Biography: How her mother's desire for stardom took Natalie Wood to Hollywood, writes Hugh Leonard
Where, it might be asked, do child actors go when puberty strikes? As a coda to his biography of Natalie Wood, Gavin Lambert reminds us that Peggy Ann Garner - so unforgettable in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - twice attempted suicide and died, jobless and almost forgotten, at 53. Margaret O'Brien, whose sweetness could drive strong men mad, was colourless in her few adult roles. Roddy McDowall became a photographer and gossip-monger; Scotty Beckett died of drugs, the careers of Gloria Jean, Bobby Breen and Jane Powell expired with the death of the screen musical; Deanna Durbin sensibly fled to France and stayed there; and among the few survivors were Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney and Natalie Wood.
None of which would be any more than quiz trivia, except that as a child star grows into adulthood, her younger self clings to her like a leech.
It might be said of Natalie Wood that she was a lightweight and that nothing quite became her life like the leaving of it. One would not go quite as far as to echo Gore Vidal's comment on learning of the death of Truman Capote, "good career move", but Vidal would surely have recycled it in Wood's case.
In 1933, many years before Natalie was born, there was a minor MGM film named Stage Mother, starring Maureen O'Sullivan and the bibulous Alice Brady. Natalie's mother - aptly nicknamed "Mud" by her son-in-law, Robert Wagner - was one of the deadliest of the species: a parent who enjoyed vicarious stardom through her daughter. When director Irving Pichel was shooting a crowd scene in a tear-jerker named Happy Land, Mud dumped the five-year-old child on his lap with the instruction: "Make Mr Pichel love you."
By the time Natasha Gurdin, as she then was, had worked her tiny wiles on Mr Pichel, he was offering to adopt her. Better - or worse - still, he cast her as Orson Welles's daughter in Tomorrow is Forever, an updated version of the Enoch Arden poem.
One of the many photographs in this perhaps unnecessary biography shows the winsome mite extending an invitation to infanticide by embracing a helpless Welles; at any rate, her career, which would endure for nearly 40 years, was underway.
First, however - and a family tree would have been helpful to the reader - Lambert treats us to a history that extends back into Tsarist Russia. One emits a sigh of gratitude when Mud, a White Russian, takes the Shanghai route to San Francisco, marries Nick Gurdin, a a failure by profession, gives birth to Natasha/Natalie and moves to Hollywood.
A producer friend of this reviewer said during Natalie Wood's lifetime that whereas Robert Wagner was easygoing, level-headed and utterly unspoiled by Hollywood, Natalie was as neurotic as a Chekhov heroine, and as tiresome. A "pain" was his summation. One is hardly surprised when Mud is quoted as saying: "I raised my daughter to be a movie star." On the same page, Wagner is more eloquent: "Her mother was genuinely, fanatically obsessed with Natalie's talent and possibilities. It became the focus of her life, and sometimes made her as close to certifiable as you can get".
Among Natalie's early films, the best is probably Miracle on 34th Street - the title was changed on this side of the Atlantic to The Big Heart - and the climax of the story is when a court of law must decide whether or not a department store Santa Claus is the real thing. Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar, but the film belongs to Gene Lockhart as the hapless judge, aching to bring in a verdict that will appease his own pro-Santa family. As Maureen O'Hara's little daughter, Natalie made suitable faces.
She was married three times: to Robert Wagner, the agent Richard Gregson and (again) Robert Wagner. Both during these liaisons and between them, she did not go short of lovers; it is possible that she was the star whom Bette Davis acidly described as the original good time that was had by all. Lambert tells his story with a literateness to which, in showbiz biographies, we have not been accustomed, and it ends on board the Wagners' yacht, the Splendour, anchored off Catalina Island.
A recurring motif in Natalie's life is her fear of "dark water". If one is to be wise after the event, then attention must be paid to the warning supposedly given by a gypsy fortune teller that she would die by drowning. Much is made of this by the author, but had she taken it seriously, it seems unlikely that Natalie would ever set foot on a yacht, never mind that she would permit her husband to buy one.
In the company of R.J. and her current co-star, Christopher Walken, she was drinking on board the Splendour at its moorings. The weather was cold and drizzling, and R.J. was artfully steering the conversation to the point where it was the prologue to a seduction. Wagner reacted by getting very drunk and later had an imperfect recall of events, but the most likely scenario seems to be that there was a quarrel and that Natalie left the yacht with the intention of untying the motorised dinghy and spending the night at a motel in the nearby resort of Avalon.
Possibly, in stepping from the yacht to the dinghy she fell between the two - for nautical imbibers it is an occupational hazard - and perhaps both Wagner and Walken were too drunk to help her. R.J. has freely told the little he can remember, and Walken refuses to say anything at all. Perhaps his silence is a cover-up for guilt; or it may be that he is protecting Wagner. Probably if Walken gave his side of the story there are few who would believe him.
A small, but pretty and vivacious talent was blotted out, and one can only echo Dorothy L. Sayers's verse: "As I grow older and older/ And totter towards the tomb,/ I find that I care less and less/ Who goes to bed with whom."
Hugh Leonard is a playwright and novelist. His latest book is Fillum (New Island)