Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1962)

“I think people have to decide whether they want to have a career or marriage." “All I’ve ever wanted to do is act.” “I guess I’m one of those corny, dedicated actresses people make jokes about.” “You might say I’m going steady with acting.” Now suddenly she went back on everything she’d ever said. She didn’t believe marriage and a career could mix, yet on December 28. 1957. she upped and married Bob Wagner. She’d declared that “my man, when he comes along, will not be too conventional.” But Bob had been so conventional — even old-fashioned — as to ask her father for her hand before be ever popped the question to her. There was only one possible explanation. Love. Love that ignores logic. “Forever” — three years At the altar Natalie whispered to Bob. “Darling, this is forever.” In a statement issued jointly to the press. Boh and Natalie declared, “Our marriage vows mean we love each other and that we are one forever.” In an interview they both insisted, “Our marriage is more important to us than any career.” Forever lasted thirty-six months. For three years, they shut themselves off from the rest of the world either in their house or on Bob’s boat. When they did venture out. it was always side by side. But there were moments, even when both were insisting how marvelous their marriage was, that trouble peeked through. Once, in a statement to the press. Boh said. “It’s been wonderful from the moment I slipped that wedding ring on Nat’s finger.” But then he halted for a second and added, “But it isn’t true that we haven’t had some rough spots. Not between us, you understand — but during our first year of marriage Nat was having serious career trouble. ... At that time when Natalie was out of work. I was working. Then there was a period when I had a long wait between pictures. There were moments when we were worried.” Career trouble. And for actors — especially a dedicated actress like Natalie Wood — that’s bad trouble. What was happening to Natalie was bad enough. “Marjorie Morningstar,” a box office flop for all the hullabaloo; mediocre roles in “Cash McCall” and “Kings Go Forth.” A string of artistic and financial failures. But what was happening to Bob was worse. He’d always been hailed as a “rising young star.” Suddenly, at thirtyone, he was no longer so young and definitely not rising. He made a series of pictures that either ; nobody remembers or somebody wants to forget. The critics, when they took note of him at all, damned him with faint i praise. One reviewer praised him with a faint damn when, in speaking of his per■ formance in “Say One for Me,” he wrote, “It is not his fault he is miscast.” Bob tried to bolster his sagging career r by making a record. “So Young” was very poor; the flip side, “Almost 18,” was impossible. In desperation — and despite all their insistence that “we’ll never appear in a picture together” — Bob and Natalie costarred in “All the Fine Young Canni bals.” The critics devoured them alive. Then overnight, everything changed. The modest-living Wagners bought a $150,000 home, began to decorate it in a Graeco-Roman style, and poured $50,000 into furnishing just one bedroom and bathroom. Natalie made two big ones in a row, “Splendor in the Grass” and “West Side Story,” and the word went out, even before the film was dry on both pictures, that either of them might win her an Academy Award. Once, someone had asked Boh how he’d feel if Natalie’s career skyrocketed to where he’d be known as “Mr. Wood.” His reply was, “It wouldn’t bother me at all. In fact. I’d regard it as a compliment.” But now that the supposition had become a fact, there was tension and trouble in the Wagner mansion. And it couldn’t be smoothed over by statements to the press. On the contrary, after “Splendor in the Grass” was released. Bob and Natalie announced that they had agreed to disagree. One columnist put her finger on the main reason for their separation when she wrote : “Close friends of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner attribute their breakup to the most familiar of Hollywood troubles, career jealousy. Natalie’s career is zooming. ‘R.J.’ isn’t doing quite that well. . . .” An end and a beginning The end of a marriage. The blackness of despair and defeat. And suddenly the miracle of new love. A man holds Natalie in his arms in front of the cameras and she feels alive again, as an actress and as a woman. A man holds her in his arms off-screen and once more she believes in love. In the broadest sense, the problem on the screen becomes the problem in her life — the problem of youth and love. W ho am l? Am I a girl who has grown up at last? Do I finally know my own heart? W hat am I? Am I first a woman and then an actress? Or first an actress and then a woman? W'here am I going? Shall I trust myself and my future to this new man — a man with the eyes of a boy and the passionate mouth of someone who has been alive since the beginning of time? ... So like Jimmy, yet so different. The same tender forcefulness, the same crazy disregard for convention. But different, too. A man who can be “engaged to be engaged” to a woman, Joan Collins, for two years — and then suddenly turn off his heart in one second. W hat should / do? Say “Yes” to him if he asks me to marry him? Open myself up to possible rejection, disillusionment and unbearable pain? These are the questions Natalie Wood must be asking herself today as she weighs her future with Warren Beatty or without Warren Beatty. The door to her marriage to Bob Wagner has slammed closed behind them — there is no turning back. 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