SEVENTEEN! Cutest Doll They’ve Ever Seen—Natalie Wood

I first met Natalie Wood when she was six. I had a lot of questions to ask, but I never got to them. Natalie took the interview in hand with her opening statement. “I don’t like girls much,” she said. “But I do like boys.”

This time, 11 years later, I got right to the point. “Tell me,” I said to 17-year-old Miss Wood, “how do you feel about girls?” “I don’t like them much,” she said. Then she brightened. “But I still like boys!”

The feeling is mutual. At 17, Natalie’s blonde hair has darkened to a soft brown, her eyes are a mixture of childish wonderment and adult wisdom, and her figure has developed into a dainty replica of Venus. In action she is all teen-ager, bouncing here, running there, her conversation skipping about in the same way. And I don’t date when I’m on a picture. There’s Marty Milnar and Tab Hunter and Dick Davalos—before he got married. And Perry Lopez and Nicky Adams—the three of us go out all the time together.”

“How often do you date?”

“Almost every night,” she said and then flushed. “It isn’t nice to say that—better make it three times a week.”

“How do your parents react to all this nocturnal activity?”

“Oh, they’re very nice about it. Mother just concentrates on my keeping in touch with her. As long as she knows where I am, she’s all right. They tease me a lot about my boy friends—they call me Scarlett.”

“What do they think about your career?”

Actor John Smith is a new date—Natalie goes for boys in show business. “We understand each other.”

She laughed. “Once a year, just like clockwork, my father calls me to him for a talk. ‘Don’t you want to quit?’ he says, and of course I say no. I couldn’t live without acting, you know, and he gives up for another year. But I think he still has hopes that one day his annual question will break me down and I’ll agree with him that the work is too hard. Neither one of them has ever been too much in favor of my acting.”

Acting has been Natalie’s ambition since she was all of three. At that age, fired by her older sister’s scrapbooks of movies and -movie stars, Natalie played an imaginary game all by herself. Each morning she “checked into” the garage, approached an imaginary desk and announced, “Good morning. Today I am Lana Turner.” And she was, too, until it was time for lunch. Then she checked out as Turner and returned after her nap to announce herself as another Hollywood queen.

Nick Adams kissed her at a party; first screen kiss came from James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

When she was six, Natalie was discovered. At the time, Irving Pichel was directing Happy Land in Santa Rosa, California, Natalie’s home town. The natives turned out en masse to watch the making of a movie. Natalie’s mother, one of the spectators, soon realized that her small daughter was nowhere in sight. When she finally located her child, Natalie was sitting, starry-eyed, squarely in the middle of Mr. Pichel’s lap.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said her mother, and reached to remove the youngster.

“Please don’t take her away,” said Pichel. “I’m enjoying her—even though I can’t get a word in edgewise.”

Marty Milnar takes her out, too—Natalie averages 7 dates a week when she isn’t working!

A child star

What Natalie said was never reported. But Pichel gave her a small part in Happy Land, and after the picture was finished he remembered the child with small gifts from time to time. Not too long after, he wrote the parents they might be wise to move to Hollywood, as he was certain Natalie had talent and would sooner or later fit into a fat part. He was right on both counts. If the family disapproved they hid it well—they moved south, and Natalie’s father got a job in the construction department of a studio. A year later Natalie was given the role of a child who could speak English with a German accent and also German itself in Tomorrow Is Forever. She did a good job of it.

That role set her up. She was mentioned as a candidate for a child Oscar, and given a seven-year contract with International studio, which in turn was besieged by other studios for her services.

It was at that point that we had that startling first meeting. Natalie was something special. She had the poise of an ambassador, not a smidgen of self-consciousness and was, to put it mildly, very talkative.

“Edwin,” she told me, “is my special boy friend. He lives in Santa Rosa. I didn’t like him much when I lived in Santa Rosa, but when I moved to Hollywood I wrote letters to all the boys up there and Edwin was the only one who answered. I don’t like cats. I like dogs, and I’ve asked Santa Claus to bring me a puppy this year. He’d better, too. I like Barbara Stanwyck because she’s so pretty and I like Sonja Henie because she wears such nice shiny clothes. I dance ballet but Mother won’t let me go on toe yet because she says I’ll get bulging leg muscles. I play the piano. Would you like me to play for you?”

Mom and Natalie look like sisters, act like friends—as long as Natalie keeps checking in on time.

It is easy to recall the memory of that tiny girl, sitting on the piano bench with legs dangling and not reaching anywhere near the pedals, and pounding out a fair-to-middling version of Chopin’s Waltz in C-Sharp Minor. It was too slow in the fast spots, her short fingers struggling with the complicated music, but when the score called only for the lyrical melody, it seemed that Natalie had an uncommon feeling for music.

Between her conversational and musical ability, I felt no wonder at the fact that she had lasted just one week in the first grade of the studio school and then had been immediately advanced to second grade. She had an intelligence far beyond her years. Drive, too. While most girls her age were breaking toys, Natalie, on the advice of George Brent, was breaking her contract with International and signing with an agent. A year’s contract with 20th Century-Fox followed, and ever since she has been free-lancing and making money at it. Name a Hollywood studio and she knows all about it, having worked at every one of them. Radio and television are also her meat, although live television, a prospect that makes most actors flinch in horror, is her very favorite.

“I did a TV series once that was filmed, and it was dreadful.”

“Dreadful?”

“Well, yes. It was one of those family shows, and the whole idea of it was that I was the idiot teenager who gave everybody trouble. I objected to it because I don’t think teenagers are dopes and idiots, and I didn’t think the show was at all funny. I know the teenagers who watched it agreed with me. It was like being a traitor to my own class.”

She toyed with the shrimp on her plate.

“You don’t eat very much,” I commented, and Natalie made a face.

“I think food is awful. I never have time for it, and half the time I forget to eat. Mother is after me all the time. But I’m too busy to eat. There are more important things to do. Now that I’m really into my career, I can’t think of anything else.”

Lipstick vs. pigtails

With that deplored tv show of which Natalie spoke, she came of age in her work. She was fourteen at the time and finally, at long last, was asked to portray a girl of her own age. Before that, it had been pretty awful. She attended studio schools through sixth grade, classrooms where anything unusual was overlooked. Teachers employed by studios are accustomed to their students showing up dressed as Arabs or ranch hands or Persian slaves. But when Natalie began seventh grade, she entered a public school for the first time—Van Nuys Junior High. At the time she was a year younger than most of her classmates, having skipped a grade previously, but she was still dressed like an eight-year-old. In frilly dresses and ribbons and pigtails, she was the comedy relief for the other girls, who were beginning to wear lipstick and high heels: Being pint-sized was no help. (Natalie, five feet, two inches tall, still wears a size five.) Natalie stuck it out for a week—the jibes and the giggles behind her back—and then went home in tears. Mrs. Gurdin agreed that enough was enough, that no matter what Natalie’s agent said, the girl was to act and dress her age. After that it was better. Natalie made some fast friends—even among the girls—but the boys she ignored. They weren’t in show business.

In her senior year she worked so steadily for Warner Brothers studio, making The Searchers and The Silver Chalice, that she did her studying at the studio school! She went out to Van Nuys in June to pick up her diploma—the only time she set foot inside the school during her final year.

Then came Rebel Without A Cause, and Natalie thanked her stars she was finished with schooling and could concentrate on her work. “I couldn’t have done both and done a good job on either one.”

The picture was important to her “because it presents teenagers as they really are. These two weren’t bad kids—they came from good families and weren’t the rat-pack type you see all the time in movies. They came from good homes but had their problems imposed by their families. They were true problems, the kind of things kids really have to put up with and find their way out of.”

Working with Jimmy Dean, naturally, was a thrill for Natalie. “I guess I would have been scared to death, working opposite such a brilliant actor, but I’d already done a TV show with him once, and knew him well enough not to be terrified.”

Natalie’s father, who is now miniature-set director for a studio, has moved his family around more or less to fit in with his daughter’s career. They started off in West Hollywood, moved to Burbank, then out in the country to Northridge at the time when Natalie was crazy over horses. (“That was after I gave up ballet. I studied it for five years and then somebody told me it would make me bow-legged. So I took up riding instead.” She giggled. “Isn’t that silly?”)

Now they live in a house in Sherman Oaks in the valley close to town and convenient to Warner Bros. where Natalie is now under contract. A swimming pool is being built in the back yard, a project which Mr. and Mrs. Gurdin fervently hope will keep Natalie at home a bit more.

She has her own room, enhanced by a magnificent four-postered, canopied bed, and her dressing-table mirror is framed by a multitude of photographs; mostly boys, and predominantly actors. This room is Natalie’s own haven, the place where, when she begins to fold after a crowded week of either work or dates, she sleeps the clock around to catch up.

Natalie is still as much of a movie fan as she was at the age of three. Marlon Brando is her favorite actor and Jo Van Fleet her favorite actress. “I just think she’s the greatest. I saw East Of Eden nine times, and I guess everybody thought I was going to look at Jimmy, but really it was because I wanted to watch Jo Van Fleet. Did you ever see such a beautiful job as she did with that mother role? I met her once and just flipped. She came into make-up one morning unexpectedly and I got so tongue tied I couldn’t make sense. I mumbled something about thinking I knew Dick Davalos—thinking I knew him—I’d been dating him! And then I couldn’t think of another thing to say!”

“I don’t want to get married”

I asked her how she felt about marriage, and the word seemed to bore her as much as her lunch. “I want to fall in love—that would be fun—but not get married. Oh, I suppose I’ll get married some time, but that’s way off in the distant future.”

“Do you wish you’d had time to go to college?”

“I’m too busy for that. Maybe some day I’d like to take literature courses and art, because I like to paint. But you see, acting has become my life. I have no ambition to do anything else. I want to be as honest an actress as I’m capable of being. Actors are basically lonely people, you know, and I want to see things and meet people. You have to do that in order to be able to understand life and therefore what you’re trying to portray.”

“Are you still taking dramatic lessons?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I never did take any. I don’t like technique in acting. I think a good director is the important thing. And I believe if you have a feeling for acting it comes to you naturally, that you don’t need. any training.”

At seventeen, Natalie Wood has racked up an impressive list of co-stars, including Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, Jimmy Stewart, Rock Hudson, John Payne, Rex Harrison, John Wayne, George Brent, Bob Cummings and James Dean. Time was, she ended up in the final reel being dandled on the handsome gentleman’s knee.

These days, she usually ends up in a clinch. She feels no regret at the change.

“It seems as though I spent my whole life in pigtails,” she says. “I always had to look younger than I was so that I could take child roles. You don’t know how glad I am to be seventeen. It’s a special age for any girl, but for me it’s heaven.”

THE END

—BY JANE WILKIE

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1956