was saying that she was only doing that film because there was nothing else around and she wanted to go on acting, she was very aware that she was not going to get any star roles, except in television, which she had no snobbishness about — she did some very good work in television, like she played Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [Robert Moore, 1976], but she had decided that she would try the theatre, and she’d been offered it before and no play had seemed to her what she wanted to do.

And Robert Fryer, a film producer, was also in charge of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles at that time, and he had sent her Anastasia, and she liked that, because of the Russian connection and she thought it was a good part. Slightly old-fashioned play, but nevertheless a good role, and something she felt she could do. And in fact the photograph that you saw was taken for the poster of the opening of the play, which was due to open about a month after she should have finished Brainstorm, which she never finished.

Audience: Do you think she could have cut it in the theatre, good though she was in films?

GL: Well, that was a thing she asked herself too. She knew that her one problem would have been vocal projection, and she was going to a voice coach and taking lessons, and hoping, and I remember we talked about that and I said ‘supposing it doesn’t work, what will you do?’ She said ‘I might produce. I’d be interested in that. She was not giving up at all, and I think actually if the theatre had not worked, and she had lived, she would have done very well in the independent film movement, which was just coming up, and might have gotten set up some of the things she wanted to do. She was trying to set up a film in which she would play Zelda Fitzgerald.

James Dean

Audience: Can you explain her relationship with James Dean, what his nature was and how close it was?

GL: Surely, yes. Actually she had done a television show with James Dean before Rebel without a Cause. It was a half-hour drama show, live, called I’m a Fool based on a short story by Sherwood Anderson, and she was at a low point in her career at that time, almost at the point of thinking ‘I’m never going to get a good part again,’ and James Dean was extremely impressive to her because, first of all, he was clearly proud of being an actor.

Secondly, he was very independent-minded, to the absolute distraction of the director who was only worried about the schedule. He would say ‘no, I’d like to try this scene this way, then I’d like to try it this way, then I’d like to try it that way, and decide which I like best.’ And she was very impressed with that. They got on…

They didn’t become close friends until Rebel, when they met again, and that for Natalie was extraordinary, because she had both a director who said to her ‘now what do you think of this scene, do you think it’s okay, is there anything you don’t feel is right, that you don’t feel comfortable with?’ which she’d never been asked in her life before. She’d always been told ‘do what you’re told.’ And there was James Dean, saying to her ‘now let’s rehearse this three or four different ways,’ and this was a complete revelation to her.

This was the sort of first taste of the Actors Studio method. This was the time when all the New York actors were starting to talk about truth, which was a word not often uttered in the studio. And they got on very well, there were all sorts of rumours of course that they were lovers; they were not. They were very close friends, she admired him immensely, she felt that he had been hugely helpful to her on Rebel, as well as Nick, that he had told her one thing which she found very valuable, she said later, she said ‘before playing a very intense emotional scene, relax.’ She said this sounded contradictory, but I followed his advice and I found that it worked. So he was a kind of mentor, and a fellow rebel. That was, I would say, the basis of their friendship, and she was very, very stunned and cut-up by his death. It was a very great loss for her, because she associated him with her first breakthrough.

Audience: Did her mother want to give her up for adoption to Irving Pichel?

GL: No, that was a fan magazine story. No, that’s completely untrue. No no no. He liked her very much, but, no, no no. He had three kids already, what did he want with one more? It was one of the many stories the fan magazines and tabloids carried at the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Maria put it out. It was the kind of thing she would do.

NJ: I can’t see any hands pressing upwards, so… oh yes, over there…

Audience: I’m intrigued by the possibility that it was just actually sheer chance that she managed to find any projects that were worth working on, because of the way Warners treated her, as a contract star, and whether or not that was typical of other actors of the time.

GL: Oh, very much so, because, you see, if you turn down a part at a studio that you’re under contract to, you could be put on suspension, which meant that your salary was stopped and one side or the other had to sit it out. What usually happened — and this was not only in Natalie’s case — any star at that time — okay, they went on suspension. Then, maybe two or three weeks later, the studio came back and said ‘well how about this?’ Sometimes they said yes, sometimes they didn’t.

In Natalie’s case, she went on suspension for over two months and turned down a couple of roles which were not any good, but in this she was actually encouraged by her agents, who saw the whole situation as an opportunity to renegotiate her contract and get more money. That’s an old story. And in fact that’s what she did. At that time she was married to Robert Wagner, who was still a very successful star at Fox, so there was no financial problem. She was very… she had a low salary at that time. She was signed for something like $500, whereas he was making a couple of thousand, so there was no problem there.

But she sat it out, and one film she turned down actually was a film of The Devil’s Disciple [1959] that Sandy Mackendrick was going to direct, with Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier, and as a matter of fact she was wise to turn it down — it was a supporting role, really. They thought she might take it because of the great names she’d be with, but in fact Mackendrick was removed from the movie after two weeks’ shooting and not getting on with Burt Lancaster, the other great star, and it was taken over by an action director called Guy Hamilton and the movie was not a success, so she was really well out of that one. She also turned down something called The Miracle [Irving Rapper, 1959], which was from the famous Max Reinhardt play that Carroll Baker did, and I think there was another ethnic role that she turned down as well… she played a half Dutch, half Indian girl…

Audience: I was just wondering, if she had not submitted to couch-casting, do you think she would have been as big a star as she became?

GL: Well it wasn’t a question of submitting to the casting-couch, she was, I think, almost first on the couch [laughter]. This was absolutely by mutual consent. It was not… if you say no you weren’t going to get the part, no no, I don’t think that ever really… in the case of Nick Ray she wasn’t expecting it and actually, when it happened she was rather thrilled. So, no.

NJ: What do you think were the qualities that enabled her to move from being a successful child star into an adult star, because that’s very rare — most child stars don’t make it.

GL: Well, first of all she had real talent. A lot of child stars have a sort of performing talent, but they’re really performing as themselves, not really playing roles. They’re just doing what they’re good at, you know, like a party turn. Roddy McDowall always said that for a child actor, acting then was an extension of the game of ‘let’s pretend.’ He said but of course when you become an adult — if you become an adult star, ‘let’s pretend’ doesn’t work because you say ‘well I don’t believe in that, I can’t pretend that…’

In Natalie’s case, she had the will to act, she really cared about acting. She wanted to be a good actress, she wanted to learn, and she had this great determination, this staying power, really. She had enough discouragement, you know, that would have stopped many others in their tracks and in fact did. But she hung in there and finally it paid off.

NJ: Well I think we’ve just run out of time, actually, so it remains for me to say thank you to Gavin Lambert. [applause]

GL: Thank you.

Interview © BFI 2004