This article originally appeared in the April 2000 issue of Architectural Digest.
Before she was a lady of Beverly Hills, Natalie Wood was a Valley Girl—long before the term came to satirize adolescent fatuousness. As a teenage movie star in the fifties, Natalie, together with her Russian immigrant parents and sister Lana, lived in a succession of communities in the San Fernando Valley: Burbank, Northridge, Sherman Oaks and Laurel Canyon's north slope, where it widens into Studio City.
The family had moved to Los Angeles from the San Francisco area in 1945, when Natalie, at the age of seven, landed her first speaking part in a movie, Tomorrow Is Forever, with Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles. (She had served as a film extra even earlier.) Born Natasha Gurdin, she became Natalie Wood when director Irving Pichel decided that the name Natalie sounded better than Natasha and that Gurdin should be replaced by Wood, after his friend the director Sam Wood. The Tomorrow part led to others, culminating in a leading role in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which turned Natalie Wood into a genuine child star.
Unlike many child actors who flame out when they reach adolescence, Natalie thrived. Her mother managed her career, her father worked as a studio carpenter and artist, and the family enjoyed life in the San Fernando Valley. It was while living in a house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard—a stucco-and-stone fifties modern with three bedrooms at the top of a steep driveway—that Natalie Wood flowered from a tree-climbing, pet-loving kid into the duskily beautiful sixteen-year-old who starred in Rebel Without a Cause.
Released in 1955, the film struck a strong chord with the same generation of young people who were being captivated by J. D. Salinger and Elvis Presley. To rehearse for Rebel, Natalie was driven by her mother from the Laurel Canyon house south through the twisting canyon to writer-director Nicholas Ray's suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard. There Natalie got to know her fellow actors: James Dean, Nick Adams, Sal Mineo and Dennis Hopper, among others. Soon her new friends were frequenting the Laurel Canyon house, where they made a game of diving and touching a smiling tile mermaid on the bottom of the swimming pool.
"Boys flowed in and out of our house, and every arrival and departure—plus all that went on in between—was carefully monitored by Mother," recalls Natalie's sister Lana Wood in her book, Natalie: A Memoir by Her Sister.
A door led from the pool directly into Natalie's expansive bedroom suite—her personal headquarters—which she decorated in black and white. In addition to a large double bed, she had a private bath, a dressing room, a telephone, a television, a record player and a sofa. Natalie loved to draw pictures of her pets and objects around the house. "She was a natural artist," her sister writes. "She would sit on her bed, her legs tucked under her, her sketchbook in her lap, her concentration complete."
Ensconced in her room, Natalie would read scripts, do schoolwork and preview new clothes. She would also play the records of Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, Pearl Bailey, Johnnie Ray (Ray's recording of "The Little White Cloud That Cried" drove Lana "crazy") and Frank Sinatra, with whom she later costarred in Kings Go Forth (1958).
Natalie got her first driver's license and car while living in the Laurel Canyon house. She would hop in her bright pink Thunderbird, drive up the canyon to Mulholland, head west along the winding ridge to Coldwater Canyon and then drive south into Beverly Hills, where she would shop and visit her hairdresser. On one of these drives the car spun out of control and smashed into a barrier on a dangerous curve along Mulholland. Natalie wasn't seriously hurt, but the Thunderbird was wrecked.
She wasn't yet allowed to drive after dark. Her mother drove her to night shoots for Rebel Without a Cause at the Griffith Observatory and on the palisades overlooking the Pacific, where James Dean's character, Jim, squared off against his rival, Buzz (Corey Allen), in a "chickie run": racing two stolen cars toward the edge of the cliff. The first to jump was branded a "chicken," lacking in courage, deserving the scorn of his peers. Natalie's character, Judy, was the starter for the race.
"She threw her arms up in-to the air, shouted, Hit your lights!' and brought her arms flying down to her sides just as she jumped into the air. The cars roared toward her," writes Lana Wood, who witnessed the shoot as a frightened eight-year-old, worried about Natalie's safety. In the scene, Buzz plummets to a fiery death when his sleeve catches on the door handle and he can't exit the car before it plunges off the cliff. James Dean jumps just in time. It was not until Natalie was back in her dressing room that her little sister relaxed.
Natalie's career continued to flourish after Rebel Without a Cause. For one of her next films, The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford, the family left the Laurel Canyon house temporarily for Flagstaff, Arizona, where they lived upstairs over a trading post. Natalie played John Wayne's niece, who is captured by Indians, setting off a lengthy search.
Back in Laurel Canyon, Natalie eventually won what her sister calls "the Great Dating Wars" with their mother. Natalie was allowed not only to go out with boys but to entertain them at home. Tab Hunter, then a heartthrob of American teenage girls, was her mother's favorite. But there were others. "When Natalie was dating Nicky Hilton," Lana Wood recounts, "I saw them holding hands and stealing kisses as they played in the pool."
In early 1957 a handsome young actor named Robert Wagner became Natalie's steady beau. R. J., as he liked to be called, gave her tigers—those made by Steiff in Germany—which added a touch of color to her black-and-white bedroom. He took to calling Natalie "Tiger," as well as "Nate" and "Nathan." When Natalie's mother accompanied her to the Adirondacks to film Marjorie Morningstar (1958), he moved into Natalie's bedroom in their hotel. Reports Lana Wood, "Mother, quietly accepting the inevitable and trying to prove herself a liberal soul, served them breakfast in bed."
Late that year R. J. appeared at the house in Laurel Canyon with a bottle of champagne and two crystal glasses. "Just for a celebration," he told Natalie. He poured the champagne. When she drank hers, she found a pearl-and-diamond ring at the bottom of the glass.
"Read inside," he said.
Natalie peered at the tiny inscription: "Marry me." Three weeks later she did.
After the wedding, Natalie Wood's parents turned the Laurel Canyon house over to Natalie and R. J. It wasn't long, however, before they bought a house in Beverly Hills.
Some of Natalie Wood's most memorable movies were yet to come: William Inge's Splendor in the Grass (1961), the debut vehicle for Warren Beatty, directed by Elia Kazan; the Hollywood versions of two Broadway musicals, West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962); Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), costarring Steve McQueen; Inside Daisy Clover (1965); and Bob Carol Ted Alice (1969). She was nominated for three Oscars, though she never won.
Amid the movies, Natalie Wood divorced Robert Wagner, married Richard Gregson, a British agent, producer and writer, with whom she had a daughter, Natasha, and later remarried Wagner, with whom she had another daughter, Courtney.
Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Catalina Island in 1981, at the age of forty-three. Three of her friends from Rebel Without a Cause—James Dean, Sal Mineo and Nick Adams—had met tragic deaths even earlier. But the house in Laurel Canyon where they used to play looks much as it did in the fifties. The mermaid is still smiling at the bottom of the pool.
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