Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood by Suzanne Finstad

Author:Suzanne Finstad [Finstad, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Rich & Famous
ISBN: 9780609809570
Google: wU0uhbkAK2AC
Amazon: 0609809571
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2001-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

Natalie and R.J.’s profligate spending and fast life with such as Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, began to catch up with them by the end of 1959. “It was like we were playing house with play money,” Natalie said later, “and when it ran out—that was it.” To recoup their financial losses, they agreed to break their marital agreement to not make a picture together after MGM offered Natalie $150,000 to cast her with R.J. in a Southern Gothic soap opera ultimately called All the Fine Young Cannibals.

Natalie approached it with her usual dedication, moving a dialect coach into the house to teach her and R.J. the proper Texas accents, but the picture would come to be known as the fiasco of her career. Hyatt visited her on the set, where Natalie was worried whether her husband could handle a dramatic role.

Although Natalie joined R.J. earlier that year ridiculing “nose-picking fringe Method actors” in the New York Times, she was embarrassed by the bad Hollywood films she had made since accepting her star-making Faustian pact with Warner Brothers, beginning with the Tab Hunter pictures. It rankled her to be forced into Cash McCall by the studio, which had caused her to forfeit an opportunity to costar with Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, which she wanted “desperately.”

All of her hopes and dreams for her career seemed to reside with Splendor in the Grass, the picture Warners had dangled to get her to return to the studio. She saw Splendor, and its director, Kazan, as her last best hope to restore her integrity as an actress. As with Rebel, A Cry in the Night, and Marjorie Morningstar, her three earlier passion projects, Natalie deeply identified with the character in Splendor because of parallels to her own life. Wilma Dean, “Deanie,” the sweet high school girl in Splendor, was almost too close to Natalie for comfort.

In the script, by William Inge, Deanie has a weak but tender father and an overbearing mother who demonizes sex and tries to keep her from the high school boy she loves, with tragic results, leading Deanie into a mental institution for psychoanalysis. Natalie recognized herself, and Jimmy Williams, in the thwarted teen lovers Deanie and Bud, though in the movie it is Deanie—not Bud—who tries to commit suicide. The role excited her because of the storyline with the controlling mother, Natalie told her friend Bobby. At the same time, “I always had a bit of inner resistance to doing that part,” she said later, “because I felt I would have to open doors and relive a lot of feelings that I had put the lid on. I had a hunch that emotionally it wasn’t going to be good for me… [that it would] open up a lot of wounds.”

The script also called for the character of Deanie to sob in several scenes, to walk on a high ledge, to submerge her head under water in a bathtub, and try to drown herself—some of Natalie’s most deep-seated fears.

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