Too adult for her own good

In 1966, the Harvard Lampoon voted Natalie Wood “Worst Actress of Last Year, This Year and Next.� She surprised the magazine’s staff by accepting in person. “They invited me,� she told her presenter, “and I thought it was only polite to accept,� Gavin Lambert writes in “Natalie Wood: A Life.�

“She looks very demure and bats her eyelids. ‘It’s funny, last year I was nominated by the Academy for Best Actress, and this year I’m the worst.’ Then she bursts out laughing. The crowd laughs and applauds, a group of undergraduates hoist her on their shoulders and paraded her around the campus.�

I was in that crowd, and what I remember of her, besides her pert good humor, is how old she seemed. She was 27, at the crest of her career, but to me she was Mrs. Robinson.

She had been a movie star for 19 years. “Tomorrow Is Forever,� her first real role, was also her breakthrough. The studio dyed her pigtails blond and taught her a German accent. Orson Welles, whose ward she played, remembered her as “fearsomely professional.� That was also a fair description of her performance, though it was clear as well that little Natalie was having a very good time. She was an excellent crier.

Natalie played in 22 films as a child star. Her most enduring role was the doubting girl whom Edmund Gwenn allowed to pull his beard in “Miracle on 34th Street,� the 1947 film in which kindly adults conspire to believe in Santa Claus. She had a fluid and amusing skeptical glance. Lambert points out that in most of her early films she played emotionally displaced children whose problems are resolved by understanding grown-ups. These decorous, sensitive folks were the polar opposite of her parents, White Russian refugees Maria and Nick Gurdin.

Maria was a fantasist with the con artist gifts to maneuver her daughter into the limelight, then convince her to be grateful; Nick was handsome, charming and a vicious drunk. They presented a benign front to the rest of the world, but the child knew better. She did not know that Nick was not her real father, though he knew it, which may have explained some of his anger. He was an ineffectual man.

Maria wrote herself into her daughter’s studio contract as the keeper of her fan mail and got Nick employed on the lot as a carpenter. Once he was called to the set to repair a piece of furniture. Natalie embarrassed cast and crew by shouting “Hi, Dad.� Her mother warned her never to acknowledge her father at the studio again. Natalie’s principal achievement away from the set was earning a diploma at Van Nuys High School. She wanted her family present at graduation without the studio publicity machine. Maria, of course, alerted Warner Bros., burbled to the assembled reporters about a mother’s pride and kissed her daughter for the cameras. Nick was off on a bender.

Natalie had the talent and good fortune to land perhaps the only role that would allow her to move from child star to actress. At 16, she and 24-year-old James Dean played a pair of troubled teens in “Rebel Without a Cause.� Dean’s narcissism and emotional volatility made him seem younger than Natalie. While he projected a raw, unpredictable intensity, she delivered intensity on demand, doled out in beats. She had the gift. She was particularly adept at emotional collapse. She earned her first Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.

According to Lambert, Natalie lost her virginity to the film’s 44-year-old director, Nicholas Ray. She maintained a parallel affair with her fellow cast member Dennis Hopper until her mother complained to the studio. Maria knew better than to complain about the director. In “Rebel,� Natalie had the appeal of the girl who peaks in high school because she matures faster than the rest. As she grew older, with a thickish nose and a face at once sharp and soft, she didn’t have the bones to be a beauty, but she was very, very pretty, with large, dark, knowing eyes and longbow lips that curled at the tips with lascivious glee.

Natalie’s principal roles were as young women resisting controlling parents. When she played opposite Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen and Robert Redford, her name preceded theirs in the credits; more important for her performance, the young actors had yet to acquire their star-turn tics. In the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass,� she was directed by Elia Kazan and won her second nomination, for best actress. Karl Malden, who had worked with her before in “Bombers B-52� and after in “Gypsy,� remarked that, thanks to Kazan, she had “advanced enormously.� Her performances became subtler, more nuanced, more fluid, more relaxed. She was at her peak in her 1963 Academy-nominated performance in “Love With the Proper Stranger,� playing opposite a calm and confident McQueen in a delicate romantic comedy that begins with Natalie’s character pregnant by McQueen and ends when he realizes he loves her. Eight years after “Rebel Without a Cause,� she was fresher and more honestly juvenile than she had been at 16.

Why, then, in 1966 did the Harvard Lampoon give her its lifetime achievement award for worst actress? For the same reason I found her old: She was a Hollywood icon at a moment when Hollywood was behind the cultural curve. She was in the last wave of films about young people made for old people. The films felt contrived, if brilliantly contrived; they felt acted from an adult perspective. They portrayed the adult world as an essentially benign place, beyond one’s controlling parents. By the second half of the 1960s, that wasn’t a popular view among the young.

Lambert writes that Natalie’s mother instilled in her a need for approval and a mistrust of anyone who got too close to her. In her personal life, he says, this translated into compulsive flirtation, what she called “swishing her tail,� and a string of unsatisfactory affairs with partners who included Beatty, Frank Sinatra, Tom Courtenay, Nicky Hilton, Henry Jaglom and Jerry Brown. She was phobic as well, afraid of airplane trips and movie theaters and dark water. Lambert was her friend, and his account benefits from his clear-eyed, affectionate point of view. He accepts her contradictions and her foibles as one accepts them in a friend, as regrettable and sad but not defining of the person. When he says she was capable of great happiness, I believe him.

Lambert, a Hollywood veteran, befriended the actress when she starred in “Inside Daisy Clover,� which he adapted from his novel. He enjoyed extraordinary access to those who were close to Natalie and felt a commitment to telling her story straight, which he does in clean, honest prose. This promises to be her definitive biography.

Lambert says Natalie found the love of her life in Robert Wagner. This book is the result of Wagner urging him to “write the truth about Natalie Wood,� and Wagner is an essential source for the personal story. What emerges is a moving sense of Wagner’s devotion to his wife, his pain, the strength of the bond between them and the terrible intensity of their arguments. They married in 1957, and, until their breakup in 1961, they were among the tabloids’ golden couples. The final rupture came when Wagner refused to let her consult a psychoanalyst.

She married Richard Gregson, a British talent agent, in 1969, and had his daughter. She threw him out the day she learned he’d cheated on her. In 1972, she married Wagner again, and they had a daughter. Lambert says these were the best years for both of them.

When Wagner asked Lambert to tell the truth about Natalie Wood, he was referring to the mystery that surrounds her death. On Nov. 29, 1981, she drowned off Catalina Island after a night of hard drinking and bitter argument. Lambert presents Wagner’s version, and it sounds convincing, though the details he provides are sketchy. Whatever the particulars, in describing the events of that evening, Lambert makes a strong case that Natalie’s death wasn’t caused by suicide or foul play but by alcohol, exhaustion and unhappy accident.

Natalie Wood was 42 when she died. She had been in 52 films and a star since she was 7. As Lambert points out, she had reached the age when iconic actresses stop being stars. At the mortuary, Sydney Guilaroff did Natalie’s hair one last time. He used Ava Gardner’s fall.