Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Natalie Wood by Gavin Lambert Natalie Wood: A Life by Gavin Lambert. It was during the screen test for her second movie, Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), that seven-year-old Natasha was encouraged by her mother to remember the time, not long before, when her dog had run out into the street and been hit by a truck. That proved to be all the inspiration the young thespian needed in order to muster the full resources of her emotions. “As a result” — according to Gavin Lambert, her eventual friend and current biographer ​ “she rose to a pitch of emotional intensity that astonished [director Irving] Pichel, producer David Lewis and the president of International Pictures, William Goetz, when they ran the test.” Her performance in the subsequent film inspired Orson Welles to remark, with a grim adverbial pertinence that even he couldn’t have imagined, that young Natasha’s performance was “almost terrifyingly professional.” After that, of course, Natasha became Natalie, and nothing was ever the same. Her whole life was terrifyingly professional, and professionally terrifying, even those moments that didn’t have to be. A funny thing happened on her way to becoming another child-star burnout: She played opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and opposite Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass (1961) — two epochal films about teenage repression and rebellion — and a successful career as a child actress became what such careers so very seldom become: a subsequent success as an adult actress. And although Lambert, in his terrific biography Natalie Wood: A Life , doesn’t spend much time dwelling on the reasons for this, he doesn’t need to. We all know that most child stars are eclipsed out by strugglers and strivers, kids who didn’t come up as pampered prima donnas, and who have real drives and real talents to offer — not just a superficial sort of cuteness. Wood was always driven and talented, and with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to watch her now in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), for example, and behold her sense of timing and humor, utterly free from awkward self- consciousness, a child receiving simple and total enjoyment from her precocious craft. Then you pick up the thread and follow it from Miracle all the way to Rebel and Splendor and Kings Go Forth (1958), and then into her next phase and This Property Is Condemned (1966), where all that burning angst and sexuality are carried in the perfect physical vessel to create what has to be, frankly, the most supremely delicious depiction of female sexuality ever put on the screen. It’s a performance that was underappreciated in its time, and remains underappreciated still, although not if Lambert has anything to say about it. We can be all but certain that Natalie Wood went through life not knowing that her real father was a sailor who provided extramarital bliss to her mother, Maria Gurdin, while on shore, just as surely as we know that Maria is responsible for the broken arm Natalie suffered while filming The Green Promise (1949) (She could have died, when her footbridge broke above racing rapids.); we’re told that her mother had been warned of “dark water” by a Gypsy in Harbin; and we know that years before Elia Kazan refused to employ a double for the attempted-drowning suicide in Splendor , director Stuart Heisler, in The Star (1952), refused to do a similar favor for the childhood Natalie. (Bette Davis, who played her mother, came to her rescue. Many years later, a condescending and egomaniacal Davis told Wood that she was “too young to remember” Davis’ performance in The Star , to which Wood replied: “Bette, I played your daughter in that picture.”) All of this, as well as the nature of her roles, goes to show that it’s not only directors and writers who have running themes throughout their life and work. And it’s not as simple as being typecast, either. Wood wasn’t being typecast into roles; she was playing the roles that her life demanded she play: orphaned child, repressed teenager, inflamed young adult and despairing woman. As the latter, she would often get turned down for roles for being too beautiful. Or on the occasions when she was accepted for the part, a little cosmetic corrective was often required before she looked her age. None of that was required by the end of her life, of course, when all the drinking and pills and bad relationships, all the tears — both forced and spontaneous — had begun to do their destruction. Her first husband and one true love, Robert Wagner, broke off their first marriage when Wood insisted on seeing a therapist — a situation that seems just as preposterously dated today as does her big starring role from that period, that of West Side Story (1961). After that, she was in and out of many beds, and one bad marriage, and then she and Wagner, seemingly inevitably now, remarried in 1972 — on a boat off of Catalina. Anyone who knows anything about Natalie Wood knows that that’s where the final act of her tragic life took place just nine years later: She and her husband and her (potential) lover, Christopher Walken, all on the same boat; it was such a preposterous scene that you’d think that only a playwright could have gotten that group together and alone on the same boat. (Others were invited, but the storms kept them ashore.) And no one will ever know exactly what Wood was doing, drunk, out on that dinghy on the ocean at night. Her lifelong terror of dark water is, of course, well- documented all throughout this book. Was it a suicide? A call for help? Had she fallen into the dinghy? Or was she simply trying to tie the dinghy faster to the boat, so that it would stop banging, and she could finally get some of the sleep that had been coming with ever more difficulty? Lambert has written the kind of book that only an intelligent friend could have written: sensitive without being maudlin, unforgiving without being harsh, intimate without being trashy. He has gotten friends to talk who surely wouldn’t have talked to anyone else. He rewards one of them, Warren Beatty, by giving him the benefit of the doubt about what happened on the night, while filming The Great Race (1965), Wood almost overdosed on Seconal after a Beatty visit. (He asserts that Beatty was not responsible for her depression at the time.) As a homosexual friend who wrote the story ( Inside Daisy Clover ([1965]) that provided Wood one of her most challenging and interesting roles, Lambert had singular access to the psyche of Natalie Wood, and the two of them, it so happens, had at least one lover in common during their lifetimes: Nicholas Ray (who, incidentally, is the man who took 17-year-old Wood’s virginity during the filming of Rebel ). And another of her lovers, the actor Henry Jaglom, serves up this psychological explanation (as if any was necessary) of that most crucial way in which Wood’s mother ensured her failure at life, just as surely as she assured her success at movies, two realms that should never be confused, but almost universally are, especially by those who should know better: “She told me that ever since she was a seven-year-old actor in Tomorrow Is Forever , she’d been begging for love. She was constantly asked to cry, praised and admired when she did, realized that if she could cry authentically, everyone adored her, and she soon established a connection between love and pain.” Unlike traditional biographers, Lambert, who is really a novelist by trade, has written a swift piece of intimate storytelling. It’s a book that respects the obligations of biography, without being beholden to some of its more tedious customs. It’s in that spirit that any in- depth discussion of Wood’s cinematic performances is saved for one epilogously and gloriously set piece: “Something Extra” — which was Norman Maine’s term of choice for that thing that Wood had and so many others didn’t. It’s a consumptive essay that necessarily takes on the complexion of celebration as it generously ignores the worst performances (such as The Great Race and Brainstorm (1983), made by Wood at the heights of her personal turbulence), and focuses instead on those films in which she was born to star: Miracle on 34th Street , Rebel , Splendor , Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) , Daisy Clover , This Property Is Condemned , Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and The Cracker Factory (1979). One can be fairly certain of why Lambert chose this approach: it’s the saddest stories, after all, that deserve the happiest endings. At least this way we get to leave under the illusion that the films are what happened only after Natalie Wood, finally, had stopped making herself cry. 'No one could lose control like her' F irst of all, she was Russian; and the great acting teacher Stella Adler once commented on the uniquely Russian "extreme sensibility of reacting, caring, feeling". Natalie Wood's parents, who fled the 1917 revolution with very little money and no prospects, first met after they settled in San Francisco. It was a flammable match between two very different emotional extremists: Maria Gurdin had one ruling passion, to create a future for herself through her daughter, whom she admittedly "raised to become a movie star". Nicholas Gurdin, basically gentle but weak, was fixated on a past that the revolution had forced him to leave behind. The more he lamented it, the more he drank - and erupted with violent rage. For her actor friend George Segal, "nobody could lose control on the screen like Natalie", and he cited her extraordinarily intense breakdown scenes in Splendour in the Grass, Inside Daisy Clover and the television movie The Cracker Factory, as well as her near-breakdown before leaving the family home in Love With the Proper Stranger. In fact, the first time Natalie lost control on the screen was in her first film Tomorrow is Forever. She was seven years old, and cast as an Austrian orphan from the second world war. To ensure that she'd cry on demand when she tested for the part, Maria primed her with a hair-raising account of watching a boy tear off the wings of a live bird. Because Natalie had talent as well as star quality, she'd have cried anyway, although maybe not so wildly as to amaze the director and producer when they ran the test. Maria, no mean actress herself in the cause of manipulation, continued to implant all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties in her daughter, most dangerously that only Maria herself could be trusted. It was only after Maria had put her through another 16 movies and three TV shows during the next eight years that Natalie was able to catch her breath, and realise that not only her mother but her directors had always told her what to think and feel, leaving no time to think and feel for herself. In many of those 1940s and early 1950s movies, the Wonder Child, as she quickly became known, played the daughter of ideal parents in an ideal world where all problems and misunderstandings were resolved in the end. Not surprisingly, she felt happier in a make-believe studio home than in the real world of a drunken father and a mother who replaced warm affection with a cold shoulder when Natalie lost a part. But when she finally began to look back on her life, she had to confront the fact that by escaping into a cunningly fabricated illusion of reality, and posing for publicity photos of growing up in a "normal" family, she'd lost her real self. As often happen with actors, a role helped her find it again. Two years later, when Nicholas Ray cast 17-year-old Natalie as Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, she found a mirror image in the character of an adolescent girl alienated from her family, and impatient to rebel. And after years of being told what to do and think, she was astonished by a director who asked her opinion of a scene and even encouraged criticism, and by James Dean, who insisted on exploring a scene in different ways until he found the approach that felt right. Creative and sexual liberation went hand in hand when Ray became Natalie's first lover; and shortly afterward she invited Dennis Hopper, who was cast in a supporting role, to become her second. Recalling how she made the first move, and "the cool way she handled two simultaneous affairs", Hopper realised she was "way ahead of her time". But the price of liberation, her first Academy nomination, and eventual stardom was high. It involved a seven-year contract with Warner Bros, and a frustrating series of mediocre parts in mediocre movies, with the exception of John Ford's The Searchers, in which she (rightly) felt miscast. A lost childhood had left Natalie painfully insecure, and her personal life soon foundered: a brief first marriage (to Robert Wagner) that ended abruptly in divorce, like the second (to a leading British talent agent, Richard Gregson); years of psychoanalysis to undo her mother's work, and the lapses into uncontrollable panic or melancholy it had caused; years of affairs, some serious (with Warren Beatty), and some not (with Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen), but most as short-lived as her marriages; one serious suicide attempt, and one not. Released from professional bondage in 1961, when Elia Kazan cast her in Splendour in the Grass, Natalie won a second Oscar nomination in a movie that established her as a star. Throughout the 1960s she gave a series of outstanding performances, working with directors she admired: in Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan), Inside Daisy Clover (Mulligan again), This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack), Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Paul Mazursky). "She had a quiet determination to grow as an actress," Mulligan recalled. "No declarations. It was just there." "When the persona fit the character," said Kazan, "you couldn't do better." The characters that fitted it best were outsiders, in rebellion against authority or their families. But win or lose she remained vulnerable, one of the reasons that Natalie particularly appealed to women and gay men. From the first, Robert Wagner noted, she accepted something generally considered unacceptable at the time, and formed "many friendships with gay men". During the Warner years, her best male friend was Tab Hunter, and her later circle included playwright Mart Crowley, Howard Jeffrey, dancer and assistant to Jerry Robbins, Jerry Robbins himself (who once proposed marriage), Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowall, John Schlesinger and me. When I first got to know Natalie during the 1960s, she was at her professional peak. Enjoying stardom while shrewdly aware of its unreality, she was accessible, loyal, generous, with a pungent sense of humour. But the child-woman's interior demons were still stirring, and only seemed to rest when she remarried Wagner in 1973. After several chance encounters - during which they made only small talk, but "the subtext was loaded" as Wagner said - they decided they'd always been in love. As Natalie explained: "We got back to where we started, and should have stayed." She'd already had one daughter by Gregson, was eager for another child by Wagner, and after the birth of a second daughter, concentrated on motherhood and domestic life for three years. In Hollywood-speak, it was a bad career move. At 38, Natalie (like all famous screen beauties) was close to being considered over the hill, and knew it. Typically, when offered good roles on TV, she didn't consider the small screen a comedown, but welcomed the opportunity to do some of her best work. At Laurence Olivier's invitation, Natalie and Wagner played Maggie and Brick to his Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She followed this with the Deborah Kerr role in a mini-series based on From Here to Eternity, and a harrowing portrait of a disturbed housewife in The Cracker Factory. Its director, Burt Brinckerhoff, found Natalie "at the top of her game", but also realised that her interior demons were stirring again. During the last two years of her life, they became fully awake, and the rest of the story is of addiction to painkillers and too much white wine out of frustration at a stalled career: the final movie, Brainstorm, she accepted because there was nothing better on offer; her infatuation with its leading man, Christopher Walken, and the tension it caused in her marriage; the increasingly tense and drunken weekend on the Wagner yacht that ended with Natalie's accidental drowning. All this leaves me with only one thing to add. In Meteor (a last resort dud that preceded Brainstorm), the role obliged her to be buried under a million tons of mud when a large chip of extraterrestrial matter fell on Manhattan. And after her death, Natalie was buried under a myriad tons of tabloid mud - was it murder or suicide, which one of the three was really making it with the other etc etc? It completely submerged the person and the actress - and one reason I wanted to write about Natalie was to clear the sludge away. · Natalie Wood by Gavin Lambert is published on Thursday by Faber, price £16.99. Natalie Wood's Russian roots. When actress Natalie Wood drowned off Catalina Island after a night of drinking in 1981 it was ruled an accident. Now in a new book, author Gavin Lambert traces the life and career of the brunette beauty in "Natalie Wood: A Life." Here’s an excerpt: Out of Russia Shortly after eleven p.m. on November 6, 1917 (New Style calendar), the Bolsheviks seized power by storming government buildings and the Winter Palace in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). After months of violent disorders throughout Russia, the revolution was under way; and as the majority members (Bolsheviki) of the Socialist Party believed in "dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants," thousands of wealthy landowners and businessmen realized their lands and businesses would be confiscated, and fled the country with all the money and possessions they could take with them. Supporters and/or relatives of Tsar Nicholas II (government ministers, army officers, princes and grand dukes with their wives and children) also took flight, and when fighting between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces erupted across the country, thousands more fled their homes to become refugees from a savage and devastating civil war. Among the refugees were two families, one rich, one poor, living three thousand miles apart. A daughter of the rich family and a son of the poor family eventually emigrated to California, met in San Francisco, and were married on February 8, 1938. The Russian Orthodox ceremony took place at the Russian church on Fulton Street, when the bride was almost five months pregnant, and the following July a future star was born. In 1917, Stepan Zudilov was forty-two years old, a portly, prosperous middle-class businessman who owned soap and candle factories in Barnaul, southern Siberia, and an estate in the outlying countryside. By then he had fathered a large family: two sons and two daughters by his first wife, who died in 1905 after giving birth to their younger daughter; and by his second wife, whom he married a year later, two more daughters followed by two more sons.His youngest daughter, Maria Stepanovna, born in 1912, claimed years later in California that her mother came from an aristocratic family with Romanov connections, and had "married beneath her." But this was Maria the fabulist speaking, with her dreams of nobility, and Zudilov the outspoken tsarist and land-and-factory owner had no need of Romanov connections to qualify for the Bolshevik hit list. The Zudilovs were known as "gentry," and to the Bolsheviks all landowning gentry were suspect, like the family of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin (who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933). "Any of us who had the slightest chance to escape did so," Bunin wrote after he fled from his estate in central Russia to France by way of Romania.But the armies of the new government headed by Lenin were slow to gain control of an enormous country, and for almost a year the Zudilovs, like their tsarist neighbors, were in no imminent danger by remaining in Barnaul. It was not until the summer of 1918, six months after the civil war broke out, that the Bolsheviks managed to gain control of all southern and central Russia. On the night of July 16, Tsar Nicholas II, his entire family, their doctor and servants, were executed by a squad of Red Guards at Ekaterinburg, the western terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the news reached Barnaul, it sent tremors of fear throughout the neighboring gentry; and by late November, Red Guard units were only a hundred miles from the town, after executing suspected tsarists en route.Zudilov had arranged to be warned of their approach in advance, and when the alert came, the family hurried to a prepared hiding place on the estate, stuffing as much money and jewelry as they could inside loose-fitting peasant clothes. Forgotten in the panic of the moment was eighteen-year-old Mikhail, Zudilov's eldest son, who happened to be out of the house.After the soldiers moved on, the family left their hiding place. Just outside the house, they were confronted by Mikhail hanging from a tree. The sight of her dead half-brother sent six-year-old Maria into convulsions.Knowing the soldiers were bound to return, the Zudilovs quickly made plans to leave Russia, and in the dead of winter they set out for Harbin in Manchuria, the northeastern province of China. Maria claimed later that they traveled by private train, with a retinue of servants as well as stacks of rubles and the family jewels stowed in their luggage. Although there's no doubt they escaped with enough assets to live very comfortably in exile, the private train is almost certainly another example of Maria the fabulist.Red Guards were still searching the area for potential enemies of the new Soviet Russia, and a private train would have aroused immediate suspicion. But as Barnaul was a stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway, only four hundred miles from the Manchurian frontier, and Harbin the last stop before Vladivostok for eastbound trains, it seems far more likely that the Zudilovs decided to keep a low profile and traveled by the regular route.When the child from a secluded country estate looked out the train window during that journey of almost three thousand miles, she would have glimpsed the same frighteningly alien world as the Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie, who traveled by the Trans-Siberian that same year. He saw a "stricken land of misery," with ravenous and spectral refugees huddled on the platform when the train slowed down past a wayside station; dismal tracts of frozen steppe, occasionally swept by a violent gale that caused the coaches to rattle, squeal, and shudder; and near the Chinese frontier, where civil war had been especially ferocious, a wake of gutted villages and more desperate refugees, some dying or dead.Ivan Bunin: No one who did not actually witness it can comprehend what the Russian Revolution quickly turned into. The spectacle was sheer terror for anyone who had not utterly lost sight of God.Like thousands of other refugees, Zudilov chose Harbin because it was a Chinese city with a strong Russian presence. The Byzantine dome of the Russian cathedral dominated its skyline, and there was an extensive Russian quarter, part business, part residential, with street signs in Russian, droshkies instead of rickshaws, restaurants that served borscht and beef Stroganoff. Japan had also moved in, with trading concessions at the port on the Songhua River, investments in the city's grain mills, and a chain of "Happiness Mansions," brothels that featured very young boys as well as girls; and Britain, with the British Export Company, which employed ruthlessly underpaid Chinese to slaughter thousands of pigs, fowl and sheep every year, then freeze them for export to the homeland and the United States.Business as usual, of course, meant politics as usual, colonial expansion in a country weakened by years of internal rebellions led by rival warlords. By the spring of 1918, Russian nationals formed almost a third of Harbin's population of three hundred thousand, and the Chinese quarter was just a suburb, like a picturesque Chinatown set in a Hollywood silent movie; while the much larger central downtown area, with its handsome beaux-arts railroad station and Hotel Moderne, looked solidly Western. Under the agreement between Russia and China, the stretch of the Trans-Siberian that crossed Manchuria was officially known as the Chinese Eastern Railway; but it was Russian- financed, maintained by Russian workers, and guarded by regiments of Russian soldiers headquartered in Harbin.And in the wake of the revolution, the Zudilovs escaped one political upheaval only to find themselves in the middle of another. Not long before they arrived, fighting had broken out between Red and White Russian workers and guards on the railway. The Soviet government had sent in militiamen to rout the anti- Bolsheviks; and in case a full-scale civil war developed, the Japanese made ready to invade Manchuria and seize control of the Chinese Eastern. At the end of December, when the Zudilovs reached Harbin, the Chinese government intervened by sending in an army to disarm and deport the Soviet militia; and for the moment at least, the situation was defused.A few weeks later, on February 8, 1919, the Zudilovs celebrated Maria's seventh birthday. Although she was too young, of course, to understand the ways of the great world, the flight from Barnaul had stamped images of warning and terror on her mind. Like most Russian refugees, the Zudilovs stayed within their own community of exiles, ignoring China and the Chinese; but as she grew up, Maria couldn't fail to notice-beyond the house in the Russian quarter where Zudilov established his family with a Chinese cook and a German nanny for the girls, and the Russian school where she occasionally took ballet lessons as well as regular classes-more warning signs that the great world was a disturbingly insecure place.Throughout the 1920s, the city witnessed several outbreaks of fighting between Red and White Russians, parades of underpaid Chinese workers on strike against foreign companies, and street demonstrations by the growing nationalist movement. In 1920 one of these demonstrations led to violence, and smoke covered the city when the storage plant of the British Export Company was burned to the ground. Occasional Soviet threats to invade Manchuria and restore order sent shivers of alarm through the exiles; and an increasingly familiar experience for Maria was the sight of Russians who had arrived in style, like her own family, reduced to begging in the streets when their money ran out.The sight of her half-brother hanging from a tree had produced Maria's first convulsion. It soon led to others, when something frightened her or when she didn't get her own way. As a result she was considered delicate, pampered and spoiled by her parents and nanny.As a further result, Maria learned that she could get her own way by throwing a fit. She grew cunning, but at the same time incurably superstitious, and most of her superstitions were based on fear. At first they were the conventional ones: the bad luck caused by breaking a mirror, leaving a hat on your bed, or touching a peacock feather. But they grew quite bizarre with time, like her more extreme fantasies. Years later, in California, she told her daughters that she was a foundling, born into a Gypsy family that taught her fortune-telling, explained the dangers lurking in everyday signs, and later abandoned her on a Siberian steppe.Among the multitude of poor Russians, peasants and laborers, some had never heard the word "revolution" before, and thought it meant a woman chosen to replace the tsar. The poor, in fact, simply fled the chaos of civil war: famine, butchery, looting, skyrocketing inflation. In Vladivostok, a subzero city on a bleak peninsula in Far Eastern Siberia, almost half the population had been reduced to near-starvation, and some died of cold on the wooden sidewalks rotting under heavy snow.Hundreds more died in the street fighting that broke out in November 1918 between Red and White Russian soldiers. Among the dead was Stepan Zacharenko, who worked in a chocolate factory and joined the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces who fought side by side with the Whites. His widow escaped by train to Shanghai with her three young sons, and wrote to ask for help from her brother, who had emigrated to Canada. With the money he sent, she bought steerage tickets on a boat that left Shanghai for Vancouver, but it's unclear whether she traveled with her sons or remained behind.In August 2000, the youngest Zacharenko son, Dmitri, was living in Palm Springs. At first he insisted that his mother remarried in Shanghai, and her new husband, a Russian engineer, brought her to Canada, where the family was reunited. But at eighty-five Dmitri's memory was erratic, and he later contradicted himself by insisting that he and his brothers were sent to live with their uncle and aunt in Montreal.Although Dmitri wasn't always sure what he remembered, it's certain that he and his brothers, Nikolai and Vladimir, attended school in Montreal, learned to speak serviceable English, and soon heard the call to go west. As a young boy, Nikolai had acquired a passion for reading and learned to play the balalaika. As a young man, he became a migrant worker, took any job that would bring him nearer California, and developed into an expert carpenter along the way. But in San Francisco he had to take the only job on offer at first, as a janitor at the Standard Oil Building.Vladimir, the oldest brother, played violin; Dmitri played mandolin; and when the three Zacharenkos met up in San Francisco, they formed a trio with Nikolai on balalaika to earn extra money at local dance halls. Although Vladimir eventually became a nuclear engineer, and Dmitri worked as chief accountant to an automobile tire company after joining the U.S. Army and being awarded a Purple Heart in World War II, Nikolai appeared to place his future on indefinite hold. In 1934, the year he met Maria, he was working at the docks, loading and unloading the sugarcane boats that plied the coastal ports between San Francisco and San Diego.A photograph of Maria in Harbin with her mother, sister, two half-sisters and German nanny shows a dark-haired girl with strikingly intense eyes. She faces the camera confidently, directly, as if daring it not to find her more attractive than her siblings. She looks around sixteen, so the photograph was probably taken in 1928, the year she met and fell in love with a Russian-Armenian regimental officer from one of the military units stationed in Harbin."When I was young," Maria said many years later in California, "I was ruled by my heart, not my head." So was her own mother, she added, who was forced to break off her affair with an impoverished aristocrat to marry Zudilov, a merger arranged by the heads of their respective families. And Maria claimed to have married Captain Alexei Tatulov in secret, because she feared her father would consider him "unsuitable."For "heart that ruled the head," read "sexual drive." Maria probably inherited it from her mother, and there's no doubt the same gene recurred even more strongly in her famous daughter.In Maria's sometimes conflicting accounts of her early life, she never discussed her parents' reaction to her secret marriage to Tatulov. But in 1929, after the birth of their daughter, Olga, it was clearly no longer a secret. At Tatulov's insistence, Olga was baptized in the Armenian Orthodox Church; and when Zudilov learned that he had a granddaughter, he accepted the situation on condition that a Russian Orthodox priest rebaptize her. Excerpted from Natalie Wood by Gavin Lambert. Copyright © 2004 by Gavin Lambert. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Way ahead of her time. More than half way through his biography of Natalie Wood, Gavin Lambert tells us that he first met his subject in 1956. They were introduced by Nicholas Ray, who had directed Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause a year earlier; Lambert had since become Ray's assistant. Nine years later, when Wood wanted to star in the movie of Lambert's novel, Inside Daisy Clover, the pair became good friends. 'I was wondering exactly what was going on with you and Nick Ray,' Wood said over dinner, referring to their first encounter. 'What was going on,' Lambert replied, 'was exactly what you wondered.' The timing of this revelation is mischievously discreet. We already know that Ray had relieved Wood of her virginity; now, over a hundred pages later, we find out that her biographer himself succeeded her. But to have given this detail any more prominence would have been un-Lambert-like. Readers of his gripping memoir, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, will already know about Lambert's relationship with Ray, so movingly entwined with the movies. And in writing about Natalie Wood, Lambert has chosen a careful position: one that must contrast with that of the scandalmongers and self-proclaimed intimates who came forward after her mysterious death. It's not until Lambert's final acknowledgments, for example, that we learn that Wood's widower, Robert Wagner, once told him: 'When you tell the truth about Natalie as you see it, I shall be at peace.' Movie bios often fall into one of three broad categories: the autobiography (ghost-written or otherwise) of the star; the memoir of the star's assistant/butler/lover/child, in which agendas come out of hiding; the workmanlike overview with little critical insight. Lambert, however, is exceptional. He is an insider in Hollywood, where he arrived in time to know Norma Shearer (about whom he wrote a masterly biography) among many others. But he is also a critic (Lambert edited Sight and Sound for most of the 1950s), and in all of his non-fiction he brings a critic's eye to materials to which only an insider would be granted access: letters, diaries, the testimony of close relatives and friends. Lambert has equal respect for history and human beings; this biography is stunning not merely because he reveals new facts but because of his ongoing relationship to facts: he is sceptical, elegant, generous, exact. Natalie Wood was propelled into stardom at the age of seven, by an ambitious mother who demanded that she 'make people love' her, in order to support her Russian immigrant family. She appeared opposite Orson Welles in Tomorrow Is Forever, and is still remembered as the little girl in Miracle on 34th Street. She continued to act in 'family pictures' as her own family disintegrated (her alcoholic father once waved a knife at her pregnant mother's stomach) or went unacknowledged: when her father, a studio carpenter, appeared on set to repair a piece of furniture, her mother warned her never to say hello to him in those circumstances again. Then she met Nicholas Ray and Dennis Hopper and had affairs with both of them. 'When I think about those early days with Natalie,' Hopper told Lambert, 'the cool way she handled two affairs at the same time - I realise Natalie was way ahead of her time.' After Rebel Without a Cause, she went on to give another Oscar-nominated performance in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass. She was a lovestruck teenager in West Side Story, and an awkward girl turned high-class stripper in Gypsy. To each of these roles she brought a mixture of sweet-eyed serenity and nervy despair. When she was 10 years old, she came across a 19-year-old actor on the lot at Fox studios, and instantly fell in love with him. By the time she made Rebel Without A Cause, Robert Wagner's fan mail was, according to Lambert, 'second only to Marilyn Monroe's'. They were married in 1957, and became one of the brightest star couples in Hollywood. 'My husband, my child, my strength, my weakness, my lover, my life,' Natalie Wood wrote of Robert Wagner a year into their marriage. Lambert tells this extraordinary love story with great empathy, and a good deal of help from Wagner. The couple bought a house, and planned to decorate it in such grand style that it was never finished. When Lambert met them, they seemed to him 'not quite real, like the house. Later, I wondered if they seemed that way to themselves.' Eventually, their marriage fell apart. 'They were paralysed by simultaneous but separate insecurities,' Lambert writes, 'a couple who still loved but no longer understood each other, or themselves.' Wood took refuge in other affairs; Warren Beatty, Nicky Hilton, and later, Frank Sinatra. One co-star remembers her 'working a room in search of love'. Wagner remarried and had a child. Wood attempted suicide (twice). She remarried and had a child. Then, in July 1972, they both remarried and had a child - with each other. 'The first time round, you sometimes got the impression they were playing it,' one friend told Lambert. 'But this time they just enjoyed letting people see how happy they were.' One crucial protagonist in the Natalie Wood story refused to break his silence. Christopher Walken, with whom Wood may or may not have been having an affair when she died, and who, along with Robert Wagner, was with her the night she drowned, or drowned herself, at the age of 43. Towards the end of her life she took a regular cocktail of drugs - pain medication, sleeping pills - and a fair bit of drink. But many people who saw her around that time felt she was upbeat. She was very close to her two young daughters and maintained a dry sense of humour. Did she jump into the water, or did she slip? Lambert lays out as many facts as he can, then presents her family's hopes. And here, it seems, he is gently heroic, because Lambert can embrace multiple stories, and he knows that truths can be told by biases and nostalgia and love. Natalie Wood. She spent her life in the movies. Her childhood is still there to see in Miracle on 34th Street. Her adolescence in Rebel Without a Cause. Her coming of age? Still playing in Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story and countless other hit movies. From the moment Natalie Wood made her debut in 1946, playing Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles’s ward in Tomorrow Is Forever at the age of seven, to her shocking, untimely death in 1981, the decades of her life are marked by movies that–for their moments–summed up America’s dreams. Now the acclaimed novelist, biographer, critic and screenwriter Gavin Lambert, whose twenty-year friendship with Natalie Wood began when she wanted to star in the movie adaptation of his novel Inside Daisy Clover, tells her extraordinary story. He writes about her parents, uncovering secrets that Natalie either didn’t know or kept hidden from those closest to her. Here is the young Natalie, from her years as a child actress at the mercy of a driven, controlling stage mother (“Make Mr. Pichel love you,” she whispered to the five-year-old Natalie before depositing her unexpectedly on the director’s lap), to her awkward adolescence when, suddenly too old for kiddie roles, she was shunted aside, just another freshman at Van Nuys High. Lambert shows us the glamorous movie star in her twenties— All the Fine Young Cannibals, Gypsy and Love with the Proper Stranger . He writes about her marriages, her divorces, her love affairs, her suicide attempt at twenty-six, the birth of her children, her friendships, her struggles as an actress and her tragic death by drowning (she was always terrified of water) at forty-three. For the first time, everyone who knew Natalie Wood speaks freely–including her husbands Robert Wagner and Richard Gregson, famously private people like Warren Beatty, intimate friends such as playwright Mart Crowley, directors Robert Mulligan and Paul Mazursky, and Leslie Caron, each of whom told the author stories about this remarkable woman who was both life-loving and filled with despair. What we couldn’t know–have never been told before–Lambert perceptively uncovers. His book provides the richest portrait we have had of Natalie Wood. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. NATALIE WOOD: A Life. An easily familiar biography of the actress, from a personal friend who fails to connect some of the critical pieces in her puzzle.It's clear from the get-go that screenwriter, novelist, and . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. Gavin Lambert knew Natalie Wood, but he manages to refer to himself very rarely in this biography of the famous actress who drowned mysteriously one night on the family yacht. Nor does he manage to . Читать весь отзыв.