Natalie Wood by Suzanne Finstad

Author:Suzanne Finstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

As Mordente spent more time with Natalie, he discovered how insecure she was in the part, and how much she wanted people to like her—just as she had at Fulton Junior High, with Mary Ann. “She was very genuinely worried about what the entire cast thought about her. She would always ask me, ‘What do you think? What do you think they’re thinking?’ In a sense, she was shy around the company. I said, ‘What are you worried about? They’re not even in the scene with you, forget about ’em.’ She was worried about other people’s perception of her as a person, and what they thought of her as a performer. She was so concerned that people like her, and she wanted them to think she was good.”

Natalie talked to Mordente, for hours, about her Puerto Rican accent. “I know she worked on it all day long. She used to talk to me like that. We’d be out to dinner, and suddenly she’d be breaking into it. She was always concerned about it. She was always concerned that things were going to be exactly the way she wanted them. She wanted them to be perfect all the time.”

If Natalie had a flaw, in Mordente’s opinion, “it would be that she wanted people to like her, and she wanted to be a great actress…she strived to be the perfect actress. There was no question. She wanted to be the best actress in Hollywood, even the world, there was no question about that. The Academy Award was very big to her.”

Mordente saw Natalie virtually every day from the time Robbins was fired in October, until the end of filming West Side Story in February. “I became friendly with Natalie, and R.J., and we spent a lot of time together, going to dinner and so forth. R.J. became a very good friend of mine. And he was going through a very tough period at the time, because he had been suspended by Fox…and I think R.J. had his ego, and his ego was being a little bit tossed around because Natalie was peaking, and he was sliding, at that time, in no man’s land, not knowing what he was going to do next.”

Mordente considered the marriage “good,” though he allowed, “They had their problems. And I think their problems stemmed from Natalie really driving to stardom, and the possibility of winning an Academy Award, and R.J. saying, ‘Where’s my career going next?’ Natalie was a very ambitious lady, I make no bones about that.”

While filming West Side Story, Natalie said positive things to Mordente about Warren Beatty as an actor, never mentioning him otherwise. Nor did Mordente see Beatty around Natalie from October 1960 to February 1961. Natalie’s intimate, Bob Jiras, who did her makeup on West Side Story, confirms Beatty was never there. In Mordente’s view, “there couldn’t have been” any personal contact between Natalie and Beatty during filming. “Because, I’m not going to exaggerate, Natalie and I spent five nights a week together.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.